Ex-KOP by Warren Hammond

From The Week of March 13, 2011

Where KOP offered a rich world and a weak mystery, this sequel is the opposite. The world, now familiar in its crime, its destitution, its depravity, takes a back seat to what must be, even for a corrupt world like Lagarto, an unusually repugnant crime.

Juno, the antihero from the first novel, is rather the worse for wear. Events in KOP have taken their toll on him, professionally and physically, obligating a semi-retirement into the life of a private investigator, chasing after sleazy off-worlders who assume that their privilege and their superhuman bodies will protect them from Lagarto and its slums. But his life is interrupted by the return of Maggie Orzo who, still intent upon her mission to reform, reaches out to Juno to get him to investigate a murder that she believes leads back to the mayor of Lagarto's capital city, Koba. Juno isn't so sure, but he needs the money, so he accepts and begins an investigation that, in true Lagartian style, can only end in misery and vengeance.

In Mr. Hammond's universe, actions have consequences, especially for his protagonists. Ex-KOP is a wonderful demonstration of how neglecting ones marriage in the service of ones self-appointed duty can only lead to heartbreak. Juno's pain here bursts out of his cool facade and transforms him from just an angry man into a crusader, determined to see his last case through. The book's other major theme, the abuse of power, is just as riveting. Rich off-worlders, who have the wealth to create for themselves superhuman bodies capable of the darkest depravities, descend to Lagarto to slum around with the planet's poor, playing with them like they are toys to be used and discarded. It's not a perfect analogy, but this reminds me of Western sex tourism in countries like Thailand and Vietnam, where rich first-worlders can get their darkest fantasies fulfilled by people compelled by poverty to participate. It is vivid and foul, but its repellent energy animates the mystery here and elevates it into the first class.

If Mr. Hammond does not revisit this series again, I hope he considers it a success. It has its warts, but his thoughtfulness, his willingness to use his future world to examine contemporary problems, has made Juno and Lagarto stand out as worthy fiction fueled by a genuine sense of purpose. Just, well, readers may want to have a sickbag handy, just in case. (3/5 Stars)

KOP by Warren Hammond

From The Week of March 13, 2011

It's not enough for dark fiction just to be grim. It must have soul. It must be animated by a core message that gives the grit a purpose. KOP is not a perfect book; some of its characters are predictable, two-dimensional villains who offer the reader little more than a sense of revulsion. But what it lacks in style it more than makes up for in moxie, in intelligence, and in dark vitality.

In the 28th century, humans have gone to the stars, spreading themselves across numerous worlds. Lagarto, a tropical planet, is one of the most impoverished of these colonies. Economic miscalculations have sent its citizens spiraling into soul-crushing destitution. Many of them haven't even the funds to get off-world, to the orbitals, where the most paltry fare would be, for the Lagartians, an inconceivable delicacy. Consequently, Lagartian society has lost its grip on the rule of law and allowed civil society to devolve into a vicious game of every one for themselves, a rat race for the last scraps of food and shelter. Enter our antihero, Juno, an aging police officer who, long ago, made a pact with his best friend, Paul Chang, now the police chief of the capital city, to clean up their streets regardless of the physical and moral costs. All these years on, though, and it seems to Juno that their efforts have been in vane. They may have saved some people from the cruel gangs who devour Koba's streets, but they've only treated the symptoms; they haven't cured the disease. Now, tired of the fight and lonely in his marriage, Juno is sent out by his best friend to solve a case he's not supposed to solve. Further complicating matters is Maggie Orzo, an idealistic cop who is Juno's partner on this case. The daughter of a rich family, her sights set on reforming Lagarto with the light of justice, she has no time for Paul Chang and the corruption of his administration. Will the investigation change her mind and make her see the world through Juno's cynical eyes, or will he be the one who is forced to make changes?

Though KOP is, at root, a mystery, the murder investigation is easily its weakest component. There's nothing particularly wrong with the case; rather, life on brutal Lagarto has three times its intensity. The scenery is grippingly noir, with not a hero or a savior in sight. What's more, Mr. Hammond has committed himself, here, to a heartfelt examination of what life is like when one is the exploited, not the exploiter. Strip away the science fiction, the otherworldliness, and Lagarto could be any of a dozen colonialized countries, trying to wriggle out from under the boot of their imperial masters. However, KOP's best feature, by far, is its earnest depiction of the consequences of poverty and the myriad ways it coerces good people into the darkness where, slowly, their will to be honest and true is sapped from them. Juno's marriage is a powerful example of the cost he pays for trying to do what he considers to be the right thing. And though Mr. Hammond is a bit overwrought here, the price Juno must pay is simply too high for anyone to endure. Flawed but eminently engaging on numerous levels. (3/5 Stars)

The Professor Of Secrets by William Eamon

What we find appalling and abhorrent changes from generation to generation as ever-shifting cultural norms redefine our prejudices and our tolerances. However, it's one thing to acknowledge that we once allowed children to work in coal mines; it's entirely a different horror to read the intimate and disgusting details of how medicine was practiced during the Renaissance. Perhaps, in a hundred years, our descendants will look back at us and, in the same vein, shake their heads at the barbarity of Chemotherapy which is, in effect, a scorched earth policy applied to the human body, but surely that won't be the same as reading about early rhinoplasty, in which 16th century surgeons sliced open the skin of the patient's upper arm, slid a piece of wool underneath the skin, medicated the area until the skin thickened to the proper amount, then transferred this excruciatingly prepared substitute to the patient's ruined nose, cutting the skin as needed to make for a proper fit. The surgeon capped off this anaesthetic-free procedure by forcing a metal form down over the new, well-stitched, nose, leaving it there until it could hold its own shape. I'm sure there will be other procedures I find equally as awful as this one, but I doubt they will exceed it.

Mr. Eamon's fascinating, if disturbing, biography of Leonardo Fioravanti, a 16th century Italian surgeon, contains many of these shiver-inducing anecdotes, but these 360 some pages contain more than just moments of revulsion. This is a sprawling illumination of Renaissance Italy, its powerbrokers, its customs, and most importantly its rigid hierarchies. Fioravanti is depicted here as a dogged doctor with a mind opened to new possibilities. Whatever skill in medicine he could claim, however, paled next to the brilliance of his showmanship which seems to have been first-class. His hunger to be both rich and famous seems about equal to his obsessive need to be right, even when proven wrong. And so, not content with the simple satisfaction of bettering his own understanding of medicine, Fioravanti reached out to a far more powerful world than his, overestimating himself and his authority and incurring some eminent enemies.

Though The Professor Of Secrets lacks the dark humor of History's Worst Jobs, it has something of that book's spirit. Mr. Eamon set out to expose a brilliant man, a brightening world, and its primitive practices, but his descriptions of some of the period's brutalities will be what I carry with me. I'm still wincing! Dry in parts, slow in others, but always enlightening and disturbing. (3/5 Stars)

Stolen Innocence by Elissa Wall

From The Week of March 06, 2011

Though only the hardest of hearts would deny that the world's various religious faiths have brought peace and comfort to untold millions, the fact remains that religious institutions demand that their worshippers enter into emotionally and psychologically dependent relationships with them. And if we know anything about humanity, we know that we do not do well with imbalances of power. Those who hold the power are tempted to abuse it while those who have given up their power are easily manipulated into sacrificing their rights, rights every human being should have and exercise. Stolen Innocence is a vivid demonstration of this human weakness made real.

Elissa Wall was born into a world defined, in every respect, by Mormon fundamentalism. Her parents, who were both active members in the FLDS church and practitioners of Plural Marriage, did not expose her, or her siblings, to mainstream America. They, and their community, taught her to fear that world. They taught her that the police would, if they learned of their lifestyle, disperse their family beyond the ability of anyone to piece it back together. As a consequence, Ms. Wall was raised to have full and unwavering faith in her parents and her church. And so, when it came time for her to be married, at fourteen, to her cousin, nineteen, she was expected not to question. She was expected to do her womanly duty and further her husband's ascent to heaven by expanding his Household. When, unhappy in her abusive marriage, she rebelled, the leader of her church, Warren Jeffs, the megalomaniacal son of the church's dying prophet, first called upon her sense of duty to her husband to convince her to stay in the marriage. But when that failed to silence her, he turned to threats, against her and her family, manipulating Ms. Wall through her devout and complicit mother. But Ms. Wall defied all these pressures to break free of her cultish world, relying on the love of a supportive friend to be the star witness in the well-publicized trial of Warren Jeffs.

Though autobiographies draw their vitality directly from the striking, first-hand accounts of their authors, they simply cannot be objective. I doubt anyone has the necessary mental clarity to be objective about their own ordeals. But while it would be wise to take Ms. Wall's extraordinary tale with an appropriate amount of salt -- she does, at times, seem to almost revel in being the helpless, wide-eyed victim --, the extent to which she reveals the FLDS church as an institution driven by coercion, manipulation,heartlessness and duplicity is worthy of Jon Krakauer. Jeffs' herculean efforts to maintain power over others at all costs, even the misery of his own followers who look up to him as a demigod, is both sickening and depressing. It's a good thing then that, to a large degree, Ms. Wall's tale has a happy ending. But what about the hundreds, maybe thousands, of other women who are raised in isolation from the moderating influence of society, trained to be obedient, and then locked into unhappy marriages from which there is no exit but exile? What of them?

Ms. Wall narrates her challenging life with a kind of delicate grace. The clear and uncomplicated delivery of her story will, in all likelihood, leave readers with a poor opinion of Jeffs and his church. And though I agree that these men are revolting, we must remember that these sorts of practices, regardless of which religion sanctions them, are the result of imbalances of power. Men like Jeffs succeed because other people surrender their free will to them, not because of the popularity or otherwise, the righteousness or otherwise, of their faith. Until we find a way to ingrain in everyone a belief in themselves, in their own power, there will always be Elissa Walls and Warren Jeffs. But then, there will always be books like this one to remind us of deeper truths. (3/5 Stars)

Afterlight: Last Light 02 by Alex Scarrow

From The Week of March 06, 2011

Where Last Light focused its energies upon the end of civilization, this epic sequel takes us some ten years into the future, wrapping itself in the question of what comes after the total collapse of the first world. Can the light of civil society simply be switched back on, or must humans make the agonizing, centuries-long climb back up to a technological society step by laborious step? It's a worthwhile premise, but the extent to which Mr. Scarrow lets himself down in its execution left me disappointed.

In the ten years since the world's oil distribution system was destroyed by a series of coordinated attacks, all but a few thousand British people have survived on an island riddled with decaying ghost towns. The rest of the population has died from starvation and disease, leaving behind tiny pockets of life which stubbornly persist in spite of hardship. On one end of the island is Jenny Sutherland who, with her family behind her, has forged a community out on an oil rig just off the British shore. The Sutherlands and a few hundred of their followers pour their hearts and souls into eking out a living on the rig. But in spite of their best efforts, it's clear to virtually everyone but Jenny Sutherland, the matriarch, that they are merely treading water. Meanwhile, in London, thanks to the ruthlessness of its administrator, one of the many emergency zones, set up in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, is holding together remarkably well. It has occupied the O2 Arena, defending it against scavengers and cannibals, while functioning internally on a system of cult-inspired rewards meant to maintain order and allow the zone's leader to stay in power. These two communities know nothing of one another, that is, until Jenny Sutherland's restless son, Jacob, sets off with his best friend to see if there's something else out there. When Jacob discovers the Zone in London, he's sucked down into a savage and ugly world hungry to expand its powerbase. Consequently, the Zone's leadership takes a particular interest in Jacob's home, setting out to capture it at all costs.

I applaud Mr. Scarrow for his ambition here. He has bitten off far more than was necessary in order to tell his tale, but this is, unfortunately, also a contributer to Afterlight's problems. Firstly, the devastation here is far too universal for a disaster brought about by a lack of oil. Mr. Scarrow has essentially described here, and in Last Light, the worst case scenario for Peak Oil, and it seems extraordinarily unlikely that all life, everywhere, would snuff itself out for lack of food. Agricultural communities, fuelled by the knowledge base of educated elites, would persist, especially in the countryside. And and while these communities would cause England to revert to the 16th century, it would be a 16th century augmented by makeshift solar panels andsteam powered vehicles, not to mention handguns and all manner of related tools. Oil is vital to the maintenance of our lifestyle, I agree, but its absence can't reduce the population to a few thousand. Nothing short of an asteroid impact has that power. Secondly, while Mr. Scarrow deserves credit for pushing his characters through some truly trying tests, he wastes it all in a truly ridiculous final 20 pages. I have no wish to spoil the conclusion for anyone who hasn't yet read it, so I will confine myself to this. An author cannot commit 95 percent of his story to insisting the world is one way and then spend the other five percent trying to convince readers it's not. Expectations have been established. And when those expectations are overturned in this way, it's not clever, or revelatory. It's cheesy and sloppy.

There's a lot here: desperation, deception, fatalism, hunger... There's a lot to like, but Afterlight has one of the worst endings to a good novel I've read in some time. (2/5 Stars)

Last Light: Last Light 01 by Alex Scarrow

From The Week of March 06, 2011

A good apocalypse story is, at its core, a rumination on human nature. After all, in lieu of a real apocalypse, we can't really know how we would respond to the disintegration of civilization. We know that humans tend to perform well in smaller-scale disasters like floods and earthquakes, banding together to form strong, sympathetic, supportive networks. But such disasters aren't large enough to threaten the Rule of Law. They aren't devastating enough to wipe out the world that humans know and operate in. So what if the disaster is apocalyptic? What if it kills off the Rule of Law? What if civil services collapse and humans have to rely on other humans to survive? Will our ethics, our civilized standards, hold up in a world without justice? Last Light is far from a perfect novel, but it does ask this question. And though its answer is rather more pessimistic than mine, that it speaks to the issue makes it a worthwhile read.

One morning in contemporary England, everyday British citizens rise and go to work, not realizing that this will be the last normal morning they ever experience. A series of explosive attacks at various global chokepoints for oil distribution have, it soon becomes clear, virtually crippled the dissemination of fossil fuels to every country in the world. Though these attacks are well-disguised as terrorist events, Andy Sutherland, a British-born, oil engineer, knows, when he sees the oil fires burning across the Middle East, that something bigger and infinitely more cruel is behind this well-coordinated strike. Everything, from international trade to putting food on supermarket shelves, is made possible by oil. Take it away and there is no global community; there are no cars; there is no economy; there is no law.

In the days that follow the attacks, Andy battles to get back to his family in Britain while his wife (at a job interview) and teenage daughter (at university) attempt to re-connect with one another in an England infinitely more dangerous and less predictable than the country they knew and loved. Through the eyes of the Sutherland women, we watch England fall apart, devolving into bands of thirsty, starving humans willing to do anything to fill their bellies. We watch both the government and the emergency services collapse. We watch chaos reign as a prelude to the deaths of millions who, in their desperation, aren't thinking of the long term: putting crops in the ground and finding a place to rebuild. They are stripping the supermarkets bare, unable to think beyond the next score. If the Sutherlands are to survive the chaos, and the darkness that hunts them, they'll have to start abiding by the new rules of a new world.

At some 500 pages, Last Light struggles to maintain a good pace, alternating between long passages of dreary plodding and quick smashes of mayhem which rapidly advance the plot. Of the three main protagonists -- the three Sutherlands --, Mr. Scarrow does his best work with the daughter (Leona) who is forced to grow up quick as her comfortable and sheltered world swiftly transitions to one of brutality and selfishness. Where the daughter provides us the longing for home and normalcy, mother Sutherland shows us the true extent to which Britain has decayed in so short a time. Jenny's desperation to reunite with her kids drives her onward, but not so singlemindedly that she doesn't observe how the world has forever changed and what will need to come next if there's to be a next. By far the weakest link here is father Sutherland who, stranded for much of the book in Iraq, gives us nothing more than a succession of thunderous battles as he and his British-American companions attempt to extract themselves back to their homelands. The scenes here are all-too repetitive and are little more than party favors tossed to Mr. Scarrow's action-oriented fans. But for its flaws, the story holds together well. Mr. Scarrow injects a sense of genuine menace into an already scary genre. Treads a bit too close to the silly Rothschild conspiracies for my tastes, but those who like a good conspiracy will devour the malevolent scheme which underpins this piece of quality post-apocalyptic fiction. (3/5 Stars)

Harvard And The Unabomber by Alston Chase

From The Week of February 27, 2011

Though this is primarily a biography of Ted Kaczynski and his fascinating, troubled life, Mr. Chase, who has written extensively on animals and the environment, allows himself the freedom to roam beyond the Unabomber's dramatic actions. He devotes as much time to the man's theories and the times that created him as he does to the man himself and, as a consequence, has assembled here a sweeping and satisfying history of a man who thought he understood the future and, to say the least, liked it not at all.

Ted Kaczynski is remembered, of course, as the Unabomber, the man whose home-made bombs terrorized seemingly random businesses in the 1980s. Though his campaign actually claimed only three lives, its psychological impact was sufficient to coerce the New York Times into publishing his 35,000 word manifesto on the perniciousness of technology. Kaczynski believes that technological dependence will lead to the enslavement of the human race and it was this which motivated him to mail out his bombs to places which proliferated such technology.

Before Kaczynski was the Unabomber, however, he was a brilliant mathematician whose mind, according to one faculty advisor, was sharp enough to solve a problem that maybe ten, contemporary Americans could solve. But as clever as he may have been with numbers, he was equally anti-social, a problem helped not at all by being skipped two grades in high school which only furthered his isolation. As a consequence, the Kaczynski who arrived at Harvard at the age of 16 was ill-equipped to defend himself against the psychological attacks from Henry Murray, a famous and clearly cruel professor of psychology at Harvard who very much belonged to the right wing ethos of American universities that existed prior to the liberalization of the 1960s. Mr. Chase needed only to describe the barbarous tactics used in Dr. Murray's test to explain how this traumatizing incident could have contributed to Kaczynski's radicalization.

This is an excellent biography of a difficult subject. For while Kaczynski is clearly damaged, he's also, at times, a sympathetic figure. At one point, in the 1960s, he flees civilization for the peace of the Montana wilderness, removing himself from a world he disagrees with. But civilization follows him, invading his solitude by mining his hills, paving roads through his wilderness. It's only after these incursions into his world that he gets angry enough to lash out. Our world is an ever-changing place that is incredibly insensitive to those who do not deal well with such change.

The extent to which Mr. Chase is able to explain Kaczynski by keying on the events which turned him into the Unabomber is impressive, revealing a broken man who lacked the tools to articulate himself without the use of violence to acquire the world's attention. Yes, it's all here, from Kaczynski, to his family, to his bombs, to the FBI's effort to catch him. And it's all told with one eye always turned towards the bigger picture of the man in his time.

Kaczynski is wrong, of course. He believes that the use of technology will inevitably lead to a future day in which we invent intelligent machines to do our labor for us. Whether we master these machines and have them facilitate our lives, or whether the machines overthrow us and enslave us, either way we will be slaves to their power, dependent upon them to exist. So far, pessimistic but logical. However, when Kaczynski concludes, from this, that the only solution is to return to a world prior to the Industrial Revolution, just to escape a future that may or may not come about, he loses, well, everyone. Because, of course, we can't go back to a world prior to the Industrial Revolution! Not only would we be consigning billions of people to starvation and death, we can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. We know how electricity works, how Relativity works, how the sun works, how energy works, how fossil fuels work, all of which catalyze the ignition of civilization. We know how to make guns, cars, planes, boats, bombs... That knowledge can't be wiped out, not completely. Somewhere, somehow, someone will rebuild what was destroyed. And if, on Kaczynskian grounds, they refuse to do it, someone in the future will once Kaczynski's lesson has been forgotten. Progress is inevitable. And if this means that we are on the road to enslavement, then enslavement it will be. That doesn't mean, until then, that we sacrifice all our agency and give up. Who knows what the future will hold, but we do know this. It's impossible and foolish to go back.

A thought provoking book. (4/5 Stars)

Murder City by Charles Bowden

Where and into what circumstances we are born, together, have the greatest impact on who we become as adults. If you're lucky enough to be born to privileged parents in a prosperous, democratic nation, the odds that you will live a successful life are astronomically better than someone who is born to impoverished parents who struggle to survive in a nation savaged by crime and war. Nowhere is this truth more apparent than on that one, fateful stretch of the US-Mexico border where the twin towns of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua are connected by a bridge that may as well be a bridge of destiny. For on the American side, there persists a healthy state protected by the rule of law and nourished by a strong, civil society. On the Mexican side, however, there endures a place racked by poverty, chaos and death. It was the murder capital of the world in 2009 and, according to Mr. Bowden, a journalist who has spent considerable time in this shattered city, this is just the beginning of the story.

In Murder City, Charles Bowden quickly dispenses with journalistic objectivity; nothing so ivory tower can abide on the soul-numbing, life-shattering streets of Juarez, where drug gangs have acquired so much power that not even the presence of the Mexican army can prevent their footsoldiers from posting cop-killing lists on the walls of police precincts, lists in which they thank the cops they haven't yet killed for waiting patiently for their deadly number to be called. Journalists, soldiers, government officials, judges all have a choice to make, be bought, be silent, or be killed... This is life in a failing state.

Mr. Bowden, in trying to document the catastrophe unfolding in this ruined place, comes across so many bodies, so many crimes, that he details them casually, quietly, as if for him, and for Juarez, stabbed bodies, shot bodies, burned bodies, raped bodies, are no longer remarkable. He learns the intricacies of the drug trade and hands onto his readers the surprising and existential truth that killing, here, has become so normative, so commonplace, so cheap, that often it is done almost whimsically; drug lords exercising power just to prove to their rivals that they have it, that they can do anything. He learns that the Mexican army is complicit in the killing, that many of its generals have no interest in prosecuting a war against the drug lords who are perfectly willing to offer them and their families the same cruel choice they've offered to the journalists and the judges. He learns that no one can live clean in a place where stability is a pipe-dream and life can be bought and sold more cheaply than the weapons used to snatch it away.

This is gonzo journalism at its absolute rawest and scariest. It's clear from Mr. Bowden's lyrical prose, and from the extent to which he has chased a story too few people care about, that he has wrapped himself in the same, nihilistic shroud that encloaks poor Juarez. The genesis of his investigation appears to have been the earnest pursuit of the rapists of a beauty queen who was one of the many women snatched up out of Juarez, used up and discarded like trash. In his desire to bring some closure to her story, Mr. Bowden amplifies her importance in the narrative until it's clear that she is the personification of Juarez, goodness sundered by the teeth and claws of wolves. But this isn't just a tale about the victims; Mr. Bowden saves some of his most incendiary passages for the foolish and insensitive American policies which have contributed to Juarez's fall. His searing condemnation of NAFTA is one of the most powerful and poetic eviscerations of a government policy I've ever read. Just as his interview with a particularly cruel hitman is about one of the scariest.

Mr. Bowden is an extraordinary writer who imbues this piece with an incredible, angry energy. His demons and his outrage take turns lashing out at every conceivable victim. Exceptional and unforgettable work. (5/5 Stars)

Turning The Storm: Eliana's Song 02 by Naomi Kritzer

From The Week of February 27, 2011

Ms. Kritzer has avoided, here, the numerous traps laying in wait for sequels, imbuing Turning The Storm with a vitality just as potent as tht which animated its progenitor. This second volume feels like a natural continuation from the first, not, as other sequels have been, an addition dreamed up after the fact at the urging of others.

After successfully transforming beaten down slaves into an army of reformists, intent upon bringing the old gods back to the land, Eliana, a violinist-in-training, should be able to lay down the burden of leadership necessity pressed upon her. But when her army is betrayed and many of her people ashed by magefire, Eliana conceives of a new, dangerous mission that, if successful, may bring to a conclusion this ugly war that has consumed her lovely, Renaissance country. Leaving her people behind, Eliana travels to the imperial court and, there, disguises herself as a boy musician. Her bold aim is to gain a secret audience with the emperor and convince him of the religious and mystical truths she's discovered. But though her plan meets with early successes, her life is ultimately imperiled and it may be that hope for the reformers is truly lost.

This second and, it seems, final edition in Eliana's Song is essentially two stories. The first, which consumes most of the novel, concerns Eliana's betrayal and subsequent attempt to finish the war. The second, though much shorter, is easily the most powerful of the two, as what Eliana has willed into being threatens to be derailed by zealots from within her own ranks. This eloquent coda is not only a fitting and emotional conclusion to the series, it convinced me that Ms. Kritzer has a truly open mind. Her sympathies were clearly with Eliana's people and Eliana's gods in Fires of The Faithful. But here, we see that the author has grasped a fundamental truth about power of every kind.

Heroes are just as likely to abuse power as villains. It doesn't matter if your soul is pure or tainted. The having of influence over other people creates temptations that no one is prepared to resist. And so, when some of Eliana's own reformers begin to exhibit signs that they might not be any better than the cruel tormenters they are trying to overthrow, the reader should feel blessed to be consuming a work of fiction that is both thoughtful and free of ideological blinders. Zealousness is an equal opportunity offender. Ms. Kritzer has tapped into some deeper truths here that won't disappoint those looking for realistic fantasy fiction.

This is good work. The author has an inventive mind, but there are some truly formulaic elements here that seem ripped straight out of the fantasy author's handbook. It's this that keeps it from being truly revelatory. (3/5 Stars)

Fires of The Faithful: Eliana's Song 01 by Naomi Kritzer

From The Week of February 27, 2011

I found Ms. Kritzer in one of my periodic plunges into the depths of the internet, trolling for good, dark, fantasy fiction. And though the results of such searches can be frustratingly hit or miss, this potent, allegorical tale is certainly a success.

Set in a fantasy realm inspired by, and which closely hews to, renaissance Italy, a hardworking family manages to send their young and talented daughter to a musical conservatory where, while she is learning the violin, she has her eyes opened to the powerful religious and magical forces that underpin her existence. The former becomes evident to Eliana when one of her fellow students introduces her to a kind of earth music that the dominant, monotheistic faith has banned because of its connection to the now suppressed pagan faith that inspired it. The latter arrives in the form of Eliana's roommate who carries within her a strength that Eliana and her fellows cannot imagine. As the country beyond the conservatory devolves into savage war, Eliana flees her schooling only to discover terrible truths about her family, her land, her emperor, and her faith, truths that have forged for her a rebel destiny she has no choice but to embrace.

Ms. Kritzer has served up a full platter of issues for her readers to sink their teeth into. Theologically, her decision to cast the enforcers of the Christian-like religion as cruel and oppressive villains leaves little doubt that her sympathies lie with the pagans. But whatever one might think of her religious politics, the extent to which she's highlighted the brutality of one religion's suppression of another is worthwhile. It It has come to pass, many times in our world, that religions which claim to practice only peace wind up having some of the most heinous crimes committed in their honors. More interesting to me, though, was the conversation here about the nature of power. That magic in Eliana's world is drawn out of the earth and, as a consequence, sickens it, serves as a wonderful analogy for power of any kind that is gathered up and used regardless of its consequences. Our entire world is powered by fossil fuels, the use of which sickens our world, but we use them because we believe we must, because we are driven by necessity. So too the magicians here who use their powers because they believe they must, choosing not to think about the price that is paid. Finally, politically, the necessity of good people to stand up to tyranny is, while hardly a new theme in literature, successfully drawn. Ms. Kritzer's tale suffers from a bad case of the predictable. Most of the outcomes here are readily apparent before they occur which can make the 400 odd pages drag as our heroine plods her way to conclusions the reader's already drawn.

For those who appreciate good fantasy that uses its world to speak to some of our own issues, this is worth a pickup. For Christians sensitive about their religion, be prepared to be reminded of your faith's bloody history. The parallels are not subtle. Good work... (3/5 Stars)

Emma Goldman by John C. Chalberg

From The Week of February 20, 2011

My admiration of Emma Goldman demands that, someday, I read her two volume autobiography, but until I can bring myself to sit down with 800 pages of someone's personal thoughts and deeds, I settle for Mr. Chalberg's much more manageable, and objective, 240 page biography of this Russian-born, American individualist who helped give birth to modern libertarianism.

Emma Goldman's extraordinary life was characterized by a lifelong struggle against governments far more powerful than she. Having emigrated to America at 16, she carried with her the injustices of the Russian empire and the hope for a new, fairer existence in America. But after realizing that America was plagued by some of the same inequities she had suffered in her homeland, beliefs crystalized by the Haymarket Riot, she took up her anarchist pen and signed away a normal life by writing and then publishing essays and pamphlets which challenged the oppressive policies of successive American governments. For this, she was hounded and spied upon by authorities looking for a reason to deport her. When she advocated against the citizen draft for the First World War, she finally gave them that reason and she was thrown out of the country, returning to Russia where she was one of the first intellectuals to see through Vladimir Lenin.

Mr. Chalberg covers the major events in Goldman's life, articulating her politics and the core principles that motivated them. He also delves into her complex love life which seems to have brought her no more happiness than her public life which ended badly. Her particular strain of individualism, while admirable in its advocation of the end to all personal prejudice, was staunchly anti-war, a position which obligated her to oppose the Second World War against Hitler. This may not be the most lyrical or insightful of biographies, but Mr. Chalberg's thorough and concise account of exceptional individual does honor to a subject worthy of more attention than she receives. (3/5 Stars)

Angel Of Vengeance by Ana Siljak

From The Week of February 20, 2011

Today, we in the West live in countries which have evolved beyond righteous political assassinations. When killings, and attempted killings, do take place, we find they are inevitably instigated by minds troubled by mental illness. The reality is, our standard of living, coupled with our general belief in a just society, has leeched all of the righteousness out of the act. There is no striking a blow for freedom, but this wasn't always the case. Ms. Siljak's moving and chilling chronicle of the attempted murder, which kicked off an age of terror and revolution in 19th century Russia, not only animates the radicals who first gave us the concepts of terrorism and nihilism, it shines a light on the soul-crushing conditions which are necessary for people to knowingly give up their liberty, and even their lives, to perform acts of violent justice.

On January 24th, 1878, Vera Zasulich, the radicalized daughter of an impoverished noble family, capitalized on a public audience with the governor of St. Petersburg, withdrawing from her clothes a powerful revolver and shooting the governor in the lower torso. She made no attempt to flee in the chaotic aftermath; in fact, she deliberately allowed herself to be arrested in the belief that to flee would make her seem, to the people, ashamed or guilty. She wanted Russia to know why she had committed this crime. She wanted them to follow her example and stand up for themselves and demand justice from a monarchy and a nobility that had been leeching off of them for generations. The assassination, however, backfired on Zasulich in two dramatic ways. First, the governor survived her attack, the bullet having lodged too low in his pelvis to do damage to his vital organs. But secondly, and much more importantly, Zasulich, rather than being martyred by the Russian establishment she so loathed, she was the beneficiary of a newly liberalized judicial system which bent over backwards to grant her a fair trial. Her lawyer was able to argue that Zasulich was a victim of the system, a convenient lie Zasulich detested. Consequently, her act became the trigger event for an age of terror, but her message of vengeance and justice was lost in the tumult.

This is an outstanding biography of a woman pushed into radicalism by rank injustice and the ambition of vicious revolutionaries. Ms. Siljak is juggling a lot of balls here: illuminating Zasulich's background, articulating the injustices Zasulich sought to give voice to, and fitting the events of 1878 into the broader framework of Zasulich's unhappy life. Ms. Siljak succeeds in every respect. Highlights here include the depiction of the unspeakably cruel and undoubtedly charismatic Sergei Nechaev, the revolutionary leader and nihilist who radicalized Zasulich, and the incredible irony that Zasulich's message was lost in what amounted to the 19th century version of the O.J. Trial! Unbelievable. Lowlights are mostly limited to Ms. Siljak's plodding description of Zasulich's frustrating and depressing later life. On balance, this is an exceptional biography. Top five this year, easily. (5/5 Stars)

The Floating Brothel by Sian Rees

From The Week of February 20, 2011

The power of human mores never ceases to amaze me. Racism and sexism, slavery and eugenics... Something can be perfectly normative in one generation and be perfectly abhorrent in another. We don't have a gene that encodes for decency, for morality; so we fall back on the cultural norms of our times to teach us good from bad, acceptable from objectionable. Is it any wonder, then, that each generation seems to reveal the sins of the one just prior? After all, these generational mores are the only judges of what is a virtue and what is a sin. The Floating Brothel is a wonderful and devastating example of this power and the inability of people to see beyond their own prejudices to truths which are, to us, now blindingly obvious.

Ms. Rees has put together, here, a chronicle of the systematic attempts of 18th century British authorities to gather up their country's petty, wasteful criminals, impose upon them punitive sentences, and then mercilessly banish them from their homeland and their families, consigning them to hardship and struggle in the new Australian colony. These authorities could not conceive of a truth so obvious to us now, that, in large part, crime flows from poverty. If the laws and customs of the land prevent human beings from pursuing and attaining their basic needs for sex, shelter, food and comfort within the law, then they will try to find extralegal, and even illegal, ways of satisfying those needs. Human need will always trump the laws of the land, especially when those laws are seen by the less fortunate to be unjust. As a consequence of this self-righteousness, politicians and judges of the period ordered ships bound for Australia to be filled with women who had stolen to feed themselves and their families. Not only were these ships rife with disease, many of the women in question were ordered to become the ship-wives of the sailors who lead them across half the known world to to an as-yet untamed land.

Ms. Rees does an exceptional job of illustrating the cruelty of not only the men who consigned these petty criminals to hazard and death, but the journey that followed their banishment from England. The narrative is more or less divided into three parts: the first covering the socioeconomic pressures that lead to their crimes and their sentences, the second illustrating their tempestuous journey to Australia, and the third detailing the existential challenges of staying alive in the new world. As successful as Ms. Rees is at revealing the inequities that launched these ships, parts two and three suffer from a descent into the dry recitation of dates, times, facts and figures typical of creaky histories. Nonetheless, part one empowers the story enough to carry it over the line. (3/5 Stars)

Reading Lolita In Tehran by Azar Nafisi

From The Week of February 20, 2011

Is there a more pernicious, human force than extremism? From enslaving minds to destroying governments, it has a whole host of virulent powers, but perhaps the most terrifying of these is its capacity to silence intellectuals who, in all their knowledge, are a danger to that special brand of illogic practiced by extremism. Reading Lolita In Tehran does many things well, but its articulation of this assault on society's educators is, by far, its most important achievement.

Born in Iran to a successful family, Ms. Nafisi was educated in America before returning, in the late 1970s, to her homeland to teach English at the University of Tehran. Not long after taking up her professorship, the Iranian revolution brought to power zealots who swept away many of the secular freedoms Iranians once enjoyed. Frustrated and offended by stricter and stricter codes of religious conduct, Ms. Nafisi quits the university when it is made clear to her that she will no longer be allowed to teach the great works of Western civilization made verboten by the new regime. Refusing to go quietly into the night, she establishes a small reading circle for some of her female students, running it out of her home under the guise of ladies who lunch. And it is this circle which forms the core of Ms. Nafisi's memoir, exposing us to the young women of revolutionary Iran, women who have had their freedoms usurped, their life choices narrowed, their futures dimmed by ignorance.

Though there are numerous self-indulgent detours into Ms. Nafisi's uncompelling personal history, the narrative is primarily driven by the fallout in the classroom of the Regime's crackdown on universities and the consequences this crackdown has on Ms. Nafisi's female students. The story creatively cuts back and forth between Ms. Nafisi's attempts to teach English literature in a university being radicalized by Islamic fundamentalists and the personal lives of her students, all of whom struggle with all they've been made to sacrifice. Their pain, at being treated as objects, not people, is acute, and it's a pain that I can well imagine applies to the whole of Iranian society which has now spent 30 years being slowly devoured by radical Islam. What will be left when the clerics are done? Will there be a civil society who knows of Nabokov and Joyce, Fitzgerald and Twain? We'll have to wait to find out.

Ms. Nafisi is a bit too taken with her own story -- the plight of her students is infinitely more interesting than her own --, but the extent to which she has captured the slow descent into chaos of a world governed by anti-intellectuals is powerful and revealing. (3/5 Stars)

Player One by Douglas Coupland

From The Week of February 20, 2011

Though Player One is superficially about the consequences of reaching and then enduring the shock of Peak Oil, at the story's core is a fascinating conversation about the need for all humans to connect, to speak a mutual language, and to belong to something that matters.

In the very near future, the world changes forever when humanity reaches Peak Oil, the point at which the extraction of oil from the earth, thanks to both demand and scarcity, enters a phase of permanent decline. Because no effective alternative to fossil fuels has been found, the cost of oil rockets up from $100 to $400 in hours. Thanks to the law of supply and demand, it will never again decrease in value. During this eschatological event, four, random Canadians cross paths in an airport bar, bonding as they watch the world's economy dismantled. Karen, a middle-aged mom, has arranged to meet a date from the internet. But when he proves disappointing, she turns her interest upon Rick, the bartender of the lounge, a man who has placed all his faith for a new beginning in a personal wellness guru who has promised to meet him today, of all days. Luke, a preacher who recently lost his faith in god, has stolen thousands of dollars from his church's charity fund, but his nihilistic intentions are swayed when he meets Rachel, a beautiful genius who lacks even rudimentary social skills. As the hours pass, and the world's plight deepens, these four will share their stories and their desires and their needs as they struggle to survive the deaththrows of the civilization they once knew.

Mr. Coupland has put together a pleasingly philosophical novel which, while narratively driven by the apocalypse, concerns itself with themes of belief and communication. The former manifests in each character's need to have faith in someone or something that has the power to deliver them from their own failings. The latter makes itself felt through each character's attempt to communicate to someone, anyone, their need to belong, to be made whole. Mr. Coupland makes no bones of these themes; his characters openly proclaim their fears in outbursts of unrealistic dialogue. Nonetheless, it works precisely because this is a philosophical piece that draws its value from the articulation of human nature and human need, not from an exact reconstruction of reality. Wonderfully thoughtful, pleasingly succinct, and, for all its declarations, well-plotted. (4/5 Stars)

Hater by David Moody

From The Week of February 20, 2011

In order to explore the various aspects of human existence, dramatists often find it necessary to capture relatively minor, societal trends and blow them up to apocalyptic proportions to ensure that their audiences heed their messages of warning. This is what fuels the popularity of genres like zombie fiction, stories built on the fear of our fellow humans devolving into mindless slavishness as a result of repetitive work, poor education, and a willingness to be mastered by their social betters. Mr. Moody is as guilty of this over-amplification as anyone, taking the basic zombie scare, welding some us-versus-them politics on top of it, and then turning the heat up on his re-imagined stew of horror until only an inferno remains. If this is literary art, it is the art of the sledgehammer.

In contemporary England, everyday Britains go about their daily lives, unaware that doom is about to befall them. A new kind of virus is sweeping the country, an affliction which, if contracted, has a good chance of turning the infected into a hateful, violent savage. The condition is characterized by a sudden certainty that everyone around the infected has decided to kill him. The Haters, as they come to be called, respond to this threat by lashing out and brutally murdering the totally innocent bystanders surrounding them. No one, no matter how precious to the victim, is safe from his attacks.

Danny, our narrator, is scraping by at a fairly menial job while supporting a wife and kids. He is the one who communicates to us the slow build of the Hater virus. It is through his eyes that we watch civil society pulled apart while the government looks on, paralyzed. Soon enough, life across Britain has ground to a halt as the Haters threaten to take over and destroy civilization with their nihilism. Will Danny save his family? Will his loved ones contract the illness? Where is it safe to go?

This might have been a thought provoking book if it was not so completely covered in gore; after all, Mr. Moody is playing with some powerful themes: the frailties of identity, both personal and national; the catch 22 of paranoia; and the oppositional nature of our us-versus-them societies. However, the tale mirrors the devolvement of its British society, beginning innocently and intellectually and ending in an orgy of mindless barbarism. In-between, it is a steady march down into Hell. This is not instructive or revelatory; it is gleefully anarchic, as mindless as its Haters. The extent to which Mr. Moody was able to flip the paradigm, exploring paranoia and violence from the inside, is interesting, but the explosions and the noise and the blood make it impossible to hear anything meaningful here. Searing, overwhelming and caustic... (2/5 Stars)

Curfewed Night by Basharat Peer

From The Week of February 20, 2011

In this gripping memoir, Mr. Peer brings to life a part of the world which, while familiar to us in name, is, for most of us in the West, nothing more than disputed ground on a distant continent. For Mr. Peer, however, Kashmir is home: where his parents raised him, where his grandparents loved him, and where his community nurtured him into adulthood. Though it has been contested ground since 1947, it was, in his youth, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, a largely peaceful place where the author and his peers underwent adolescences not unlike those experienced by teenagers in the developed world. But with the acceleration of violent posturing between India and Pakistan in the late 1980s, and through into the 1990s, Kashmir became a proxy state, neutral but mutually claimed ground in which armies from both sides skirmished in a kind of Asian cold war which obliterated Kashmir's civil society and triggered an exodus of native Kashmiri to other lands.

Curfewed Night is an exceptionally moving piece of journalism. Mr. Peer's understated narration permits the reader to be a vicarious witness to an underreported tragedy of cold war, the fallout that lands on innocents ground up between the gears of two massive and conflicting states. There are political opinions here, as Mr. Peer leaves little doubt of his resentment over the Indian crackdown which was a deathblow to his homeland, but this is primarily a chronicle of one boy's coming of age in a time of tension and strife. First, he watches some of his friends radicalized to fight in a hopeless war, then he feels the terror of having his honorable father and his proud village both put squarely in the crosshairs of Indian reprisal. By the end of his adolescence, it's clear that he has been changed forever.

This is an old story that has, and will, be told of many lands, places destroyed because of quirks of politics and geography that fatefully entrap them between agitated behemoths. I doubt, however, many of such accounts have been composed with such pride, sadness, empathy, and passion. In exposing the price he paid for watching his homeland sundered, Mr. Peer teaches those who read this book a lesson about the consequences of national conflict and national policy they won't soon forget. (5/5 Stars)

The Bookseller Of Kabul by Asne Seierstad

From The Week of February 13, 2011

I imagine that all of us who read books about international conflicts do so in hopes of learning about the root causes that both underpin and empower them. The problem is, while books can grant us an understanding of a conflict's broad strokes, it can't ever get at its essential truths. These can only come through immersion in a culture. Everything short of this relies on the opinions of reporters and their subjects, people whose educations, biases, agendas, we can't possibly know and account for. And so the portrait we wind up with is impossibly distorted by fragments of moments blown up to fit the author's expectations.

So what do we do? We turn to books like The Bookseller of Kabul, point-of-view accounts which give voice to the silenced citizens from whom we would never otherwise hear a word. The Afghan family, with whom Ms. Seierstad devotes a year of her life, living under their roof, eating their food, observing their fights, gives us an incredible texture, a reality, to life in war that broader, more journalistic efforts simply cannot match. The family's mundane struggles to survive during the foundational period of the American occupation, post-Taliban, is more powerful than any summation of the key events, the policies, the generals, the corruption, the national aspirations. It shows us the heartbeat of a place, its loves and its jealousies, its terrors and its triumphs. And in doing so, it allows us to understand the cruel prejudices which have been allowed to shape a land like Afghanistan into what we see today.

Ms. Seierstad does her best to disappear inside her own book, handing the narrative completely over to the fascinating family who take her into their home. But while this grants the reader a first-hand account of life for Afghanis in war-torn Afghanistan, it runs the risk of controversy. After all, Ms. Seierstad claims to know a great deal about the emotions and motivations of her characters, intimacies which we cannot know for sure she drew out of them. But while the patriarch of the family has disputed her version of events, her characterization seems both solid and remarkable. From the stress polygamy puts on the patriarch's wives, to the silenced but intelligent daughter who is treated like a mule by the family, everyone here is believable and tragic, leaving the reader to mourn for their lost potential and hope for their better future.

The Bookseller of Kabul is experimental non-fiction. It tells a true story, but does so without the author's voice to explain where the detail emanates from. And in this, it reads like narrative fiction. Whatever its classification, it is an intense experience which, while explaining little about the overall conflict, imparts a great deal about the price the little people pay in times of war. This is a book about both the sadness and the hope of a land obliterated by zealotry and combat. I won't soon forget it. (3/5 Stars)

Tea With Hezbollah by Ted Dekker & Carl Medearis

The spirit of reckless adventure animates Tea With Hezbollah, a tour of the Middle East guided by two Western authors who, driven by a need to understand hatred of America, set out to interview the region's key figures. Though some of their intended targets refuse to meet with them, they get surprisingly far in their quest, meeting with some of the Middle East's most reclusive powerbrokers and putting to them some basic queries about love, forgiveness, justice and brotherhood. Though this book will not re-shape the way the West views the Middle East, it is not without its fascinations and its revelations.

From Egyptian cabs to Saudi palaces, Mr. Dekker and Mr. Medearis give as much respect to the views of the average Arab as they do to the most powerful cleric. Once the religiosity has been parsed out, the interviews transcribed here reveal a universality of human wants and behaviors which span all ideologies, all faiths. All cultures have a tendency to gin up conspiracy theories to explain away defeats; they manifest belief in personal gods so that meaning can be applied to life; and they make important distinctions between the decency of regular citizens and the selfishness of governments who represent their interests. While These are all reassuringly human sentiments, it is this last which offered me the most comfort. Our governments may be the faces our nations put to the world, but they are hardly representative of us, of our sensitivities, our interests. They are snapshots of our emotions on election day and little else. And so, when the leading cleric of Hezbollah recognizes this distinction, choosing to focus his enmity on Western governments and not Western people, the reader is given a small but valuable glimpse into the rationales of men who are otherwise incomprehensible to us in the West.

This is far from a perfect book. Its portrait of the region is not only filtered through the conversations and the subjects Mr. Dekker and Mr. Medearis chose to include here, it is obscured by the agendas of the men with whom the authors spoke. But even if we must keep many grains of salt nearby while consuming this piece, there's value here. Humans are more or less the same, driven by the same goals, the same needs. Their circumstances are what make them different. We are all born into specific times, in specific places, with specific custom's, into specific traditions. These mores combine with our personalities to create our identities. But even if the finished products look, talk, act, and believe differently, the underlying software is still the same, urging us to seek out the same peace. Perhaps, if we all keep this in mind, West and East, the themes of brotherhood expressed in this book will be strong enough to quiet the hatred.

Interesting work. The interview with Nasrallah is captivating, but the tone here is ragged, veering between light-hearted and zealous. (3/5 Stars)

Dreams And Shadows by Robin Wright

From The Week of February 13, 2011

While freedom is the birthright of all intelligent beings, it is, in some parts of the world, a right rarely practiced or protected. Though there are many different superficial reasons for this most grievous oversight, there is, to my mind, only one root cause, instability. It can corrupt political systems, corrode economic practices, and destroy societal norms, all this while flowing effortlessly across national borders. After all, what are the odds that country A remains a peaceful, neutral, multicultural, economically viable state while country B, with whom it shares a border, descends into violent, chaotic, despotic conflict? Poor, to say the least. And yet this is the Middle East, a collection of re-drawn nations whose populations know only colonialism and authoritarianism, where, for the last 50 years, instability has had its AK47 pressed to the sweaty temple of intellectual and scientific enlightenment. Find peace in that...

Ms. Wright, a veteran, American journalist, has travelled to, and clearly spent a great deal of time in, the Arab world. Dreams And Shadows is as much a distillation of those many adventures as it is a political and historical primer for the region, its many states, its violent regimes, its savage politics, and its heroic dissidents. From the hama Massacre in Syria to the most recent flare-up between Israel and Lebanon, she covers, here, many of the region's key events, painting a 30 year picture of political and religious extremism and the extent to which brave souls, armed with nothing more than their minds and their courage, have tried to stanch it. Iran's zealousness, Syria's ruthlessness, Egypt's corruption, Lebanon's sadness, and Morocco's darkness all play prominent roles here, illuminating, for those of us lucky enough to know stability, what it's like to live in a world where hope can be so easily and cruelly snuffed out.

This kind of sweeping narrative can be prone to generalizations, as the author's mind, built to seek out patterns, tries to make all the pieces fit. But Ms. Wright does an admirable job of steering clear of grand pronouncements, substituting them for descriptions of the events she's seen and the meetings she's had, with the oppressed and their oppressors. I found her succinct characterization of the 2006 Israeli-Lebanese war particularly revealing. The only major flaw here is the necessarily inconsistent approach Ms. Wright has taken with each of her national subjects. In Lebanon, much of the conversation is taken up with its leaders, while elsewhere the action is focused on beleaguered dissidents trying to overthrow their jailers. But I imagine this to be a largely unavoidable consequent of following the story. One can only talk to people who will talk to you... Excellent, sobering, enlightening, and especially relevant in the light of the Arab Spring. In this, it is far more prescient than dated. (4/5 Stars)

The Grave Tattoo by Val McDermid

From The Week of February 13, 2011

In the past, I've enjoyed Ms. McDermid's work; she has created some wonderfully complex protagonists and some truly revolting villains. The Grave Tattoo, however, did little else than but disappoint. There's a wonderful idea here, but the execution of the idea leaves much to be desired.

In contemporary England, the corpse of a man who might provide answers to a 200 year old mystery washes up out of the past, triggering a series of events which can only lead to darkness and deceit. Taking center stage in the drama that follows is Jane Gresham, a Wordsworth scholar, who lives a lonely and frustrated existence. But when the body in question seems to lend credence to her theory, that one of HMS Bounty's mutineers might have secretly returned to England, Jane's life is transformed as her tireless endeavor to get to the bottom of the mystery invites jealousy and chaos from the selfish men who surround her. Companioning her on this hunt for the truth is Tenille, a teenaged girl whose impoverished upbringing makes her escape into Romantic poetry all the more necessary. Together, they just might solve Jane's mystery despite the best efforts of the police, art dealers and other scholars to thwart them.

It's clear that a great deal of research went into composing this rare, stand-alone volume from Ms. McDermid, but dogged research and a good idea don't always amalgamate into a good tale. The Grave Tattoo lacks focus, defusing its potency across way too many unnecessary protagonists. Way too often, I found myself flipping pages in hopes of returning to characters more vital to the story. It is meticulously plotted, but what it gains in symmetry it loses in dramatic punch. Needed to be a hundred pages shorter and two protagonists lighter to move me. Disappointing... I sensed that Ms. McDermid was rather too enchanted with her concept to see that her finished product lacked the sharpness and the intensity of some of her other work. (2/5 Stars)

The Woman Who Fell From The Sky by Jennifer Steil

From The Week of February 06, 2011

It was a surreal experience to read this book while protests in Yemen threaten to topple Ali Abdullah Saleh from power; for The Woman Who Fell From The Sky concerns, in whole, the trials and tribulations of an American woman's attempts to bring the standards of Western journalism to a Yemeni newspaper. Though her efforts to teach Journalism 101 to her reporters has its ups and downs, Ms. Steil has totally succeeded in penning a fantastic memoir of her years living in this particularly enchanting Arab dictatorship.

Yemen practices what we might charitably call a faux democracy. While all the instruments of representative government exist, corruption rules the day. President Saleh maintains his position through the liberal use of force against those who disagree with him. Though Yemen has a notional free press, the reality on the ground is far more pragmatic, with the publishers of newspapers well aware of the lines that must not be crossed. Any criticism of the government will be swiftly and mercilessly punished.

This is the country into which Ms. Steil falls. Invited to leave her cozy New York life for an uncertain and problematic existence as chief editor of a Yemeni newspaper, Ms. Steil seizes the opportunity for adventure. But it's not until she arrives in Yemen that she realizes she must not only publish a newspaper, she must teach everyone at the newspaper how a paper is published. Confronted by censorship, sexism and institutional arrogance written into the Yemeni DNA, Ms. Steil soldiers forth with admirable doggedness, leaving as profound a mark on her fellows at the Yemen Observer as the country itself leaves on her. For she makes clear in her account that she's fallen in love with this most crazy, and yet oddly lovable, Arab nation.

While this memoir speaks eloquently to the weighty issue of press freedom inside a dictatorship, it's Ms. Steil's fondness for Yemeni culture that makes her effort here memorable. She unreservedly throws herself, headlong, into a world she barely knows, seeking out knowledge and experience with an admirable absence of prejudice or judgement. Her love for the people she befriends seems as genuine as her antipathy towards the blockheads at the newspaper who ignorantly squander the resources around them. Yes, Ms. Steil devotes too much time to her love life which matters a lot more to her than it does to her readers, but this flaw did little to diminish my enjoyment of a book which taught me as much about a culture as it did the subject. A rare feat. (4/5 Stars)

The Grand Turk by John Freely

From The Week of February 06, 2011

For Nearly eleven-hundred years, the Byzantine empire sheltered the flickering flame of Western civilization, preserving the knowledge of the Greeks and the Romans long after the fall of those societies. But after many rulers and many victories, the Byzantine empire met its match. In 1453, it faced its existential threat and, deprived of the cunning that had kept it alive for so long, collapsed before the onslaught of its Ottoman enemies. On may 29th, 1453, the world changed forever, when a 21-year-old Mehmed II, the Conquerer and Grand Turk, entered shattered Constantinople, making it, for the next 500 years, the seat of Ottoman power.

Mr. Freely indulges in some unnecessary details, trudging through Mehmed's complicated family tree, but this is, on the whole, a balanced and vivid account of one of the world's most successful conquerers. From the politics which surrounded his early life to his myriad conquests, Mr. Freely valiantly illuminates the life of a man who seized his opportunity to be at the heart of world events. For in conquering the Byzantines, he banished the last remnant of the old world and replaced it with the new, a world still somewhat familiar these 550 years later. Mehmed the Conquerer lengthened the arm of Islam and permanently reconfigured the boundary between the eastern and western worlds, ensuring generations of war and conflict between Asian and European civilizations, each of which laid claim to the one right and true god.

Understandably, Mr. Freely devotes most of his time here to the siege of Constantinople, Mehmed II's crowning achievement. But he does spend some time with the Grand Turk's incursions into Europe, efforts which met with mixed success. For while he would make inroads into Bosnia, he suffered great losses in Hungary, losses which, it could be argued, were all that stood between him and the Islamification of Europe. A giant of history at a nexus point in time... Mr. Freely does justice to an area of history all-too-lightly regarded in the West. (3/5 Stars)

A Needle In The Right Hand Of God by R.howard Bloch

From The Week of February 06, 2011

The Bayeux Tapestry is an exceptional piece of history. Likely commissioned by members of William The Conquerer's family, it is a visual retelling of the Norman Conquest of England, encapsulated and transferred to a 224 foot length of cloth that has survived for more than 900 years. Stop and consider that for a moment. Fires, religious wars, natural disasters, lootings, political upheavals, the Nazis... It has endured all to remain with us, an invaluable resource for our understanding of a medieval world so often clouded by the mists of time.

Mr. Bloch, here, not only recounts the Tapestry's long history, he details the ways and means of its creation by reconstructing the labors of countless women to embroider colored yarn on a linen backdrop. Every image, from the grandest battles to the simplest of letters was the result of incalculable hours of necessarily errorless stitching. But while its making and its adventures fascinate, Mr. Bloch is at his best, here, filling in the events depicted by its myriad scenes. Being an account of the Conquest from the viewpoint of its victors, the reader requires a historian to provide both context and balance to a biased tale. And while Mr. Bloch's account is more pro-Norman than the version posited by Harriet Harvey Wood, it is just as edifying.

It's such a shame that the piecing together of our history has been reduced to the interpretation of wall hangings, yet, there's something glorious about such necessities. For while we pick it apart for nuance, we're forced to acknowledge that all history, all understanding, is transient, that who we are and what we achieve will be retained, forgotten, remembered and forgotten again as we and our descendants endure the rapids of the future. There's nothing especially revelatory about Mr. Bloch's work here, but he certainly does justice to a worthy subject. (3/5 Stars)

Between Two Worlds by Zainab Salbi

From The Week of January 30, 2011

In this vivid piece, Ms. Salbi describes an Iraq few of us in the West can imagine. It is an Iraq of her parents' generation, an Iraq before Saddam, an Iraq of culture and style. It is an Iraq which is perverted and then destroyed by the ego of one man and the will of Iraqis to follow him. Between Two Worlds is the anatomy of a nation's disintegration into a tyranny so ugly and profound that its ripple effects can be seen in the Iraq of the 21st century.

By Ms. Salbi's account, she had a childhood much like many in the West. Born to loving parents, she grew up comfortable with herself and her freedoms in a sane-ish and secular state. Her father, a commercial pilot, provided for the family while her mother raised her and her siblings with warmth and confidence. But when Saddam Hussein rose to power in the late 1970s, this normal life was replaced by an existence far more terrifying. Ms. Salbi's parents socialized in a circle quite near to the new Iraqi leader. As a consequence, they were drawn into Hussein world of lavish parties, stupendous excesses and perverse passions. While, publicly, he was leading Iraq into a disastrous war with Iran, privately, he toyed with those around him, dominating them, breaking them. Caught in an abusive relationship they were too afraid to end, Ms. Salbi watched her parents ruin themselves on Hussein's altar of sacrifice, unable to find a way out of his cruelty.

This is an intense memoir which spends as much time chronicling the cruelty of a dictator as it does with Ms. Salbi's own story which is fascinating and complex. Pressured by her parents to flee Iraq and marry in America, Ms. Salbi describes her own terror and abuse at the hands of a dictatorial husband. But soon enough, she finds her way out of her own darkness and into the light of activism which takes her into the world's most dangerous conflicts, to help improve the plight of women shattered by war. In this way, Ms. Salbi's star ascends even while her country's flickers and threatens to go out.

Incredible work. Ms. Salbi's portrait of Saddam Hussein captures the Hitlerian cruelty of a man perfectly willing to allow his people to suffer for the furtherance of his own glory. But while the stories she tells of her adolescence spent near this dictator are memorable and noteworthy, her own journey is equally as potent. To flee ones homeland for an abusive marriage, only to escape that plight and transform oneself into a crusader for women annihilated by war is both commendable and astonishing. As admirable as it is unforgettable. (4/5 Stars)

The Siege Of Mecca by Yaroslav Trofimov

From The Week of January 30, 2011

Religion is one of the most powerful and pernicious forces humanity has ever unleashed. It captures the natural, human need to believe in an organizing person or principle governing the universe and codifies that belief into a tribal doctrine which only serves to divide people from one another. The moment that we create rules for the proper following of a faith, we create the circumstances by which true believers, true followers, can distinguish themselves from those who do not believe as they do, who do not follow the right path. For humans, the only outcome of this division is war. Thankfully, in the West, the combination of great minds and their scientific endeavors have handed down to us a legacy of inquiry into all questions, creating in our society and our culture a healthy skepticism that allows us to pursue truth. But in other parts of the world, this freedom does not exist. On November 20th, 1979, the world witnessed the consequences of a society pillared on righteousness. And for it, many lives were lost.

The Grand Mosque at Mecca, in Saudi Arabia, is, for Muslims, not only the holiest mosque but the focus point of their prayers. It is the culmination of the annual Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that each Muslim must complete at least once in their lifetime. As such, it is a symbol of the Islamic faith that, I imagine, is rivaled only by the Quran. In 1979, after years of agitation against the Saudi Arabian monarchy, a group of some 400 Islamic radicals, advocating a return to a strict interpretation of the Quran, seized the Mosque and held it for some two weeks while demanding the abolishment of the monarchy, the end to oil exports to the West, and the expulsion from the Arabian Peninsula of all foreigners. The calamitous response from Saudi authorities not only prolonged the terrorist act, it transformed a controllable situation into an international incident disastrous to Saudi Arabian prestige in the world. After the authorities deployed tanks and commandos against the terrorists, the siege was brought to a bloody and tragic conclusion.

Mr. Trofimov does a wonderful job revealing the many elements of history involved in this ugly incident. His explanation of Wahhabism, that strain of Islamic conservatism that has ideologically fuelled Islamic fundamentalists from Juhayman to Bin Laden, is the clearest articulation I've read of what motivates these zealots to sow their terror. Most memorably, however, is his depiction of the Saudi royal family which manages, somehow, to botch the response to the seizure so badly that they must beg the country's powerful clerics to grant their footsoldiers permission to raid the Mosque with lethal weapons. In exchange for their blessing, the clerics extract from the House of Saud a crackdown on some of the same freedoms the terrorists were agitating against, leaving the reader with the distinct impression that the royal family would have been better off negotiating with the terrorists!

This is excellent work, chronicling an incredibly tragic event. It is not difficult to contemplate these two weeks in 1979 and see in them an explosion of terrorism which fuelled the rise of the Taliban, the disintegration of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the planning and the execution of 9-11. Here are the consequences of zealousness writ large. (4/5 Stars)

Dining With Al Qaeda by Hugh Pope

From The Week of January 30, 2011

It is one of my eternal frustrations that much of what is reported from the Middle East comes to us through Western journalists who never settle long enough in the region to understand it, to internalize its character, its rhythms. Perhaps this is asking too much; after all, locals aren't immune from reading too much into symbolic events, much less being fooled by government untruths. Nonetheless, they have a knowledge that no parachuting journalist can have. It's a knowledge that allows them to contextualize events, to give them their proper weight. After all, as a Canadian, I wouldn't trust that a journalist from Zimbabwe could come to my country for a few weeks, talk to some government officials, tour some sites, and then declare that he's captured the spirit of my country. I'd put the odds of his account being accurate at a thousand to one. Mr. Pope may be British, but he's spent 30 years living, working and loving in a region that most of us in the West have never even visited. He's as close as I am going to get to the authenticity I crave. And being that I can veritably taste the Middle East in these pages, I consider myself satisfied.

From Iran to Saudi Arabia, from seductive Egyptian girls to deadly serious Islamic terrorists, Mr. Pope spills his three decades of reporting from the Middle East across this vivid account of life in a region so unlike the West which has sought, for so long, to control it. His description of what it was like to fly with the Iranians during their war with Iraq in the 1980s gives the reader a glimpse of a world so drenched in ideology, so locked into the necessities of the moment, that nothing short of victory can be tolerated. Contrast this hardcore determination with Saudi Arabian excesses and the reader will never again generalize about the "the Middle East." These nations are far too distinct to be merged. But this isn't just an account of events, of people, of moments in time; Mr. Pope communicates the sadness of the region, the inability on anyone's part to fix it, and the lack of will on anyone's part to speak up for a sense of unfiltered, unbiased justice. He's not a moralist; he merely has the knowledge that emanates from reading countless faces, absorbing the culture over hundreds of dinners. It's a knowing that seems to be in his blood and it wonderfully informs his work here.

Dining With Al Qaeda is an admirably sober image of a place no one understands. The narrative, though it jumps around as Mr. Pope moves from assignment to assignment, is fresh and devoid of fluff. Though the glimpses he gives us into the world of international journalism are interesting, the time he spends with the stateless Kurds in Kurdistan is most powerful and, alone, makes this a memorable read. Completely compelling. It lacks answers, but it does not lack for truths. (4/5 Stars)

The Self Comes To Mind by Antonio Damasio

From The Week of January 30, 2011

Unless we unlock the secrets to immortality, we will all likely be dead before humanity learns the fundamental truths of the how, the why, and the where of human consciousness. Thanks to brilliant minds like that possessed by Dr. Damasio, we have pieces to the puzzle, but these pieces are only theories that have yet to be proven. How can they be proven? We barely have the tools to measure consciousness, let alone divine its origins. Yet there's a virtue to theorizing. It stimulates debate, insight and inquiry. It may be that The Self Comes To Mind will succeed at doing all three.

Dr. Damasio, a professor of Neuroscience at USC, has been, for 30 years, studying the human brain in an attempt to extract its secrets. Here, he lays out his model of consciousness, arguing that it is the product of three, major systems which hierarchically build on one another to create a self-aware, functioning human being who can think, feel, remember and adapt. The Protoself is a largely subconscious awareness of the body, a map which allows the brain to regulate heart, kidney, lungs, among other vital systems. Core Consciousness builds on the Protoself by plugging in a sense of being, that is the awareness of self as distinct from ones environment, coupled with an awareness of desires and needs that motivate us. Finally, Extended Consciousness takes this understanding of the physical self and envelopes it in an autobiographical self, a self that is capable of remembering and, therefore, learning from experience. This self allows us to create communities, tools, societies, all of the elements that comprise human culture.

This is a clean and coherent explanation of selfhood and Dr. Damasio backs it up with a wealth of evidence drawn from years of experimentation and investigation. He includes, here, some of these experiments, enlightening the reader on the long journey to his theory of the human mind which he seems to have grasped on a level that I never will. And so even if I disagreed with him, It'd be pointless for me to be critical of his methodology or his conclusions. However, I can critique the book which I found both fascinating and challenging. Dr. Damasio is at his best when he descends from the Olympian heights of his understanding of neurology to engage the reader in a discussion of the fundamentals of both his theory and what we know of the brain. Consequently, he's at his worst when he falls back on the technical details that no one without a degree in Neurology will understand. I'm left enlightened, but feeling like I'm watching Van Gogh put together a masterpiece that I can only follow on a level less profound than the one on which he understands and operates. (3/5 Stars)

Battle Hymn of The Tiger Mother by Amy Chua

From The Week of January 23, 2011

Ms. Chua has received an extraordinary amount of criticism for Battle Hymn of The Tiger Mother which is both a memoir and a statement on good parenting. Some of this she welcomed; after all, screaming at your kids, threatening to burn their stuffed animals, and pushing them so hard they resent you is not exactly standard tactics in the Western parent's field manual. But these critics of Ms. Chua have not only missed the point here, they, like the overzealous defense lawyer who uses every sleazy tactic in the book to smear the victim, have only succeeded in making it less likely that anyone who writes a book like this in the future will be as honest and as forthright as Ms. Chua has been. Some may publicly insist otherwise, but no one wants, or is ready for, the kind of criticism this book attracted. And it's a shame because lost in the cacophony is the truth that this is a personal and sincere effort that is worthy of praise.

Ms. Chua, a professor of law at Yale University, has a beef with Western parents who, she believes, have reduced themselves to playing the role of recreational coordinators for their children. They have, she argues, substituted actual parenting for something much less useful, a kind of shepherding of their children to adulthood, at which point they happily turn over their parenting responsibilities to their kids' universities, or employers, or girlfriends. Ms. Chua wants her kids to have and aspire to much more than this aimless, floating existence. And so, even though she's firmly ensconced in enemy territory, surrounded by American adolescents and their Western parents, she elects to become a tiger (read Asian) mother, drumming into her two daughters a relentlessness which sees both of them achieve remarkable musical feats before they are even 16. But while her tiger mother gameplan works well with her eldest daughter, the youngest rebels and, soon enough, tiger mother and American daughter are locked in a furious and, at times, hate-filled back and forth which puts tremendous strain on most of the family's internal relationships.

This is a well-composed memoir which does everything it ought to do. It exposes us to an interesting and dynamic family, it engages us in a meaningful debate about parenting, and it offers us the conflict of the mother/daughter discord and the resolution of their finding, eventually, a workable compromise. Its honesty is admirable and its bravery is considerable; this is all we can ask for. And yet, it does seem like Ms. Chua, in insisting her piece is just a memoir, is denying the fact that she is making the case for tiger mothers. She clearly believes that success is measured by achievement and, therefore, Western parents should adopt some of the tiger mother philosophies that worked so well for her and her eldest daughter. It'd be dishonest of Ms. Chua to claim otherwise. And so, in that vein...

Success shouldn't be measured by achievement. Success should be measured by joy. Yes, we ought to instill in our children a desire to be productive citizens, but we shouldn't infect them with our ideas of how that productivity should be realized. Parenting cannot be the systematic creation of children in our own image. It isn't a vanity project. They have free will. We should present to them an opportunity to explore their own interests, to achieve their own dreams. To do otherwise is to force upon them a life they may not want. Yes, Ms. Chua's argument here has merit, but it's just too black and white and that's evident even within her own family. Joy has to matter. If joy comes from striving to play at Carnegie Hall, great! If it comes from working in a corner store, great! It's not for parents to impose their own standards upon their kids. We all have agency.

Fascinating and compelling work. (4/5 Stars)