Eternity Road by Jack McDevitt

From The Week of June 19, 2011

Civilization as we know it is built on knowledge, time-tested truths and scientifically proven theories which underpin our technology, our morality and our understanding of the world. But what would civilization look like if most of these truths were ripped from us? What manner of lives would we lead in a world where we had only the most rudimentary understanding of physics, of engineering, of society?

In Eternity Road, Mr. McDevitt imagines a world in which our civilization has been swathed in a thousand years of wind-swept desolation, a world in which humans have been all but wiped from the earth by that oldest and most deadly of foes. Plague has reverted the land of the 31th century to an 11th century environment of thick forests, swollen rivers and medieval towns which sway uncertainly between empire and republicanism. Though a few remnants of civilization have been handed down to these pre-industrial homesteaders in the form of the odd book or two, these fragments are cultural, not technological. These survivors, who call the Mississippi valley home, must trust in horses, livestock, and human labor to travel, feed and clothe themselves for they have lost the knowledge of how to build even the simplest steam engine.

Our adventure begins when the strong-headed leader of a failed expedition returns home from a nine year journey to discover Haven, a mythical store of knowledge left behind by the Roadmakers, the name these future medievalists give to our fallen civilization. Though the leader has solid explanations for how his companions perished, a shadow is cast across his story when, soonafter his return, he dies. His will petitions his son to give a mysterious book to Chaka, the sister of one of his fallen expeditionists. It is a here-to-for lost work by Mark Twain, the origins of which are enshrouded in mystery. Inspired to unearth the truths hidden within this twisted tale, Chaka, a strong-willed woman ill-suited to life within her paternalistic state, decides to reconstruct the road the first expedition took to find Haven and follow it with her own team of adventurers. For she believes that the volume of Twain could only have come from Haven, the fabled treasure that may well have the power to restore civilization.

Mr. McDevitt harnesses the timeless power of an adventure story to explore civilization at its infancy and how it might go about acquiring lost knowledge. In this, he adopts many of the epic's tropes, the rugged band of heroes who battle hardship, bandits, and ignorance in their against-all-odds quest to restore light to the world. But for all that this is fairly predictable work, Mr. McDevitt hires some excellent characters to entertain us on a vividly described journey which manages to be harrowing and creepy in spite of an absence of surprising twists and turns. Chaka is easily the brightest light, her iron will keeping the tale focused on its mythical destination. But even though she is clearly the hero of the piece, she is pleasingly human, full of doubts and fears that plague her and her expedition.

Post-apocalyptic fiction should always thrill. After all, it is an opportunity for us to stare into the existential darkness that may, at any moment, come for our civilization. And though Mr. McDevitt could have penned a less methodical tale, one in which his adventurers arrived at their destination at a more expeditious pace, a dark foreboding infuses Eternity Road, leaving the reader with the sense that he is being escorted through the graveyard of a civilization. How can that fail to thrill? (3/5 Stars)

Solaris by Stanislaw Lem

It has now been 50 years since the publication of Stanislaw Lem's classic, Solaris. And though the passage of time has antiquated certain technological aspects of the tale, it has, in no respect, reduced its philosophical might.

In the distant future, humanity has taken to the stars, exploring interstellar space and setting foot on far-flung worlds. But though these achievements are noteworthy, they stand humanity in poor stead when it stumbles across the enigma that is Solaris, an ocean world riding an awkward orbit between powerful, binary stars. The planet's oddities are sufficiently compelling to earn it a manned research station which is assembled and then lowered into Solaris' atmosphere, where upon it studies the seemingly landless planet. Though there is disagreement over the how and the extent, the experts agree that Solaris is alive, its all-encompassing ocean? A single, conscious entity. This is no simple intelligence, no plant or tree. This is an entity capable of observing even while it is being observed by the human scientists studying it for clues to its composition and its origins.

Kris Kelvin, a trained psychologist, arrives at Solaris, intent upon observing it as well as the station's crew. But though our protagonist seems to possess an admirably ordered mind, his formidable intelligence is immediately threatened when he begins to see things on the hovering station, apparitions that cannot exist. What's more, these manifestations (Guests), which, for Kelvin, take the form of his long-dead wife, are flesh, organized reality sourced from his deepest memories. Slowly, as days give way to weeks, Kelvin, like the crewmen before him, is driven to madness by what cannot be. Haunted by the guilt over his wife's untimely death, he fights for understanding, for a way out of the alienness in which he has been ensnared, but it's clear that, even if he does succeed in physically escaping Solaris, it will always be inside him, enmeshed in his spirit.

Mr. Lem bites off a great deal in a piece which, though it is intellectually engaging, offers little in the way of the satisfying escapism common to most science fiction. He challenges readers to consider what first contact with aliens might be like if the extraterrestrials are not some variation on a familiar form but a thing entirely foreign to us, an organism whose thinking, existing, is so inaccessible to us that it is necessarily inscrutable. In this, Mr. Lem asks us to contemplate the nature of consciousness. How do we know that we are not dreaming? How do we know that we are not part of some hallucination? How do we maintain our sanity in the face of something that can pull from us our deepest fears and use them to examine us even as we are examining it? Though these existential questions are callbacks to Western philosophy, they are also meaningful to the 21st century reader aware of and interested in the ethics of exploitation. The presumptuousness of the human scientists prodding insensitively at Solaris and getting back a response they cannot handle is analogous to the way we have savaged our environment, running roughshod over it and its creatures in an effort to understand ourselves and our world. And though this may have been largely unavoidable, we cannot expect to freely exploit without consequences for ourselves and our civilization.

Solaris is delightfully creepy, entrapping our minds on a distant, alien shore where reality is malleable and enigmas abound. But though the philosophy here is enjoyable, I needed there to be more of an actual story. Mr. Lem is a skilled illuminator of the nature of deteriorating, human relationships, but he does not truly explore Solaris. This may have been an intentional choice on the author's part; after all, how can one explore something one does not understand. But the novel was poorer for it. Nonetheless, Mr. Lem has captured the dark underbelly of human emotion, particularly our tendency to destroy what we do not understand and he's done so with rare skill. (3/5 Stars)

Amerigo by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

From The Week of June 19, 2011

What is in a name? Though Amerigo is, in the main, a biography of Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian explorer after whom the Americas were named, it is this question which rests at the heart of Mr. Fernandez-Armestoe's tale. Does it matter that North and South America were named for a pimp turned merchant turned explorer who was not even the first person to make landfall in the western Atlantic? Likely not. After all, very little about Amerigo's life has survived the turbulence of 500 years of history that separate us from him, but it does afford us an opportunity to examine a difficult man whose life was enshrouded in mystery.

Born into a 15th century Italy ruled by the Medici clan, Amerigo was the hard-living son of a moderately successful family. Tutored in both the classics and the romance languages, he appears to have enjoyed his proximity to power while partaking of the pleasures of the bawdy street. In pursuit of success and fortune, Vespucci eventually relocated to Seville where upon, after enduring the highs and lows of business, he traded the tempestuousness of a merchant's life for the actual tempests of the sea, taking to the life of an explorer without any formal training. Though Vespucci's boasts make it difficult to parse out truth from lies, it is clear that he did succeed Columbus in making landfall in the New World, arriving in South America some few years after Columbus mistook the Caribbean for India. What's more, he made valuable contributions to the methodology of calculating latitude and longitude, procedures which were used into the 19th century.

Mr. Fernandez-Armesto must be commended. He has rescued from the sea of mythology a figure enshrouded in mystery, skinning him of his many lies and boasts to produce for his readers the bare bones of Amerigo Vespucci's life. In this, he discards all romanticism and embellishment in an admirable effort to get at the truth of the man after whom the new world was named. Unfortunately, this commendable obsession with the accuracy of his subject is also what dooms Mr. Fernandez-Armesto's history. For after sweeping away all the half-truths, the author is left with precious few facts about a man who has all-but-been eclipsed by the tides of time. It may be justice that Amerigo Vespucci's adventures be solidified for posterity here, but the fragments of the man are too few and too far between to fill out his portrait. And after all, is this not the purpose of a biography, to illuminate a human subject in all his brilliance and his blundering? There is only something in a name when the name means something. It is difficult to extract meaning from a handful of shards.

The scholarship is first rate, but the reader is left with little of value. (2/5 Stars)

The Civil War Of 1812 by Alan Taylor

From The Week of June 19, 2011

It is the forgotten war. Lacking the insurgent gravitas of the American Revolution, or the bloody, fratricidal battlefields of the American Civil War, the War of 1812 has been relegated to history's dusty closet. And yet, though it has been subsequently eclipsed by many, more terrible conflicts, the Anglo-American discord of 1812-1815 not only solidified the United States as a republic bent on Manifest Destiny, it sowed the seeds for the creation of Canada as a nation entirely apart from its more populous neighbor to the south.

Mr. Taylor, a historian of the early years of the United States, has assembled a thorough history of a brief but telling skirmish ignited by British desperation. Faced with a determined and pugnacious Napoleon, the British empire in 1812 ruthlessly pressed into its naval service every half-competent male it could get its hands on. This not only included British citizens who had the misfortune of being snared by the press gangs that roved the British isles n search of able men, it encompassed American citizens still considered by the British government to be subjects of their king. Rising up in defense of their kidnapped sailors, the United States, under the presidency of James Madison, retaliated by fixing the sights of its muskets northward, on Upper and Lower Canada, then English territory. American safety from British aggression, they decided, could only be secured by sweeping the empire from the continent.

However, in 1812, the United States had nothing of the military might it boasts today. And so, what began in ambitious hope for a swift and decisive victory quickly stalemated against unexpectedly fierce resistance from British-backed Canadians who enlisted various Native tribes to their aid. A series of bloody, barbarous engagements saw York looted and the White House burned, but nothing permanently gained on either side, that is, until the famous British victory over Napoleon at Waterloo allowed the world's most powerful empire to turn its attention to its colonies across the Atlantic. But rather than pursue the war any further, the two sides, humbled America and fatigued Britannia, sued for peace, ending a short but telling chapter in the history of human warfare.

The War of 1812 may have been a foolish and unnecessary exchange, but as Mr. Taylor argues in The Civil War of 1812, it solidified the meaning of citizenship. The United States of the 19th century was a little-favored upstart, an experiment widely considered to be destined to fail. These were opinions not only held by the British but by many of the United State's own citizens. In prosecuting a largely unsuccessful war against the British, the U.S. managed to not only bolster its fledgling national identity, it clarified the idea that a human being, while branded at birth by the nationality of his homeland, has the right to pursue the nationality which best reflects his ethics and his ideology. In other words, even if we are is but a fraction of the whole. born into bondage, we have the right to flee that bondage and pursue our freedom where freedom is prized. But while this is an extraordinary and noble idea, it is a shame that it has only been selectively practiced by the country that popularized it.

Mr. Taylor's history devotes as much time to the beginnings of Canadian identity as he does to American consciousness. Though Canada would not be made an independent nation for another 50 years, the War of 1812 ensured its independence from Americanism. Ruthless attacks from American militia founded, in the minds and hearts of the surviving Canadians an identity apart from not only the rapacious Americans but from the complacent British.

This is a gripping read. Mr. Taylor does a wonderful job educating the reader on the background of both the conflict and the nations that fought it. Pleasingly, he gives equal time in his chronicle to both sides while spending considerable time with the Native Indians and the Irish who fought for Canada and America respectively. Of all the forces involved, the Natives come out the worst, having been thoroughly screwed by both sides. But is this not the sad constant in the history of North America?

For all that this is quality work, Mr. Taylor, but for two passing references, completely ignores the burning of the White House by British invaders. I respect that he wanted to focus the attention of his history upon the borderlands, where the main battles were fought, but he devotes more time to American prisoners in English jails than he does to the most memorable incident of this war. It is a glaring oversight for what is, in every other respect, a fine history. (4/5 Stars)

The Four Percent Universe by Richard Panek

From The Week of June 19, 2011

We live in a world of objects: cars and buildings, lakes and mountains, stars and planets. This is our universe, a tangible reality that can be seen, touched, experienced, and even understood. But as Mr. Panek explains in The Four Percent Universe, all of what we are, all of what we can observe, is but one-25th of the stuff that makes up the universe.

We are the four percent. Mr. Panek, an author of popular science, illuminates this startling revelation in this, his history of the search for the composition of the universe. Drawing in many of the 20th century's greatest minds in astronomy and physics, he describes the evolution of human understanding of the world beyond our world. After quickly touching on the various astronomical revolutions which informed our understanding, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Hubble, the author focuses on the two teams of scientists which, in the late 1990s, independently uncovered the astonishing truth that everything we are is but a fraction of the whole. But if this is true, then what is the rest?

According to results garnered by the High-z and SCP teams so thoroughly chronicled here, the remainder of the universe is made up of a combination of Dark Matter (23 percent) and Dark Energy, 73 percent), forces inimical to light. How can something be measured when it cannot be seen? Indirectly. Dark Matter reveals itself in the structure of galaxies which should be disc-shaped. But given that spirals, bars and clusters abound, there must be missing mass. Dark Energy is made manifest in the rate at which the universe is expanding. Some unknown force must be counteracting gravity, forcing every cubic foot of universe to expand away from its fellows at an ever increasing rate. Invisible truths, uncovered as a result of realizing that something is missing.

Mr. Panek sets himself a difficult task with this history of Dark Matter and Dark Energy. He has plenty of fascinating and engaging scientists to fill out his tale, characters who culminate in the warring teams which continually one-upped each other in the late 1990s to find answers to the big questions in astronomy. What he lacks, however, are conclusions. Dark Matter and Dark Energy have only been discovered, not understood. And so, while Mr. Panek has done a wonderful job explaining how we have arrived at our current understanding of the universe, The Four Percent Universe is necessarily incomplete. It is more a chronicle of the competing teams of scientists than it is of Dark Matter and Dark Energy which are, as ever, omnipresent and utterly elusive.

What science there is here is gripping, but Mr. Panek has to rely too much on the self-indulgent, human narrative to compensate for our lack of understanding of Dark Matter and Dark Energy. But while this handicaps his tale, it does not cripple it. Engaging work. (3/5 Stars)

The Exile Kiss: Marid Audran 03 by George Alec Effinger

From The Week of June 12, 2011

All good things end. Some conclude with grace and dignity, in the full awareness that their time has come and gone. Others hold on, desperate for a last glimpse at glory. The Exile Kiss, sadly, belongs to the latter category, a clumsy and anticlimactic bow to a trilogy full of promise and disappointment.

When we were last with Marid Audran, he was acclimating to life as Friedlander Bey's loyal lieutenant. In acquiring status, wealth and power through his association with the Arab crime lord, Audran had largely left behind the hustle of the dirty, 22nd century streets of the Budayeen, reluctantly swapping them for the polished and servant-laden corridors of his master's palatial estate. But though life was proceeding apace, according to Bey's designs, an unexpected development has thrown a wrench into Marid's indoctrination. Forces within the Arab city have conspired to frame both Marid and Bey for the murder of a policeman. But before anything so civilized as a trial can take place, the two supposedly guilty parties are kidnapped, forced onto a sub-orbital flight out of their familiar world and unceremoniously dumped in the middle of a distant desert where, instantly, every trace of their advanced civilization vanishes into the endless, devouring sands. Marid must valiantly escort his master across miles of unrelenting desolation to find help and salvation in the form of Bedouin tribes sympathetic to their plight. But even if the Bedouin can aid Marid and Bey back to civilization, only enemies and discord await them there. Will they have the strength to confront and defeat their challengers?

The Exile Kiss is essentially two books which, unfortunately, are equally impotent. Part one concerns Marid and Bey's framing and forced deportation to the desert where their enemies fully expect them to perish. Though the Bedouin are a welcome contrast to the Budayeen with their codes of honor and their honest living, Mr. Effinger fails to inject this section with any sense of purpose. His intent is to give Marid an opportunity to see how the other half lives, to understand what his life might have been like had he been born into a different society, and to invest him with enough moral fortitude to return home and become a kinder, gentler Friedlander Bey. However, once Marid returns to the Budayeen in part two, Mr. Effinger all but drops the Bedouin storyline. An unchanged Marid acts as he always has, ensuring that the entirety of part one, but for a brief subplot with a Bedouin girl, is pointless.

Part two suffers from a different but equally devastating ailment. Not only does Mr. Effinger fail, even for a moment, to convince the reader that Marid won't have his revenge upon his nemesis, he allows Marid to take his revenge in the most anticlimactic and cliched manner possible -- the bad guy over-reaches in his feud against the protagonist, leaving himself wide open to an attack from an unexpected source. Even worse, the conclusion requires all of five pages! Three-hundred pages to set up a five-page denouement... This is the stuff of a sloppy, loopy amateur and well beneath Mr. Effinger's prior efforts in this series.

Mr. Effinger painstakingly established a fascinating arc for Marid Audran. The independent hustler was to trade in his autonomy for power, a transformation culminating in Audran assuming Friedlander Bey's position upon his master's death. Not only does Mr. Effinger fail to realize this promise, he does not imbue Marid with anything like the courage or ingenuity necessary for him to fill Bey's shoes. This is an unconvincingly and unworthy conclusion to a series that deserved a far better end than this. (2/5 Stars)

The Believing Brain by Michael Shermer

From The Week of June 12, 2011

We all believe in something. To believe in nothing is to endure a painfully grim existence in which it is impossible to experience love, loyalty, fidelity, or trust. So we believe to survive, to organize ourselves into communities, to share our lives with our partners and to grasp the truths of the world around us. But somewhere along the way, belief went too far. It became a crutch,fantasies to fall back on when science systematically dispelled the world of gods and magic and replaced it with a world of inescapable knowns. We've cured diseases and sent astronauts to the moon; we've spread democracy to the world and harnessed the power of the sun; we've built 200-story skyscrapers and journeyed into the depths of oceans. And still three quarters of us believe in gods. Three quarters of us believe in an after life. Three quarters of us believe in things never seen, never felt, never proven. How is such a thing possible?

Mr. Shermer, a professional skeptic and a professor of the history of science, has assembled here the major conceits that burden believers the world over, gods and ghosts, aliens and conspiracies. For the most part, he relies on neurology to provide scientific explanations for these irrationalities, arguing that what he calls patternicity, or the brain's desire to find patterns in the world around it, is the origin for many of our myths. The brain is, in the end, an extraordinarily advanced tool for pattern recognition. After all, rapidly distinguishing harmless rocks and lovely trees from poisonous snakes and deadly panthers was necessary for our survival, causing evolution to favor those humans who were the quickest to read and react and to cast aside those too slow to avoid the deadly sting, the lethal bite. But while this capacity for patternicity served humans in good stead in the wild, it harms us in the modern world, for it prompts us to ascribe meaning and significance to every worldly mystery. And given that humans are designed to survive, not to think scientifically, these conclusions often rest on supernatural foundations, foundations that are re-enforced by mental constructs like confirmation bias and selective memory which aid humans in believing in what they cannot see.

While much of The Believing Brain is a scientific exploration of belief, Mr. Shermer acknowledges that science cannot explain every earthly phenomenon. Here, he falls back on philosophy, arguing that the onus is on the believer to prove that the supernatural does exist. The onus is not on the non-believer to prove it does not exist. One cannot prove a negative. For some, this is a weak attempt on Mr. Shermer's part to excuse away the inability of science to solve for every unexplained mystery. For others, this is only logical, an attempt on the part of a non-believer to compel believers to justify their beliefs, to subject them to scientific rigor. For Mr. Shermer himself, it appears to be enough to simply state his case and have his readers decide where to stand.

In the hands of a less sensitive author, this would be a polemic, a heartless attack on the illogical beliefs of billions. But Mr. Shermer is better than that. Unlike atheists of the contentious ilk of Richard Dawkins, he does not seem driven by the need to be right. He is impelled by a more noble goal, the search for truth, whatever its shape. Perhaps this sensitivity to others emanates from his own time as a devout believer. Whatever its source, it provides a gentle reasonableness to a contentious argument. Mr. Shermer is interested in dialogue, not conquest, making this a useful read for believers and non-believers alike.

We all depend on conceits, lies we tell ourselves to get us through the day. But though these lies may be useful, their utility does not change the fact that they are lies. If the search for truth, in life and in our world, is the noblest of goals, and I think most of us can agree on this, than that revealing light must be shined on all our beliefs, no matter how sacred. For it is only when we subject these conceits to scientific scrutiny that we can begin to sift out reality from fiction.

A fascinating piece. It relies too heavily on current theories drawn from scientific experimentation to build a completely convincing case for why we believe, but that does not appear to be Mr. Shermer's objective. His goal is to present the data and to extrapolate conclusions from that data. It is for the reader to decide what, ultimately, to believe. (4/5 Stars)

Uranium by Tom Zoellner

From The Week of June 12, 2011

Though the rise of science and scientific thinking were the intellectual spurs for the Industrial Revolution, without which we would not have a modern world, industrialization would not have ignited without hydrocarbons to fuel it. Even today, oil, coal and natural gas are our energy mainstays because they are easily utilized. Even in their simplest forms, they need only be burned to produce useful energy. But while hydrocarbons are the dencist and most abundant form of energy on Earth, they are not the most powerful. That title goes to Uranium which, when refined to Uranium-235, can produce energy output, in the form of nuclear fission, magnitudes larger than hydrocarbons. In this, Uranium represents both our possible salvation and our potential demise.

Mr. Zoellner's excellent history of Uranium invites the reader back into the late middle ages where prospectors for silver discovered Uranium in Europe. Ignorant to the rock's potential, it was denigrated as ad luck and disregarded for centuries until the discovery of the atom, its form, its function, and its potential, allowed 20th century scientists to conceive of nuclear fission. While highlighting Uranium's key figures, scientists and prospectors, Mr. Zoellner educates us on the process that makes Uranium so potent. For making up .72 percent of Uranium is U-235, a heavy atom which, when it breaks apart, emits neutrons that are capable of penetrating and destabilizing other atoms of U-235, causing a chain reaction that, if properly controlled, leads to self-sustaining nuclear fission. Given that Uranium occurs naturally in nature, one might expect to find nuclear fission wherever one finds Uranium, but except for one or two ancient cases, uranium does not have enough U-235 inside it to reach criticality. Which is where modern science steps in with its centrifuges, refining the metal down into bricks of enriched uranium which have, so far, been put to two uses: the powering of peaceful, nuclear reactors or, as has happened twice in human history, the fuelling of bombs capable of annihilating entire cities.

This is a thorough history. Mr. Zoellner spends a great deal of time on the Manhattan Project which was the first, widespread effort to sound out the awesome power of Uranium. But unlike many historians who are too entrenched in an American-centric world to include in their materials anything beyond the borders of the United States, Mr. Zoellner travels to Africa, Australia and Europe in a heartfelt effort to grasp what uranium has meant to the world and what it will mean to its future. In doing so, he details Stalinist Russia's horrific campaign to mine Uranium with sacrificial slave labor. But while the history and the science educate, at the core of this piece is the idea that Uranium may be the one great hope for humanity's ever-increasing energy requirements. Mr. Zoellner does his best to stay neutral in the question, but his numerous interviews make it clear that many experts believe that Uranium is the future. For though the use of U-235 as nuclear fuel creates harmful radioactive waste, it does not produce green-house emissions. More over, it produces a staggering amount of energy, blowing hydrocarbons out of the water. A single ton of Uranium generates as much energy as 20,000 tons of coal.

We're all looking for a solution to a broken energy system. The world's population is growing which means the world's energy requirements are growing as well. The more hydrocarbons we use, the more we pollute the planet, the hotter we make the environment, the more species we kill, the closer we get to oblivion. Uranium may not be a solution, but it may buy us enough time to bridge the gap between hydrocarbons and space-based solar, or whatever the future, clean energy will be. But will disasters like the one in Japan doom uranium and doom us in the process? Maybe. Only time will tell.

This is a wonderful book, history, science, environmentalism, exploitation of populations... It's all here, superbly knitted together. Congratulations, Mr. Zoellner. This is first-rate. (5/5 Stars)

Flashforward by Robert J. Sawyer

From The Week of June 05, 2011

While science fiction authors hardly ever claim that their novels are genuine predictions of the future, a certain degree of plausibility is necessary for their work to have longevity. After all, science fiction is an exploration of an imagined future and all its wonderful possibilities. Flashforward, originally published in 1999, is a fun romp through a world of big science, but its discredited premise and its Hollywood ending mark it as a dated effort from a thoughtful author.

Mr. Sawyer's book imagines a future -- now our past -- in which the Large Hadron Collider avoids its numerous, technical glitches to, moments after activation, discover the famed Higgs boson, or God particle. But though this is a cause for momentary celebration, soon disaster strikes in the form of a strange, temporal dislocation which transports the sum total of human consciousness 21 years into the future. For two minutes, everyone alive in 2009 experiences themselves in 2030, save for those whose future selves were either asleep or dead. These unfortunates experience nothing. When the event concludes and everyone returns to their 2009 selves, they carry with them personalized memories of the two minute glimpse of the future and, as a consequence, history is rewritten. Much like Back To The Future, humans now have some idea of what they'll be like in the future which causes them to effect changes in the present, changes designed to either encourage or avoid that future reality. Will these individual efforts to improve upon personal destiny brighten the future, or will they merely succeed in throwing the world into a chaos for which no one could have possibly prepared?

Mr. Sawyer does good work here. His thoughtful ruminations concerning the nature of human life are as admirable as his communication of the various, conflicting theories about the nature of our universe is edifying. Unfortunately, his decision to marry these fascinating, philosophical meditations with the thunderous explosions and overwrought plot twists of a Bruckheimer film left me dizzy and disappointed. Mr. Sawyer tried to have his cake and eat it too, to amalgamate heavy science and Hollywood with the aim of producing a product with both gravitas and sensationalism. This alchemy, however, fails to take and leaves Mr. Sawyer with two halves to two different books. Not that Hollywood minds. Television studios have been quite interested in taking his projects to the silver screen. But those of us who read him in hopes of being enriched by the experience are left out in the cold.

There's substance here, but an absurdity of a final act robs it of its impact. (2/5 Stars)

Lyrics Alley by Leila Aboulela

From The Week of June 05, 2011

Domestic novels, examinations of a family and its trials and tribulations, have a mirror's power. They capture the commonalities, the prejudices and grudges, the loves and friendships, and reflect them back at us, offering the observant onlooker an opportunity to see his family in a different light. Structurally and imaginatively, these novels lack the intellectual challenge of speculative fiction; instead, they rely on the strength of their characters to reveal the truths about life and love that have been woven into the world around us. In this, Ms. Aboulela has penned a success, for its the extent to which the Abuzeid clan comes alive in her vision of 1950s Sudan that gives Lyrics Alley its punch.

In British-occupied Sudan, a country marked by vast inequities in income and opportunity, Mahmoud, the head of the affluent Abuzeid clan has everything he could want. Professionally, his thirst for respectability in the minds of the British has driven him to learn English, form wise business relationships with his country's Western overlords, and to begin to realize a vision of a modernized Sudan. Meanwhile, personally, Mahmoud, has four healthy children from two healthy wives. Nur and Nassir are his eldest, sons from his Sudanese wife, young adults who are set to inherit both their father's business and his vision. Farouk and Ferial are his youngest, the issue of his second, Egyptian wife, children of too few years to hold more than the hope of future success. But for all of Mahmoud's notable achievements, he cannot protect his family from the tragedy about to befall it. Nor can his formidable will keep fate's blow from opening up devastating fissures in its midst, turning wife against wife and son against son in a battle which will have consequences for more than just the Abuzeids.

Though Lyrics Alley is hobbled by an overburdened first act, marked by a plot yet to take off and by a host of characters yet to individuate, the final two-thirds of Ms. Aboulela's sweaty novel, its tragic politics, its stricken fathers, its beleaguered women, fill it up with a dark vitality. Many of its characters take their turns narrating their histories, but Nur, the most promising of Mahmoud's sons, steals the show. His longing to give up in the face of tragedy, to surrender to a world too ignorant to accept him, is as realistic as his bouts of poetic output are beautiful. Nur is the sun around which the story's characters orbit, his fight defining their lives, their actions, their emotions. But as much as Nur transforms the piece, the plight of his tutor, Ustaz, is our teacher. It's through his working-class struggles that we come to understand the poverty of the Arab world: its disrespect for education and enlightenment, its obsession with religion, and the cost it has paid as a result of meddlesome, Western colonialism.

This is a novel lit by poetry and shadowed by pettiness and cruelty. It is the story of a family and a nation in the midst of the most transformative century in human history. It is an examination of how one event, one moment in time, can rewrite the destinies of dozens of people. Ms. Aboulela has a keen eye for life's tiny but telling details and it is this, coupled with her compelling portrait of life during a difficult time, that turn Lyrics Alley from a slog into a delight. (4/5 Stars)

The Origins Of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama

From The Week of June 05, 2011

For most of us, civilization is a constant. It was here when we were born and, barring a massive calamity, it will be here after we die. As such, it escapes serious scrutiny by the majority of us who do not extend ourselves beyond the daily distractions of work and family, the pleasures of play and profit. But for a minority of us, our ubiquitous present is just a brief moment in time, one rung on the unfathomably long ladder of human organization which began with bands of hunter-gatherers millennia ago and, barring some global catastrophe, will end with interstellar posthumans at some point in the distant future. For these inquisitive few, the now, with its politics and its beliefs, its successes and its failures, can only be understood when a coherent history of how we got to this now can be told. This is the task Mr. Fukuyama has set for himself, a globe-trotting journey through the history of humanity's political order, sparing not a civilization in an effort to understand how we came to be here.

How do we get to Denmark? This is not a question solvable by Google maps. It is, instead,a question posed by political theorists. How does a nation evolve into a peaceful, orderly, democracy (Denmark) with minimal corruption and opportunity for all? To begin to answer this question, Mr. Fukuyama, first, defines political order, "a strong and capable state, the state's subordination to a rule of law and government accountability to all citizens," then retreats some 2,500 years into our past to fetch and explore the first, recorded attempts at actualizing these three component's of political organization. The reader is given a crash course on China's Kin dynasty, one of seven, warring Chinese states which elevated itself to prominence by destroying its rivals and consolidating their power into a single, unified force. Next, Mr. Fukuyama locates the state's subordination to the rule of law in religious traditions. Though the Christian and Jewish faiths are given their moment, he pays particular attention to ancient India's class-based society in which the priests, or Brahmin, were the protectors of sacred law and who yielded to no one when it came to interpretation and actualization of that law. Finally, we arrive in western Europe during the second millennium where, in Britain and elsewhere, we discover the beginning of government accountability in a series of wars which lead to political conflicts which opened the door for citizens of the state to demand a say in the composition and the destiny of the state. Along the way, Mr. Fukuyama takes a number of enlightening detours, describing key events, E.G. The Concordat of Worms, which influenced the evolution of political order.

This is a successful history. Mr. Fukuyama has not only vividly described the regimes that were pivotal to the development of the modern state, he delves into the anatomy of political order by highlighting the important pillars upon which such a successful state rests. But while this is logically and commendably communicated, I found the author's analysis, that a nation's cultural history plays a substantial role in the nature of its present-day state, to be compelling. Some may object to his contention that states are, in large part, reflections of and slaves to their pasts, but the cases he makes for why Russia collapsed into an authoritarian oligarchy, why China accreted to state capitalism, and why India developed into a corrupt democracy are all incisively argued. Just as fascinating is his explanation for why Africa and Native North America remained tribal while western Europe evolved towards civilization. How such massive differences in intellectual, industrial and political organization can manifest as a result of quirks of geography boggles the mind.

My only major objection to this work stems from Mr. Fukuyama's habit of ascribing to the various institutions in history the uniform desire to gain power through indoctrination and centralization. For instance, the Catholic church's actions are always viewed through the lens of what's best for the Catholic church. This smacks strongly of Confirmation Bias. After all, these institutions are not monoliths. Not only do different administrations have different agendas, individuals of influence within the institutions will occasionally have the power to make decisions based on their own beliefs and biases, not the beliefs and biases of the institutions they represent. And so, while I agree that, generally, institutions act to preserve their authority, It seems sloppy to filter their every action through the same, polarized lens. The Origins of Political Order feels a little too neat, key moments inevitably yielding to logical outcomes when we know that the actors involved aren't always rational or logical.

Otherwise, this is a challenging and captivating read, the first of two volumes. The second promises to finish the story of political order by analyzing formative events from the French Revolution to the present day. As of now, our story is only half told. (4/5 Stars)

Cinderella Ate My Daughter by Peggy Orenstein

From The Week of June 05, 2011

Why do we make princesses of our daughters? Though sons suffer the weight of their own set of parental expectations, these are nothing like the standards of purity and proper comportment we expect from our daughters. Are girls different somehow? Is this inequity a legacy handed down from centuries of doctrinally inspired societal thinking that promoted female chastity over all other womanly virtues? Is it a byproduct of the sophisticated corporate advertising which preys on girls by convincing them that they aren't real girls unless they have the right toys, play with the right dolls? Cinderella Ate My Daughter is one mother's effort to find an answer.

Ms. Orenstein, an author and journalist, explores, here, the rise of what she calls "girlie girl culture," or the princessification of young girls. From beauty pageants with five-year-old contestants to the line of Disney Princesses with whom girls are enticed to form an affinity, the reader is hauled down the rabbit hole that is the odyssey of raising a young daughter in the 21st century. She charts how girlie girl culture gained momentum after 9/11, as troubled parents turned to cocooning their daughters in the safety implied by fairies and magic, this while pointing out how much the corporates have influenced what is necessary, what is cool, what is desirable. Between tours of toy stores and interviews with the minds behind the products that fill them, Ms. Orenstein explores all of the psychological, social and biological influences that have converged to encourage young girls to remain innocent, immature, princesses for far longer than girls of prior generations. The picture that emerges is both knotted and devoid of immediate solutions.

This is not a polemic. Ms. Orenstein does not rail against Disney for its marketing prowess, nor does she blame the toy stores for proliferating such products. She appears to be a realist, recognizing that parents and executives alike are only trying in their own ways to fulfil the desires of girls to be girls. And it is here that Ms. Orenstein is at the peak of her powers. For as much as she has investigated cultural and commercial trends, she understands that every one of these efforts is an attempt on behalf of people to understand what girls want and, through the exploitation of parental bank accounts, to give it to them. And so Ms. Orenstein shifts her focus to the latest research into girl psychology. This isn't just an exploration of nature versus nurture,, or how much of what girls want is innate (internal) or how much is welded onto them (external); this is an examination of gender, how it differentiates us, how it impacts us, how it drives us.

Cinderella Ate My Daughter cast a wide net, but the balance its author strikes between the commercial and the biological marks this as a success. Ms. Orenstein is notably short on solutions for the questions she's raised, but I prefer no solutions to the half-baked and sometimes dangerous theorizing typical of many investigations of parenting and its trends. More over, it's refreshing to read a piece involving commercialism and not have the author heap knee-jerk blame onto big corporations for every societal ill. Every human being has agency. And though it's regretable that corporations are able to market to children too young to have fully developed that agency, corporations are, in the end, only trying to sell an ideal product for maximum profit. This is too light to be scholarly, but heavy enough to have gravitas. (3/5 Stars)

A fire in The Sun: Marid Audran 02 by George Alec Effinger

From The Week of May 29, 2011

A Fire in The Sun is, in almost every respect, an improvement upon the novel that gave it life. Like a young athlete adjusting to the speed of the big leagues, Mr. Effinger has found his storytelling stride. He's always had the Voice -- it was perhaps the most memorable and successful element of When Gravity Fails --, but this sequel adds another, valuable string to his literary bow, elevating Marid Audran onto a list of Cyberpunk's greatest characters.

When Gravity Fails was, at root, a novel about freedom from technological bondage and autocratic slavery. In refusing to have his brain wired, Audran was limiting himself to a life as a second-rate hustler, yet, this was the only way to both remain completely himself and to keep below the radar of kingmakers like Freidlander Bey, men who run the world in the 22nd century. But now that Audran has accepted his cutting-edge implants, A Fire in The Sun drops the freedom theme and replaces it with prophecy and destiny. For as we discover in the first few pages here, Marid has become what he feared most, a pawn in the schemes of the king of the Budayeen, the aforementioned Freidlander Bey, a 200-year-old, Arab powerbroker who, with the twilight of the nation state, has stepped into the breach to become one of two overlords who have divvied the world up between them, running their spheres from the background, spiders in the web. Marid has become Bey's lieutenant, moving into his lord's expansive home where he acquaints himself with Bey's eccentric and deadly associates. These choices have only served to further alienate Audran from his former friends, a reality that does not appear to trouble Freidlander Bey one bit. After all, the more Marid drifts away from what once rooted him, the more he becomes Bey's creature.

Though Marid's descent into vassalage is a large component of this piece, the main thrust of the plot concerns a new series of murders in the Budayeen, these even less explicable than the last. But though Marid's obligations to Freidlander Bey preoccupy him, he still has time to take an interest in the killings, crimes which lead him to a most unpleasant truth about his master and the power he wields. Can Audran accept his destiny, or will he recognize what he's becoming and be able to pull himself away from the life being built for him?

Though this is quality Cyberpunk, it has its warts. Mr. Effinger is as subtle as a jackhammer when it comes to important plot developments. His efforts to conceal that many of his characters exist to provide exposition to the reader, and to feed clues to Audran, are pathetic. Not to mention that Audran can be extraordinarily petulant about his plight even though, despite Mr. Effinger's attempts to convince the reader otherwise, his fate is completely within his own control. Nonetheless, Mr. Effinger has generated a truly Machiavellian idea and used it to inject both life and disgust into the mystery here. This, combined with Audran's descent into a life as the right hand to a king, grant this piece a dark, enjoyable vitality. (3/5 Stars)

Sex Lives Of Cannibals by J. Maarten Troost

From The Week of May 29, 2011

There are those among us who are settled, comfortable in their careers, content with their families. Their days are structured, familiar, routine, each ones passing inching them closer to financial security and the freedom of retirement. And then there's Maarten Troost, a Dutch-born, Canadian-raised, American-educated wanderer who, restless and aimless in the wake of graduating from college, enthusiastically follows his girlfriend, Sylvia, to Kiribati, a nation of 32 atolls sprawled out on the equatorial Pacific. What he finds there is both fascinating and terrifying.

Though Sylvia has a job in development work for the island nation, Mr. Troost finds himself an unemployed observer of one of the hottest, inhabitable places on Earth. Devoid of anything that the West would call infrastructure, restaurants, airplanes, malls, the Kiribati he encounters is impoverished, tribal, notionally independent and largely content with itself and its lot. Not that this means he is accepted by the locals who, when they take notice of him at all, seem bemused by his revulsion to certain of their practices. Of course they relieve themselves in the ocean; there are no bathrooms. Oh, and if you're Troost and you happen to be swimming in said ocean at the time, well, just make sure you're not down-current.

From the dogs that devour one another for food to the gigantic, tropical bugs that infest every imaginable nook and cranny, Mr. Troost's unsparing descriptions of the challenges of adapting to Kiribati life are both entertaining and laugh-out-loud hilarious. But while a thick sheen of humor glosses this memoir of life among a society alien to Westerners, there's also an intellectual gravitas here that elevates this piece out of simple escapism. His criticism of the U.S.'s ruthless exploitation of Pacific islands, using them for nuclear tests and as dumping grounds for radioactive waste, is pointed, as is the scorn he directs at the administrations of island nations like Nauru which have been all-too-eager to sell off the vitality of their islands in exchange for international cash which they squander. But the most enduring lesson here concerns the incredible adaptability of human beings who can not only persist in vastly different climates, they can adjust to polar-opposite lifestyles. Nothing that we have is necessary. Nothing that we have is essential. We just think of our toys, our civilization, that way because we are imbedded in it. Remove us from it and we do not wither. We change and, in doing so, we discover a great deal about ourselves.

Wonderful, droll, and vivacious work. (4/5 Stars)

In 50 Years We'll All Be Chicks by Adam Carolla

From The Week of May 29, 2011

Mr. Carolla's boastful and hilarious memoir is a testosterone-saturated romp through the life of a self-made man. The co-creator of The Man Show and the host of one of the world's most downloaded podcasts, he is a wildly successful comedian, but it wasn't always thus. As he details in In 50 Years We'll All Be Chicks, Mr. Carolla grew up poor in 1970s and 1980s Los Angeles, its fame and fortune as unattainable to a career construction worker as the moon. But after taking a series of acting classes, and religiously attending open mic nights, he built a brand of comedy that's carried him to stardom.

But as much as this is a memoir of Mr. Carolla's funny and painful exploits, it's equally a cultural polemic. He decries the "pussification" of American society, digressing into memorable rants against everything from the proliferation of peanut allergies to the pettiness of security guards. But though his literary fire can sometimes seem indiscriminate, his anger has a single source, the softening of masculinity. Considering that, in America, tree women now graduate college for every two men, and in light of the fact that many of the labor-intencive jobs men have traditionally fallen back on for good careers are being mechanized, it seems like he's tapped into a serious, cultural shift.

Mr. Carolla's effort here won't win any awards; it is far too provocative for such niceties. But for guys looking for a laugh at the expense of, well, everyone else, it completely delivers. Conversely, if you're a woman who does not find value, or humor, in aggressive jock talk, this is one to skip. A successful, easy, entertaining read. (3/5 Stars)

The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson

From The Week of May 29, 2011

Mr. Ronson is a fascinating journalist. He has somehow married an irrepressible interest in the bizarre and the fringe with a relentless will to pursue his stories to the bitter end. This blend of admirable doggedness with less-than-healthy obsession is what gave The Men Who Stare At Goats, his tremendously successful exploration of the U.S. Military's pursuit of the paranormal, its punch. But now he has turned to a far more serious topic, one that begins with a mystery and ends with a wary eye cast over its shoulder.

In The Psychopath Test, Mr. Ronson is sparked on a journey through psychopathy after he is asked by a female academic to investigate a strange case. She, along with several of her fellows, have been receiving an odd book from a mysterious author. Though Mr. Ronson quickly solves the mystery, its conclusion causes him to wonder about the role manipulative people play in society. What follows is a thorough and gripping account of his odyssey through the world of psychopaths, from the institutions that have attempted to treat them, to the men who have tried to profile them, to the hospitals that have hoped to restrain them. Between his fascinating interviews with possible psychopaths, he relates the history of these rare and strange humans while using a now famous checklist of psychopathic traits to spot them in his midst. But while this effort succeeds in entertaining and educating the reader on the state of psychopathy, it is Mr. Ronson's investigation of how psychopathy might affect our world that lends his tale a chill not easily shaken. From fuhrers to CEOs, Mr. Ronson pictures a world where the murderous and the inexplicable are made logical by imagining that psychopaths, more often than we might expect, occupy the seats of power.

Much of Mr. Ronson's work is marked by a characteristic over-anxiousness which causes the reader to wonder if he's allowed his imagination to take him a few steps too far, but he's a journalist, not a scholar. His job is to explore and examine, not to be soberly analytical. He wants his readers to join him in peeking over the edge of the abyss, to see what might be down there. In this, he is immensely successful. This is excellent gonzo journalism, moving, creepy and thought provoking. I might not sleep well tonight. (3/5 Stars)

The Painter Of Battles by Arturo Parez-Reverte

From The Week of May 22, 2011

Photographs do not lie. Unlike human memories which are recorded only after being filtered through an individual's biases and prejudices, photographs are snapshots of perfectly preserved truth, immune from the vicissitudes of time's corrosive power. They remember events as they were. They can never forget. And it is these truths which empower the guilt, fear and nihilism in The Painter of Battles.

Driven halfway to madness by a career in war photography, decades exposed to the spiritual taint of merciless barbarity, Andres Faulques has withdrawn to a lonely watchtower to begin his masterpiece, a grand and unflinching collage of war. The watchtower's interior walls are the canvas for his painting, a series of graphic scenes drawn from atrocities he's witnessed from across countless conflicts. His sea-side sanctuary is only troubled by the occasional boatload of tourists passing by, that is until a man he's never met steps out of his past. Markovic was a young soldier captured in one of Faulques' photographs. But while the snapshot is but one of many that earned Faulques money and fame from the ghoulish West, it destroyed Markovic's life. And now he has come to exact his revenge upon the painter of battles.

Mr. Reverte's unforgiving tale is a 230 page reconstruction of the lives of two men and the instant of time that binds them together. Though Markovic intends to avenge himself on Faulques for the photograph Faulques took of him as a soldier during the Bosnian war, Markovic is unwilling to execute his mission until he, a relatively uneducated man, has puzzled out the enigmatic Faulques. For after years spent tracking Faulques down, imagining their confrontation, it's clear Markovic expected Faulques to be a spoiled and thoughtless Westerner. Instead, he finds an emotionally exhausted chronicler of human suffering, a man compelled to memorialize all that he has seen and all that man has done. In this, Markovic inadvertently becomes Faulques' historiographer, the extractor of Faulques' past, particularly the years he spent with his lover, Olvido, a fellow war photographer. And this is how Markovic comes to find that, in his own way, Faulques has sounded out depths of depravity that not even broken Markovic has had the misfortune to explore.

For such a slim novel, there is a great deal here to digest. Mr. Reverte's prose is beautifully masculine, as foreboding as it is succinct. But while he is a writer of the first-class, his pessimism concerning the nature of man is a stain on his piece. Forget heroes; in Mr. Reverte's world, there aren't even good guys, merely men distinguished by varying shades of darkness. It does not matter if you are an uneducated soldier locked into atrocities not of your own choosing (Markovic), or a highly educated, artistic elite driven by a need to capture the soul of ugly humanity (Faulques); all are susceptible to violence, to cruelty, to brutality. It doesn't matter if you hold a gun or a camera, if you rape or witness rape; it is in you, this dark capacity which whispers to be set free. This is guilty nonsense.

Mr. Reverte appears to believe that war zones are reflective of man's true nature, that it is here where man reveals his depravity. But of course man does not have a single, definitive nature. Man is fundamentally a mimic. If all about him is chaos and cruelty, then he shall be chaotic and cruel. If all about him is order and peace, then he shall be orderly and peaceful. There are always exceptions, on either side of the coin, but these are safe generalizations. We have a desire to conform to what we see about us. Mr. Reverte has taken a snapshot of man at his worst and transposed that upon man as a whole. This is a disservice to all of the billions who live without committing the crimes that Faulques and Markovic have committed. These are men who have stayed too long under the glare of cruel suns and now they know not how to sooth their burns.

This is a compelling read, but its violence is relentless. What's more, Mr. Reverte's obsession with rape is off-putting. A book that is fundamentally about atrocities must include this most cruel act, but not to this extent. Gripping, but its distorted view of man fails to convince. (3/5 Stars)

The Physics Of The Impossible by Michio Kaku

From The Week of May 22, 2011

To an extent, the whole of human civilization is based on the daring of individuals to defy the impossible. After all, every time something is invented, the inconceivable is forced to retreat another inch in our slow, arduous journey to understanding. But of course, there are different kinds of impossibilities. It would be absurd to think that any of us non mountaineers could whimsically climb Everest. And yet, with the right equipment, the proper training and the best guides, it's possible to imagine success. Let's call these practical impossibilities. If these are problems with solutions, Michio Kaku's impossibilities. Michio Kaku's impossibilities make such feats seem like walks in the park, fantastic feats of science and engineering, the manifestation of which will require technologies to be built from schools of thought that haven't even been considered yet. And yet, before the wheel was invented, it would have been impossible to imagine the wagon. And in this spirit, Mr. Kaku takes on the impossible and, in the effort, travels through the realm of cutting-edge science.

From phasers and forcefields to time travel and invisibility, Mr. Kaku, a professor of physics and co-creator of String Theory, gathers up most of the tropes imagined and distorted by science fiction and makes a genuine attempt to rank them for plausibility based on our knowledge of the universe and its myriad laws. Though none of these technologies will likely be invented any time soon, much less in the ways imagined by dramatists, they are all being researched in one form or another, to varying degrees of success. The invention which seems closest to actualization appears to be invisibility which has been demonstrated in the lab. Scientists can either choose to bend the light around an object, preventing the human eye from receiving enough data to visualize it, or by covering the object in a fabric that projects an image of its surroundings, thereby cloaking the object in plain sight. Conversely, the most far fetched trope covered here is arguably teleportation which while achievable on an atomic level, is highly resistant to being scaled up to handling larger, useful objects.

While much of Physics of The Impossible feels like a lifeline thrown by Mr. Kaku to Star Trek geeks tired of being made fun of for their outlandish beliefs, there's a surprising amount of interesting science here. Mr. Kaku uses the discussion of these technologies to inform his readers about the physical theories underpinning them. And so, while there's plenty of indulgent dreaming here, there's also a wealth of minable knowledge that can be extracted by the diligent consumer. The tone is typically optimistic and benign, but this shouldn't be mistaken for vacuousness. (3/5 Stars)

Kluge by Gary Marcus

Humans have, in less than ten-thousand years, transformed themselves from sparse bands of hunter-gatherers, who committed the whole of their short lives to just surviving in a hostile world, into a global civilization of seven billion souls that has conquered its rivals, its environment and many of its own weaknesses in an unstoppable surge towards a coherent understanding of ourselves and the universe. Everything we use we've invented, adapted. Nothing was given to us. But Mr. Marcus has no time for these inconvenient truths. To hear him tell our tale, we're nothing more than the accretion of evolution's mistakes.

The human mind, Mr. Marcus argues in Kluge is an assemblage of systems cobbled together to defend us from existential threats that no longer plague us. From our contextual memories, to our anxious emotions, to our self-centered worldviews, the reader is escorted on a tour of the mind's major processes. First, plausible explanations are provided for how memory, emotion and reasoning evolved then Mr. Marcus, a research psychologist, suggests how our minds could have functioned had they evolved differently. One example of this is his comparison of computer memory with human memory. The former is comprised of a series of logically numbered addresses, each of which contain discrete and knowable bits of information. The latter, meanwhile, is a hodgepodge of experiences which do not appear to be stored in any logical way.

Kluge makes a number of disturbing assumptions which undermine its argument. While it's true that the human mind has spent infinitely more time adapting to an ape's world of predatory threats than it has adapting to our world of human civilization, and while this may burden us with certain unnecessary weaknesses, this completely misses the point. The primary virtue of humanity is its ability to adapt to anything. Poor recall, emotional fragility, and defective reasoning are not failures of the mind, they are failures of instruction. Our civilization has not yet figured out the ideal way to teach its youngest, its clean slates, how to think, how to be emotionally stable, how to remember. We haven't come close to maximally wiring the human mind, training up its strengths and minimizing its weaknesses. What's more, it's far from clear that we are capable of handling all of the improvements Mr. Marcus so casually yearns for. Certainly, Jill Price would argue that Mr. Marcus' Postal Code memory is a quick way to drive oneself insane. More over, Mr. Marcus failed to convince me that his Postal Code memory would not deprive the human mind of the experience-based insight and intuition we rely upon to make progress in our world. Nowhere in these 210 pages does Mr. Marcus seriously consider the possible, negative consequences of his improvements. He just assumes evolution built the human mind up from the scraps it had to hand, not considering that it may have bestowed the human mind with all it could handle. He may be right, but his failure to consider any alternative explanations, much less to explore the consequences of his improvements, makes Kluge not much more than one man's gnashing over human imperfection. That's novel.

This is engaging and provocative work, but its over-eagerness to point out how the human brain could be improved leads it to breezy and shallow conclusions. (2/5 Stars)

The Elegance Of The Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

From The Week of May 15, 2011

We all hide parts of ourselves from the world, concealing our petty jealousies, our foolish grudges and our overpowering desires in an attempt to seem, to those we know and love, halfway normal. And why not? If conformity breeds success, as it so often seems to do, what's to be gained by putting oneself fully, intensely on display? Ms. Barbery deftly deploys this potent theme to drive her captivating, philosophical novel.

In an upperclass apartment building, nestled in Paris' elegant Left Bank, two remarkable souls abide in the midst of a crowd of self-important, elites. The homely Rene is the building's 54-year-old concierge. A 27 year veteran of the building, she disguises her keen intellect and her extraordinary erudition behind a bland mask of polite detachment. Recently widowed, she has only one friend in whom she shares any measure of her true self. The rest of the building's privileged occupants she holds at arm's length, petrified that they might catch a glimpse of the volcanic spirit which burns beneath her cultivated dullness. Little does Rene know that she has in the building a kindred spirit in Paloma, a 12-year-old girl with a formidable mind, a powerful will and a terrible secret. For having investigated the world around her and found there only vacuousness, Paloma has decided that, unless something interesting happens in the next few months, to convince her that life has meaning, she will kill herself on her thirteenth birthday. Though the lives of Rene and Paloma have almost nothing in common, and though each is barely aware of the other's existence, their orbits are about to collide, throwing their steering their destinies onto entirely new courses.

The narration of Ms. Barbery's compelling tale is handled equally by Rene and Paloma. Each philosopher has a distinct voice. Rene communicates her thoughts and beliefs in the present tense, intermingling her love of classical literature, her scorn for her fellow residents and her dismay over her various day-to-day chores. Paloma's voice, meanwhile, takes the form of sharp, declarative journal entries which both communicate her frustration at life's banality and convey her eagerness to find something to hook onto, to believe in. While both characters can be witty and caustic, expressing appreciation for intellectual pleasures and disdaining the superficiality of those around them, they are on distinctly different journeys. While Rene is quietly yearning for love and understanding, to find someone to see through her walls and meet her on her lofty level, Paloma is trying to pull meaning from a seemingly meaning-less universe. "Why am I here?" "What is all of this for?" Like a lonely intellect combing the stars for other intelligent life, she is waiting for a sign, a connection, from out there, to let her know that there is a purpose to existence.

This was the most difficult, but also the most rewarding of the philosophical novels I've embarked upon. Though I've never come as close as Paloma to giving up the ghost, her journey has a decidedly atheistic tinge with which I deeply empathize. When one cannot fall back on the Divine to provide meaning and order to ones existence, then one has to extract it from their surroundings. Given how banal our culture can be, how, like water, it seems to find its lowest level, extracting meaning from it can be decidedly challenging. Rene, meanwhile, evokes a wonderful sympathy. A self-taught and wholly misunderstood creature, she flourishes in private, away from a world that would misunderstand and judge her. She's confident enough to want nothing of the external world's affirmation, but lonely enough to need a connection, with someone. And when that connection comes, she blooms, escaping her scalding self-criticism for a kind of happiness that smooths out her rough edges. Ms. Barbery has painted portraits of the lives of two humans enduring life, puzzling out its cryptic messages while maintaining the reader's attention with a series of incisive criticisms of our culture and the depths to which it sinks. And though it starts slow, it comes home with a power that makes the journey all the more rewarding.

Not a perfect piece; I'd have liked to have seen Ms. Barbery engage a third protagonist who was less like her two pompous, privately suffering intellectuals. And certainly Rene's near obsession with putting herself down grew tiresome after awhile. But these are but two small flaws in what is a challenging and edifying read. (4/5 Stars)

Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder

From The Week of May 15, 2011

History has had its bloody periods, episodes of political, religious, and tyrannical conflict which stain our past. The Terror sparked by the French Revolution, the doctrinal slaughter of the Thirty Years War, and the Killing Fields of Pol Pot all immediately come to mind. But though all such conflicts have, directly or indirectly, impacted civilians, never have so many innocents born the brunt of a more widespread and systematic extermination than that which Germany and the Soviet Union enacted in the years between 1933 and 1945. Mr. Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University, meticulously reconstructs these twelve, gory years and, in doing so, sheds light on crimes both familiar and forgotten.

Though their motives and their methods were quite different, Mr. Snyder estimates Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia to have, together, slaughtered 14 million eastern European non-combatants during this period. Though Stalinist Russia got an early start, enacting a series of disastrous economic policies and cruel political reforms which resulted in the mass-starvation of millions of its own people, many of them in the Ukraine, Hitlerian Germany swiftly caught up and surpassed the Soviet total when World War II ignited their plans to exterminate what they considered to be inferior races, particularly the Slavs and the Jews. In a chilling reconstruction of these unimaginable depravities, Mr. Snyder describes a relentless march of organized killing and its peripheral costs. He begins with the near extinguishing of civilization and civilized humanity in an Ukraine forced into cannibalism and, mercilessly, ends with the grotesqueness of Nazi death camps and starvation plans which tormented Poland and the Soviet Union. His conclusion? That these two nihilistic regimes walked similar paths of tyranny. Their policies brought about catastrophes, the blame for which they aimed straight at their enemies. In doing so, they succeeded in creating a kind of feedback loop in which the more things went wrong, the more they could fan the flames of anger for the enemy, further entrenching themselves in the seats of power.

Bloodlands is a valuable but masochistic read. It describes the consequences of state tyranny and articulates how that tyranny perpetuated itself. However, it takes the reader on an implacable tour of some of the grimmest scenes in human history. There seems, at times, no end to the existential slaughter, no reprieve from the cruelty of men who largely escaped the consequences of their terrible actions. But for as challenging as this book can be to the mind and the stomach, it articulates the motives and the processes that drove and allowed these two states, ensorcelled by charismatic tyrants, to commit some of the most grievous crimes in history.

The most valuable contribution here is the filling in of Soviet history which, for numerous reasons, has been played down in the decades since the Second World War. German accountability, coupled with a desire to never again succumb to such savage nationalism, has left behind a vivid record of Nazi atrocities. But the closed nature of Soviet society, succeeded by the prideful, authoritarian governments that have followed its collapse, have, to some degree, kept the lid on Stalinist crimes. In describing these barbarities, Mr. Snyder eloquently expresses what I consider to be Bloodlands' most telling truth about human nature, that Stalin, upon being faced with the calamitous nature of his economic reforms, fixed upon the idea that, as socialism nears its goal, resistance to its implementation increases. In other words, the failures of ones plans can be self-justified on the grounds that somewhere out there someone is working against you, frustrating you, defeating your noble goals, that it's not a fault in your stars but enemy resistance. This idea is the enabler of tyranny. "I'm not wrong!" "It will work if people stop fighting me!" Until we can rid ourselves of the capacity for such justifications, we will always be susceptible to the crimes of such men.

This is a powerful, existential, and sobering read, but its unyieldingly grim view of humanity during this period, while probably deserved, left me flailing for some shred of goodness to hold onto. It offers no reprieves from its repeated, savage blows to the reader's head. And so, even while it informs, it alienates. This is a tricky balance to maintain and Mr. Snyder never quite gets it right. (3/5 Stars)

Americans In Paris by Charles Glass

From The Week of May 15, 2011

I enjoy monographs. They offer their readers incomparable glimpses of the inner-workings of great events, forsaking the big-picture view for a narrower but deeper understanding of the forces that underpin them. The risk of the monograph is irrelevancy, the adoption of such a restricted view that the reader is left to question its importance. This, unfortunately, is a disease that afflicts Americans in Paris.

Mr. Glass' 540 page history of American expatriates in Nazi-occupied Paris (1940-1944) chronicles some fascinating figures who had their careers and their lives jeopardized by war. Chief among these are DR. Sumner Jackson and Sylvia Beach, the former the chief surgeon at the American Hospital, the latter the owner of the famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore. Initially, the expatriate community in Paris seems inclined to weather the storm, but as the crisis deepens and French resistance collapses, many withdraw from the city, leaving behind a hard core of as-yet neutral Americans in a city swiftly conquered and controlled by the Third Reich. While Beach kept her shop open, using it as a means to disseminate information through the American community and the French Resistance, Dr. Jackson took an even bolder role by treating wounded, French irregulars against the explicit instructions of the occupying Nazis. Eventually, Beach and Jackson, like many of their fellow Americans in the City of Light were interned, some under crippling conditions which proved, for some, to be fatal.

Though Beach and Jackson are incredible protagonists who deserve every page of attention paid to them, the rest of Mr. Glass' micro history fails to launch. There are some machinations here concerning the French Resistance and some secondary Americans who float in and out of the story, but these are poorly articulated sidebars that don't integrate well into the main narrative which is the plight of the key Americans. I'm left to conclude that Mr. Glass wanted to write about this period in occupied Paris, knew he had strong characters in Beach and Jackson, and so he did his best to weld his heroes onto a basic backdrop. Not only does the welding fail to take, the backdrop does not satisfy. I needed to know more about the French Resistance. I needed to have at least one German character to give me an impression of the Nazi view of these American expatriates. I needed someone, or something, to tie all this together. Americans in Paris delivers none of these. It's only the remarkable stories of Beach and Jackson that save this piece. (2/5 Stars)

Three Cups Of Deceit by Jon Krakauer

From The Week of May 08, 2011

Mr. Krakauer possesses a rare will. Not only did he survive to write about a botched 1996 climb up Mount Everest, he's since devoted years of his authorial career to exposing religious and governmental coercion and deception. In Three Cups of Deceit, which, at 75 pages, is more a pamphlet than a novel, he trains his formidable powers upon Greg Mortenson, the famous humanitarian who transformed a failed 1993 climb of K2 into a career building schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Mr. Krakauer wastes no time systematically and sensationally debunking Mr. Mortenson's heralded achievements by pointing out the numerous and startling inconsistencies in Mortenson's story. Drawing on interviews with figures within Mr. Mortenson's own charity, as well as individuals on the ground in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Mr. Krakauer describes how Mr. Mortenson has exploited his own charity to further his fame and advertise his books while keeping every dime of his earnings from both his published works and his speaking engagements. Worse yet, Mr. Krakauer alleges that only a fraction of the schools Mr. Mortenson claims to have built have actually been completed, with many of even the completed schools devoid of teachers.

Mr. Krakauer is not a disinterested party. He admits to donating $75,000 to Mr. Mortenson's charity before growing disenchanted with Mortenson's increasingly erratic behavior. Though Three Cups of Deceit has the rage of a man scorned, made to feel the fool, the relentlessness of Mr. Krakauer's explosive research convinced me that, at best, Mr. Mortenson has a great deal to answer for. After all, he would not be the first human to succumb to the allure of his own mythology and the power and wealth that accompanies it.

Sensationalistic and polemic, but it has the feel of a solid case. If Mr. Krakauer is right in his claim that Mr. Mortenson has even defrauded schoolchildren via his Pennies for Peace program, then it is my sincerest hope that, at some point in his life, he comes to recognize that, rather than do good, he has committed one of the gravest crimes imaginable, to selfishly profit from the credulity of innocents. (3/5 Stars)

The Town That Food Saved by Ben Hewitt

From The Week of May 08, 2011

This thoughtful, sober piece from Mr. Hewitt is hardly the first, and certainly won't be the last, to investigate the food problem -- I've reviewed several of these efforts --, but it is, perhaps, the most honest and down-to-earth examination of how far North American society has strayed from real food made by real people. It is not a polemic, nor does it offer sweeping solutions to looming catastrophes. It's an exploration of a town, its rise, its fall and its rebirth as something that may well resemble the face of food in the challenging 21st century.

Mr. Hewitt, a native of Vermont, applies a journalist's sensibilities to this, his endeavor to sound out the sustainability and scalability of local food. The protagonist of his history is Hardwick, Vermont, a boomtown which thrived on granite. When the quarries dried up, jobs and paychecks vanished, plunging the small town into an extended period of hardship and obscurity. It's subsequent rebirth seems due in part to the legacy of the back-to-the-earth movement of the 1960s and 1970s which helped to create, in Hardwick, one of the largest, most successful food co-ops in America. Since then, other localvor businesses have taken root, producing soy beans, cheese, milk and meat for distribution to local citizens, for the tables of local restaurants and for the truckbeds of interstate commerce. Mr. Hewitt, himself an interested party in the movement, interviews the key figures in all these businesses, granting his readers an inside look at the personalities and the passions which shape and drive local food which is powering Hardwick's resurgence.

Mr. Hewitt does a wonderful job illustrating the economic challenges that plague local food. He demonstrates how oversized egos and their outlandish claims have damaged the movement's credibility. But it is his talent for capturing the personalities involved that sets his chronicle apart. From socialist farmers to hard-headed, big-idea entrepreneurs, he captures the men and women who, in their own ways, are trying to find the equation that will make local food work, for everyone and for the planet. For all that he paints an edifying portrait, though, Mr. Hewitt failed to convince me that local food saved Hardwick. The movement has made me want to visit what seems like a remarkable town, but saved it? Seems a bit grandiose.

This book offers more hard-to-swallow facts than it does easy, exciting solutions, but it's this honesty which grants Mr. Hewitt's work authenticity. A must-read for anyone interested in local food, the now and the future. (4/5 Stars)

The Invisible Gorilla by Christopher Chabris And Daniel Simons

From The Week of May 08, 2011

How we perceive and interact with our world has an enormous and largely invisible impact on our lives. Every second we're awake, Our minds process incredible amounts of information: where we are, what we're doing, what's in our environment, how we are feeling. If our consciousnesses lacked mechanisms to filter out the noise of the familiar, the expected, all but the most meditative among us would be permanently lost in a sea of ceaseless distractions. Fortunately for our species, we have evolved to possess minds which are wonderfully adapted for recognizing patterns. This is how we can pay attention to what requires our focus and to discard what does not. But as Mr. Simons and Mr. Chabris argue, in The Invisible Gorilla, that system is far from flawless. In fact, it may well let us down far more than we realize.

From the foibles of human memory to the selective blindness of human perception, the authors deploy a mixture of experiments and case studies to demonstrate that the human mind believes itself to be a lot more accurate than it is in actuality. While the experiments can quickly and succinctly prove the premise here, the case studies provide The Invisible Gorilla its rhetorical backbone. From Jennifer Thompson, the perfect eyewitness who misidentified her rapist, to Joshua Bell, the violin virtuoso whose expertise was completely ignored when he played for crowds of people going to and from work, the reader is forced to confront the challenging truth that our experiences are shaped by what we pay attention to. Furthermore, what we pay attention to is based on cultural biases and personal expectations which means that none of us perceive the world the same way. This conclusion has interesting implications for both the law and society.

This is not a perfect book. As always, works of popular science depend almost entirely on the results of experiments which often have either flawed methodologies or misinterpreted outcomes. More over, the authors here seem a bit too impressed with their own research. Yet the sheer range of replicable experiments conducted to make what is a fairly demonstrable case for our attention deficits gave me confidence that Mr. Simons and Mr. Chabris have sounded out something near an understanding understanding of the way we process sensory information and how this can lead to self-delusion. Fun and thought-provoking. (3/5 Stars)