Carthage Must Be Destroyed by Richard Miles

From The Week of August 21, 2011

It is a sad but universal maxim of human nature that we demonize that which we most fear. Be it the rise of the industrial might of Asia, or the influx of immigrant populations into our communities, or even the building of an Islamic community center near Ground 0, we all denigrate peoples and faiths, corporations and governments, because it helps to justify our prejudices. It is infinitely easier to indulge in thoughtless spite than it is to examine the ugly truths that linger behind our fear. For most of us, this ill will is internal, a mental monologue covered up by a veneer of politeness. But for those few among us who possess genuine power, bigotry can ignite wars from which some people never recover. So it is now; so it has ever been. It is a maxim to which the lost people of Carthage would surely testify.

Raised in what is now modern-day Tunis, Carthage was a powerful, north African state which plied the oceanic waters between Africa and Europe for much of the first millennium BCE. Though it is now best remembered for the mercilessness with which it was exterminated by the Roman Republic during the Third Punic War, Carthaginian power predated Roman might by centuries. In fact, for most of its history, Greek Syracuse was its chief rival and antagonist, not the Romans who would eventually annihilate it. A mighty naval power, Carthage was a magnet for wealth, successfully deploying a powerful, oligarchical council which guided it to Mediterranean prominence. But while its achievements enabled its expansion into Spain, Italy and Greece, it was also its downfall. For it stoked up in prideful and powerful Rome jealousy and envy for which the Roman character was ill-equipped to suffer.

Carthage Must Be Destroyed is, in the main, a treatise on the history of Carthage, the mythology of its founding in ninth century BCE, its rise to mercantile supremacy in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, its obliteration at the hands of the ruthless Roman Republic in the first century BCE, and the years between in which its great generals, its geographic advantages, and its entrepreneurial spirit made it an immensely successful civilization. But while Mr. Miles details, here, the history of this Phoenician society, now remembered for Hannibal, its greatest and most prodigal son, and for the Romans sowing salt into its soil, it is the fearfulness with which the Romans viewed Carthage that connects this ancient tale to the present day.

Want drives human action: want of stuff, want of emotion, want of power. And so, when Carthage dared to stand before the assembled might of Rome and demand that the Italian state recognize it as an equal, to treat with it on the terms of a worthy opponent, the want of Rome, to be the best, to have no equal, to be supreme in every way, drove it to commit genocide against Carthage, to refuse to stop until it was no more. For only then, in the destruction of an enemy, could the preeminence of the Roman Republic be truly declared.

This is an excellent and scholarly work. Mr. Miles is as detailed in his reconstruction of Carthaginian civilization as he is in sketching out the sociopolitical forces which tied the region together during its reign. But as much as this work teaches the reader about Carthage, it is surprisingly vague on the Roman side of the equation. Yes, there are brief descriptions of some important figures, Marcus Cato, whose famous quote gave this book its title, Fabius the Delayer who was so successful in fighting Hannibal, and Scipio Africanus, the man who eventually destroyed Carthage, but these figures seem like afterthoughts. Perhaps the author considers the Roman side of this story to have already been decisively told. Nonetheless, I required more.

There are lessons here, not only for humans individually but for powerful nations as well. You may, for awhile, assuage your fears by vanquishing those you consider your enemies, but ultimately those fears will end you. For the enemy is ultimately in your own character, not in those who are not like you. And if you must fight the enemy to prove your own worth, then you will only wind up annihilating yourself. (4/5 Stars)

Devices And Desires: The Engineers 01 by K. j. Parker

From The Week of August 14, 2011

We know, from our own history, that great conflicts can begin from the smallest provocations, the wrong enemy antagonized, the wrong alliance made, the wrong marriage consummated. Had these moments in space and time played out differently, entire calamities might have been mitigated, perhaps even avoided. Never has this truism been more apparent than in K. J. Parker's clockwork universe of wars, clans and engineers. For here, in this world of mountains and deserts, hatreds and jealousies, even the tinniest sparks can ignite conflagrations powerful enough to extinguish civilizations.

In the Great Republic of Mezentia, life unfolds with exquisite regimentation. A civilization of far-seeing engineers, Mezentia has managed to perfect virtually every mechanical process known to man, bending these talents to the manufacturing of goods of a quality to shame all competitors. By positioning themselves as the one-stop shop for everything from domestic clocks to the weapons of war, they have grown immensely wealthy and exceedingly powerful, so much so they have little motivation to be kind to their friends or merciful to their enemies. But rather than channel this phenomenal success in engineering into innovation, Mezentian society has come to be governed by strict codes of law and design. After all, Mezentian creations are perfect in every way. And if one attempts to improve upon a perfect design, then one is implicitly admitting that the design in question is flawed. That is an abomination.

Ziani Vaatzes, a foreman of a Mezentian ordinance factory, is the last man any Mezentian would consider an abominator. And yet, when investigators from the bureau of Compliance discover that, in creating a mechanical doll for his young daughter, he has illegally improved upon the perfect design, he is swiftly arrested and sentenced to be executed. Initially, Ziani appears to be resigned to his fate until the infuriating obstinance and insensitivity of his jailers towards his family provokes him to shrug off his compliant nature and effect a bold escape from his prison, from Mezentia, and from his life. Abandoning everything he's ever known, Ziani flees to the mountainous borderlands where, if he succeeds in ingratiating himself with the two combative peoples who inhabit these hostile lands, he may be able to exact his revenge upon the people who called him abominator.

Littered with dark characters and darker deeds, this first effort in a trilogy from K. J. Parker interweaves the fates of four primary provocateurs whose conflicting wants and desires may well bring death and destruction to their people. In addition to Ziani, there is the hopeless Duke Orsea who senselessly provokes a war with the Mezentians, the ruthless and highly intelligent Duke Valens who tries to protect Orsea for the love of the bumbling duke's wife, and Miel Ducas, Orsea's loyal right hand who was not made for the life that has shackled him. Altogether, their plots and schemes, needs and wants, create a treacherous tangle of temporary alliances designed to gain advantages which forever seem elusive.

But as much as the author's characters are a strength of the story, they are also its primary weakness. For while Devices And Desires is darkly, cleverly, and satisfyingly plotted, and while its conclusion holds promise for the next two volumes, there is a disturbing uniformity of personality here that is already grating. It may be that the world K. J. Parker created here is intentionally populated by people with minimal to no emotional affect. If so, there ought to be some explanation for this flatness, some indication of why both the Mezentians and the people of the mountain duchies experience so few emotions other than anger, jealousy and fear. And most of this is internal, hidden behind masks of politeness and suffering.

Devices And Desires has an intriguing premise, many cunning characters and an inventive world, but its characters are so consistently, pointlessly sociopathic that one has to wonder about the headspace its author was in it when it was composed. Engaging and promising, but its bleakness requires justification. (3/5 Stars)

Egypt On The Brink by Tarek Osman

From The Week of August 14, 2011

With luck, Egypt will soon be free. Empowered by a wave of young Egyptians who make up almost 70 percent of the country's population, the stifling statism that has, for the last 60 years, restricted their freedom and ripped away their opportunities for economic success may soon be drowned, replaced by an open democracy capable of building on its energetic and hungry youth to create a modern nation. But while we can remember the crowds that bravely filled Tahrir Square in the spring of 2011 and hail them as courageous revolutionaries who overthrew a crumbling dictatorship, there is only one way to have even a remote idea of what will replace Hosni Mubarak's security state. We must journey into the past and examine Egypt in the 20th century: its people, its governments, and the ideas that impelled both their successes and their failures. This Egypt On The Brink achieves with clarity and grace.

Published a year prior to the 2011 Arab Spring, this treatise from Mr. Osman, on 20th century Egypt, its politics, its economics and its religion, makes the Tahrir uprising seem like an inevitable outcome of 60 years of political corruption and societal decay. Who is responsible for this desolation? The three men who have hovered over Egyptian life since independence in the 1950s.

Gamal Abdel Nasser rose out of the fog of obscurity to guide his country away from British colonialism and into an ideological marriage with the USSR. Under Nasser, Egypt became a command economy that saw millions of impoverished Egyptians educated and welcomed into a new middleclass, dominated by the public sector. But when, in 1967, his plans to unite the Arab world under a single, pan-Arabic banner were crushed by Israel's shocking victory over the combined might of Egypt and its Arabic allies in the Six Day War, Nasser's reforms lost legitimacy, a reality which only hastened their decline into the bureaucratic stagnancy typical of Soviet-style economies.

Anwar Sadat, who succeeded Nasser by being the least offensive of the available options, not only abandoned the Nasser plan, he ran in the opposite direction. Politically and economically, Sadat embraced the West, implementing Al Infitah, a program of privatization which both enriched and ingratiated him to Egypt's elite. However, when Sadat's reforms only succeeded in cementing an Egyptian oligarchy, the millions of Egyptians who were elevated to the middleclass under Nasser were mercilessly dropped back down into poverty, creating widespread discontent. This discord crescendoed with Sadat's assassination in 1981.

Which brings us to Hosni Mubarak's 30-year dictatorship. Forever marked by the terror of being at Sadat's side when the president was killed during a military parade in Cairo, Mubarak left behind Nasser's socialism and Sadat's capitalism to carve out his own identity, the leader of a security state. He consolidated Sadat's oligarchy and kept faith with Israel and the United States while, at home, he cracked down hard on dissent, imprisoning his enemies and dissolving any forms of organized opposition to his authority. Unfortunately for the Egyptian people, Mr. Mubarak did not learn one of the major rules of human nature, that denying someone a thing, no matter its form, only makes him want it more. After a series of assassination attempts, Mubarak was overthrown in 2011 by the Tahrir revolt.

Egypt On The Brink is a marvelous and concise breakdown of the difficulties the Egyptian people have faced over the last seven decades in which they have been bounced from colonialism, to socialism, to capitalism, to the militarism. They have been the victims of a cruel game of political experimentation driven by the desire of three powerful men -- Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak -- to seize power and impose their ideologies upon their people. And so, while Mr. Osman has done a wonderful job elucidating the tragic march of Egyptian history, his greatest achievement here is to present to his readers a potent, systematic indictment of not only authoritarianism, but that form of political paternalism that infuses ambitious men with the misguided belief that they know best. We only needs look to Egypt to grasp the full cost of such folly.

This is riveting work, only marginally dated by the revolution that so quickly followed it. (4/5 Stars)

To End All Wars by Adam Hochschild

From The Week of August 14, 2011

Despite the best efforts of historians to record its significance, World War I has been, in Western culture, overshadowed by its bigger, louder successor. This is logical. After all, World War II was the first war of the modern era, a war prosecuted with cutting-edge weapons and contemporary nation states. Not only did World War I involve horse-mounted cavalry, the generals who fought it out deployed 19th century ideas of honor and bravery and, in doing so, consigned their men to be slaughtered by the millions. World War II was ignited by an epic antagonist in Hitler, a man so demonic, he could not have been imagined by dramatists. World War I was launched by the pettiness and the pride of monarchs who, in committing their countries to the ruinous conflict, wrote the final chapter on their era before ushering themselves into history. But while it's clear to see how the bigger, starker World War II defined the remainder of the century, World War I gave rise to powerful voices and vital ideas that laid down the destinies of political movements for decades to come.

In To End All Wars, Mr. Hochschild, a journalist and author, traces the lives of several influential figures in British politics and society in a largely successful attempt to create a portrait of life during World War I. From the political dissidents who were jailed for their unwillingness to fight to the staunchly pro-government loyalists who considered such dissent in a time of war treasonous, Mr. Hochschild uses his subjects to explore not only the manner in which public opinion was shaped during this dark period of European history, but the extent to which great strife polarizes people by creating opposing camps into which people, on the basis of class background, political affiliation, and career path, sort themselves. In the case of Britain from 1914 to 1918, this sorting created three distinct, powerful groups: the conservative loyalists who believed in the war, who felt it a matter of British pride to fight it out, and who deemed dissent to be un-British; the socialist opposition who hated the war, who wanted it ended as soon as humanly possible, and who advocated political revolution to see those objectives realized; and everyone else stuck in the middle who were asked to fight the war, to die in its battles, to suffer its deprivations, and to bear up under its pains with dignity and grace. No surprise then that this unhappy stew generated extraordinary tumult in Britain during these five years of international calamity.

From Lloyd George, Rudyard Kipling and John French, loyalists all, to Emily Hobhouse, Keir Hardie and the Pankhurst clan, socialists all, Mr. Hochschild's vivid biography of a society during one of history's most senseless wars is surprisingly gripping. After all, this is a tale not of battlefields and tactics; this is a chronicle of the lives of desperate and passionate people who stood at the nexus of a pivotal moment in humanity's history and insisted that their presences be felt, that their ideas be heard. Through their own words, and Mr. Hochschild's reconstructions of their lives, the reader is presented with a composite view of the homefront during wartime and the epic conflict which, for such citizens, characterizes all wars.

Do we agitate against our government, like Sylvia Pankhurst and Bertrand Russell, putting our beliefs ahead of the betterment and unity of our nation during a difficult time? Or do we support our leaders like Kipling and French, demanding that the people suspend their beliefs for the betterment of the cause and the nation? To do the former is to risk being labelled un-British, or un-American, an unpatriotic traitor to ones people and the soldiers dying for the cause. To do the latter is to risk being a helpful stooge for the government, a willing dupe who, infected by propaganda, spreads this insidious virus to the people. It is a question yet to be satisfactorily answered, but one which Mr. Hochschild's subjects all confront in their own ways.

This is a wonderful examination of a vital time in our world's history, a time in which the fate of a century was being written not only in the blood of the men dying in Flanders Fields, but by the revolutionaries who dared to be heard, dared to force their ideas into the world. A riveting tapestry of time lost to history. (5/5
Stars)

The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak

From The Week of August 07, 2011

Torn between east and west, between democracy and authoritarianism, between secularism and Islam, turkey stands at the crossroads of our world. One side lies Europe, a continent of order, peace and prosperity. On the other lies the Middle East, a region of chaos, violence and poverty. How can one nation of 80,000,000 people, forged from the wreckage of the bloody first world war, maintain its cohesion in the face of such lacerating disharmony? Though The Bastard of Istanbul primarily concerns itself with the trials and tribulations of an extended, bifurcated, Turkish family, with branches in Istanbul and the southwestern United States, Ms. Shafak's characters are a delivery system for deeper messages about women, nationalism, freedom and Turkey.

For 19-year-old Asya, life is a series of disappointments and restrictions which, together, have kindled in her twin fires of rage and nihilism. The eponymous bastard, Asya was born, out of wedlock, into a family of difficult women, three aunts, two grandparents and one mother, all of whom, at one point or another, live under the same roof.

This clan of females suffers a curse, chiefly that their menfolk never seem to be able to survive into middle age. The only male who has defied this curse is Mustafa, Asya's uncle, and he may have only been spared by fleeing Istanbul for America where, for the last 20 years, he he's lived with an excitable American woman who came to him a single mother with a half-Armenian daughter. Years on, the daughter Armanoush, or Amy to her American friends, is a bright, articulate and bookish college student who, finding herself gripped by a desire to explore her Armenian roots, secretly travels to Istanbul where, as the step daughter of Mustafa, she is welcomed under the roof of Asya's wild family of women.

It would be difficult for scholarly Armanoush and hedonistic Asya to have less in common, and yet, as Armanoush begins to delve into her Armenian family's tortured history, the two youths bond tightly. Asya has her cynical eyes opened to the Armenian genocide which Turkish society has tried to sweep under the proverbial rug, and Armanoush learns, through her associations with Asya's free-spirited circle, that, counter to the expectations of her anti-Turkish Armenian friends, Turkey and its people, while reluctant to admit the sins of the past, are not hate-filled warmongers. They are people, good and bad, living their lives. And in this, they are no different than anyone else the world over.

The story crescendos when, learning that Armanoush has lied to them about her journey to turkey, Rose and Mustafa hurry across the globe to Istanbul to retrieve her, a fateful decision which will have profound consequences to both branches of this eccentric family.

Though The Bastard of Istanbul opens slowly, indolently laying out its myriad players and their assorted troubles, it rapidly acquires a powerful momentum that impels it to a shattering conclusion. Ms. Shafak's characters shine. Everyone from thoughtful Armanoush and nihilistic Asya to their thorny and zealous relatives have distinct and difficult personalities. But while her living, breathing characters give her work its color, they are also the doorways through which she can explore the challenging questions of Turkish society.

Asya embodies liberal, secularist turkey. Frustrated and angry, she flails to find her roots in a world that is, often, hostile to her existence. Armanoush, meanwhile, represents that part of the Armenian Diaspora that wishes rapprochement with Turkey, an acknowledgement of and a settlement to the butchery of 1915. It's no surprise, then, that both women face such insurmountable lives. After all, the tide is against them, not only in Turkey but in much of the rest of the world which seems increasingly unwilling to enjoin with its enemies on peaceful, common ground.

The Bastard of Istanbul is slow to ignite, but its launch, when actualized around the halfway mark, is spectacular and engrossing. I could have done without Ms. Shafak's occasional digressions into religious mysticism which felt shoehorned into the story to help clue the reader into its central plot point, but the rich history and the vivid world more than made up for this flaw. (4/5 Stars)

I Know I Am But What Are You by Samantha Bee

From The Week of August 07, 2011

Writers are the lifeblood of television shows. After all, it's almost impossible to enjoy an episode of any program riddled with stilted skits, awkward dialogue and senseless plot twists. The Daily Show, then, must have some phenomenal talent empowering it. For no other program has maintained such sharp satire, such mocking wit, for such a long time. Though this latest effort from a Daily show performer is more a limited memoir than a mocking comedy, Ms. Bee displays, here, the charm and the humor that infuses The Daily Show of which she's been apart since 2003.

Born in Canada to wildly eccentric parents, Ms. Bee clearly had an unusual adolescence. Enthusiastically delving into her past, she details not only her awkward sexual encounters -- she appears to have been quite a magnet for older, pervy men --, she unapologetically embraces her early roles as depressive, car thief, and crapped-on girlfriend. About the only noteworthy absence in the life described here is normalcy with which Ms. Bee seems only passingly familiar. But then, when ones formative life is shaped by asshole boyfriends, inappropriate parents and strange, strange men, one is bound to trade in boring, old normal for exciting and exhilarating bizarre.

From horribly awkward family vacations to drug-fuelled concerts, I Know I Am But What Are You is a fun romp through Ms. Bee's entertaining adolescence, but there's very little here about her latter life and virtually nothing about her time on The Daily Show. The writer of a memoir is under no obligation to lay out the totality of her life in a single work, but the omission of her adult life from this piece is quite jarring. There are references to it, of course, brief allusions to her husband and childbirth, but these are little more than glances in the direction of events after Ms. Bee turned 20.

It's no doubt an impulse for comedians to look nostalgically back on their childhoods; after all, these are the years that shaped them into the funny, sarcastic and zany wits that so capably amuse us. And yet, our lives have arcs, trajectories, moments of change and maturity. Ms. Bee is commendably raw and open about the ungainliness of her youth and the moments of painful silence and loneliness that punctuated it, but such tales have been told many, many times before. If it's to be told again, the recipe must be spiced up with a new variation on an established theme.

Despite having her Daily Show six-shooter primed and holstered, Ms. Bee's refusal to draw and fire confines this memoir to conventionality. Amusing and, at times, playfully terrifying, but more than a little disappointing as well. (2/5 Stars)

Dirt by David R. Montgomery

From The Week of August 07, 2011

Humanity is beset by dualities. North and south, liberal and conservative, rich and poor... Philosophically, politically, and even geographically, we find polarities everywhere we look. And so it should not be a surprise to find the same polarized forces at play in the study of our species. Futurist scholars disregard what has come before to focus on what's to come next while historian scholars reject the future to focus on the past. While Mr. Montgomery is undoubtedly an adherent to the latter, historian camp, Dirt is an intriguing attempt to bridge the gap between past and future under the umbrella of a single, logical premise.

Civilizations live and die on the health of their soil. For there is nothing more fundamental to the functioning of any civilization than a steady supply of food, or so argues Mr. Montgomery. Great empires from the Romans to the Mayans have expanded to meet their food supply, only to crash when either that food supply is cut off, or when political instabilities, created as a result of expansion, bring them down. People must eat. And if they cannot eat, they will not sit idly by and waste away to death; they will fight wars for the resources they require.

After laying out this theory of civilization extinction, Mr. Montgomery investigates the soil itself: its properties, its systems, and most importantly its limitations. For as farmers have known for centuries, soil can be exhausted by heavy use. What hasn't been common knowledge until recently is why. Enter the relentlessly scientific Charles Darwin who discovered that earthworms are a vital component in healthy soil, creatures capable of enlivening rocky mush into nutrient-rich earth for plants and crops. Building from this idea, Mr. Montgomery goes on to explain the methods used to work the land, how those methods have improved over time, how the yields from the land have grown to fit an expanding population, and, finally, how humanity is about to reach the land's capacity to feed all of its exploiters.

Parts science, history, memoir, and environmentalism, Dirt is a wonderful look into a world that we all take for granted. We all enjoy the products of civilization: cellphones, airplanes, restaurants, and movie theatres. But Mr. Montgomery successfully argues that all of these trappings come about as a result of the health of our soil. Without that, there is no food. And if there's no food, there's no people. And if there's no people, there's certainly no Iphone. What's more, what humans take for granted they have a tendency to abuse. We have made unique changes to Earth, modifying it in ways that can only be labelled experimental. What began 10,000 years ago with the agricultural revolution lives on, today, in a population that has exploded out to seven billion purely on the back of the capacity of the land to feed them. But none of the practices we have used to feed that population are natural or sustainable.

Mr. Montgomery does an excellent job of explaining how this has come to pass and offers researched ideas for how it can be mended for the future. For one thing seems clear. If we exhaust the soil, if we have no other way of growing food, nothing else matters. Billions of people will starve and die, all because of the health of something we consider dirty. (4/5 Stars)

The Crimean War by Orlando Figes

From The Week of August 07, 2011

Though governments will always withhold from their populations the true facts of war, its costs, its blunders and its barbarities, there can be no doubt that, thanks to our ubiquitous media, the people of the world have access to many more truths of war than they did a century ago. From imbedded reporters to corroborated reports of attacks, the people can, on a daily basis, keep abreast of campaigns and their atrocities without having to quit their couches. However, war wasn't always fought so openly. In fact, prior to World War II, the imbedded reporter was a rarely spotted species. Such newsmen were almost invariably creatures of the government, toadies who avoided the wrath of military censors by publishing propaganda pieces meant to shore up support along the homefront. So how and when did war become open? How and when were the consciousnesses of people the world over made aware of war's true price? How and when did the tide of humanism reach the battlefield and attempt to elevate the value of every human life?

In The Crimean War, Mr. Figes, a British historian of Russia, delves into this 1853-1856 European conflict, exposing not only the imperial and religious forces that caused it but the extent to which it popularized the horrific plight of the common soldier. For even in this relatively brief skirmish that pitted an ambitious and proud Russia against the Ottoman Turks and their French and British allies, hundreds of thousands of soldiers were felled by bullets on the battlefield and by disease and hunger off it. To demonstrate the role sickness, starvation and exposure to the cold played in the conflict, Mr. Figes vividly documents a single siege in which more than seven times as many French soldiers died off the battlefield as died on it.

This affliction was by no means confined to the French. Of the 130,000 lives lost during the yearlong struggle for Sevastopol, more than 100,000 were non-combat casualties. But unlike with past wars, such deprivations did not go unnoticed. Thanks to letters and news stories from the front that detailed the tragic conditions, the Crimean War gave birth to the careers of crusaders like Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole whose work on behalf of sick and wounded soldiers helped to change perceptions of the value of life.

But while Mr. Figes does a terrifyingly vivid job illustrating the battlefields, the notables who fought on them and the changes the media brought to them, he is equally determined to expose the roots of the conflict. Portraying the emperor of Russia as something of a boy taken by the trappings of war, he describes how Nicholas I clashed with the French over who was the rightful protector and overseer of the Christian population within the Ottoman empire, how Nicholas' militarism doomed any hope of a diplomatic solution, and how the European powers were, as a result, drawn into what was essentially a localized rivalry between the Russians and the Turks. Tragically, this is neither the first nor the last time that pride and theology have come together to empower war.

The Crimean War is a lengthy and detailed primer on what is, 150 years on, something of a forgotten conflict, quite overshadowed by the 20th century conflagrations that followed it and the Napoleonic tumults that preceded it. That said, Mr. Figes is successful in his attempt to humanize the war by bringing to light the humanistic trends it impelled and by connecting its casus belli to the seemingly universal human failings of pride and self-importance. In this, he makes this old war relevant to the 21st century reader. But while some might find the author admirably thorough, the level of detail Mr. Figes applies to the war's peripheral players, and the extent to which he seems determined to highlight every futile skirmish, causes the read to drag considerably. While there's much here to learn from and be immersed by, there's also plenty here to find oppressing and repetitive. (3/5 Stars)

Blood Magic: The Ballad of Kirin Widowmaker 01 by Matthew Cook

From The Week of July 31, 2011

While Blood Magic falls well short of greatness, the dearth of genuinely dark fantasy fiction leaves enough room on the literary stage for this maiden effort from Mr. Cook to come forth from the shadows and have a moment in the limelight. For while it will never grace any top ten lists, or be found lovingly tucked away next to hardcover copies of more venerated series, its antiheroine protagonist, its ruthless bloodshed and its merciless conclusion combine to lend it a punch to the guts both entertaining and savage.

In a kingdom beset by the Mor, a cruel race of powerfully built, intelligent bipeds set on savagery, Kirin, a young woman with a tragic past, does what she can to protect a band of the king's soldiers from their terrifying foe. For the Mor, recently thought to have been nothing more than myth, have fallen upon them with their multiple arms and their mastery of fire, leaving them outmatched and overwhelmed. Kirin, their scout, is their only hope.

Having come into a dark, necromantic power during a troubled and abusive adolescence, Kirin has shaped herself into a keen huntress and a powerful magician. Channeling the essence of her dead, beloved sister, she has long since outstripped her teacher for knowledge and strength. Unlike her fellow necromancers, who can only raise dumb and slow-footed wretches, her Sweetlings, the corpses she animates into loyal servants, are vicious, swift and lethal, faithfully protecting her and the company of soldiers whose lot she's thrown in with.

After a particularly costly battle, Kirin meets a young mage, Lia, an innocent who is abroad with Brother Ato, an older, judgmental priest who has little love or patience with Kirin's black magic. The two travelers have little experience with the life of attrition Kirin and her band face. Nonetheless, they are determined to aid them and the realm and, in doing so, will attempt to reform the dark necromancer by unraveling her past to discover just what pains her so.

For a seminal effort, Blood Magic must be considered a success. Kirin is a gripping antiheroine, a sadomasochistic wanderer as pained as she is savage. In her, Mr. Cook has given life to his greatest achievement here, a character worthy of a series. However, as much as Kirin fascinates, shocks and entertains, the author fails to imbue any of his other creations with the same animating spark. Lia and Ato are little more than cardboard cutouts of fantasy-fiction good guys. And Kirin's sister, present as a voice in the necromancer's head, is nothing more than a foil and an excuse for Kirin's more grievous sins.

But though this is something of a one woman show, and though the Mor fail to do more than provide an enemy for Kirin to fight, Mr. Cook's willingness to be different, to explore true darkness, to have a conversation about guilt and shame, and to investigate the nature of life in its many forms makes this work memorable and unusual. A mixed but compelling bag. (3/5 Stars)

Peak Everything by Richard Heinberg

From The Week of July 31, 2011

Unless one stands to profit from the plundering of Earth's resources, or is an ideologue who holds with such plunderers, it seems painfully clear that humanity is burning through its planet's fossil fuels at an alarming rate. After all, it doesn't take a mathematician to work out that today's four billion industrialized humans are going to burn through our finite amount of fuel infinitely faster than yesterday's few hundred million agricultural humans. More people plus higher fuel requirements equals more fuel used faster. And given the exponential rate at which the human population has expanded over the last 60 years, we've never used so much so fast. So being that we have a problem here, chiefly that our technological civilization is entirely dependent upon a fast-disappearing, finite resource, what do we do and what will the future look like without oil, coal, and natural gas?

Mr. Heinberg, a journalist and environmentalist, attempts to tackle these important questions in Peak Everything, a 200-page anthology of the author's essays on issues ranging from human psychology to future sustainability. After an attempt to explain the resource-profligacy of both the Greatest Generation and the Boomers they gave birth to, he moves on to what the world might look like if fossil fuels were no longer readily available. Being that transportation is the most fuel-hungry human industry, Mr. Heinberg logically assumes that, absent a wildcard like fusion power, by the end of the 21st century, our world will be made up of thousands of localized economies, that our food and our goods will be produced within a few hundred miles of where they are consumed, and that only the most valuable components will be fetched from elsewhere. In other words, he imagines a world of affiliated city states, community nations that are largely independent of one another and incapable of being united. The cost, to a centralized bureaucracy, in time and energy, to hold onto distant territories would simply be unaffordable.

This is the best case scenario, one in which society has sufficiently braced itself against the scarcity of fuel to plan for its future. The worst case scenario, meanwhile, finds humanity in its current state, making only a token effort towards sustainable energy while recklessly and needlessly hurtling towards the exhaustion of the fuel supply. Most writers on the subject, including Mr. Heinberg, agree that this will invite a widespread collapse of a society ill-prepared to transition to a post-fossil-fuel world. Mr. Heinberg cheesily concludes his work with an open letter from the future in which the author warns us about the consequences of inaction.

Despite the weakness of the final essay, Peak Everything packages an adequate summation of our current fuel problem with an intriguing conception of our future world to create a serviceable work that speaks to the problem of our rapid depletion of Earth's resources. Unfortunately, Mr. Heinberg's speculations on the causes of our profligacy fail to hit upon the most obvious explanation for our wastefulness.

While evolution is incredibly efficient, performing a cost benefit analysis on seemingly every decision -- is this new mutation (the brain) worth the energy it requires? --, human beings are not. They have never had to be. Since the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, we have existed in a vast abundance. Yes, there have been droughts and shortages, but these dearths are intervals between long stretches of time in which food, land, and labor have been readily available to us. We haven't had to make the same life-and-death choices evolution has had to make. The human brain requires some 20 watts of power per day to perform all its countless functions. The best super computer humanity can design performs at only a fraction of the speed of the human brain and requires a million times as much power. Why?

Because humans can afford to be inefficient. We can afford to have our disposable Iphones to pour water down the drain, to get a new car every three years, and to not think about recycling. There is no motivation to be efficient in an abundant society. This is why we are profligate. Tell someone it's bad to buy an Iphone because we have only so many petroleum products from which to make its plastics and he'll shrug and tell you that's someone else's problem and he'll use that phone for a couple of years and throw it off for the new version. But tell that same someone that the Iphone he's about to buy is the last one he'll ever have and see if he doesn't cherish it, protect it and keep it for many years to come.

Scarcity drives efficiency which, for humanity, is both a positive and a negative. We are eminently adaptable, so we should be able to make ourselves efficient, to conform to the new paradigm. However, this also ensures that we will never change until we have to change, until we have no other choice.

Peak Everything is a worthy read, but its weak conclusion and its occasional omissions reduce it from a must-read to passably interesting non-fiction for anyone interested in our dwindling resources and what that may mean for the future. (3/5 Stars)

In Pursuit of Silence by George Prochnik

From The Week of July 31, 2011

From noisy neighbors to construction crews, from power washers to leafblowers, noise is an ever-present thunder in urban environments. If you're not living next to a highway, train-tracks, or a busy intersection, you're under a highly trafficked flight path to the local airport, forced to endure the repetitious din of hundreds of planes coming and going on a daily basis. For most of urban history, the growl of modern machines was tolerable, confined to roads and airways and the occasional lawnmowing on a Saturday afternoon. But since the advent of affordable power tools, escape into quiet is now impossible and no neighborhood is free of daily double-digit decibel ratings. Silence is golden. but more importantly, it's disappearing.

In Pursuit of Silence is an investigation into the rise of urban noise and the impact it has on humans and nature, physiologically and psychologically. After spending a million years evolving in a much quieter environment, human beings now find themselves bombarded by auditory stimulation they are ill-prepared for. This has lead some scientists to posit that noise pollution not only disrupts complex thinking, it may be a root cause of autism, literally re-wiring the infantile brain which is defenseless against the thunder that begins the moment the baby is born.

From birds who have their mating calls drowned out by passing cars to the horn and engine-filled clamor of New York City streets, Mr. Prochnik points out that the world is not only getting noisier, there's been only a token effort to keep the growing din in check. Noise pollution has historically been avoidable, but with the rapid rise of Earth's human population, finding silence is getting harder and harder. And yet, whenever society adjusts to a new phenomenon, subcultures are spawned to welcome and service those who find the new developments disturbing. From Buddhist temples to Japanese xen gardens, Mr. Prochnik profiles these sacred spaces, describing the physical and psychological responses to the total absence of noise.

But while spaces are being developed to shelter noise-avoiders, noise-revellers have staked out their own ground. Mr. Prochnik spends time, here, with Boom Car aficionados, men and women who gut their cars in an effort to pack so much stereo equipment inside their hollowed-out shells that the power of the sound produced literally distorts the air in and around the car, packing a punch capable of shattering windshields.

Mr. Prochnik has done justice to an under-discussed and overlooked externality of modern society. In highlighting the ways in which noise changes our world, he's brought attention to an issue that ought to be legislated and controlled. Millions of people spend a premium on their homes to live in nice, peaceful neighborhoods that have been graffitied by suburban noise. One should not have to go to a Japanese xen garden for silence. One should be able to walk out of ones own front door to locate peace and quiet. Now that science is beginning to detail the impact of noise, perhaps something will be done to curb the thunder and restore some semblance of peace to our world.

This is a thoughtful read. And though Mr. Prochnik makes his own feelings felt on this issue, he is much less inflammatory than I am on this subject and that is to his credit. (4/5 Stars)

Riding The Desert Trail by Bettina Selby

From The Week of July 31, 2011

The great age of planetary exploration has passed into history. Ericson and Magellan, Shackleton and Hillary, Livingstone and Rondon... They and their brethren have mapped our oceans and summited our mountains; they've journeyed along our rivers and charted our caves. They have claimed all the earthly firsts that we consider worthy. But while ours may not be the age of firsts, the age of great adventures, it might well be the age of admiring those firsts, of looking back with our modern technology and our gift of hindsight and standing in awe of the achievements of those who did so much with so little. In Riding The Desert Trail, Ms. Selby has done more than stand in awe. She has re-traced one of the most epic of African adventures and, in doing so, given her readers a glimpse of both the African culture that hosted her and the singleminded drive to explore that impelled the great adventurers that preceded her.

In 1988, Ms. Selby, a writer and avid cyclist, set upon a long and dangerous journey. Traveling from her native England with only her bicycle, some diplomatic papers and a minimum amount of cash, she landed in Egypt with the intention of bicycling the full 4,500-mile length of the Nile valley. Inspired by Livingstone and Baker who, only a century earlier, had risked their lives to discover the source of the great river, she devoted the following few months of her life to adventuring from the smog of chaotic Cairo all the way to distant and war-torn Uganda in the hopes of completing an epic journey that, even a hundred years on from the age of adventure, remains difficult and dangerous.

The desolation of Sudan and the discord of Uganda would be treacherous challenges for natives to the region. For a lone, foreign woman to journey through this part of the world, a region that has never known, in living memory, the moderating hand of modern technology and organized education... The perils are obvious. And yet, supported by the sturdy bike beneath her and buoyed by the families along the way who generously gave of what little they had to aid her, Ms. Selby steered into the winds of risk and history to achieve, to see for her own eyes the mythical source of a river that has been feeding civilizazions for thousands of years.

Riding The Desert Trail is as much a memoir as it is a travel log. After all, it's difficult to write of such an epic journey without revealing much of ones own character. The middle-aged Selby possesses, here, the irrepressible curiosity of youth as, in this recount of her journey, she engagingly describes both the hostile terrain and the fascinating cultures that ply it with only occasional complaints about the physical and sociological roadblocks thrown up in her way. But as much as this work succeeds in its stated aims, of educating the reader about the heartland of Africa, its most powerful message is, to her, an afterthought. In the planning, the execution and the completion of her journey, Ms. Selby devoted months of time and energy, endured risk and hardship, for a single hour, to stand at the source of the Nile and take in its beauty and its history, months for just an hour to view beauty through ones own eyes... It may be that the age of planetary exploration has come and gone, But let us not for a moment think that the human spirit has lost its thirst to see, to experience and to know, to stand next to the history, of our people and our planet, just on the off chance that we can touch the past and the future.

A well-rounded tale marred only by its 1980s context which, from the second decade of the 21st century, is somewhat dated. (4/5 Stars)

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

From The Week of July 24, 2011

Though many novels have been written about India's emergence into the modern world, few are as potent as The God of Small Things, the 1997 winner of the Man Booker Prize. For Ms. Roy has reached beyond a simple snapshot of Indian life, as seen through the eyes of a middleclass family, and, ambitiously, sought to contextualize modern India by connecting it to its recent past. In this, she exposes the social, political and economic forces that have been at work in India and the extent to which those forces contort and cripple the lives they touch.

Cycling between the late 1960s and the early 1990s, The God of Small Things patiently and devastatingly details the harrowing lives of twins, Estha and Rahel. Born to a witty but world-weary mother, Ammu, who is the regular and stoic victim of her husband's violent, alcohol-fuelled abuse, brother and sister experience life with openness and curiosity, embracing their extended family with innocence and grace. But when, aged seven years, they find themselves at the center of two deaths, one accidental and the other quite purposeful, their lives are forever changed. In the wake of these terrible crimes, the twins are ordered to tell lies for the sake of the family, blamed for its misfortunes, and then finally separated, with Estha banished abroad and Rahel jailed at home. When, 24 years on, they are reunited in India, Estha is a shadow of a man who has sworn himself to silence and Rahel is a haunted failure who has ventured to and returned from the United States with little to show for her years. Together, they attempt to piece together their sundered pasts and heal what was so cruelly broken.

Devoting most of her energy to the 1960s timeline, Ms. Roy couples her lyrical prose with vivid descriptions of mid-century India to produce a near-tangible recreation of a place in time. Through Rahel and Estha, one can feel the chaos of an airport, the terror of a movie theatre, the beauty of their family estate, and the fear of a police station and the extent to which all of these places hold life-altering significance for the fate-battered twins. But as much as one can admire her striking scenery, Ms. Roy's animated characters, and her willingness to throw all of life's cruelties at them, imbue her work with vitality. From the twins who are crushed by fate's bootheel, to their great aunt's selfish cruelty, to their mother's grim endurance, to their uncle's hopeless self-absorption, each member of the family, and the creatures who act for and against them, have distinct personalities that run the gamut from sweetness to cruelty.

The God of Small Things is far from a perfect read. It is, at times, needlessly dense and opaque, indulging in numerous and pointless digressions into a spiritualism that offers little to the story's central plot. However, Ms. Roy's ability to, with artistry and subtlety, demonstrate the extent to which human lives are molded by external influences they cannot control, by bitternesses they cannot suppress, and by desires they cannot ignore, elevates The God of Small Things into rarified air. Tragic and thoughtful work. (4/5 Stars)

Among The Truthers by Jonathan Kay

From The Week of July 24, 2011

Though those of us who are rationalists wish it otherwise, our world is shaped by popular opinion. It does not matter if said opinion is based on logic or reason. What matters is the extent to which said opinion can issue forth from an individual and find traction in a broader world yearning for an easy explanation. When we garnered our news from journalistic sources, popular opinion was, to an extent, safely harbored from extremism because it was in the best interests of journalistic publications to get the story right. But as Mr. Kay argues in Among The Truthers, with the rise of the Internet, control over popular opinion has all-but-entirely slipped out of the hands of the moderating media and fallen into the newly empowered grasp of conspiracy theorists and grudge-mongers who use their expanded platforms to pedal their narrow ideologies. Exit Walter Cronkite; enter The Blaze, or any of a thousand sites of its conspiracist kind.

So just who are these conspiracists? Who are the new shapers of popular opinion? And just how much do we believe them?

From the 9/11 Truthers to the Obama Birthers, from false flaggers to anti-Zionists, Mr. Kay, a decorated journalist for the National Post, throws himself headlong into the modern conspiracy movement. From its leaders to its adherents, he vividly describes their belief systems and their pathologies and, in doing so, quickly generates a fairly consistent portrait of a modern conspiracist. He is invariably male, dogged in the pursuit of truth, distrustful of authority, and perfectly willing to devote his life to his cause. In fact, the cause is what lends meaning to his damaged life. Though the personalities of the men Mr. Kay meets are markedly different, these commonalities connect them across the new conspiracy market which Kay describes as a series of islanded fringe thinkers who have been networked into a community by the interconnectivity of the Internet, a system which has both homogenized and supersized conspiracism.

In Among The Truthers, Mr. Kay mounts a two pronged effort to enlighten the reader about the major conspiracies floating through the Western world and to explain the pathologies of their adherents. Though he is pleasingly successful with the former, it's the later, the fascinating profile he generates of those who worship at conspiracism's altar, that elevates his work from engaging to outstanding. The damaged survivor, the fail historian, the endurer of the midlife crisis... Their backgrounds can be wildly divergent, but in these highly intelligent and endlessly opportunistic few, the outcome seems depressingly similar. The essential aspect of reasonableness that most humans enjoy collapses under the weight of their pain, plunging them into a distorted reality in which they have been victimized, their potential guttered by omnipotent forces beyond their control. It becomes their destiny to spread this revelation to the world and now, with the Internet to fuel them, they've never had a bigger pulpit.

This is easily in my top five reads this year. Engrossing and enlightening in equal measure. This is not a polemic against conspiracism; there is no rancor here. There is only a need to understand and to explain, a desire Mr. Kay ironically shares with his captivating subjects. (5/5 Stars)

The Eerie Silence by Paul Davies

From The Week of July 24, 2011

Are we alone in the universe? On the countless planets which orbit the innumerable stars captured by the billions of galaxies that comprise this grand experiment we call existence, is there no intelligent life but that which accidentally quickened here on Earth? It is a question of inestimable importance to humanity. For a conclusive answer, one way or the other, would surely set off soul-shattering earthquakes in the religious community, the aftershocks of which would reverberate through every corner of society. In The Eerie Silence, Mr. Davies, a British physicist, endeavors to provide a framework by which his readers can answer this question. But while he succeeds in imbuing his tale with some useful history, and while he enlightens his readers on the thought experiments of various scientists trying to tackle questions of interstellar travel, he fails to pepper his chronicle of the human search for alien life with enough spice to keep the observant reader from realizing that his premise is too weak for a book of some 280 pages.

For 50 years now, the SETI program has labored to locate life elsewhere in the universe. Messages have been sent, the sky has been scoped, and radio spectrums repeatedly and obsessively scanned for any sign of a reply, a glimpse, or a transmission from another species. The result of all of these efforts? Silence... A silence so profound that it has spawned many theories to explain it. Perhaps we are a fluke, the result of thousands of variables lining up to provide the exact and only formula for carbon-based intelligent life. Perhaps civilizations like ours are inherently unstable, lasting only a blink of an eye, rising long enough to exploit their planet's fossil fuels only to burn out before they can take, permanently and comfortably, to the stars. Or perhaps there is a grand, galactic club whose members all agree to withhold the knowledge of their existence from civilizations like ours until we have reached sufficient maturity to join them. Without prejudice, Mr. Davies explores these eideas and more as he lays down the essentials, as we understand them, for the propagation of intelligent life.

If there is life out there, what shape might it take? And how might it communicate with us? Mr. Davies devotes half of his book to answering this second, vital question, venturing into the murky waters of completely theoretical science to discuss how an alien species might spread itself across the cosmos. Would it be achieved through huge, lumbering ships that have simply not reached us yet? Or might they come in millions of tiny ships capable of observing us without being noticed? Fodder for worriers all...

The Eerie Silence does a wonderful job educating the reader on not only the basics of the search for alien life, but the fascinating people who've empowered it and the many struggles they've encountered to fund it. This half of Mr. Davies' effort is a complete success. But his decision to venture so deeply into the pseudo science of how completely theoretical alien civilizations might voyage amongst the stars, and what their ethics might be like, and how they might contact us, lifted his tale out of the comfortable genre of science history and dropped it into the genre of the totally speculative. This decidedly awkward marriage is a stain on what is otherwise a lovely homage to courageous and dedicated scientists who, with barely any support, have devoted themselves to a pursuit as fascinating and possibly life-altering as it is thankless. (3/5 Stars)

After The Prophet by Lesley Hazleton

From The Week of July 24, 2011

For much of our world, history is alive, an ever-present force with the capacity to fuel both scholarship and hatred. For as much as its investigation can uncover new truths and right past wrongs, destructive grievances can also be extrapolated from its maelstrom, grievances with the power to sunder once united peoples. is an examination of one such moment in history, a moment that changed Islam forever and sowed the seeds for conflicts still being played out in the 21st century.

In early June, 632 AD, in what is now Saudi Arabia, a man was dying. After a long life in which he had risen from obscurity to found one of the world's most prominent faiths, the Prophet Muhammad was succumbing to a fever brought on by that most common of human killers, illness. Severely weakened, he attempted to communicate, to his family and loyal companions attending him, his last, earthly wishes, including the definitive word on who ought to succeed him as leader of the Islamic people. But thwarted in this endeavor by his ambitious adherents who were too afraid of the great man siding against them to hear his truth, Muhammad died with his desires shrouded in mystery. Though years would pass before the full force of this calamity could hit home, in less than a generation, the uncertainty surrounding the proper succession would tear the Islamic people apart, forever dividing them into two conflicting camps, the Sunni and the Shi'a.

Ms. Hazleton, a veteran journalist, assembles in After The Prophet a chronicle of both Muhammad's death and the events that followed it, beginning with the argument over who should succeed their prophet and ending with th fates of his descendents, with a particular focus on Aisha, his favorite wife, and Ali, his cousin and the first youth to accept Muhammad's teachings. In-between, Ms. Hazleton traces, in painstaking and tragic detail, the many spats, grudges and power struggles which lead to civil war, the martyrdom of Ali and the unbalancing of a people Muhammad worked so hard to unite. For readers, like myself, who are only passingly familiar with Islam, part 1 of Ms. Hazleton's book, covering the events surrounding the death of Muhammad, will be eminently enlightening, imbuing important, historical figures with fascinating personalities and logical motivations. In this, Aisha and Ali are the standouts, long-suffering antagonists with burdens to bear, principles to uphold and wars to reluctantly fight.

But where part 1 succeeds in laying down the foundation of the conflict in gripping detail, part 2, the story of the tangled history of the various princes, warlords and self-interested chiefs who succeeded Muhammad's family, is blurred by a haze of unfamiliar names, inexplicable deeds, and unimaginable times. If part 1 is an introductory course on Islam, part 2 feels like a fourth year class in which notes must be taken and prior principles well-remembered.

As challenging as After The Prophet's second half can be, the whole is well worth the read. If Islam was a dead religion, or a religion that did not concern itself much with its history, the dispute over who should have succeeded Muhammad would be purely an academic argument. But Islam is a living religion, a faith whose followers value its past as much as they do its present. If it is to be understood, its past must be grasped and this is, for the most part, a quality place to start. (3/5 Stars)

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

From The Week of July 17, 2011

It sometimes seems as though the journey of man can be reduced to a single, continuous realization, that man is not as special, as interesting, or as central to the flow of events as he thinks he is. We exist at the center of the universe, until we realize that the Earth revolves around an unremarkable star. We believe that some god, somewhere, decided that this world, and this world alone, would be populated with his life, receive his special attention and oversight. Some of us even believe that a god created us in his image because, of course, we are superior to all other forms of life. Therefore, we must look as god does. Our planet, Our seas, Our lands, Our mountains.... We cannot help but position ourselves at the center of our own story and it is this conceit which Mr. Quinn savages in Ishmael, a story that is nothing short of the reconstruction of human hubris.

Disillusioned by the state of the world and the failure of the 1960s' revolutions to fix its systemic problems, our narrator scoffs when he sees, in the newspaper, an ad from a teacher seeking a pupil with an earnest desire to save the world. The narrator, who is never named, decides, somewhat vengefully, to answer the ad, but instead of the naive idealist he anticipated encountering, he is confronted by, in an otherwise unremarkable office, a gorilla named Ishmael. How does the narrator know the gorilla's name? Because the creature has taught himself how to communicate telepathically, a skill which he puts to lengthy use over the next few days as the astonished narrator agrees to become a student of this singular being.

Any prejudices the narrator may have had for the gorilla are soon dispelled when Ishmael intelligently and incisively disassembles, for his pupil, the mythology man has built up around himself. Through a series of question-and-answer style conversations, Ishmael tries to get the narrator to see that man, unlike any other creature on Earth, considers himself above the laws of nature, that the rules of the world do not apply to him, and that he may do with the world whatever he chooses because he considers the world his property. Stunned by what he is assimilating, the narrator is prodded along by Ishmael until, finally, in a manner he could have never expected, he realizes the revolution that had long eluded him, a coalescence of thought and ethics that will allow him to live a more satisfying life.

Ishmael is a powerful work of philosophical fiction. Through the eponymous Ishmael, the author relentlessly hammers away at human conceits of superiority, arguing that the moment, some ten-thousand years ago, when man put down the hunter's bow and took up the agriculturalist's plow, he became something Earth had never before seen, a being that considered itself subject to only its own laws. In that moment, man left the stability and sustainability of the animal kingdom to become a heartless devourer of planetary resources. Ignoring the consequences, man utilized agriculture's food surpluses to spread himself across the world, reproducing at faster and faster rates, never once slowing down long enough to consider the inevitable outcome of unchecked growth.

While Mr. Quinn presents a convincing case for the damage wrought by human arrogance, and while he argues compellingly for man to relinquish this devastating form of homo-centrism, the author fails to speak to the most obvious omission in his theory. Civilized humanity is infantile. We are at the beginning of our life's journey. We have only taken the first few, tentative steps towards enlightenment, towards becoming a healthy and wise civilization. I hold with those who say that humanity has done unimaginable harm to the planet that gave us life, but this damage may well be the natural and inescapable byproduct of an immature civilization thrashing its way through adolescence. Sadly, humans learn by making mistakes. And so, in order to be reasonable with our resources, to conserve our planet, and to allow the destinies of our fellow, terrestrial species to actualize without our interference, we have to learn a difficult lesson, the extinctionist consequences of being the destroyer. Only when we understand the grief we have caused, the destruction we have wrought, will we find the proper balance between exercising the full potential of our species without doing so at the expense of the life and the world around us. Surely no civilization can be fully realized without serious blunders along the way.

This is valuable and revelatory work, but Mr. Quinn's condemnatory pessimism is, at times, difficult to swallow. powerfully and commendably insightful, but not without its flaws. (3/5 Stars)

Bone Dance by Emma Bull

From The Week of July 17, 2011

Though it is rare for Urban Fantasy fiction to have aspirations beyond escapism, its ability to examine humanity's warts by providing it with a distorted mirror through which to view them bestows the genre with value and power. In its alternative, contemporary worlds where the normal rules do not apply, every conceit, every wish, every imagined nightmare, can be conjured up and, thus, picked apart, digested by readers used to accepting societal norms at face value. Ms. Bull's 1991 work, which was nominated for the Hugo award, manages, despite its flaws, to tap into the genre's escapism without forsaking a grander message, an admirable feat which saves her novel.

In a future Earth environmentally and economically devastated by war, hard-scrabble souls do their best to eke out an existence in the shadow of their authoritarian rulers. These powerful men have capitalized on the disintegration of high-tech civilization to regulate essential systems like electrical power, keeping all but the compliant in the dark. It is a simple and effective method of compelling wide-spread obedience from the subjugated. However, despite how many powerful cards one holds, occasionally, the gods throw up surprises, unanticipated events which have the power to destabilize the status quo.

One such wildcard is our protagonist, Sparrow, a bioengineered human being grown for a nefarious purpose which died with the collapse of the United States' government. Now free, he does his best to stay beneath the scrutiny of the high and mighty, occupying himself by restoring stereo equipment and conserving a collection of albums which he hopes to keep from sliding, along with the rest of civilization, into the rotting neglect of obscurity. But as hard as he has tried to escape the notice of the powerful, Sparrow becomes a wanted pawn in a dangerous game when, after waking from one of his periodic blackouts, he sets out to discover the source of what's plaguing him. In the process, he triggers a series of events which will shake the pillars of his city, threatening to hurl its rulers from their positions of abusive authority.

Ms. Bull has successfully amalgamated the hard technology of science fiction with the spirit world of fantasy to create a strange but compelling piece about the nature of humanity and the role that Fate plays in its existence. Sparrow is an artificial being, a thing into which the gods have breathed life. And it is through him that Ms. Bull explores the essence of human life: loves and friendships, motivations and aspirations. However, Sparrow is not his own man. He lives at the whimsy of the manifestation of voodoo spirits who have chosen to take a hand in Earth's temporal affairs. And so, even while Sparrow is learning what it is to be human, he is realizing that he is little more than a piece to a puzzle being assembled by the gods.

Though Ms. Bull succeeded in investing Sparrow with a rare, delicate and complex humanity, the remainder of Bone Dance's cast of misfits fail to animate. There are flashes here and there, moments in which the secondary characters flicker to life, but these moments are far too few and mostly confined to Frances, the enigmatic woman who complicates and catalyzes Sparrow's life.

There's much here to admire. The prose is witty and active, the world is dark and suitably spiritual, the villains are appropriately creepy and malevolent, but the story suffers from the same syndrome that plagued its protagonist. It is only half alive, deadened by a dizzying array of pop-culture allusions which rapidly became silly distractions from what was, otherwise, a serious examination of life in all its drivers and its fears. I can see why Bone Dance earned its nomination; there is gold here. But its flaws keep it well off a podium finish. (3/5 Stars)

Demon Fish by Juliet Eilperin

From The Week of July 17, 2011

If the 20th century was defined by the rise of technology and the singular role it played in fostering a global community, the 21st century will be defined by the environmental consequences of that technology. For our knowledge and our machines have allowed humanity to spread across the world in unprecedented numbers which, collectively, strain our planet's capacity to meet our demands. Though many species will be pushed to the brink of extinction as a result of our voraciousness, few, or so Ms. Eilperin argues in Demon Fish, are as susceptible as the shark.

In waters from California to Australia, from the shark callers of Papua New Guinea to the cooking pots of China, Ms. Eilperin delves into the history of the shark and our relationship with this most powerful predator. For hundreds of millions of years, since before there were dinosaurs, they have thrived in Earth's oceans, dominating this complex, underwater ecosystem without, as some species have, destroying it. But now that humanity has so successfully propagated, we've endangered the millennia-old preeminence of sharks: our pollutants soiling their food, our weapons reducing their numbers, our anthropogenic CO2 heating their waters. And so, hunted by fetishists and demonized by dramatists, they have been pushed to their limits, opening up the oceans to the kind of species imbalances not seen in millions of years.

Though Ms. Eilperin is careful to include fascinating details about the sharks themselves, their anatomy, their behaviors, their history, and their impact on the planet, Demon Fish spends twice as much time on the shark's bleak future as it does on its interesting past. In fretting over the heartless trophy hunters who catch them and the ritualistic fools who insist that their fins occupy their soup bowls, the author has sacrificed valuable pages that could have been devoted to the furthering of the reader's selachimorphic education. Instead, she has chosen to use her chronicle to shine a light on the extent to which sharks have suffered as a result of human cruelty. Exposing these ugly practices is a worthwhile goal and I come away enlightened to the repugnance of foods like shark fin soup, but Demon Fish is not billed as a polemic. It purports to be an exploration of sharks and their environment. It is, instead, activism contorted to fit into a work of popular science.

This is an enjoyable journey through the world of sharks. Ms. Eilperin has an engaging voice and a finely honed sense of injustice. Both play prominent roles in this worthwhile effort. However, I was looking to Demon Fish to educate me about sharks and the role they play in the animal kingdom beyond our shores, not to be ambushed by the extent to which they are being harmed by factors beyond my control. That this is more activism than it purports to be causes the scientifically minded reader to feel slightly duped. Still, quite the adventure and a worthwhile read. (3/5 Stars)

The Honored Dead by Joseph Braude

From The Week of July 17, 2011

We can never truly understand places culturally foreign to us. We can try, of course, but no book, no university course, no immersion scheme, can substitute for the mosaic of accumulated knowledge, behavioral, societal and cultural, which comprises nationality. But this truth should not dissuade us from the exploration of other cultures. After all, other than physical exposure, the attempt to understand something, or someone, is the most direct way of fostering tolerance and open-mindedness to new people and new ideas. And in a world suffering from a lack of tolerance, a lack of respect for other people and their beliefs, what is more valuable than an open mind? This attempt to understand empowers Mr. Braude's investigation into Morocco and its challenging streets. It's what motivates him to care about a mystery that doesn't concern him, fates that don't involve him. It is what drives him to risk alliances and friendships in a part of the world where it is dangerous to be devoid of such.It is what elevates The Honored Dead from a self-indulgent memoir into a tale of universal self-discovery.

As a consequence of recent, liberalizing reforms in Morocco, Mr. Braude, an American journalist, is allowed to experience something few Westerners have ever seen. Attached to the Casablanca police department as an observer, he is not only taken on ride-alongs, he is furnished with unprecedented access to police files and practices which, in most Arab countries, are firmly walled off from outsiders. Despite such privileges, Mr. Braude threatens both his tenuous partnership with the CPD and the friendships he's made with its officers when a simple investigation into a senseless murder of a man in a Jewish-owned warehouse provokes him to press for a truth the police refuse to acknowledge. Guided in his investigation by a man who considered the murdered man his best friend, Mr. Braude and his companion travel Morocco, delve into family history and journey into the world of Islamic magic all in the hopes of uncovering the inconvenient truth behind the killing of a man widely considered to be an innocent.

Part memoir and part mystery, Mr. Braude ably entwins his own history with his Moroccan investigation to create The Honored Dead, an exploration of Arab culture, its conflict with Judaism, its struggles towards modernization, and its inability to serve its people with a full measure of justice. Though the murder investigation is interesting enough -- many Islamic sensibilities are both revealed and offended by its execution --, Mr. Braude himself is his tale's most interesting enigma. The descendant of a Jewish community that once called Baghdad home, he is staunchly American, more than eager to aid his country's authorities in the rubbing out of terrorist activity. At the same time, he's clearly conflicted over the role he played in the dissolution of a treasured friendship with an Iraqi-American he met while at university. Consequently, he imbues the pursuit of this particular Moroccan truth with a reckless zeal that may well solve the case, but it will not repair the damage that has been done, nor restore the lost closeness he now laments. This broken friendship not only drives Mr. Braude onward in a mad pursuit of truth, it is a quietly potent metaphor for the gulf of ignorance that separates East from West, authoritarianism from democracy. And so, even though Mr. Braude is sometimes too central to his story, he's delivered, in the expose of his desires and mistakes, the portrait of a man and a world both straining for understanding, for truth and for freedom. Quality work and gripping despite its narrow scope. (3/5 Stars)

Render Unto Rome by Jason Berry

From The Week of July 17, 2011

Human nature has many home truths, ugly aspects of character and behavior which are difficult to unlearn. Of these, the most consequential to family, culture and society is our relationship with power, both in the lusting for it and the execution of it. When checked, power in the proper hands can bring about massive, positive change; but when unchecked, when humans are entrusted with autonomous authority, painful experience tells us that, far too often, bloodshed and the loss of innocence are sadly and disastrously inevitable. And even though the Catholic Church cloaks itself in holiness, Mr. Berry illustrates, in Render Unto Rome that righteousness is no obstacle to the human temptation to abuse power.

Mr. Berry, an investigative reporter, has spent 20 years at the tip of the spear which, in its insistent probings into the Catholic Church, has been revealing the extent to which the Vatican has been covering up for its sinful priests. Though Render Unto Rome features its fair share of victims, and the extent to which they were protected by an institution supposedly shrouded in divinity, this effort, Mr. Berry's third book on the recent scandals which have been rocking Catholicism, focuses more on the finances of the Catholic Church, examining both its assets and how those assets are deployed. After explaining some of the accounting tricks which help to make the Church seem worth far less than it actually is, he launches into his primary premise, the consequences for the Church and its adherents of the many, substantial civil settlements which have threatened to bankrupt numerous diocese in the United States.

These eight and nine figure awards, court-ordered settlements meant to comfort and repay the many victims of sexual and physical abuse at the hands of priests, necessitated, in Massachusetts, Ohio and California, a wholesale restructuring of worship. To cut costs and pay the bills, diocese suppressed (closed down) churches, seizing their assets and selling them to fund the settlements. Unsurprisingly, these desperate and heavy-handed edicts angered the many thousands of affected worshippers who, despite doing nothing wrong, had their churches sold out from underneath them by a Vatican caught with its hand in a very naughty cookie jar.

Though the men who ordered the suppressions, and the men and women who fought them, spin through Mr. Berry's riveting chronicle, equally prominent are the abusers, the Orders they founded and the cultures that, for so long, shielded them from exposure. Though there are many names featured in this gallery of pedophiles, none are more prominent, here, than Father Marcial Maciel, the founder of a Christian order which claims tens of thousands of followers. Mr. Berry relentlessly exposes Maciel's unpardonable acts while holding him up as an exemplar of the many abusers which have forever altered the lives of innocents entrusted into their care.

Though Mr. Berry's account suffers from a certain academic dryness, this is, for the most part, an unavoidable consequence of laying out the complicated means by which the Church handles money. This aridness is more than made up for by the flood of information and emotion that comprises the rest of his investigation into the temporal workings of a church which was, for far too long, shamefully, willfully blind to the crimes perpetrated by its most zealous devotees. The reader is not informed about the immense power of archbishops, who are effectively the banks and the auditors of their diocese, he is made aware of the extent to which these bishops have squandered the money of faithful parishioners on the absurd rehabilitation of abusive priests and the cynical schemes of shysters. This is a thoroughly informative and profoundly disturbing piece of journalism which, if it does nothing else, must surely make every reader contemplate a truth far more profound than the cruel crimes of an insensitive church, that man is, by his nature, tempted to test his power, that he will, if unchecked, abuse that power, and that abuse of power is only energized by the expansion of that man's power. No one, and especially no institution, no matter how holy it claims to be, is immune from this truth, the denial of which only hastens ones descend into fantasy. (4/5 Stars)