Snowdrops by A. D. Miller

From The Week of October 17, 2011

When we discuss the Good Life and all the elements that constitute it, a loving partner, an engaging job and healthy children are often cited as its most vital components. But while these are undoubtedly stabilizing influences which sustain the Good Life, the bulk of the credit for maintaining true north on our moral compasses should go to the roots that we put down in our chosen communities. After all, these attachments to family, to friends, and to country and its laws, are what shackle our worst excesses, keeping our temptations from transitioning from fantasy to reality. Uproot a man from these normalizing influences and he is morally adrift, willing, with time, to sample any desire. And as Snowdrops so vividly demonstrates, there are parts of the world brimming with destructive delicacies.

Upon the occasion of his engagement to his future wife, Nicholas Platt, a British lawyer, pens a long letter to his fiance, full of confessions and revelations, concerning his years spent in hedonistic, tempestuous Moscow during the first decade of the 21st century. A contracts man for a European bank doing business in the new Russia, Platt recounts how, over a calendar year, his relationship with a young, seductive Russian woman drew him down into the amoral embrace of a country which, since its birth from the ashes of the Soviet Union, has been shaped and run by a cabal of oligarchs and autocrats intent upon turning Russia into a Mafia state. I'll equipped to handle these neon-soaked, vodka-laden, gangster-infused streets with which his British upbringing has not familiarized him, Platt describes how, with the passing of only seasons, he lost focus on his work, his future, and his scruples, forsaking all for sweat-soaked nights with Masha and a world she knows intimately well.

Shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, Snowdrops is a gripping work of philosophical fiction which was unlucky to have not taken out the award. Mr. Miller, an author and a Moscow-based correspondent for the Economist, skillfully portrays one man's quiet descent into the temptations of life in powerful, corrupted states. Russia, which thanks to its history has never had a strong, pervasive respect for the rule of law, has discarded even the veneer of communist equality to welcome in the unrestrained, unregulated vices of extraordinary wealth. In this, it has created the perfect playground for entitled oligarchs and opportunistic peasants to succeed in a world which has enthusiastically embraced the fast-paced lawlessness that characterized the Wild West. All of this is too much for Nicholas Platt, a decent, British bloke who, here, feels hopelessly overmatched by the hard-bitten reality of the rapidly developing, non-western world.

Though Snowdrops succeeds in depicting the menace of new Russia and the hedonism it espouses, the novel's greatest virtue is the extent to which it portrays this world without resorting to a single gunshot, fist-fight, or act of brutality. Platt's descent is neither characterized by Hollywood violence nor soviet-era blackmail. Instead, Platt's morality is killed by that human desire which is unleashed any time opportunity intersects with a man unconstrained by the obligations of family life. In this, the author has published a work which feels as authentic in spirit as it is in detail.

However, Snowdrops is not without flaws, foremost of these being that the author fails to convince us of Platt's original innocence. Snowdrops rests on the notion that the new Russia is a seductive place that tempts ex-pats to sample its many vices. But if Platt is an ass to begin with, then it becomes difficult to make the novel's central argument, that his descent is caused by Russia and not by his own flimsy character. That the author failed to sell us on Platt's prima facie goodness robs the novel's conclusion of some of its formidable power.

Nonetheless, this is wonderful and thoughtful work which is no less potent for its gradual development and its quiet but pervasive melancholy. (4/5 Stars)

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

From The Week of October 17, 2011

Though it is frequently marred by both bias and error, memory is the primary tool by which we navigate our lives. After all, without it, we would not know ourselves, what we've endured in the past, what we stand for in the present, and what we wish to accomplish in the future. Life's narrative does not exist without it. And so its deep and systemic flaws can and do profoundly impact and reshape our lives. Though The Sense of an Ending harbors mystery and philosophy, expresses revenge and regret, it is, at root, a rumination and an expose of memory and the ways in which it is a malleable record of what we consider a concrete past.

Tony Webster is an aging Englishman largely content with his life. Though he's been divorced now for nearly 20 years, he is on amicable terms with both his ex-wife and his grown-up daughter who now has children of her own. He has long since put to rest any hopes or aspirations of being extraordinary. And so, when a letter arrives from the mother (Sarah) of his adolescent girlfriend (Veronica), bequeathing him $500 and the diary of a high school friend who committed suicide some 30 years earlier, Tony is stirred from his settled life to both make sense of this puzzling development and to delve into his past to revisit the events which lead to it.

While Tony reaches out to the difficult and uncooperative Veronica to ask that she hand over the diary, he recounts the story of his life, ruminating on the desires and the vicissitudes of his ordinary adolescence. He details how, in his schoolboy years, he and his friends added Adrian, an intelligent boy and the author of the diary, to their clique. Though Adrian dates Veronica just after she and tony break up, and though he commits suicide a short time later, Tony sustains his appreciation for Adrian, envying both his clarity of his thought and the force of his moral vision. Now, decades have come and gone, careers forged and retired from, families raised and released into the world. And Veronica has returned to both bemuse and trouble him. For she refuses to cooperate with her mother's request and Tony must find out why if he is to understand what happened, to himself, to Adrian and to Veronica, all those years ago.

The winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize, this slim novel from Mr. Barnes, a British author of more than a dozen works of fiction, is, in the main, a reflection upon the fallibility of memory. Though Tony's geniality entices us to like him, to feel sympathy for him, and to believe his account of events which depict him as having been a gentleman to Veronica, we swiftly learn that Tony's version of events cannot be trusted. As the novel unfolds, the reader and Tony together are presented with proof that Tony was far from accepting of Adrian and Veronica's relationship, that, in fact, he did his best to poison it by revealing to Adrian his suspicions about Veronica and her odd family, and that his harshness may well have contributed to the challenges both friends later on. This revelation forces Tony to re-evaluate his life and causes the reader to re-evaluate Tony, feeding every new fact he tells us through the lens of suspicion and doubt.

Though I can understand why The Sense of an Ending has earned its acclaim -- rarely has the Unreliable Narrator been used more skillfully and to profounder effect than it has been here --, the work is less than satisfying. Despite many hints, from the author and from Tony, we learn next to nothing about the lives of Veronica and Adrian, characters vital to the story's plot. What's more, the author is elss than convincing with the novel's central conceit, that a settled Tony would lift himself out of his comfortable retirement to pursue a 0-year-old mystery. Yes, most novels rely upon conceits to drive the core drama, but this one is surprisingly clumsy for a novel of such repute. When stacked up against prior winners of the prize, The Sense of an Ending does not measure up to works like Wolf Hall or The God of Small Things, pieces which both moved and educated. For all its supreme cleverness, this is, in the end, a story about a bored Englishman,his unspectacular life and his glitchy memory. Well-done, yes, but revelatory or provocative? Sadly, no. (3/5 Stars)

The Crisis Caravan by Linda Polman

From The Week of October 17, 2011

When we look into the world's most troubled corners, only the most callous of us cannot but feel empathy for our fellow humans who must live, every day, with chaos and despair. Families forced from their homes, famines ravaging communities, genocides playing out over regions... These ought to be crimes with penalties so severe that no savage dare indulge in them. And yet they unfold, seemingly on a yearly basis, devouring the lives of those who deserve so much more.

Should not those of us with the power to mitigate such atrocities do so, if only to spare the innocents from fates they did not invite? The answer must be a resounding yes. Not so fast, argues Ms. Polman, who points out, here, that humanitarian aid is so fraught with squandered funds and unfocused efforts that it can barely be called aid at all. In this, there could not be a larger gap between the goodness that imbues the desire to help and the dismaying corruption that results from its pure intention.

The Crisis Caravan devotes its 200-some pages to a scathing expose of the corrupted culture of humanitarian aid. Ms. Polman, a freelance journalist, reconstructs her experiences covering African conflicts, from the Rwandan Genocide to the conflict in Sierra Leone, to demonstrate that, though aid organizations (NGOs) are launched with the best of intentions, they swiftly devolve into professional fundraisers. Because NGOs do not generate their own products, because they have no internal economies to sustain them, they live and die on external funding that flows from the United Nations, the aid budgets of wealthy nations, and the pockets of generous individuals. With their very survival riding on the acquisition of contracts to lend aid to the war-torn, the NGOs quickly succumb to what the author calls Contract Fever, a particularly repugnant form of exploitation in which NGOs learn of a crisis somewhere in the world, race there to claim it as their cause, and then send up flares to the developed world for funding to give aid to the troubled. Ms. Polman argues that this aid, when it comes, is almost never vetted. Only a handful of crusading journalists ever investigate to find out if roads are paved, bridges built, water distributed, food programs established. Even scarcer are those individuals tasked with measuring the effectiveness of the aid which may well go to services considered essential by the NGOs but secondary to the people they are trying to help.

Around her own experiences watching NGOs in action and investigating their programs, Ms. Polman lays down the 150-year history of humanitarian aid, how it was spawned by the abominable conditions of the Crimean War and then rapidly expanded during the two world wars of the 20th century which devoured so many civilian lives. In this, the author not only takes the reader into war-ravaged Africa, but she beckons him into a philosophy class in which she poses the questions all-too-rarely asked of humanitarian aid. Does it prolong conflicts? The evidence suggests it might. Is it moral to give succor to the perpetrator as well as to the victim in an effort to treat all the afflicted equally as human beings? Though the ICRC may wish it otherwise, perhaps not.

The Crisis Caravan is a well-argued, utterly gripping examination of the folly that surrounds humanitarian aid. From the accounting tricks that allow wealthy western nations like the United States and Canada to claim that they give far more humanitarian aid than they actually do, to the sickeningly corporate and self-serving cultures that have overtaken NGOs around the world, the author spares only the victims of the aid in what is an all-encompassing and ruthless excoriation of aid culture. This is no polemic against generosity. The author never advocates that aid should be withheld from peoples in desperate need. On the contrary, the author claims that Western aid comes at such a cost to the people to whom it is given that it often loses its effectiveness. If the aid was injected directly into the economies of troubled nations, and not into the budgets of NGOs and the pockets of Western businesses promising to do good works in crisis zones, aid would not only help those directly in need, it would come at far more reasonable a pricetag to the nations trying to do good works.

Rarely has more been packed into so few pages. Completely compelling. Ms. Polman may well have a chip on her shoulder when it comes to NGOs, favoring their flaws while downplaying their virtues, but when their flaws are this apparent, this systemic, they deserve to be exposed to the light of truth. This rotten culture is a betrayal of the vbest of human ideals. Not good enough... (5/5 Stars)

Mohamed's Ghosts by Stephan Salisbury

From The Week of October 17, 2011

We have known for some time now that liberty and security live in opposition to one another. Liberty requires that individuals be allowed to act and choose as they desire, unfettered by the restrictions of government. Security, meanwhile, requires that personal freedom be restricted so that deviant behavior can be seen and snuffed out. Giants of history like Benjamin Franklin, men who have created nations, have convinced us of this much. And so, when terrorism does hit home and governments respond by strengthening security to protect against future attacks, they must know that every choice they make in the pursuit of security weakens the very liberties they claim to cherish.

No matter how obvious a truth this is, governments will never admit it; to do so would be to invite unwelcome scrutiny into the ways in which governments have weakened the freedoms of the people they purport to serve. And so it falls to journalists and libertarians, advocates and whistleblowers, to alert us to the ways in which our governments have robbed us of our freedom for the sake of our security. In this, Mohamed's Ghosts is a revelatory and frightening tale.

Mr. Salisbury, a journalist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, describes here the manner in which the US government, in response to the September 11th Attacks, have used the insinuation of possible links between American imams and foreign terrorists to jeopardize and then shut down mosques across the United States. The author's case centers on a particularly egregious incident in which the mosque of Mohamed Ghorab, an Egyptian living in Philadelphia, was left to decay after immigration officials discovered that Ghorab was in the United States on an expired student visa. Launching an investigation, the authorities used rumor and innuendo, along with an old airplane seat in the basement of ghorab's mosque -- a one-time garage in one of Philadelphia's worst neighborhoods --, to justify his deportation back to Egypt, severing him from his American family and leaving his community work on Philadelphia's troubled streets to wither on the vine.

From this, Mr. Salisbury expands the scope of his investigation to document other cases in which the US government, paranoid of further attacks, overreacted to a swath of expired student visas by heartlessly uprooting the offenders from their lives and expelling them from the United States. The author concludes that this overzealousness may have lead to the expulsion of up to a thousand Islamic leaders from the country, mistreatment which would surely not have befallen Christians had Christians been responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

Mohamed's Ghosts is a challenging read. Though Mr. Salisbury undoubtedly infers too much from a handful of gross injustices, the picture of a nation struggling to cope with the psychic wound of 9/11 is both vivid and convincing. While then president Bush was on television, asking Americans to be tolerant of Muslims, arguing that Islam was a peaceful faith, his government was scraping together rumor and shards of half-truths in order to banish innocent Muslim from its shores. It eagerly seized upon the expired visas as proof of ill intent while failing to acknowledge the widespread incompetence of the immigration service which allowed those visas to lapse and stay lapsed without sanction or comment. More over, the author documents the unwillingness of the US government to acknowledge, or vigorously prosecute, the numerous cases of anti-Arab crime which played out across the country in the days and weeks following the attacks. The case for the Bush administration's extraordinary duplicity is well-made.

But while Mr. Salisbury succeeds in demonstrating how the overreactions of governments ensnare and criminalize innocents, his longwinded digressions into his own past as an activist in the 1960s are unnecessary distractions from the work's primary thrust. In fact, given that the author fails to provide much in the way of proof that Mohamed Ghorab's treatment has been duplicated with a thousand other imams in the United States, his reflections on the 1960s, which are meant to exemplify the flaws of the security state, read like filler.

This is chilling work. Mr. Salisbury nails the duplicity, he nails Ghorab, he nails the culture that gives rise to the foolishness of the post 9/11 security state, but the weakness of the case for the broader picture is troubling. Nonetheless, a worthwhile read. (3/5 Stars)

Destiny of The Republic by Candice Millard

From The Week of October 17, 2011

From the printing press to the personal computer, numerous inventions have transformed our world. However, considering the degree to which it has altered the playing field between the rich and the poor, the strong and the weak, the big and the small, none can claim a greater impact on human civilization than the gun. Prior to its introduction, strength and skill were required to kill. After all, the deed had to be accomplished with blade or projectile, both of which demanded extensive training to be used properly. But the gun makes no such claims on its user. It needs only to be aimed and fired to make it as lethal a weapon for the fool as for the genius. Rarely has this truth been better demonstrated than in the arena of political assassination where the deranged can now, with a single shot, bring low the great. And of the histories documenting such incidents, few are the equal of this latest effort from Ms. Millard.

Though he would live on for two more months, the life of James Garfield, the 20th president of the United States, was effectively ended on July 2, 1881 when Charles Guiteau, a mentally disturbed American, approached him in a Washington D.C. train station and shot him in the back. Garfield, Ohio's version of Abraham Lincoln, was a self-made man who, having pulled himself up from impoverished beginnings, went on to serve with distinction in the American civil War before ascending to a seat in the House of Representatives. His career reached its zenith in 1880 when, despite not seeking out the office, the honor of the Republican nomination for president was bestowed upon him in spite of both his stiff resistance and a crowded field of other, overeager claimants. He was, in every respect, a man in whom his country and his state could be proud. Guiteau, meanwhile, was a lifelong shyster. Having been rejected by the University of Michigan, he turned, as a young man, to a utopian cult in New York for solace. But when even they tired of him, he fell back on the steadfast charity of his sister to keep a roof over his head. A man who bounced from scheme to scheme, Guiteau represented himself as a respectable lawyer in order to grift money from generous dupes until the electoral season of 1880 when he fixed upon the notion of aiding the Republican nominee to victory. When Garfield and his advisors failed to recognize or reward him for his dubious efforts, Guiteau took his revenge and, in doing so, consigned James Garfield to 80 days of feverish torment until, on September 9, 1881, he died in Ohio, having been president for a mere 200 days.

Destiny of The Republic recounts the lives of these two, disparate men, couching them in the America of the 1880s. Only 15 years after the civil War, Ms. Millard describes the deep wounds which yet divided the nation even after Lincoln's assassination in 1865. But as much as that conflict still weighed on the national psyche, America was, in 1881, a country of burgeoning technology. Advancements both in communications and the practice of medicine would go on to catalyze and shape the 20th century. And yet these innovations would come too late for James Garfield who, in spite of the genius of Alexander Graham Bell, and because of the ignorance of backward-thinking doctors, died at the dawn of a transformation in medical thought which may well have saved his life if Guiteau's bullets had come even a year later.

Ms. Millard is a first-rate historiographer who never fails to inform or entertain. Her biography of Theodore Roosevelt's journey along the River of Doubt was gripping, but she has outdone that effort with this compelling history of two very different men who, in one fateful moment, came together and changed a country's future. Though she is perhaps a bit too eager to paint Garfield as the noble hero and Guiteau the disreputable villain, the manner in which she imbeds these men and their moment in the accelerating, technological change of the 1880s leaves even the skeptical reader defenseless against a fascinating narrative which flows with the smoothness of liquid gold. Her descriptions of the medical torments to which Garfield was senselessly put are as riveting as Bell's efforts to save him were novel. The reader is left with little doubt that he has not only witnessed the cost of ignorance, but the beginning of a new era of innovation that would quickly consign the 19th century to the dusty annals of history.. (4/5 Stars)

Links by Nuruddin Farah

From The Week of October 10, 2011

Though Africa has been beset by conflict since the end of European colonialism, surely few of its nations have experienced as much mindless chaos, such nihilistic bloodshed, as Somalia. For decades now, this coastal nation has been plagued by conflict and torn apart by rapacious warlords grasping for power. Such is their grip that not even the earnest efforts of the UN appear to have soothed its national nightmare. In fact, with the rise to power of its sea-born pirates, it appears to have only emboldened its destructive forces. Few of Somalia's native sons are better able to authentically articulate this atavistic anarchy than Mr. Farah who, since taking up exile from his country in 1976, has written vividly, and at length, about his troubled homeland. And here, in Links he succeeds in giving his readers a glimpse into its burdens.

Jeebleh is a Somalian exile living in New York when he hears of his mother's death from old age in the country of his birth. Though he is an educated and successful man with a wife and two daughters, he nonetheless feels a powerful pull to return home to settle accounts with his mother's spirit. So, abandoning the stability and lawfulness of Western life, Jeebleh journeys back to war-torn Africa where he intends to contact his mother's housekeeper as a means of locating the dead woman's grave.

No sooner has he landed, then Jeebleh receives a crash course in Somalian nihilism. He witnesses a game played by teenaged punks wherein they target one of the many passengers disembarking a plane and shoot their victim in cold blood. In this, they are motivated by nothing more than sport, a momentary distraction from boredom. The incident profoundly affects Jeebleh who resolves to complete his business as swiftly as possible. But when he realizes that the brilliant niece of one of his oldest friends has been mysteriously kidnapped, events quickly spiral out of Jeebleh's control, sending the ill-prepared westerner barreling headlong towards a confrontation with one of the country's many, ruthless warlords.

Though Links is a moving expose of the existential challenges of Somalian life, of the disrepair of the Somalian state, and of the clan loyalties that complicate the former and exasperate the latter, Mr. Farah's two-dimensional characters fail to engage the reader's emotions. Part of this is clearly a deliberate choice on the part of Mr. Farah to convey the sense of numbness Somalians must cultivate as a self-defense mechanism against the horrors they are forced to witness on a daily basis. But the author fails to distinguish this numbness from the general flatness of his characters which leaves the reader feeling anesthetized to the drama taking place here. Make no mistake, Mr. Farah has penned a shocking and compelling portrait of Somalian life, capturing all of the damage that eventuates from a country devastated by warlords. However, if the reader cannot connect with any of the story's characters, then this chaos, no matter how superbly it is depicted, is all-but reduced to an academic exercise.

Linksis a deeply disturbing glimpse of the price of war and the extent to which exposure to it can dehumanize even the most civilized souls. It is also a compelling demonstration of the challenges faced by well-intentioned, foreign powers trying to affect positive change in a country whose customs they cannot understand. But while these are points well-made, Mr. Farah's inability to weld this onto anything like a gripping narrative prevents Links from becoming memorable fiction. I feel far more educated about Somalian life than I do entertained by an actual story. (2/5 Stars)

The Yugo by Jason Vuic

From The Week of October 10, 2011

To a pervasive degree, our world is shaped by fateful, corporate decisions. From the IPhone to the BMW, companies, the world over, produce innovative products in the hopes of maximizing both profitability and market share. Then, once these products are widely available, it is left to customer choice to separate the winners from the losers, the diamonds from the lemons. And boy, have there been some lemons. After all, for every Snapple, there is New Coke. And for every BMW, there is the Yugo.

This legendarily awful car, as Mr. Vuic demonstrates in this, his riveting look at an epic fail, is surely one of the worst vehicles in the history of personal transport. From its sloppy construction to its infamously underpowered engine, the Yugo, was the result of a slap-dash attempt by the communist Yugoslavia of the 1980s to generate a car industry that would alleviate its debts by servicing the world with a small car done dirt cheap. It should come as no surprise then that the Yugo, from its insubstantial weight to its problematic spare tire stored in the engine compartment, suffered numerous, devastating problems. And yet, despite its farcical faults, seemingly all of which have been memorialized in hundreds of jokes -- the best of which Mr. Vuic includes at the beginning of each of his chapters --, nearly 200,000 Yugos were sold in the United States from 1985 to 1989 when its problematic history finally overcame its bargain-bin pricetag and doomed it to the status of laughingstock.

As much as the folly of the Yugo prompts amusement, there is a serious side to this humorous story. From the pro-Yugoslavian lobbyists inside the American government who helped to make the car a reality, to the charismatic showmen who actually sold it, Mr. Vuic lifts the hood on the story of the Yugo, the little car that couldn't, in an attempt to understand just how such a poorly designed car could get through the rigorous screening that keeps most of the world's worst cars off American roads. He discovers that the Yugo likely wasn't as bad as it was purported to be, that its Yugoslavian designers worked hard and meant well when they modified the car from the Fiat it was based on, and that its disrepute likely stemmed as much from the chicanery of its salesmen as it did from its shortcomings as a vehicle. Here, Mr. Vuic is at his best, reconstructing the career of Malcolm Bricklin, a many-times-failed entrepreneur whose cockiness and boastfulness ensured that the Yugo would be a disappointment. For as much work as he did to seize upon the Yugo as an opportunity, to help steer it through the safety testing and bring it to market in the United States, his overconfidence, at best, and his fraud, at worst, clinched his and the Yugo's demise.

The Yugois a delightful tale about an epically bad car and its epically over-the-top salesman. Mr. Vuic is a talented author who balances, here, the humor of the Yugo's history with the dark side of capitalism. For as much as it encourages innovation by enticing winners with rich profits and widespread fame, it also encourages shysters to take shortcuts in order to attain that fame and fortune. There is likely no solution to this problem except, perhaps, to always doubt that which seems too good to be true. This is a thorough examination of a failed car, the era that spawned it and the high jinks that sealed its fate. As funny as it is informative and one of the best light-hearted efforts of non-fiction this year. (5/5 Stars)

The Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum

From The Week of October 10, 2011

In a 21st century world in which many of the basics of science are well-understood, we take the wisdom of medical practitioners for granted. We have transplanted organs and harnessed the X-ray. We have banished diseases and sequenced genomes. But such was not always the case. Less than a century ago, the role of germs and infections, bacteria and viruses, were still being debated. In such a confused climate, it is no wonder that clever murderers considered themselves above the law for there was no law capable of catching them.

Since time began, humans have been poisoning each other, but it wasn't until the beginning of the 20th century that they could freely purchase such exotic substances to use in the actualization of their vengefulness. In jazz-aged New York (1910-1930), these new methods of killing came up against the dawn of forensic medicine to create an environment in which a city's coroners and pathologists were as important to the investigative process as its police detectives. For it was only in these dreary labs, under these harsh lights, that the destructiveness of substances from arsenic to wood alcohol could be isolated, understood, and detected in the bodies of the city's murdered.

Into this lethal stew, where killers freely prey on their victims, wades Charles Norris, a wealthy idealist who, as New York's chief medical examiner, fostered a revolution in forensic toxicology. The standards he established, along with the talent he attracted and nurtured, transformed the coroner's office from an uninspired documentor of death into an agency capable of, first, solving the scientific mysteries behind unsolved, city murders and, then, using those proofs to correctly aim the NYPD at the true perpetrators of some of the city's most awful crimes. In this, Norris both advanced scientific knowledge and empowered an office to actively assist in the cause of justice. These are his cases, triumphs and failures both.

Though The Poisoner's Handbook is ostensibly a history of the birth of modern, systematic forensic toxicology, Ms. Blum has tapped into a man in Norris whose determination and nobility transform her tale into a biography of a fascinating American. Norris' willingness to challenge some of New York City's most powerful political figures in the pursuit of justice is as courageous as his doggedness is admirable. In vividly exemplifying Norris' more famous contributions, in thoroughly capturing Prohibition-era New York, and in compellingly elucidating the important strides in the development of modern forensics, Ms. Blum has paid tribute to an inspirational scientist, reminded us of the flawed logic that can lead government to calamitous policy, and documented the development of a science vital to the achievement of criminal justice. That she does so with equal success and vigor endows her effort here with the power to educate and entertain.

Witness testimony has been, for centuries, the primary tool used by the legal system to earn convictions of the guilty. And in an era where science is revealing the deep-seated weaknesses in such testimony, it is clear that forensics will only continue to gain in importance, on its way to perhaps becoming the pillar upon which lady justice leans. In this,Ms. Blum has put together a glitzy origin story for a potent science. (4/5 Stars)

Death In The City of Light by David King

From The Week of October 10, 2011

The vast majority of humans are decent, lawful souls. After all, were it otherwise, civilization would have never coalesced. Humanity would be characterized by discord, a vortex of murderous chaos out of which nothing of order could possibly cohere. That we experience civilization on a daily basis tells us that most of us form families, follow the rules and put ourselves to productive work in an effort to build rather than destroy. But for as many of us as there are, the othersstill exist, minds so unhinged from the laws of our shared reality that subordination to them is out of the question. Many of even these anomalies are harmless, persisting around the edges of our world, content in themselves, but some bend their wills to desires and deeds so violent, so cruel, that they threaten to destabilize our reality, pulling it down into the darkness that has already consumed them. Of these deeds, surely none are darker than those perpetrated by Marcel Petiot.

Mr. King, whose potent pen gave the world a vivid biography of the Congress of Vienna, here, investigates the life and crimes of Dr. Marcel Petiot (1897-1946) who, during the Nazi occupation of Paris (1940-1944), capitalized on the chaos of a destabilized country to sadistically murder at least 26people. A doctor by education and a politician by trade, Petiot, in a scheme worthy of Nazi depravity, let it be known that, for a fee, he could help Jews, and other beleaguered citizens, flee the German occupation. In exchange for exorbitant sums, Petiot would secure his clients safe passage out of the country and fresh identities in the lands of their choosing. However, despite the hopes of their families, Petiot's victims never left Paris.

Petiot, under the guise of inoculating his escapees against viruses they could encounter in the new world, euthanized his clients and, from a hiding place in his chamber of death, watched them pass from this world. In this way, he is suspected to have claimed as many as 60 victims, among them women and children.

Death In The City of Lightis the meticulous reconstruction of Petiot, his troubled life, his tangled motivations, his intricate and endless lies and his spectacular trial which culminated in his execution. In-between,Mr. King introduces us to Paris, her hedonism during the interwar period and her pain during the Nazi occupation. Drafting in famous philosophers and resistance fighters, the author demonstrates how the desperation of the period brought about many crimes, but none as heinous as those committed by the clever and erratic Petiot who, up until his death, steadfastly claimed that his victims were all German and that the bodies discovered on his properties were planted there by his enemies. Not once did Petiot offer the families of his victims any peace or understanding as his flawed trial entertained a postwar Paris struggling to reclaim her dignity.

Mr. King is a commendable historian and a first-rate storyteller. Death In The City of Lightis a 400-page recount of 60-year-old murders that have little bearing on the troubles of the 21st century. This is surely a recipe for boredom. And yet the author's engaging narrative maintains the reader's interest throughout. The only discordant note struck here arises when Mr. King tries to connect Petiot's crimes to the modern day; this is shaky at best. But such is the compelling nature of the piece that it needs no relevance. It is enough to understand the depths to which some of us can sink and the damage that, in doing so, they do to the rest of us.

Gripping and entertaining both. Hopefully, someday, we will better understand the Petiot's of the world and, in doing so, be able to prevent them from doing so much harm. For while most of us can now recognize that evil is just a placeholder for the incomprehensible deeds of the mad, this knowledge does nothing to mitigate the suffering they can cause when unleashed upon an unsuspecting world. (4/5 Stars)

Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven And Jerry Pournelle

From The Week of October 03, 2011

In any discussion about human virtues, patience and kindness are invariably cited as the most desirable. But while these are qualities of character we would appreciate in any of our fellows, surely adaptability laps them, and any of their brethren, for usefulness. After all, most of us are not creatures of change; a million years of evolution has seen to that, instilling in us a desire to survive that causes us to favor the familiar and reject the unknown. But we cannot always count on our lives being stable. We cannot always count on the next day being like the last. Sometimes, disaster strikes. Sometimes, the next day is September 11th, 2001.

This is why adaptability is so valuable. For on these days that are like no other, while we flounder in confusion, helpless to find our equilibrium in a world falling apart, those among us who can change, who do adapt, thrive. They seize chaos, wringing from it what they require to survive and then they move on to build new lives in different tomorrows. Though Lucifer's Hammer is rightfully held as a classic of science fiction, and a seminal work of disaster fiction, it is the extent to which it investigates this question of rigidity versus adaptability, of the familiar versus the unknown, that truly grants it greatness.

Originally published in 1977, Lucifer's Hammer transports the reader back into the heady world of late 1970s Los Angeles where the Tv cameras are bright, where fame is priceless, and where the American Dream seems alive and well. Capitalism and human ingenuity have created a new and exciting society characterized by affordable technology and hopes for future abundance. Into this glamorous world strays an astronomical curiosity. A comet has just been spotted hurtling past Saturn, on a course for Earth. For months, humanity enjoys the spectacle, comforted by reassurances from the scientific community that this massive thunderbolt of rock and ice will pass harmlessly by. But as the comet grows near, and as the odds of it striking Earth increase with each day's passing, "Hammer Fever" grips a humanity transfixed by the onrushing comet. While some organize viewing parties, others raid stores for supplies and hit high ground, preparing for the worst. But no amount of preparation can ready one for doom's day.

The Hamner-Brown comet was supposed to miss Earth by a million miles, but when, on that fateful Tuesday, it defies the odds and smashes into the cradle of humanity, boiling its oceans and blurring out its sun behind a deluge of saltwater rain that baptizes the land, no one has time to marvel at the odds. Instantly, Earth's coastlines are submerged, civilization there wiped from the map. The lucky thousands who survive Hammerfall cling to mountain ranges too high for the water to cleans them, watching as their numbers are swelled by those smart enough, or lucky enough, to have escaped cities now vanished beneath monstrous tsunamis. Civilization gone in a heartbeat... Humanity and all its works persist by the thinnest of threads. Will it hang on in this new world of endless winter, or will divisiveness and discord prove too much for the remnants, plunging them into war and ruin? The fate of the species now rests in the hands of the few. On one side is the light of civilization; on the other the darkness of religiosity and madness. Only fate can split them, fate and the hope for tomorrow.

Though Lucifer's Hammer is slow to catch fire, Misters Niven and Pournelle have combined to produce, here, a masterful work of post-apocalyptic fiction. Drafting in dozens of characters, the narrative struggles at times, fragmented between too many points of view for comfortable consumption. However, when the comet strikes, radically altering civilization in an instant, this character-developing spadework is no longer laborious; it is the fuel by which the story ignites. For at Hammerfall, the reader has lived with wonderfully human characters, their sympathies engaged with real people with real problems now having to confront the gravest challenge of their lives. Yes, this is a novel of action and suspense, with wars waged between order and chaos, progress and atavism. For all this though, it will be these personalities I remember, the good and the evil, the brave and the cowardly, the smart and the foolish. For it is they who transform this from a war story into a philosophical piece about humanity's capacity to survive in the face of a suddenly hostile world.

I first read Lucifer's Hammer 20 years ago, when I was an impressible boy. Often, when we revisit books that moved us in our formative years, they disappoint. After all, adults are far better equipped to pick out mistakes and cliches than children. And so I was pleasantly surprised to find that this classic, but for two respects, withstands the test of time. The setting is now horribly dated; the idea that the United States government would, at the behest of egghead scientists, sent astronauts into space to study a comet now seems ludicrous in 2011. More over, the female characters here are little more than caricatures, starved for the screen-time necessary to animate into full-fledged people. However, in every other sense, Lucifer's Hammer remains a thrillride that towers over its genre. In 35 years, only The Road can challenge it for apocalyptic power. (4/5 Stars)

Antiphon: Psalms Of Isaac 03 by Ken Scholes

From The Week of October 03, 2011

Until physicists unearth the fundamental truths that underpin reality, philosophers will continue to debate the nature of the universe. Does fate rule our lives, our every action predetermined since the dawn of time? Or does chaos hold sway, our choices guided by nothing more omnipotent than free will? Each novel in the Psalms of Isaak series has, in its own way, struggled with this question, as characters fight to exert their wills upon the seemingly olympian powers that have proscribed their destinies. And though Antiphon does not give us an answer, it does go a long way to entertaining us as its author builds towards a final, revelatory crescendo.

Thousands of years from now, Earth is nothing like the world with which we are familiar. Numerous civilizations have risen and fallen in the intervening millennia, so much so that the humans who persist on this future, desertified planet barely even remember us, referring to our time simply as the age of the Younger Gods. Though details on what precisely befell Earth are scarce, its inhabitants know this much. Terrible and powerful spells, couched in the form of songs, empowered its destruction. They know this first-hand, for it was one such song, thought long lost, that rose out of legend to obliterate windwir, the world's last, great repository of knowledge. The ramifications of this annihilation, having occurred in the opening pages of Lamentation, the series' first novel, are still reverberating in this third entry.

In the chaos of Windwir's fall, darkness invaded the land. In the north, the rightful queen of the marshlands is usurped by a woman claiming to be her elder sister. This new, dark queen is the harbinger of a bloody faith that, until recently, has only been worshipped in secret. But now, with Windwir's fall, they have emerged from the shadows, heralds of the Crimson Empress who promises to conquer the land and restore it to the ownership of the family that ruined it so many centuries ago.

But while darkness is ascendent, the light is not without its champions. What remains of its army has consolidated under the banner of the gypsy king of the Ninefold Forests. King Rudalfo is not without his own darkness, but, for his infant son, the wife who bore her, and the people he's sworn to protect, he will never surrender to the dark. Alongside him stand figures vital to the resistance against the Crimson Empress. Neb, the home-seeker, was once just a boy who witnessed Windwir's destruction. He is now a man who has accepted his destiny as a power in and out of dreams. Petronus, a pope in self-imposed exile, returns to give counsel and to absolve himself of guilt. And Winter, the deposed marsh queen, fights with Rudalfo until she can win back her throne and deliver her people back into the light. Together, they are a band overwhelmed, souls who hold only the most insignificant of threads to the tapestry being woven around them. Will they prevail, their goodness powering their ignorance, or will the dark eclipse them and return them into the hands of powers thought long banished from the world?

There can be no doubt that Mr. Scholes is a storyteller of the first order. In Antiphon, he perfects a system of fragmented points of view that lend his tale wonderful potency. The narrative is divvied up between half a dozen characters, each of whom capture the novel's focus for ten or 15 pages at a time before handing it onto the next character in the sequence. In this, the author is able to transmit his plot in discrete packets of knowledge that are, in effect, stories within a story. This shared P.O.V. is not unique to Mr. Scholes, but few have mastered it to this extent.

In this, Mr. Scholes is fortunate. For Antiphon, though exciting, suffers from being the third instalment in a five-novel sequence built on the core mystery of who destroyed Windwir and why. The author must bridge the story he's so meticulously \established in the first two novels to the conclusion that will play out over the next two. But while this is understandable, the reader is now 1,500 pages into an epic which, so far, has only offered portentous clues to the core mystery. Mr. Scholes is great at injecting his chapters with drama and promises of revelations to come, but a scarcity of concrete details leaves Antiphon high on style and low on substance.

This is a beautifully crafted novel, but I am only willing to be teased for so long. Here's hoping Psalms of Isaak does not fall prey to the same sins of perpetual promise that crippled The Wheel of Time and A Song of Ice and Fire. (3/5 Stars)

The Forever War by Dexter Filkins

From The Week of October 03, 2011

Though we have, and will continue to, debate the value and the importance of the various social, legal, and political pillars that underpin successful societies, we know this much. It is impossible to live a life of peace in a world of chaos. Just a glance the way of the war-torn regions of human civilization, where the rule of law has failed, where justice has ceased to flow from the state and its institutions, and where the government ignores the will of the people, demonstrates this truth. These are dark places in which corruption has so thoroughly eclipsed fairness and lawfulness that peaceful people can only survive by conforming, by obeying, by being drawn down into that darkness. In this world, there is no room left for morality, not for those who want to live another day, not for those who have families to protect, and certainly not for those who disagree with their regime. Though The Forever War is, in many respects, just another book about the war-torn, the extent to which it exposes this truth bestows upon it the power to prick even the most calloused of consciences.

In The tradition of true gonzo journalism, Mr. Filkins, who has reported from the Middle East for the L.A. Times, the New York Times and the New Yorker, recounts, here, his various journeys through Afghanistan and Iraq during the American occupation of both countries. From the young Afghan boys who race heedlessly across minefields to the tormented Iraqi fathers whose families are threatened and murdered on even the suspicion of working for the Americans, the reader is plunged headlong into a world that, thanks to the corrosive effects of corruption and religious fundamentalism, is defenseless against the atrocities of its demented criminals. Such conditions are antithetical to peaceful living, driving many who would have otherwise been productive and educated citizens into flight from their decaying countries.

The American government, trying to rebuild Afghanistan and Iraq would undoubtedly attempt to argue that these are merely temporary conditions that will clear up when democracy is implemented and the trust of the people earned back, but Mr. Filkins, in both his description of the mistakes of the Bremer administration and the insular isolation of the Green Zone as a whole, leaves little doubt that it will be decades before life is normal in Iraq. And Iraq is perhaps the healthier of the two nations, with Afghanistan lacking even the shreds of a civil society around which a fair state might cohere. For while it may be true that the Western powers have pacified certain areas within these countries, they do not control the countryside from which insurgents bide their time until the inevitable,American withdrawal.

The Forever War is, emotionally, a difficult read. In his ride-alongs with the US military as they try to clear out insurgents, in his runs through dangerous and troubled Baghdad, and in his interactions with friendly and bellicose locals both in Afghanistan and Iraq, Mr. Filkins has successfully painted a picture of a part of the world so fragmented, so fraught with paralytic corruption, so infected by insurgents, that it is hard to imagine it ever recovering. However, as much as his conclusions are cause for depression, the extent to which he distinguishes the human story from the regional one makes this a worthwhile read. Over and over again, we are presented with examples of people who want to live, who want to provide for their families, who want to be safe. But those lives are denied them by the destructive forces that plague their world. There are moments of cultural connection, moments of hope in which maybe there could exist mutual understanding, but how can that delicate union be nurtured while the insurgent bombs are falling, while the world is thunder and rage?

Written prior to the Sunni Awakening in 2007, The Forever War suffers from being somewhat dated. The severity of the violence has seemingly ebbed from its nihilistic heights during Mr.Filkins' time in both countries. Nonetheless, this remains an excellent read. Its battles thrill, its conditions appall, its exposes amaze and its introspections devastate. Most importantly, however, it is another brick in the wall of our understanding of the folly of war. Justice cannot be brought with bombs and guns.Democracy cannot be instituted with smart bombs and tanks. It has to be cultivated. It has to be grown. Freedom is not AstroTurf. It cannot be manufactured. when it is, this is the result. (4/5 Stars)

The Ides by Stephen Dando-collins

From The Week of October 03, 2011

Our world has seen popes murdered and rulers hung, saints butchered and presidents assassinated, but no killing has captured the minds, or excited the pens, of historians quite like that of Julius Caesar. Cut down at the prime of his power, the life of this remarkable Roman has been memorialized by kings and scholars, warriors and playwrights, elevated into legend by the passage of two-thousand years and countless civilizations. But though it may be history's most famous murder, do we actually know what happened? Do we grasp the motivations which drove Brutus and his cohorts to such drastic and fateful actions? Mr. Dando-Collins thinks not.

Drawing upon all the available sources, The Ides is Mr. Dando-Collins' attempt to reconstruct the day of Caesar's murder, March 15th, 44 BC, a day that began with portents and ended with the death of the dictator of Rome though the traditional accounts get it mostly right with regard to the identities of Caesar's murderers -- a band of pro-republican senators lead by his friend Marcus Junius Brutus --, and rightly finger the where -- the Roman Forum, the heart of Roman government --, the why, the how, and the fallout, argues the author, are much more contentious. For one thing, historians has largely turned its admiring eye from Caesar's sins, preferring to think of him as a great man of history. And yet, Julius Caesar was a tyrant who used his position as the governor of a province of the Roman Republic to gain fame and fortune by conquering Gall. These military expeditions, which were not sanctioned by Rome, earned him enmity from the senate, enmity that Caesar leveraged into a Roman civil war in which he was victorious. Having killed his greatest rivals for power, Caesar appointed himself dictator of Rome for life, the king of a so-called republic.

Caesar's authoritarianism gave birth to the conspiracy to kill him. The liberators, as they termed themselves, hoped to strike a blow for the Roman Republic by killing Caesar and handing political power back to the Roman senate. But while the murder was carried off, and while the Roman public initially supported the liberators, events soon turned against Caesar's murderers when, with the reading of Caesar's will, Antony revealed to the public that Caesar had left each citizen within the city at the time of his death a substantial sum of money. With public opinion swaying against them, the liberators fled, hoping to raise armies and excise, as a cancer from the body of Rome, Antony and the young Octavian, Caesar's lieutenant
and Caesar's rightful heir, Unable to exploit the enmity between Antony and Octavian, Brutus and his cadre were ultimately overwhelmed, their armies slaughtered by the forces commanded by the two, rising autocrats. These defeats forever swept away true, republican rule in Rome and converted antiquities greatest republic into a powerful and voracious empire.

The Idesis an admirable reconstruction of Caesar's death, its aftermath and the consequences the murder had for Rome. But while the author brings some clarity to specific points about the murder and rightfully re-focuses our attention upon Caesar's autocratic actions, he falls into the same trap of many of his sources. There are far too many declarative statements here for a factual account of a murder that happened 2,000 years ago and for which we have no physical evidence. All Mr. Dando-Collins has to go on are the various accounts of that murder, cross-referenced to extract some kind of composite truth. But a composite truth is not truth. The author never speaks to this distinction, preferring to represent his account as the authoritative version of a murder that occurred more than 80 generations prior to his birth. Notwithstanding this arrogance, The Ides is an informative look at the men who, in their attempt to liberate Rome from Caesar's authoritarian control, wound up catalyzing the fall of the very republic they loved so much, their deaths surrendering it to empire.

Educational and entertaining, The Ides is a thorough account of a pivotal moment in western history. Well worth the read, even if it must be taken with a full measure of skeptic's salt. (3/5 Stars)

Pivotal Decade by Judith Stein

From The Week of October 03, 2011

For nearly 200 years, western economies have thrived on manufacturing. For most of this period, large-scale industry, and its hungry assembly lines, required so much manpower that jobs were plentiful, available to anyone willing to bend their back to labor. Many countries like Germany and the United States rode industrialism to economic success, producing products desired the world over. The profits earned from these ventures went back into business, expanding industry and fuelling national growth. But now that we stand at the dawn of a new century, the simple math that served the world's nations so well, manufacturing equals jobs, is changing. It began with globalization and it will continue on with the advancement of technologies that will, someday soon, remove man from the production line altogether. The management of this transition,however, is a problem for the 21st century, not for Ms. Stein who,here, casts her attention back to the 1970s where she believes she will find the beginning of these transformative trends.

Pivotal Decade is an examination of the extent to which the economic policies of successive,US administrations, from Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton, converted the United States' economy from one dependent upon industry to one dependent on finance. From the Carter Administration's obsession with trade deficits, to Reagan's deregulation,to Clinton's budget cutting, Ms. Stein reconstructs 30 years of American, federal politics in hopes of bringing to light the decisions which, collectively, steered the US economy away from the stamp factories of the midwest,which for so long powered economic growth, to the trading floors of Wall Street where the health of the economy became increasingly linked with complex, financial instruments. Along the way, we watch while, in the 1970s, Carter's geopolitics (Arab oil and Jewish Israel) trump American prosperity, we look on, in the 1980s, as Reaganomics breaks unions and empowers finance, and we observe while the Clinton presidency holds on for dear life as the rocketship that is the 1990s Tech Boom transforms the American landscape. Each step along the way provides a nail for the coffin for American manufacturing, leaving it to the 21st century administrations to finish the job.

Though Ms. Stein is thorough in her recount of the dozens of decisions that went into the evolution of the American economy, her chronicle is hobbled by two significant flaws. Firstly, Pivotal Decade is not, as its subtitle and premise suggest, a record of how the United States "traded factories for finance in the 1970s." It is, instead, a political history of the last 30 years. As much, if not more, attention is paid to the budgetary negotiations of the Clinton years as the global negotiations of Carter's reign. What's more political campaigns that have nothing to do with the 1970s -- Bush versus Dukakis, Clinton versus Perot, Reagan versus Mondale -- feature so prominently that one would be forgiven for thinking this a campaign biography in the style of Game Change. Secondly, a weak and meandering conclusion fails to tie these 400-plus pages into anything like a coherent narrative. Yes, the reader is educated on American oil dependence, and the collapse of the labor force at GM, and the rise of the stock market in the 1990s, but Ms. Stein never interweaves these strands to provide anything like a telling portrait proving her premise.

Pivotal Decadeis an informative read. Its chapters, individually, are quite engaging, but Ms. Stein has somehow managed to write a book about the failing might of American manufacturing without hardly touching on the massive role Globalization has played in its dissolution. By the 1950s, the United States had mastered capitalism. They proceeded, in the next 20 years, to export it to the world. The cheap labor in these emerging markets became appealing to American business which farmed out its factories to the rest of the world so it could sell its products more cheaply to American consumers. This is, naturally, a tremendously oversimplified version of events. Ms. Stein, however, hardly touches upon these broader forces, choosing instead to focus her attention on the preoccupations of American presidents.

Valuable for its moments of insight, but far too scattered to be conclusive,or convincing. (2/5 Stars)

Germline: The Subterrene War 01 by T.C. McCarthy

From The Week of September 26, 2011

Though there remains some hope that technology will advance to a point where it is capable of easing our dependence on Earth's finite resources, it seems likely that the 21st century will be dominated by wars, declared and otherwise, over our dwindling supply of everything from fresh water to precious metals. For we are burning through the Earth's abundance at such a rapid rate that jittery countries, disinclined to be the last one to the feeding trough, will initiate conflict with resource-rich nations in hopes of securing for themselves a sufficient slice of the resource pie. This in turn will prompt other nations to weigh in, either in support of the aggressor, or in defense of the besieged, creating regional conflicts that will mirror the disastrous engagements of the late 20th century.

If such a gloomy scenario were to come to pass, what would that dark future look like? Will it be like other wars, fought, on foreign soil, by the young for the rich? Will it spark new technologies and new hope, or will it simply extent a cloud of misery over the nations that play host to its battlegrounds? Mr. McCarthy, in this stirring, futuristic, military thriller, makes these calculations and decides that it will be grimmer, and more exciting, than we could possibly imagine.

In the 22nd century, humanity has extended its mastery of science, creating new drugs, new weapons, new machines and new species which further complicate an already complicated world. But while technology has advanced to the point where genetic engineering is commonplace, many of these new wonders require rare earths to be manufactured. And given that many of these rare earths can only be found in a handful of pockets around the world, Earth's great powers find themselves drawn greedily to these remote nations, eager to secure their supply of extraordinarily precious ores. In such a scenario, war is inevitable. And so, when Kazakhstan becomes the battleground for hostilities between the zealous United States and protective Russia, only the naive are surprised.

Into this war of unmanned drones and plasma bombs, genetic soldiers and chameleon suits, drops Oscar Wendel, a 28-year-old war correspondent from the United States. Confident that his frontline stories from "Kaz" will earn him a Pulitzer, the arrogant, naive and drug-addicted Oscar is rudely awakened to the brutalities of war. Swiftly, his preconceived notions are shattered in an orgy of death and devastation with which his mind cannot cope. And so he retreats into a drug-fuelled lassitude, broken only when he comes face-to-face with the Gees, genetically engineered soldiers who are trained from birth to kill.

Clones, these female warriors -- males are too unstable and aggressive for their training -- are as lethal as they are obedient, operating on a strange blend of training and faith to carry them through their service time until, at 18, they are "retired" from service. Though his fellows find the bald and identical Gees repulsive, Oscar falls in love with their grace, but union with a genetic is not only verboten, it is impossible. Oscar came to Kazakhstan for war; instead, he has found love, but escape from Kaz seems about as hopeless as a relationship with a genetic.

Germline is a Sci-Fi thrillride that, when consumed, will not soon be forgotten. Mr. McCarthy is clearly a fan of the literature generated from the Vietnam War, for, here, he has wrapped a futuristic war story around a war correspondent seemingly lifted straight out of the hedonistic 1960s. From the cocky reporter shattered by combat's ugly realities to the beleaguered soldiers fighting for their old, white masters, this is, inescapably, a futuristic re-imagining of that most socially transformative of American conflicts. Yes, the science here is simple, explosive and entertaining, calling to mind Heinlein's Starship Troopers, but it is the extent to which Mr. McCarthy successfully welded this 1960s narrative onto the SF that makes the novel so enjoyable. Even the love story, which is inarguably the work's weakest component, performs well enough that it does not detract from the nihilism that seems an inevitable byproduct of total immersion into such an all-consuming and unjust war.

This is exciting and pleasing science fiction. No, it does not tax the mind in the same way other efforts of the genre do, but this is not Mr. McCarthy's objective. This is gonzo journalism transmitted from the 22nd century and it works wonderfully well. (5/5 Stars)

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K.dick

From The Week of September 26, 2011

As we tumble into our future and all of the technological advancements it promises,one age-old question will increasingly capture our hearts and minds.

How do we define human? Must we simply be intelligent? Must we be evolved apes? How about a certain genetic profile, or ten fingers and ten toes. In a world of genetic engineering and cloning, of artificial intelligence and robot servants, what are the criteria by which one measures humanity? This is the question that reaches out from the heart of Mr. Dick's most famous work and grabs at us, pulling us into his dystopian world.

In 2021, as the result of World War Terminus, Earth is a graveyard. Once great cities slowly decay, neglected by the undamaged humans who have emigrated to other, more promising worlds. Consequently, Earth's metropoli, and the sad fragment of humanity left to occupy them, have been abandoned to the slow accumulation of radioactive dust which thickly layers every surface, falling like filthy snow from skies so clogged by particulates that the sun rarely manages to squeak through.

On this brutalized planet, life somehow persists. Though animals are a rarity, humanity still tenaciously clings to the rock that birthed it. But while civilization yet has a pulse, things are far from what they once were. Robot animals are the sad substitutes for the many species lost to the war, ersatz replacements for the creatures in which humanity once took so much pleasure. These simple beings, however, are nothing next to the impressive androids, or Andies, which are promised to each emigrant who decides to make a new start elsewhere in the solar system. Giving every appearance of being human, externally and internally, they are only distinguishable from their human masters by a lack of empathy which their designers cannot program for.

Andies are bred to be the perfect toys for off-world humanity. But when they find themselves dissatisfied with their slavish lives on Mars, they rebel, gradually infiltrating Earth society in an attempt to carve out better and freer lives for themselves. Unable to stomach this loss of control over their servants, humanity elects not to share its ruined world with its most human-like creations, banning them from Earth and appointing bounty hunters to capture and destroy the Andies who defy them. Rick Deckard is one such bounty hunter and this is the story of one day in his difficult and often miserable life, as he is forced to confront six, new android models who have not only come to Earth, they may be skilled enough to fully assimilate into human society, undetectable by even the most advanced android tests.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is that rare piece of literature which does not outperform the movie it inspired. Blade Runner successfully irons out many of the novel's challenges by simplifying the motivations of the Andies, giving them both a clear mission and an obvious grudge that must be avenged. The book, meanwhile, adopts a more oblique approach. Here, the androids are far less mature. They are uneducated slaves who have escaped their bondage to return to Earth in search of both a better life and a confrontation with the humanity that created them. Whereas, in the film, the Replicants were sympathetic figures, reminiscent of Jews under Nazi Germany, here, they are the mirror by which humanity examines itself: its sins and its failings. For Andies are said to be creatures incapable of empathy; and yet humans hunt them down with enthusiasm and vigor, never once considering the possibility of cohabitation. What is this if not an absence of empathy?

For all of the intellectual and emotional punch the Andies provide the tale, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep struggles to stay relevant in a more modern world. The religious faiths Mr. Dick sketches out for his dystopia seem far-fetched and, at times, outright silly. The self-flagellation of Mercerism is possible, but something on the order of the Guilty Remnant from Tom perrotta's The Leftovers seems a much likelier bet. What's more, for beings of cleverness, inventiveness and high intelligence, the Andies depicted here largely act like defenseless children. They make attempts at defending themselves, at hiding in the human population, but in light of what they have been forced to bear, there is little anger and much more self-pity than seems reasonable. Andies are feared, but the why remains evasive. But for injuring one of Deckard's colleagues, they are essentially docile. Clearly, Mr. Dick chose to represent them this way in order to heighten both the contrast with their human makers and to deepen our sympathy for their plight. Instead, they come off whiny and wimpy.

There is entertainment here. Deckard's search for meaning and solace in a grayed-out world is poignant and engaging. The extent to which his journey causes him to locate his own humanity is compelling. But the Andies fail to provoke an emotional response and it is this which burdens the piece. The movie is noticeably superior. (3/5 Stars)

The Interrogator by Glenn L. Carl

From The Week of September 26, 2011

There has been, and will continue to be, debate about torture. Its proponents argue that the greater good demands that no tool, no matter how unscrupulous, should be kept out of the hands of a nation's security guards. If the lives of many can be saved by the torment of the few, then the act must be righteous. Its opponents, meanwhile, eagerly point out the slippery slope inherent to such logic. If the torturer is willing to renounce his morality for the greater good, then all that is required to manipulate him into depravity is to take the greater good hostage. Principles should not be so swiftly and unequivocally sacrificed, not if one wishes to maintain some semblance of ethical behavior.

For the most part, this debate takes place on university campuses and in lecture halls, cocoons far from the bloody frontlines of counter-terrorism where the temptation to deploy torture is keenest. This real-world reality is what grants The Interrogator its power. For here, torture is no academic discussion. It is the stuff of life and death

In The Interrogator, Mr. Carl, a veteran of the CIA, describes, within the strictures of CIA censorship, an event which profoundly altered his life. After devoting some 20 years to the agency, believing in its mission to defend the United States from foreign threats by acquiring actionable intelligence regarding its enemies, he was asked, not long after the onset of the War on Terror, to interrogate a man known here as Captus. Like many of the men captured by the United States' spy agencies after 9/11, Captus was thought to be a member of Al-Qaeda, a man with some operational control over this terrorist organization which, since 1998, has killed thousands in its various attacks, the most spectacular of which coming on September 11th, 2001. Eager to serve his country, Mr. Carl interviews Captus, pressing him for information on Al-Qaeda and its plans. But after weeks of relentless quizzing, the author concludes that, far from a first-class, Al-Qaeda asset, Captus was a reluctant participant at the periphery of the organization and that he has told his captors all that he knows.

Dissatisfied with their officer's conclusions, Mr. Carl's superiors have Captus rendered to another black site where he can be properly interrogated with what the CIA has euphemistically called Enhanced Interrogation Techniques which include, but are not limited to, deafening white noise, blinding white light, desecration of religious objects, sensory deprivation and waterboarding. Powerless, Mr. Carl returns home, shaken by what he has seen at the bleeding edge of the War on Terror.

The Interrogator is a fascinating and frustrating work. While Mr. Carl has a great deal to say on the nature of torture, much of it is scissored out of his account by censorship from the CIA. The spy agency, here, has not only redacted the names of the work's major actors, they have spitefully washed out, with oceans of black ink, most of the interrogations of Captus arund which this work revolves. In this, they have done a splendid job of hobbling a revelatory piece of thoughtful journalism, blinding the reader to many of the worthwhile facts Mr. Carl intended to share with the world.

However, despite this overeager hatchet job, Mr. Carl salvages much of his account by consolidating his tattered narrative around a clear and powerful premise. Torture is not only morally wrong, it is foolish. If torture could grant the State valuable intelligence about so-called Ticking Timebomb scenarios, perhaps it could, under certain circumstances, be justified. But these scenarios are vastly outnumbered by the case described here, men kidnapped from the streets of their homelands, rendered to secret black sites, disassociated from everyone they know, denied any contact with the outside world, and deprived of any anchor by which to hold onto their sanity. They can be held for years. It's no wonder, then, that by the time they are plied with so-called Enhanced Interrogation, they are shattered men, willing to spill any truths their captors wish to know so long as it will improve their plight. In other words, torture does not just hinder the effort to extract actionable intelligence, it corrodes the morality of the interrogator and it thoroughly destroys the asset, ruining him for any future work. This is stupidity of the first order.

The Interrogator is a difficult book. The CIA censorship has cut out so much of the core story that the reader is left adrift in Mr. Carl's guilty introspections. Such ruminations left me somewhat repulsed by the author's navel-gazing. However, it is hard to see what else Mr. Carl could have done under the circumstances. For all its challenges, however, this is a must-read for any advocate of torture. For only the most calloused mind can read these pages and come away unmoved by the argument for ending state-sponsored torture and restoring not only our humanity but our honor. (3/5 Stars)

South With The Sun by Lynne Cox

From The Week of September 26, 2011

In a world crowded by authoritarianism and tribalism, exploitative globalization and financial meltdown, there is little room for the celebration of human achievement. After all, of what relevance to the war-torn and the oppressed, the distracted and the bored, are the accomplishments of explorers who have long-since been pulled under by the tide of history? Of what use to the beleaguered are the teachings of the nearly forgotten?

Great achievement may mean little to those among us just trying to survive; it may mean even less to those preoccupied by the distractions of a Facebook world, but they should mean something. For without great achievement, without the men and women of the past who bent their wills to the singleminded dream of something better, we would still be running with the monkeys, sleeping under trees for cover and hunting our food which sticks. Civilization itself is the gestalt of generations of human achievement. And if we allow that to be neglected, to lapse into the past unremarked, then civilization will rot and all that we have made will stagnate.

This is why we read books about men like Roald Amundsen, adventurers who possess indomitable wills and resilient spirits, men who shame our petty fears by looking into the unknown and seeing only an ignorance waiting to be conquered. And so, it is a great pity that, here, Ms. Cox does her worthy subject such a grave disservice.

South With The Sun is ostensibly the author's reconstruction of the life of Roald Amundsen, the first human being to not only reach the South Pole, but to reach both poles in separate expeditions. Born in modern-day Norway in 1879, he abandoned the settled life of a doctor and, at the age of 21, fixed himself upon a life of naval adventure. At great cost in physical suffering, and for very little financial gain, he successfully navigated the Northwest Passage (1903-1906), reached the South Pole (1911), and flew over the North Pole (1925). All of these feats, firsts in human history, may have had to share the limelight with yet more achievements by Amundsen had his life not come to a tragic end in 1928 when, taking part in a rescue mission, his plane crashed in the Barents Sea. A keen planner, Amundsen was renowned for a willingness to learn from the native peoples he encountered on his journeys, lessons which bestowed upon him a substantial competitive advantage over his fellow and less successful explorers.

While Ms. Cox, here, pays tribute to Mr. Amundsen's unique achievements, in reserving more than half of South With The Sun's 320 pages for herself, she dooms her tribute to the great Norwegian explorer. An American swimmer, Ms. Cox sparingly describes Amundsen's background and his achievements while lavishing self-reverential attention upon her own efforts to swim Earth's oceans under the most challenging of conditions. And make no mistake, From Greenland to the Arctic, from the English channel to the Ohio River, Ms. Cox has faced some formidable challenges and conquered many of them. But the extent to which she eagerly fetes herself destroys the reader's ability to hail her accomplishments and put them next to Amundsen's which, in assembling this chronicle as she has, is clearly her goal here.

South With The Sun is a travesty of adventure non-fiction. Had Ms. Cox lengthened her chronicle and done Roald Amundsen's life justice, her self-aggrandizement could have been easily forgiven. After all, in this, she would at least be providing the reader with a book that appropriately honored its subject. Instead, in what swiftly becomes a trumpet for Ms. Cox's own life, South With The Sun is rife with self-importance, name-dropped celebrities, and simplistic prose. One of the most complete disappointments of the year thus far. Roald Amundsen deserves so much more than this, non-fiction less informative than Mr. Amundsen's Wikipedia entry. (1/5 Stars)

The Birth of Classical Europe by Simon Price & Peter Thonemann

From The Week of September 26, 2011

Every nation has its historical narrative, a story that both explains its origins and justifies its mores. These narratives weave the tapestry of the national culture,cohering it around a handful of core beliefs that bind the nation's citizens in common enterprise. For instance, the origin story of the United States, that it was a country founded on the desire to practice faith and commerce unhindered by the leash of the British empire, both catalyzes and sustains the pro-capitalist and pro-democratic America of today. But what about suprenational narratives? Do origin stories exist for continental cultures, for global cultures? Misters Price and Thonemann, classical scholars both, cannot speak to the latter; however, the former, the cultural history of early Europe, is well within their purview. And, here, they speak to it clearly and compellingly.

Beginning with events prior to the TTrojan War of Homeric fame (1100 BCE), The Birth of Classical Europe is a systematic and informative excavation of European culture up to the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century AD. Two civilizations dominate this vital, 2,500-year chunk of European history, the Greeks and the Romans. The former, a civilization of warriors and philosophers, thrived for a millennia, agricultural city states slowly consolidating into regional alliances which bound the Greeks in common cause against foreign threats. This profoundly impacted Greek thought and Greek supremacy which persisted until the rise of the Roman Republic. The latter, a civilization of soldiers and farmers guided by populist autocrats, rose rapidly in the third and second centuries BCE, consuming Greek thought and smashing Greek supremacy to reign unchecked,for the next 600 years, as the most powerful European state the continent had ever known. Ostensibly a republic, a sense of destiny and self-belief elevated Rome above the other Italian city states,consolidating the peninsula on its way to conquering territories in Europe, Africa and Asia, founding an empire nearly as impressive as the one Alexander so briefly forged.

Whereas the Greeks connected themselves, historically,to both the Homeric narrative of the Trojan War, as well as their bronzed-aged forefathers who created an identity by defeating and banishing the tribal, animalistic peoples that preceded them, the Romans connected themselves to history through Aeneas, a Trojan hero who survived the fall of his civilization to father Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome. Not only did both cultures cherish their origin myths as a means of legitimizing their existences, they rose to power in similar ways as well, by forming alliances to conquer an enemy common to their internal tribes. For the Greeks, these enemies emanated from Troy and Persia, the latter of which had the power to annihilate Greek culture. For the Romans, the enemies were Carthaginian and Mithridatic in origin, civilizations and alliances from Africa and Asia that stood in the way of Roman destiny. Together, these two European civilizations endured and, in doing so, succeeded, by dint of their longevity and power, to imprint their cultures and their gods, their ethics and their dreams, upon a continent of disparate peoples, connecting them, in an unbroken line, back into Greco-Roman antiquity.

Though The Birth of Classical Europe is a dry, academic text which, at times, threatens to overwhelm the reader with a flurry of unfamiliar events and archaeological parlance, it sustains its vitality and relevance by connecting the deeds of ancient cultures to the morals of the modern day. Much as we may wish it otherwise, primogeniture is important to us. We place great stock in the first one to discover, claim, own, invent, something. And so it should come as no surprise that the politics of the Social War, or the radicalism of Athenian Democracy impact on our lives. For these are the West's cultural forefathers. The founders of the United States did not pull their Constitution out of the clouds; they looked to the Roman Republic for lessons in the creation of a free state. It is this continuity which the authors captured here so well.

This is excellent and thorough work. It is unquestionably obsessed with the Greco-Roman legacy, relegating to the sidelines the cultural contributions of early, western Europe. I wish the authors had more than merely touched on the Urnfield and Hallstatt cultures which appear to have stretched from Germany to Hungary. But it is unclear to what extent these cultures influence us today. After all, we are not erecting statues to Hallstattian queens before the parliaments of Europe. Those we reserve for the heroes of Greece and Rome. (4/5 Stars)