The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy

From The Week of January 23, 2012

Power can be a pernicious force. For not only can its possession encourage the sweet-natured to be tyrannical, its loss can leave us feeling helpless and enraged. Power stokes our ego, allowing us to feel useful and confident, but it can leave us numb to the suffering of those who don't have it, dismissing them as weak and foolish, unworthy of our notice. Power changes how we view the world. Thus, anytime it shifts, there is cause for anxiety. Though this cynical and short piece from the legendary Mr. Tolstoy primarily concerns the dissolution of a marriage, it is the consequences of the redistribution of power that underpins his tale. It is a point sublimely, if unintentionally, made.

On a commuter train journeying through 19th century Russia, a truculent passenger makes a startling confession to those of his fellow travelers inclined to hear him. He has murdered his wife. After a long and difficult marriage, characterized by emotional and verbal discord, Pozdnyshev, the confessor, returns home from business to find his wife entertaining her musical instructor in their home. Embittered by years of disharmony and utterly incapable of blessing his wife with a moment's happiness and freedom, he flies into a rage which culminates in the flight of the instructor and the violent assault of his wife. This leads to not only the dissolution of his family -- his wife, on her deathbed, vengefully removes their five children from his care and gives them to her sister to raise --, it brings about her painful demise for which Pozdnyshev is tried. Dismissing the crime as one of passion, Pozdnyshev is acquitted and allowed to go free, having ruined all for which he cared.

Constructed as a conversation between Pozdnyshev and the story's narrator, The Kreutzer Sonata is, in the main, a warning against carnal love and a dissertation on female power and the extent to which its ascendance stokes male paranoia. Pozdnyshev, made callous by a loveless marriage, lays the blame for his unhappiness at the feet of his own male weakness and the liberalization of womens rights. He holds the view that men and women are fundamentally animalistic creatures, that the purpose of womankind is to perpetuate the species. Consequently, if women are given control over their own bodies, their own destinies, it will yield only disastrous results for the weak-willed man for which woman was created. Repeatedly, he reveals how he expected marriage to be a beautiful and fulfilling engagement, but that his joy was ruined by his wife's willingness to disagree with him, fight him, thwart him. He is completely incapable of realizing that his intractable nature is the cause of all his misery.

The Kreutzer Sonata is cynicism at its most potent. In Pozdnyshev, Mr. Tolstoy has seemingly created a straw man in whom all the author's dismay over the condition of man's soul can be invested. He appears to argue that, by dint of man's weakness and woman's deceptiveness, marriage is bound to be loveless and broken. But of course, this is nonsense. Marriage may well constrain us in ways that it is less than natural for us to be constrained, but Pozdnyshev's problem is that he expected his wife to be his perfect servant, not his perfect partner. He anticipated domination and received, instead, defiance. His inability to understand, respect or cope with this is the cause of his unhappiness, not the weakness of his soul. This is true of any marriage, the dissolution of which is rooted in an inability to adapt and communicate, not in some fundamental flaw. Human nature is imminently malleable. The moment we believe otherwise is the moment we condemn ourselves to rigid lives.

Deeper yet, we fear the loss of power. Having held its reins for so long, we have expectations that, when flaunted, cause us to salve our wounded pride with anger and rage. How dare our lessers defy us! How dare they possess their own wills to choose what they wish! This is what plagues Pozdnyshev. He cannot fathom a world in which he must enmesh his own behavior, his own desires, his own expectations, with his wife's. He cannot conceive of a marriage that does not spring up, fully formed and perfectly blissful. He cannot bring himself to understand that he will only harvest bitterness from a partnership into which he contributed nothing but his arrogance and his preconceived notions.

Fascinating work. Of course, it's possible that Mr. Tolstoy intended this to be satire, but the epilogue to the piece makes that possibility sadly remote. Love exists, just not when the power is this unbalanced. (3/5 Stars)

Raylan by Elmore Leonard

From The Week of January 23, 2012

Who are the criminals in our world and why do they do what they do? Do they act out of desperation driven by poverty, or is it instinct, a desire that must be fulfilled? We know this much; they act for significant gain. After all, the code of consequences that defines their world is so harsh that it wouldn't be worth it to live the life for any other reason. But it can't all be gain. Surely some measure of alienation, of being different, of not belonging, must also be included in the heady brew of personality common in the Underworld. Interestingly, Mr. Leonard dismisses most of these introspective theories in favor of a much simpler explanation. In the end, it's all about from where and whom you come. This is what defines Raylan.

A U.S. marshal with a propensity for shooting people, Raylan Givens can chase criminals as far as he wishes, from the mountains of Italy to the swamps of Florida, but he'll never get eastern Kentucky out of his blood. Those coal-rich hills were in him long before he earned his marshal's star. Back then, he was just a kid, working for his family, digging coal with swindlers and gun-thugs, cheats and dogs, bound together by the brotherhood of one of the dirtiest businesses in the world. That he left that behind 20 years ago doesn't mean a thing now that he's back in Kentucky, dumped in backwater America on account of being a little too free with his finger trigger.

If his superiors thought, even for a moment, that things would be quieter for Raylan back in Kentucky, they were fools. Trouble finds this roguish marshal wherever he goes. In the Appalachias, it's just a different set of problems. This time, trouble has three faces and all of them female. Carol, a ruthless representative of big coal, has her cold heart set on owning coal-rich Black Mountain and she won't stop at murder to get it either. Layla, a transplant nurse, is tired of being treated like a blowup doll for the pleasures of horny, arrogant doctors. She's going to show them how to make serious bank, even if it costs her her soul. Jackie Nevada has a serious head for poker and she's willing to play deep, no matter what the stakes. So what happens when a powerful and bored millionaire stakes her to some serious games? Deadly problems all...

Buoyed by the ratings success of FX's Justified, Raylan is Mr. Leonard's most thorough portrait of the laconic character he originally created and which Justified popularized. In these three intertwined narratives which liberally share both characters and themes, Mr. Leonard re-imagines a tale already told by the television drama while proffering two new and compelling stories for the writers on Justified to depict. Though all three work equally well, fans of the drama will be floored by the gaping absence of the mesmerizing Mags Bennett around whom Justified's second season orbited. Here, Mags is exchanged for the equally wiley but half as compelling father of the IQ-challenged Crowe clan who, fuelled by their weed business, are a powerful force within the so-called Dixie Mafia, the South's answer to Atlantic-based organized crime.

Though Mags Bennett is sorely missed, Mr. Leonard does not otherwise disappoint. Fifty years and countless stories later and the old master still has his fast ball, blending his inimitable wit, his suave characters and his breezy descriptions of extraordinary violence to create a gray world dripping in cool. You don't know why you like them, only that you do, that they possess the same, inexplicable but irresistible charm that made the cool kids so alluring. Neither fans of Justified nor of Mr. Leonard will close this slim novel, with its fine, minimalist prose, having considered their money wasted. (3/5 Stars)

The Fat Years by Chan Koonchung

From The Week of January 23, 2012

Since the agricultural revolution secured our position as the dominant species on our planet, we have been searching for the answer to a persistent and as-yet-unsolved problem.

What is society's optimal form?

Drawing on our animal heritage, we first tried communal living in the form of tribalism in which the burdens of the one were shared by all. But when those tribes were either wiped out or absorbed by larger, more organized, authoritarian states, we gave despotism a chance, hoping that some measure of good fortune might fall to us from the grasping hands of our monarchical masters. But when rampant corruption and unfairness toppled authoritarianism, we landed on democracy, hoping that, if the many were given a choice in their leaders, some measure of accountability and cohesion would arise to replace our banished kings. Now, we face yet another stage in societal evolution, a new form of government, one that is less than a century old but which promises to be popular in the 21st century. I speak, of course, of the one-party state that has sent a resurgent China roaring into the future. What does life look like in this new China? And will the fat years last? Mr. Chen speculates in his dense novel.

The year is 2013 and, thanks to the swift and uncontrolled depreciation of American economic power, China has become an unrivaled and ascendant superpower. Its economic reforms of the early 1990s, an opening up of its markets coupled with harsh, government controls on the extent of its lending, have elevated millions of Chinese out of poverty and delivered them a nation they can be proud of. Now, 20 years later, with the continuation of these wise policies, along with the suppression of discordant elements, China, after a 400-year exile, has returned to its proper place on the world stage, front and center. These are the governments words. This is what the history books say. This is what everyone knows to be true.

Lao Chen, a Taiwanese author living happily in China, is, like all of his friends, a happy man. Life in China used to be marked by strife and discord. But for the last few years now, everyone has been happy. The economy is healthy, China is strong, and there are no longer any protests. The world is as it should be. But when Little Xi, an old friend of Chen's, resurfaces, armed with a strange and paranoid tale of dislocation, mental illness and chilling state power, Chen is drawn down into a terrifying conspiracy in which a few beleaguered and lost souls are trying to find answers to some troubling questions. Why has everyone but them forgotten the most vital month in recent history? Why is everyone so happy? And who is behind the lies that underpin Chinese society? Transfixed by his affection for Little Xi, Chen delves into the mystery, afraid of what he'll find but determined to discover the truths that will bring peace to the woman he loves.

Drawing from one of the most powerful and frightening literary conceits (the omnipotent government), Mr. Koonchung, in The Fat Years, summons the spirits of the great dystopian novels of the 20th century and re-imagines their threats in a 21st century world. Though none of this is particularly new, or striking -- it seems like the West's doom is heralded daily of late --, the extent to which the author mashes fiction, science and economics together into a compelling and terrifying product elevates Mr. Koonchung's work above the fray. But as much as this is an economic treatise and clarion call to democratists, it is also a mystery, an effort to engage the reader in a circle of bewildering characters, all of whom have been, to varying degrees of success, brainwashed into believing in Chinese primacy that is both truth and lie. The extent to which the characters eventually solve the mystery but are powerless to do anything about it is a worthy homage to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The Fat Years is far from a masterwork. Its plot is limited to a series of vignettes, some of which succeed far better than others. More over, the hectoring tone of its far-too-lengthy economics lecture, though interesting as an intellectual exercise, drags and irritates, causing the work to fracture into its component parts. I recognize that the tone here is meant to mirror the lofty pulpit from which China's party elites sneer down at its citizens, but knowing this is not enough to save this section. For all its flaws though, Mr. Koonchung is a talented author who successfully taps into our fears of state power and channels from them a plausible scenario in which its ugliest form could rise. And given that all that authoritarian states require to persist is the passivity of its citizenry, his uncomplicated and yet cunning scenario has my attention.

A disturbing ride, but far from perfect. (3/5 Stars)

Lucrezia Borgia by Sarah Bradford

From The Week of January 23, 2012

Though we all live lives of imperfect freedom, limited as they are by both the wise and the foolish strictures of government, there can be no doubt that most of us have infinitely more control over our existences than did those of generations past. Whereas we make philosophical arguments for the freedom to imbibe various banned substances, secure as we are in far more fundamental rights, those who came before us often struggled for the power to make even the most basic choices, their destinies predetermined by the shackles of their cast and their sex. What would life be like operating within such restrictions? Ms. Bradford offers up the infamous Lucrezia Borgia as a case study. But while the subject does not disappoint, Ms. Bradford certainly does.

Born in the violent fractiousness of 15th century Italy, Lucrezia borgia was, by dint of being the daughter of Pope Alexander VI, a powerful figure in Italian politics. The subject of much historical debate, centering on various marital and familial scandals, time and the vicissitudes of history have made her the most widely remembered member of a ruthless clan of nobles who played the game of thrones with vicious vigor. Reputed to have been avid poisoners, the borgias killed their enemies both as a means of acquiring the wealth of their vanquished foes and as a means by which to secure their preeminent positions in tempestuous times. Given this, it would be logical to deduce that Lucrezia, the family's most famous beauty, would be deeply entangled in the family business, but to what extent did she actually earn her reputation for opportunism, slatternliness and incestuousness and what measure of it was foisted on her by the self-righteousness of future historians?

In Lucrezia Borgia, Ms. Bradford, a British author, meticulously reconstructs the tumultuous life of this Italian noblewoman, presenting an image of a woman more wronged than wronging. Sympathetically, Ms. Bradford frames Lucrezia as a creature regarded as a plaything of both her machiavellian father and her salacious brother. The former, Alexander VI, cajoled, maneuvered and even forced Lucrezia into three marriages, at least one of which appears to have been against her will. The latter, Cesare, ignoring Lucrezia's powerlessness, pursued her to the point of being the likely murderer of some of her lovers and suiters. Beset by such powerful players, the author appears to contend that Lucrezia essentially fought a lifelong, defensive battle against her fellow Borgias, yielding ground to their political and even sexual desires while preserving some measure of happiness for herself.

While Ms. Bradford's account of Lucrezia's life has much to recommend it -- she relies heavily on the noblewoman's own letters while keeping her own opinions and speculations to a bare minimum --, she fails utterly to generate a portrait of her subject. Yes, the author has painstakingly rebuilt Lucrezia's life, detailing her rivalry with Isabella d'Este, her plights with her various husbands, her difficulties in childbearing and her various strategic engagements with her family, but her account reads as a chronology of the princess' life, not a biography of it. To meet this simple requirement, Ms. Bradford would have to speculate on who Lucrezia might have been. And certainly there's plenty of room to do so given that much of the woman's early life is lost to the destructive tides of time. Her unwillingness to venture an opinion, or to provide really any historical context for Lucrezia's outlook, prevent this work from becoming anything more than a bland, straightforward chronology of events long past.

Disappointing. I'd hoped for much more than a simple line. Informative, and certainly protective of her subject, but there's little of heart or spirit here. (2/5 Stars)

Kokoda by Paul Ham

From The Week of January 23, 2012

For humans, war should hold no surprises. It has been perpetrated so often, with such ferocity, that we ought to be quite familiar with the depths of its depravity. And yet, there are crimes of war so dark, both in the ordering and in the executing, that they shock even the most hardened cynics and leave them fearing for what will become of us. Of these shamefully numerous incidents, the Kokoda Campaign was one of the worst. This is Mr. Ham's lively and opinionated account of its many sins.

In July 1942, during the darkest hours of World War II, the Japanese Imperial Army, seeking to cut Australia off from its allies, landed and occupied the island of Papua New Guinea, then an Australian possession. If Japan could hold and utilize the island, it would not only have a friendly base from which to launch attacks against shipping and naval interests, it would have a platform from which to begin an invasion of Australia itself. Having never seriously faced such an existential threat to its sovereignty, and with its military assets all-but-entirely deployed elsewhere, at the behest of and under the command of the British Empire, Australia was, to say the least, ill-prepared for this dark reality. A force would have to be hurriedly assembled, armed and hurled into the breach in hopes of buying the country time to recall its regular troops from their distant theatres and re-deploy them at home.

Thus, without training, and often without even the basic necessities of combat, the 39th battalion was scraped together, thrown onto Papua New Guinea and ordered into some of the most forbidding mountains in the region. There, for the next six months, they engaged with and halted the advance of the Japanese Imperial Army, some of the most supremely trained and ideologically driven soldiers in the world. Imbued by the divinity of their emperor and sworn never to retreat, let alone be captured, their thousands should have swiftly overwhelmed the mongrel force of Australians slapped together to impede them. Yet, in battle after battle, skirmish after skirmish, the stubborn defenders resisted, often with their lives, forcing the Japanese to pay dearly for the ground they won, lost, won again, and finally, fatefully, relinquished. For not even the fabled will of the Japanese soldier could withstand months at war without food, without home, and without hope of victory, not against a resilient foe able to resupply, recharge and replenish its forces.

As powerful as it is scathing, Kokoda is both a detailed history of a crucial WWII battle and a stinging indictment of those who orchestrated it. For as much as Mr. Ham, an Australian-born journalist and historian, celebrates the willpower and the tenacity of the belligerents to endure any hardship in the achievement of their goals, he does not allow more than a handful of pages to pass, in his lengthy account, without condemning the pigheadedness and pugnaciousness of the leaderships that ordered it. Though the author castigates both sides for the extent to which they worsened the suffering of the men under their command, he saves most of his bitter fire for the Australian brass which, but for a few beleaguered lights, is almost universally portrayed as a collection of selfish and stubborn politicians, more interested in promotions and medals than in the health of their men. In this, there is no doubt that Mr. Ham's sympathies lie firmly with the soldiers who fought fiercely and died horribly in a most terrible war.

Mr. Ham is a talented author. Though his narrative occasionally digresses into the lives and the quirks of figures somewhat peripheral to the Kokoda campaign, his vivid depictions of the ugliness of war, his psychological profiles of the men who prosecuted it, and his revealing portrayals of the politicians who oversaw the whole mess infuse his history with energy, authenticity and gravitas. He leaves no hero unheralded nor villain unscorned in an attempt to frame what must have been one of the most difficult chapters of a long and costly war. Excellent if grim work. (4/5 Stars)

The Secret In Their Eyes by Eduardo Sacheri

From The Week of January 16, 2011

For humans, love is the richest emotion. It drives us through challenges; it propels us through peril; it shields us from loneliness. It is a transformative feeling without which our days are cold and dull, but why? Why does love outstrip and outlast anger, or resentment, or disgust? Why does it brighten our days unlike any other? Because of what it asks of us. For to love someone is to extend to them the deepest measure of our trust, our faith, our credulity. To feel love, we must be naked before it. This vulnerability is both the strength of its source and the cause of its devastation. For as much as love can bestow us with the light of happiness and warmth, it can take the light away, plunging us into the darkness of isolation and grief the likes of which few can stand. Many have described love's darker side, but few have managed it with such quiet and moving potence.

At the best of times, justice in South America has been a fleeting and inconsistent virtue, undermined by the criminal and elitist exceptions powerful interests have burrowed through it. At the worst of times, it is nothing more than a cheap veneer, a half-hearted sop to a frightened public from a ruthless government that cares far more for unchecked power than it does for righteousness. Having lived through some of the worst of these times, specifically Argentina during the Dirty War of the 1970s, Benjamin Chaparro, an officer of the court, knows this all too well. For, over his 40 years working in the judiciary, he has watched incompetents promoted and protected, cases killed and buried, innocents roughed up and robbed. He has watched as the smart and the connected worked the system, reducing it, at times, to a mockery.

The worst of these cases, or at least the worst that Mr. Chaparro has committed to paper, concerns Ricardo Morales who, not long after his marriage to the love of his life, came home, in 1968, to find her raped and murdered. For months, in spite of the best efforts of a sympathetic Chaparro and the honest cop assisting him, the brutal incident proved inscrutable until a chance discovery by Chaparro produces leads that must be followed, leads that will set into motion events both terrible and unforeseen. This is justice in the darkest times, shoved forward an inch at a time by a few honest men compelled to act. This is Chaparro's story.

As much a memoir as a dramatization of his most memorable case, The Secret in Their Eyes is gripping crime fiction. Animated by the same gritty realism that imbued The Wire with so much authenticity, Mr. Sacheri's tale never drags even as its protagonists exhaust themselves just to advance the case a few meager inches at a time. It conveys the powerful, and no doubt true, impression that the so-called wheels of justice most often turn at the behest of self-interested careerists fixed upon their own advancement, not the proper execution of their jobs. Righteousness has to be compelled by the pooled wills of multiple souls who must be resolute in the face of the inevitable, and sometimes murderous, reprisals.

Translated from the original Spanish, these pages are filled with Mr. Sacheri's acerbic wit and his earthy characters upon whom time and the perils of life exact a toll. Yes, the author is prone to treating his readers like dullards, leading them through his uncomplicated mystery as though it were the literary equivalent of the Gordian Knot, but the themes of unrequited love, toothless justice, and shattered dreams that suffuse this tale more than make up for this underestimation of our intelligence. For as much as the plot coheres around its central mystery, it is animated by the lives of the men and women who inhabited corrupted Argentina in its darkest hour. It is their struggles, their unrealized desires, that elevate this tale up from the ordinary.

Poignant stuff that seems tailor-made for the big screen. For anyone who appreciated The Wire, this will be cause for both enjoyment and nostalgia. Likewise, for anyone who enjoys this book but has not seen The Wire, you will not be disappointed. Moving work... (4/5 Stars)

Low Town by Daniel Polansky

From The Week of January 16, 2011

Of the many blights that can befall a people, surely none are more destructive than injustice. Levelled cities can be rebuilt; devastated economies can be revitalized; lethal plagues can be cured; but a people's broken faith cannot be restored. For the trust of the people is not a stone to be shaped, a formula to be reworked, a disease to be isolated. It is the living embodiment of our faith in institutions that we depend upon daily for the proper functioning of our societies. If they let us down, worse yet, if they sell us out to powerful interests, we are left with no choice but to turn to our own, vigilante remedies which, while bringing some immediate satisfaction, only strengthens chaos in the long term. The end result is the night of nihilism pierced by only the occasional shimmerings of truth. This is Mr. Polansky's lesson in Low Town; he teaches it with violence and vigor.

Tucked within a province of a powerful empire, squatting within the throng of a bustling city, there lies a slum called Low Town. This lawless, rat-infested labyrinth is home to the world's unwanted. Orphans and thieves run the streets while angry men, battered women and those who enable them both cohabit in a jungle of unhealthy shops and unhealthier homes. Few outside its clutches care for it, but they cannot escape events within it, events that will spill out and infect them too.

Known on the street as the Warden, the protagonist and narrator of our story is a crime boss in this den of iniquity. During the administration of his ugly trade, he tries to bring some order to the streets, even if it is the order of the blade and the fist. Some may interpret this nod in the direction of structure as a flicker of altruism, but the Warden may well be just scratching an old itch. After all, prior to his mysterious fall from grace over a woman he may or may not have loved, he was an imperial agent, a detective imbued with the imprimatur of the crown to bring about justice. Before that, he was an officer in the imperial army where he was a witness to events so dark and savage that, all these years later, they will not allow him to sleep peacefully. But if order is in the Warden's blood, he faces the worst week of his life, for in his slum surfaces the mutilated body of a young girl, a girl so grievously wronged she evokes even the Warden's seldom-tapped reservoir of sympathy. Much as he loathes the idea, the Warden may well have to return to his post as an imperial agent, for a little while. A crime so heinous, committed on his territory, cannot go unpunished. But is the Warden ready to grapple with the darkness that lies behind recent events? Is his slum ready for the death it promises?

Though Low Town occasionally stews overlong in its own nihilism, and though certain of its characters are far too mechanical to be considered more than automata, Low Town is an exciting and atmospheric tumble through a splendidly savage world of thieves and slumlords, mages and lordlings, each of whom is wrapped up in one egotistical scheme or another. Adopting the more pleasing conventions of the noir detective novel, Mr. Polansky doubles down on darkness by building atop this grim foundation a world of injustice and misfortune, murder and sacrifice, all while spinning a plot in which redemption can only be brought about by bloodshed. The author's cruel wit is a match for his keen eye for melancholy which, together, bestow an authenticity upon the setting, a world forever on the edge of sliding into the abyss.

Though Low Town has much to recommend it, sharing as it does in the dark traditions established by Misters Morgan, Kearney, and Abercrombie, it is not without flaws. The Warden's mountainman of a best friend is a feeble character whose only purposes here are to be alternately sad and tortured. He, like several of Mr. Polansky's other characters, never advance beyond caricature. However, this blot on the work is balanced by the Warden who is drawn with a kind of authentic and well-meaning cruelty, the likes of which has rarely manifested on paper. If Joe Abercrombie was able to put his fiendish hands on Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden, strip him of his magic and torment him for a few thousand years in Hell, Daniel Polansky's Warden might well be the result.

Wonderful noir which balances its fantasy, its mystery and its cultural satire far better than one might expect for an author's first effort. I eagerly await more from Mr. Polansky. (4/5 Stars)

The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer

From The Week of January 16, 2011

For most of us, our world is all we know. Its here and its now envelop us, creating an ever-present and essentially constant cocoon that acts upon us as much as we act upon it. It is a world of coffee shops and restaurants, of universities and ideas, of stadiums and parks. It is a world whose biases and realities we cannot shake. But what if we could? What if, through time travel, we could venture to a past era, to be immersed in the rules and the customs of a time different from our own? Would we find it barbaric? Would we find honor in it? Would we adjust and assimilate? Just how strongly does our environment influence us? Mr. Mortimer has never traveled through time, as far as we know, but his exhaustive research has produced an entertaining primer to what it might be like to journey into a different world, governed by totally different laws, and survive on hostile shores.

As a result of its preponderance of heroes and villains, wars and plagues, extremism and chaos, discussion of the 14th century has generally focused on the big events of that apocalyptic time. Consequently, we know much about the rulers, priests and nobles whose battles, pontifications and schemes characterized the strife. But this is a great man's view of history, one that, with its sweeping assessments of the period, fails to capture what life was like for the everyday souls who inhabited this tumultuous world. It skips over its superstitions, its customs and its occupations which, altogether, weave the fabric of a society.

In The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England Mr. Mortimer sloughs off the legendary figures chronicled to death by countless historians and, grasping us by the hand, transports us to 14th century England where he walks us down the village streets, through the ubiquitous forests and into the boisterous taverns, all in an attempt to suffuse us with the everyday notions of a world now extinct. The food, the laws, the literature, the fashion and the pastimes are all thoroughly explored, overlooking no detail too grotesque or too bizarre in an effort to explain what the passage of 600 years has made so foreign. What results is an amusing portrait of a brutal world, one in which life is as cheap as it is short, where its pleasures are as fleeting as its justice, and where most people don't have the time or the energy to be learned.

While it's clear that our romanticism has glossed over much of the dangers and torments of 14th century England, Mr. Mortimer succeeds, with his painful clarity, to yet make this perilous time appealing. No matter how the world changes, there are some constants to the human experience, customs that arise from deep-seated desires coded into our cells. Amidst the death and the destruction, the suspicion and the xenophobia, there lie acts of charity and togetherness, kindness and brotherhood, upon which the scaffolding of a freer, more enlightened world can be built.

Full of impishness and charm, Mr. Mortimer entertains and educates in equal measure. For as much as this piece plays up the sensationalist elements of the 14th century, it delves into the hearts and minds of those who lived in and shaped this tempestuous century. Memorable if unspectacular work. (3/5 Stars)

Armies Of Heaven by Jay Rubenstein

From The Week of January 16, 2011

Though our religions generally deserve credit for demanding that their adherents follow their charitable instincts and cleave to their moral codes, these benefits are drowned by the oceans of blood that have been spilled over both their gods and their forced conversions. Throughout history, we repeatedly witness these faiths, born out of injustice and despair, coalesce around a central figure whose noble example is a shining beacon of hope in the darkness of a corrupted world. But while some are inspired to live better lives, others are invariably inspired to harness the immense powers unleashed by these saviors, powers which are eventually codified into authoritarian institutions bent upon the preservation of their influence and their gravitas, not the betterment of the people they purport to serve. It is through this corrosive process that a faith like Christianity, animated by the notion of noble self-sacrifice, becomes the banner around which murderers and madmen rally, eager for a taste of God's glory. This piece from Mr. Rubenstein is surely one of the west's most vivid examples of this hypocrisy in motion. It won't soon be forgotten.

Though later centuries would make convincing claims to be called the most destructive in human history, the hundred years, from 1000 to 1099 AD ended in spectacular destruction. It harbored the first of a series of savage, existential conflicts between east and west that would eventually be christened the Crusades by the Christians who initiated them. Brought about by the ascension of Islamic power in the east and the waning of the Byzantine bulwark that had, for the most part, kept Muslims from European shores, western Christians, plagued by a fractured church and a disunited continent, were, in 1095, rallied, by Pope Urban II, around the notion of the liberation of Jerusalem from the Saracens that had rested her from their rightful ownership.

In answer to Urban II's call, an army of nobles and peasants, sinners and innocents, was formed in France. For this was a force willing to take in anyone who had but a single desire, to take the cross upon their breast and, with Christ in their hearts, journey to distant Jerusalem and evict the filthy turks from the most holiest city. A mighty goal, but to achieve it this army, composed of as many preachers and monks as warriors and strategists, would have to sail treacherous seas, navigate the corruption of Byzantium, stave off the horrors of starvation and dissolution, and conquer vast territories before they could even reach Jerusalem. A long and bloody road filled with betrayals and bloodshed, hardship and heresy, and a price that may well be ruined in the taking.

From the Council of Clermont to the massacre at Jerusalem, Mr. Rubenstein, a historian of the medieval world, has, in Armies of Heaven vividly reconstructed the politics and the realities of both the 11th century and the apocalyptic conflict that ravaged it. Couching the First Crusade in the context of End Times, Mr. Rubenstein chronicles the earnest belief among Christians that the world was coming to an end and that their taking of Jerusalem held a prominent place in that eschatology. In this, the author expands our understanding of the conflict's beginnings even while, with revolting detail, he recounts the perfidy of the crusading army's leaders, the insanity of its preachers and the savagery of its warriors. These scenes of horror will not only leave a mark; they leave no doubt as to the extent to which ideology, particularly spiritual beliefs, entangles humans in knots of ultimately murderous logic. There is nothing here of Christ, at least as he comes down to us in the 21st century.

Powerful and informative... Mr. Rubenstein's work possesses the customary dryness of most scholarly histories. However, it is also animated by the undeniable nihilism of the period and the savagery of the quest to take Jerusalem. Both have the power to leave the reader gaping with dismay. An eye opener and, thus, neither for the faint of heart nor the blind of faith. (4/5 Stars)

The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinness

From The Week of January 09, 2011

Though many, if not most, attempts to socially engineer a better world have failed, often disastrously, it is difficult, even with the benefit of hindsight, to condemn them. Popular movements are animated by the grievances of the masses who, when ignored, churn and boil until they finally explode in righteous revolution. No matter how bloody the revolt, nor corrupt the regime implemented in its wake, we cannot fault the people for seizing back the power so long denied them. However, if we cannot condemn them for the attempt, we can condemn them for the result, for not recognizing when their experiments have failed. We can condemn them for holding onto power with the same, sad desperation of those they once overthrew, believing so fervently in their dogmas that they cannot admit defeat. This is the potent lesson that underpins Mr. McGuinness' quiet, icy novel.

The year is 1989. Bucharest, once Romania's gleaming jewel, is a befouled and broken city, a sea of concrete seemingly in constant, pointless flux. Far from the worker's paradise promised by Communism, this shattered place with its barren supermarkets, its police checkpoints, and its mandatory rallies, is the personal plaything of Nicolae Ceausescu, Romania's bloody and brutal dictator. Though he claims to rule at the behest of the people, Ceausescu is little more than an aging tyrant, a man driven to libidinousness and madness by years of ugly, dictatorial deeds. For all of this, he is still dangerous, moreso now that his greatest ally, the Soviet Union is disintegrating before the eyes of the world. For unlike his fellow Communist dictators who are acceding to Western reforms, he will fight to the bitter end, confident in the misguided belief that his people love and worship him.

Into this painful and existential morass sinks a young man from Britain. The story's narrator, he describes how the sad dissolution of his family precipitated his going abroad. Working at a university in Bucharest, he quickly falls in with the great city's anarchists and revolutionaries, looking on laconically while, in their own ways, they try to preserve what they can of the past while agitating for the revolution of tomorrow, for a time when, no longer able to sustain itself, Ceausescu's decrepit regime collapses under the weight of its own shameless lies. Though the narrator imagines himself to be at the heart of an earnest if smalltime conspiracy, he soon discovers that matters are not as they seem and that, in a security state, where informers outnumber the honest by ten to one, nothing is ever achieved without the notice or the consent of powerful, corrupted interests.

Long listed for the 2011 Man Booker, Mr. McGuinness' sharp and insightful examination of the death throws of the Romanian dictatorship is as cold and surgical as a scalpel. The unnamed narrator, beset by his own troubled childhood, expresses little in the way of emotion as he endures the daily grind of living and working in one of the world's last Communist strongholds. As he watches everyone around him fight, bargain, scheme and conform in hopes of advancing their own ends, he's the perfect, opinionless lens through which the reader can view and experience life at the end of a failed experiment. For make no mistake; the Ceausescu regime, in the winter of 1989, is a dying animal, a creature in desperate need of being put out of its misery, a demon that, nonetheless, continues to fight on and cling to power because this is all that it knows.

The Last Hundred Days rewards the reader with plots and counter plots, with keen observations and thinly veiled criticism. But for as ably as Mr. McGuinness captures the feel of 1989, his metaphors are his most effective weapons here. As he recounts the various ways in which humans try futilely to escape a machine that refuses to release them, the deathly cold of winter hangs over everything; the universal freeze of entropy to which all must inevitably decay. It's powerful work that more than compensates for the quiet isolationism of its narrator, a man who seems only halfway present in the story of his own, muted life.

A grim tale of end times and how, inevitably, they are nothing more than the beginning of the next chapter of the same, tired story. (3/5 Stars)

The Copper Sign by Katia Fox

From The Week of January 09, 2011

Though it is a genre of wide-ranging tastes and styles, historical fiction has two fundamental purposes: to open windows upon the past and to invite us to imagine how we might have fit into these times so different from our own. These are powerful enticements, seductions that speak to us of eras come and gone: their glory, their nobility, and their difficulty. They are stories capable of inspiring us, igniting passions for worlds lost to us by the shrouds of centuries. It is unfortunate, then, that this laborious effort from Ms. Fox mostly fails to deliver on either promise.

In the century following the fall of Anglo-Saxon England, a civilization largely buried by William the Conquerer and his Norman knights at the Battle of Hastings, life is hard for those who call themselves English. Not only are their customs overturned, their laws changed, their lords slain, they also find themselves bowing to a line of foreign kings who ended their way of life and imposed upon them continental conventions of tangled feuds and dubious morality. This is the thorny and troubled Plantagenet England through which Eleanor, our heroine, must navigate.

The product of a youthful and indiscreet dalliance between a French lord and an ambitious Englishwoman, Ellen is doubly cursed. Not only is she the object of her mother's spite -- the woman blames her pregnancy, and by extension Ellen, for ruining her chances at a comfortable, upperclass life --, she is a commoner with a boy's ambitions trapped in a woman's body. She does not want to succumb to a life of marriage and childbearing -- the destiny of all women of her era. She wants to throw off her meager, limited life, become a smith and make armor and swords for the great lords that rule her land.

Until she catches her mother cheating on her adoptive father with a local knight, hers is nothing more than a childish dream. But when her discovery forces her to flee her village, pursued by the knight's lethal threats, she inadvertently stumbles into a lie that will transform all her fanciful notions into reality. If she masquerades as a boy, she can not only earn an apprenticeship with a smith, she can have the life she dreamed of, traveling the known lands, her talented hands laboring for the highest kings. This is Ellen's adventure, its highs and its lows, its triumphs and its betrayals, its loves and its discord.

Though its heroine is, for the most part, a subversive pleasure, The Copper Sign is, in virtually every other respect, a disaster. Its bloated plot consumes 640-odd pages, showing no signs of having ever graced an editor's desk. For not only is the tale twice as long as necessary, Ms. Fox's characters are a confused, inconsistent muddle, their attitudes and ethics changing as the story's plot and her whimsey require. Not only is Ellen's desire to be a boy abandoned less than a quarter of the way through this dense morass, nonsensical feuds, irrational master smiths and conveniently timed illnesses are all summoned by the author and hurled at her heroine in the vain hope that something sticks. Some of this would be forgivable if the novel wasn't held together by Ms. Fox's stupefying lordly antagonist, an accretion of villainous cliches that serve no other purpose than to make Ellen's life miserable and to shove the tale towards its quiet conclusion.

It brings me no pleasure to condemn this work. Clearly, Ms. Fox went to great pains to learn and pass on to her readers the lessons of the forge and the realities of 12th century England, but she appears to have spent much more time researching than she did crafting a plot in which to embed this knowledge. Startling work in desperate need of another draft. (1/5 Stars)

How The Hippies Saved Physics by David Kaiser

From The Week of January 09, 2011

Though many factors contribute to how we interpret the world around us, its fundamentals and its ecology, the giants of history that preceded us and the culture that inculcated us are the two most influential forces shaping our worldview. Without the former, entire schools of thought would be foreign to us, compelling each generation to form every idea, to summon every insight. Even so, we would be even more lost without the latter. For with no cultural influences to narrow our focus, to distinguish for us the important from the trivial, the vital from the dormant, we would have no common ground upon which to share our observations, our revelations, or our proofs. A society that cares about freedom inspires research into the forces which bring it about. Conversely, a society that does not care about the rights of women is hardly going to encourage the opening of womens colleges. Everything we are is shaped by what we know and how we've been taught and this is the fascinating lesson Mr. Kaiser successfully communicates in this history of quantum physics.

Quantum physics is a mysterious and troublesome discipline. As much as it explains about the universe, it generates just as many puzzles, causing intellectual giants no less than Albert Einstein to throw up their hands in surrender and disgust. How can the state of something be undefined until its observation compels it to collapse into an outcome? How can the simple observation of a thing change its destiny? These seem like questions as much for philosophers as physicists. No surprise then that the founders and shapers of the field, Neils Bohr, Max Born and John Bell, were freethinking, European physicists whose early-20th-century insights drew together the spiritual and the physical to lay down the fundamentals for a field of study that shaped theoretical physics for the remainder of the century.

For as much as these men launched a thousand experiments, the study of physics is not cheap. Considerable funding is required if theories are to be transformed into reality. And so, as the century bogged down in war, both the hot and the cold, the non-dogmatic ideas of the early decades gave way to the narrowminded and coldly mathematical formulas of the latter, for the research grants flowing from western governments were concerned with military certainties, not intellectual ephemera. This constricted view of physics held sway until the countercultural revolution of the 60s and 70s, decades which produced as much academic change as social transformation. No longer did young scientists feel outcast for marrying the metaphysical with the real. They were free to form clubs, write papers, and imagine experiments that crossed disciplines in ways considered verboten only years prior. And in this, they sparked a rediscovery of earlier ideas of quantum physics, applied new insights and new outcomes to them and, in the process, revitalized and reshaped the study of a discipline that has the potential to change our understanding of the universe. Not bad for a bunch of California stoners who, at any other time in that long and difficult century, would have been shackled by the rigors of stolid academia.

Though Mr. Kaiser has overreached with his title, How The Hippies Saved Physics is an energetic jaunt through the last 50 years of the study of quantum physics: the wars that stunted it, the governments that funded it, and especially the countercultural minds that bent themselves to its challenges. No, the author does not convince that his club of California hippies saved physics; in fact, their most memorable contributions seem confined to the popularization of the work of John Bell and advancements in the field of quantum information. And while both are discussed in detail and each hold considerable promise, they fall short of being called saviors. This aside, Mr. Kaiser has penned a potent piece about a fascinating collection of kooks and freethinkers, eccentrics and geniuses, who helped to broaden the horizons of physics. And the extent to which he distills complex theories into notions understandable by the layman is both admirable and educational.

But for the oversell, this is valuable work that reminds us of the dangers of dogma. Scientific endeavor should not have any sacred cows. Science is the pursuit of truth and knowledge. There is no room for cultural or governmental biases. Knowledge is knowledge. And here, Mr. Kaiser does a wonderful job illustrating this most enduring principle. (4/5 Stars)

Glock by Paul M. Barrett

From The Week of January 09, 2011

Until humanity is capable of eliminating scarcity and creating, through technology, a world in which no one needs labor, capitalism will continue to be the economic model that underpins the most successful societies. For it taps into the avarice that lingers within all of us, catalyzing commerce by tempting clever entrepreneurs with riches far in excess of those the less fortunate can ever claim. In this, it incentivizes inventiveness, the very same creativity that has assembled the high-tech world we enjoy today.

But for all of capitalism's virtues, for all of its power to distinguish the insightful from the dense, the lucky from the unfortunate, the opportunistic from the slow, it has no morality. In fact, in light of the Faustian bargain it makes with its practitioners -- greed for gold --, it might be right to label it immoral for the way in which it rewards ruthlessness while discouraging generosity. Never have I read a better example of this principle at work than in this, Mr. Barrett's history of Gaston Glock and his most American gun.

Though he was a successful inventor long before he ever turned his hand to weaponcraft, Gaston Glock faced long to impossible odds when, in the early 1980s, he refocused his creative talents upon the designing and manufacturing of handguns. After all, he was a middle-aged creator of curtain rods, one man with no experience entering into an industry dominated by hundred-year-old corporate giants with proven track records and countless, skilled technicians. Who was Gaston Glock to think he could create a gun that would revolutionize an industry? And yet, Mr. Barrett argues this is exactly what this married father of three did when he crafted a simple, graceful, powerful weapon that would earn him billions.

Boasting both a lighter trigger pull and half as many parts as its contemporaries, the Glock 17 took only a handful of years to conquer America. Initially marketed to law-enforcement, it proved itself instantly attractive to cops and FBI agents combating a rising tide of violent, well-armed criminals. Arguing that their revolvers were punchless pop guns compared to what the enemy was packing, police departments across the country gradually switched to the more powerful and more expansive Glock, setting off tidal waves throughout the American marketplace that would not subside until they had set established and venerated brands like Colt and Smith & Wesson floundering for purchase. When they finally did react, they did so poorly, pedaling products that were essentially knockoffs of the startlingly successful Glock, a reality which only cemented the supremacy of the Austrian gun in American minds.

Though Glock is, in the main, a successful and entertaining history of this revolutionary handgun, its impact on the industry, its connection to criminal activity, and its contribution to the political debate over handgun use in the United States, Mr. Barrett, a veteran journalist, has outdone himself with his gripping portrait of Gaston Glock, the handgun's polarizing inventor. Though Mr. Glock is an emotionally remote figure throughout, the author's reporting strongly suggests that he was a man of principles and genius when, with his most famous invention, he upended an entire industry and placed himself, a then unknown player, at its pinnacle. However, as the years pass, as Mr. Glock amasses an incalculable fortune, his pride, which has swelled in proportion with his wealth, weakens his decency and his brilliance, replacing these virtues with the much more caustic qualities of entitlement, selfishness, cruelty and paranoia. His unchecked arrogance is stunningly apparent in the latter half of this piece.

Mr. Barrett has filled his 300-odd pages with two difficult and Byzantine stories. The former, guns and the extent to which they are inexplicably woven into modern America, is powerful and terrifying for what it reveals about the American mindset. Handguns are lethal weapons, built for no purpose but to kill other humans. To think that they can so easily find their way into the hands of the emotionally unstable and the mentally erratic is, to say the least, disturbing. The latter, Gaston Glock and the extent to which capitalism transformed him from an admirable man into a pitiable creature ensnared by his own self-regard, is a moving example of the flaws of the world we've built for ourselves. Compelling and terrifying in equal measure. (4/5 Stars)

Exorcising Hitler by Frederick Taylor

From The Week of January 09, 2011

Sadly, humans are experts in war. Over millennia, we have honed it into an art, a science, a pastime. Its prosecution has spawned as many feuds as it has founded cultural institutions and codes of honor which venerate its practice, to our cost. But as damaging as war can be -- just a glance at the 20th century is confirmation enough --, its legacy is even more powerful. For the more that we wrap ourselves in the honor of our flags, the more we link our self-esteem to the strength of our national institutions, the less we can accept defeat. Someone must have betrayed us, mislead us, tricked us. We could not have been vanquished from the battlefield any other way. We are the best; everyone tells us so.

This is a dangerous mindset. For as soon as defeat is assured, excuses are generated, excuses that flower into grievances, grievances that mature into fantasies of revenge. We've only to look at the ethnic conflicts in the Balkans or the cultural ones in the Middle East to see the damage wrought by this most vicious cycle. So how can we stop it ? How can a violent country be defeated and pacified without inspiring rancor, hate and recrimination? Mr. Taylor asks as much in this treatise on post-Nazi Germany. His answers are compelling.

Long before Germany's destruction ended the Second World War in Europe, the world was aware of the extensive program of social engineering being conducted in that most proud and ancient country. Hitler, capitalizing on German pride, on the scarcity of jobs, on the plundering of national resources, and on the slights of the French, had, for 20 years, been inculcating Germans with his revanchist anger. Their historic defeat in World War I was a betrayal. For the greatest nation on Earth, populated by the greatest people in human history, could not be brought low by any coalition of inferiors. And even if the defeat was deserved, which it wasn't, the Treaty of Versailles, in which the French took advantage of a weakened Germany to attack her industry and confiscate her land, was unjust. These ideas, which found fertile soil in a starving, struggling Germany, catalyzed a revisionist revolution which culminated in the rise of Hitler to power, the implementation of his fascist ideas, and the destruction of German opposition to what would become some of the most murderous government policies in history.

Hitler was wrong of course. He was wrong about the war; he was wrong about Germany. Not that it mattered... In seeking to provide for the German people a salve for their pride, he gave them a license to hate. He institutionalized racism and a sense of superiority that promised to sustain the war, if only in the hearts of defeated Germans, long after his death. Understanding this better than they understood Hitler's Nazi threat, the Allies, exhausted by war, set upon a bold and difficult course. Germany had to be rebuilt, culturally, economically, fiscally. It had to be made aware of its sins, but not punished for them. For to do that would be to trigger yet another cycle of conflict no one could afford. In covering the trials and tribunals, the policies and the textbooks, the politicians and their constituencies, Mr. Taylor describes the myriad ways in which the Allies reformed German society in hopes of bleeding the poison from its wounds and restoring it to what they considered health.

Exorcising Hitler is a powerful history of postwar Germany. Though Mr. Taylor focuses too much on the immediate aftermath of Germany's defeat, banishing to his epilogue the cultural transformation that took place in subsequent decades, the extent to which he meticulously reconstructs the Nazi culture and juxtaposes it with the suffering of the defeated Germans is as informative as it is gripping. The author summons both startling statistics and painful first-hand accounts which demonstrate not only the German desire to believe in Hitler's revisionist narrative, but the lengths to which they were willing to go to actualize it. In this, Mr. Taylor is as successful in presenting a convincing case for how Germans were indoctrinated as he is in describing how the Allies tried, successfully and otherwise, to peacefully encourage Germany back into the fold of nations.

For all the work's successes, I am troubled by the extent to which Mr. Taylor downplays the cultural reforms of later decades. In choosing to focus on the immediate aftermath of the war, he has emphasized the Allied role in reforming Germany. And though their wisdom should certainly be credited for helping that proud nation restore itself, Germans themselves are solely responsible for revisiting the root sins of their own culture. They changed their worldview, not the Allies. Thus, when Mr. Taylor confines these reforms to a few dozen pages at the end of his 400-plus-page chronicle, he is deemphasizing Germany's contribution to its remarkable turnaround.

Though it suffers for abbreviating the equally important reforms of later decades, reforms that Germans undertook themselves, This is a thorough account of a difficult and complex time. Wonderful if unbalanced work. (3/5 Stars)

The Postmortal by Drew Magary

From The Week of January 02, 2012

Though science and its practice are powerful forces for good in our world, they are also capable of unleashing immense destruction . For as much as science has allowed us to cure diseases, create a worldwide community, and travel to the stars, it has bestowed us with biological, chemical and nuclear weapons with the capacity to destroy not only societies but our entire civilization. None of this is science's fault; it does not have agency. No, these Pandora's boxes are the result of human desire which has, and will probably always, outstrip human wisdom . For what one person creates, out of an altruistic desire to help, someone else selfishly shapes into a tool for their own gain, their own betterment, without thought for the costs to others. This is our curse, the inability to think of the collective good ahead of the individual . And it is this devastating Achilles' heel that Mr. Maggary has so thoughtfully demonstrated in his gripping work.

The year is 2019 and the world is about to change forever . As a result of a laboratory accident, humans have discovered a cure for aging. With three simple, if painful, shots, any human can be made immortal . The shots will not armor the human against disease, nor will they keep him alive after he's been flattened by an oncoming train. However, short of being stopped by disease or violence, he will live forever.

Understandably, this development spreads both fear and exhilaration like wildfire through the human community. Even though the Cure has been banned by the governments of most developed countries, it is widely available underground where everyone, from lawyers to party girls, pay a modest fee for a chance to see the end of time . But for as many who eagerly take the Cure, just as many reject it. After all, there are enormous implications to living forever. Is marriage an institution capable of withstanding bonds that last multiple lifetimes ? What about god ? Is it right to thwart his will? What happens to children ? How long should they be parented ? So many questions; so little time to find common answers to any of them before life is forever altered by a chance leap forward in scientific knowledge.

All of these toxic issues and more play out over the following 60 years as we follow John Farrell through his postmortal life. From his early days as an innocent, a divorce lawyer living a happy, Cured, existence in New York, to his latter nights as a cynical population-control specialist for the US government, we watch his life and his belief in the Cure crumble in the face of societal deterioration brought about by the Cure. Without the check of death to keep the population in control, humanity replicates faster than ever, consuming the Earth in a fight for resources that will soon be depleted . What will be left when all is said and done ? And will John Farrell recognize it? Only his diary contains such answers.

The Postmortal is brilliant science fiction, showing off the best the genre has to offer. In posing a simple question -- what would happen to human civilization if, tomorrow, we were all immortal --, it invents a plausible, if unlikely, future and then extrapolates from that imagined future all the myriad ramifications of an earth-shattering, civilization-altering development . Here is where Mr. Magary shines. For not only has he posed a fascinating question, he has insightfully imagined at least a dozen nightmarish, unintended consequences resulting from it. If the question itself is the story's backbone, its imaginings flesh it out. From mothers giving the Cure to their toddlers, in order to forever preserve their mutual dependence, to permanent soldiers serving endless tours of duty, the author keenly and convincingly presents us a world which, in not thinking through the consequences of a scientific leap forward, is tormented by its fallout. Masterful...

This is riveting work. No, Mr. Magary won't win any awards for his prose; nor does his tale throw up more than one noteworthy surprise . But this is secondary to the great extent to which he has asked and answered an engrossing question which is more than can be said of most fiction, mindless or otherwise. The pages absolutely fly by. (5/5 Stars)

The Crown Conspiracy: Riyria Revelations 01 by Michael J. Sullivan

From The Week of January 02, 2012

Though the thief with a heart of gold is an old, tired literary trope, it endures in fiction for two reasons: our desire to believe that every soul is redeemable, no matter how roguish or self-interested, and our desire to invent the unattainable man who possesses skill, charm and the darkness to do the hard thing. Both emanate from the eccentricities of human nature, rooted as it is in our Judeo-Christian ethics. But as much as we might fancifully wish such dichotomies into existence, they must remain vanishingly rare. Selfishness and generosity are like oil and water; only calamity comes from mixing them together. They are mutually exclusive traits that are only combined for the sake of romance. Though there are other problems with Mr. Sullivan's novel, hobbling his protagonists with such illogical personalities is the doom of the piece.

For all but the privileged few, life in the kingdom of Melengar is often painful and always hard. Justice is a virtue that only the rich can access and even then its execution is an uncertain thing. For the whims and the schemes of powerful interests almost always trump the rights and the desires of the less fortunate. Such an environment provides fertile soil for men like Hadrian Blackwater and Royce Melborne, two talented thieves who are masters at a specialized form of justice, the kind their clients can pay for. No job is too tall, no scheme too intricate for this witty pair who are as skillful at the art of disguise as they are experts at the play of swords. So long as you can pay, they can deliver.

When the thieves are hired to steal a superstitious count's favorite sword from the royal chapel, caution is warranted. What if all is not as it seems? What if it is a trick? But the reward, which could set the two thieves up for life, is too high for Hadrian to resist. The thieves take the job, but when they steal into the palace and locate the royal chapel, there is no sword waiting for them. No, sprawled upon the marble is the corpse of Melengar's slain king, a knife in his back. Hadrian and Royce are the prime suspects and are jailed pending execution. But then a reprieve from an unlikely, royal source permits the two rogues the freedom they need to try to clear their sullied names. Thus begins an adventure that will take them across the breadth of Melengar in search of the most elusive property of all, the truth.

Though The Crown Conspiracy can lay claim to witty dialogue, a solid cast and a plot worthy of a half-decent action film, this is, in every respect, a superficial novel. Mr. Sullivan certainly has a talent for ensnaring his characters in entertaining traps from which he must creatively extract them, but the enjoyment the reader draws out of the pickles the author invents for his characters is in no way matched by the complete two-dimensionality of his protagonists. Hadrian and Royce are meant to be reluctant heros of the common man, fantasy robin hoods come to right wrongs while getting paid handsomely along the way. Instead, they are cardboard cutouts, inanimate objects programmed to spew witticisms and perform stunts. At no point do they coalesce into actual people. No, Mr. Sullivan never intended to write a fantasy classic; this is every bit fantasy pulp. But the great works from David Eddings and Raymond Feist, upon which he's clearly based his work, possessed characters as fully formed as its humor. Mr. Sullivan has captured the latter without even coming close to the former.

The Crown Conspiracy is perfect for pure escapism, for when something mindless is called for. But the absence of good characters here prevents the piece from possessing any kind of jeopardy. Impossible to invest in... (2/5 Stars)

To Prussia With Love by Roger Boyes

From The Week of January 02, 2012

Though they arrive at different moments and carry with them varying degrees of significance, every relationship experiences a moment of crisis, a crossroads at which its discontented parties, troubled by forces both internal and external, can decide to endure a rough patch of road for the sake of the long haul, or to call it a day and go their separate ways in the knowledge that they've extracted all the good that can come of their journey together . Those who choose the former transform their choice into a turning point of their relationship, a crucible whose endurance expands the scope of their love . The latter, meanwhile, consider themselves blessed to have quit while they were ahead. It's impossible to know which option is the right one for we lack the counterfactual, the playing out of the alternative scenario to which it must be compared . But we can be presented with the anatomy of such a crossroads and be asked to decide for ourselves . And this is precisely what Mr. Boyes has done with his humorous if unbelievable memoir.

Dogged by the pressures of work and the dissatisfactions of lives not lived to their liking, Mr. Boyes, a British ex-pat living and working in Germany, and Lena, his German girlfriend, are stuck in a rut. Not only is he not happy with his job working for a British newspaper obsessed with stories about neo-Nazis, she is exhausted by a life designing fashionable homes for rich divorcees with too much money. He is bored; she is overworked, a deadly combination that has drained their relationship of the fun it once enjoyed.

Imagine Mr. Boyes' surprise, then, when, at their darkest hour, a bolt from the blue starts them down an altogether new path. Lena, who inherited a family home in rural Prussia, hits upon the idea of reconnecting by slowly restoring the dilapidated home to its former glory. Both her idea and her gesture are eagerly accepted by Mr. Boyes who takes the project one step farther. What if they turn the home into a tourist attraction for British people abroad? Grants from the British government could cover the cost of the home's extensive repairs, delivering them a home for which they can be proud. Lena reluctantly accepts the scheme which proves to be disastrous for not only the house, its occupants and the interests of the local mayor, but also their relationship which the scheme was meant to salvage, not destroy . And yet, over bouts of food poisoning and sabotage, united in the face of weird servants and cricketing enemies, there remains a chance that they could still come together, made one by the perils of rustic Germany.

To Prussia With Love is a delightful and conceited romp, not only through the backwaters of Europe but the wilds of a seemingly unrescuable relationship. rom the start, our two protagonists seem hopelessly mismatched for one another, he boarish and singleminded, she suave and cultured, a characterization that is only re-enforced by the 200-odd pages of their adventure together . Their awkwardness is matched, though, by the eccentricities of Mr. Boyes' charmingly calamitous friends and by the disaster that is the Prussian home he and Lena have decided to repair. Leaky, drafty and on the edge of ruin, it has a facade only an inheritor could love . And yet, its rebuilding is the decision that launches the thousand disasters chronicled here with such wit and charm.

Mr. Boyes' amusing prose ably captures the absurdities of his adventure in rural Prussia . And so, his work must be considered a success, for this was his purpose. But there's something about To Prussia With Love that seems too fantastic to be true. This reads like the leavings of a skit from Fawlty Towers, complete with dour East Germans, fanciful plots and characters who seem too large for life. Perhaps its authenticity is irrelevant. After all, this is a work whose self-destructiveness will widely amuse, but it all just feels a bit too neat for my tastes, like the half-fevered daydream of a man all-too aware that he's once again about to be single. However, if every event in here is true, well, then we should all venture to Roger and Lena's little Prussian B&B. Hilarity cannot but ensue.

Funny but suspiciously tidy. Still, the extent to which this is a rumination on relationships and the events that knit and dissolve them makes it a success. (3/5 Stars)

Lisbon by Neil Lochery

From The Week of January 02, 2012

Though every great war begins with clear grievances, slights that, at the time, seem worthy of instigating conflict, they all evolve beyond their origins and into a fight to decide winners and losers. After all, each faction fighting the war has had to invest immense resources into its prosecution, sacrifices for which they will want compensation. And no one compensates losers. This is why morality is an inevitable casualty of war. Eventually, winning is all that matters. And this can have as devastating an impact on the countries outside a conflict as on those within it.

Great wars have no honorable neutrals. If you are not for one side then you are against it, a slight that will be remembered when it comes time to divvy up the spoils and to execute grievances. Neutrals must then choose the right side, but how? And on what terms? As a neutral, Portugal was forced to make such choices during the Second World War. This is Mr. Lochery's reconstruction of that tense and troubled time.

During World War II (1939-1945), Portugal was, politically, a dictatorship. Its ruler, Antonio Salazar, was a ruthless intellectual whose legendary discipline and work ethic helped to steer his country through the war's turbulent waters. Initially sympathetic to the Axis powers, Mr. Lochery describes how Salazar, a hater of Communism, eventually saw the Allies as the only force capable of repelling it from Europe, an understanding which helped sway his sympathies away from the fascist forces ravaging continental Europe. But as much as the pendulum of Salazar's allegiance swung back and forth,over those six, chaotic years, his desire to keep tiny but militarily vital Portugal out of the war never wavered. And in this, despite Lisbon being a neutral city frequented by enemy agents from both sides, despite the immense pressures from the Allies and the Axis powers alike, he succeeded, keeping the terrible cost of conflict from his sundrenched shores.

As much as this is a biography of Antonio Salazar, the man who was essentially the government of Portugal before, during and after the war, it is also the history of a neutral country attempting to sail through the storm of a global war. Mr. Lochery devotes as much time to the economic and social pressures troubling Portugal during this period as he does portraying the dictator who tried to manage them. Lisbon, a city of light, is described as a spy-laden, prostitute-filled tumult, a neutral marketplace for allies and Axis agents alike to comingle, to scheme and to agitate for the betterment of their side. In this, the author reveals war's impact on the innocent, its temptations for the avaricious, and its tendency to constrict the freedoms of the masses.

Lisbon is gripping work. Most histories of war center on its antagonists, not those who stand on its sidelines. rightfully so; for the action, and thus the events that shape war's outcome, are generally with war's prosecutors, not its onlookers. Neutral nations are scorned by both sides as weak and nervous, countries lacking conviction and courage. Mr. Lochery counters that view by pointing out the economic costs that befall small countries when they back the wrong side and are punished for their sins by the victors. For his courage and strength of will, to defy the greatest men of his era, Antonio Salazar should be complimented.

However, the sins of a dictator cannot be swept so cleanly under the poverbial rug. Mr. Lochery soft-sells Salazar's crimes, downplaying their importance in the context of the war. And perhaps he's right. Perhaps Salazar's personal crimes are nothing next to the ravages of war that would have tormented Portugal had he allowed it to enter WWII. But crimes are still crimes. Diminishing them in ones narrative gives the reader the impression that they've been overblown, or that they do not matter. Truth is truth.

To the extent that Mr. Lochery captures the unique pressures applied to neutrals in war, this is outstanding work. The author goes a long way to rightfully redeeming their honor. Neutrality is not, as many would suggest, synonymous with cowardice. But for all that, Lisbon reads like a Salazar apologia which is hard to swallow considering his crimes. Fascinating work... (4/5 Stars)

The Great A&P by Mark Levinson

From The Week of January 02, 2012

Though economics and the practical application of its theories have always been important to the health of our societies, the fiscal tempests unleashed by both the 2008 Financial Crisis and the forces that triggered it have refocused our collective consciousness on the roles they play in capitalist societies. Is it wise to have such enormous influence concentrated in the hands of the few who run the financial sectors of our economies? Should our governments be involved in regulating private businesses? Just what kind of business, big or small, a large or an efficient employer, is most beneficial to our communities?

These are all valid questions, questions yet without answers. And so we shouldn't expect Mr. Levinson's history of the A&P grocery chain to reveal all. And yet, he goes a long way to elucidating complex and controversial issues that have plagued us since the inception of capitalism.

In the midst of the American Civil War, what became the A&P grocery chain, a supermarket behemoth that heralded the age of Walmart, began modestly as an unremarkable wholesaler of tea in New York City. With a single store and no advantages over its competition, it bore no outward appearances of becoming the grocery powerhouse that would still be minting fortunes for its stockholders nearly a century later. And yet, over time, helmed by three remarkable men, each of whom possessed disparate but complementary talents, A&P survived and evolved, creating new kinds of advertising and a whole new way of distributing goods on its way to market domination.

From the cramped economy stores to the spacious supermarkets, from its marketing geniuses to the steady hands of the Hartford clan who lead it into the 20th century, Mr. Levinson describes, vividly, the cultural, economic, and social forces that allowed the A&P to flourish into the Walmart before Walmart. But as much as this is a biography of both the genteel Hartfords and their phenomenally successful business, it is also a treatise on the nature of commerce. For in fashioning their business into an enormously successful enterprise, the Hartfords not only changed the manner in which American shopped for and consumed food, they not only drove thousands of businesses out of work through the inevitable forces of Creative Destruction, they not only managed to to reduce through the consolidation of goods the cost of food to the consumer, they set into motion a political fight over big business that, as both a political and a practical issue, lingers to this day. A powerful legacy indeed for a company that began, 150 years ago, as one of a thousand distributers of tea.

The Great A&P is captivating work. Mr. Levinson juggles the Hartfords, their company, the reconfiguration of American food distribution, and a number of complex political issues and legal cases that engulfed the A&P, managing, throughout, to find an admirable balance between all these intertwined but competing narratives. Though he does a wonderful job explicating the private Hartfords, he is unquestionably at his best in laying out the various business models that brought them so much success. The author is so effective that, as the attentive reader attempts, inevitably, to decide which is better for society, a big, impersonal business that reduces costs to the consumer, or a small, local business that is expensive but supports and actively participates in the community, he finds himself torn in two; for Mr. Levinson has expertly made the case for both sides, leaving the reader as frustrated and indecisive as the US government was when, out of fear of big business, it attacked and contributed to the fall of the A&P.

An excellent biography, economic treatise and political primer. Good enough that I will hed any subsequent project Mr. Levinson applies himself to. This is no less than the distillation of a profound, contentious, cultural argument we've been having for 60 years. And though the work can offer no conclusive solutions, it furnishes the reader with enough data to draw his own educated conclusions about the nature of good business. Fantastic... (4/5 Stars)

Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay

From The Week of December 26, 2011

Though our identities are made up of many disparate qualities, few are as treasured as our names and the places of our birth. From the former, we draw our familial pride, a heritage that impels us to do honor to those from whom we come. The latter we invest with almost mystical significance, allowing it to be a source of our dignity, a justification for our dispositions, and a means by which we can connect ourselves, in an unbroken lineage of shared culture, to our venerated ancestors. Both are powerful forces that shape our lives in ways that we would find difficult to thwart, even if we wished to.

If these characteristics are so vital to who we are, who would we be if they were taken from us? Would we mourn our dislocation and fight to reclaim what we lost, or would we take comfort in the realization that humans are, everywhere, fundamentally similar and that names and birthplaces are only impulses to distinguish ourselves from the masses? Mr. Kay asks this question and more in this majisterial work. And though he veers off course from time to time, he leaves us with a fascinating and nuanced answer.

On a distant world, shadowed by two moons, a great peninsula is divided into nine, contentious, monarchical states which have all been, at one point, at war with one another. Attempts to cohere the nine into a more unified whole met with stiff resistance until, 20 years prior to the main sequence of events, the son of king Brandin of Ygrath, was slain in open war by royals from Tigana. Vengeful in his grief, Brandin, the known world's mightiest sorcerer, lashed out at Tigana, banishing its name, its culture and its history from the minds of its sons and daughters. He ordered its libraries burned, its institutions crushed and its leading lights extinguished in an unmatched display of power and fury that culminated in both Tigana's destruction and the reorganization of the Palm into two superstates, the west controlled by Brandin and those who fear and love him, and the east commanded by Alberico, a warlord and a powerful sorcerer in his own right.

Twenty years on, Tigana is, for all but a few, known as Lower Corte, a troublesome and difficult state where dreams go to die. But amidst its broken palaces, a rebellion grows. Spearheaded by a prince of Tigana, one of the few men alive who still remembers his country's past glory, it recruits members sympathetic to its insurgent cause, exposes them to the truths Brandin's magic has hidden from them, and shapes them into arrows meant for Brandin's heart. For there can be no other response to a crime so heinous, so dark, as the one which Brandin visited upon them. Revenge must be had.

Though Tigana has moments of brilliance, it is an inescapably flawed work of fantasy fiction. Mr. Kay should be commended for his ambition; for he set out to tell a tangled tale of war and revenge while making potent, philosophical points about the power of memory and identity and the extent to which they underpin who we are and what we care about. This is no easy feat. And so, given that he largely succeeds in this, I applaud him for penning a work that manages to be both entertainment and intellectual fodder, twin virtues lacking in all but a small minority of fantasy tomes. Unfortunately, it is Mr. Kay's characters who doom him here.

Though he has committed an unimaginably heinous crime, Brandin is largely depicted as a sympathetic character, trying to forge order from chaos. How can such a creature be sympathetic, especially when he never appears to express any great remorse for the extremity of his crimes? Worse yet, though, is Brandin's lover, a woman secretly from Tigana who spent years worming her way into Brandin's affections in hopes of assassinating him. Her skeins of the narrative are almost entirely consumed with lovesick claptrap, for she has inexplicably fallen in love with the object of her hatred and now finds it difficult to justify her own existence. Yes, there are others here who serve the story far better; the members of Mr. Kay's rebel band each take turns at captivating the reader, but even these ruthless and ambitious souls struggle at times to justify their bizarre actions. The Men in Tigana seem to be as preoccupied by rage and schemes as the women are consumed by hapless love.

Tigana certainly has its powerful moments. Mr. Kay tells an unusual story quite well, but the irrationality of his actors cause the plot too often to falter, allowing the reader too many glimpses behind the proverbial curtain. Far too much deus ex machina for my tastes. Lovers of good, romantic fantasy, though, will not be disappointed. (3/5 Stars)

The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall

From The Week of December 26, 2011

In life, there are choices that cannot be taken back, roads that, once traveled, disappear behind us, leaving ahead our only option. Worse yet, often, when we make these choices, we are too young, arrogant, or foolish to understand the full measure of their consequences. And so we choose, in haste, partners, children, religions, and find ourselves locked into lives we wish we could take back. Though this piece from Mr. Udall is principally about a man and his struggles to provide for a large and unconventional family, it is this irrevocable sorrow that throbs at its heart and gives it all of its melancholic power.

By even the strictures of his fundamentalist faith, Golden Richards, as he approaches middle age, has much to be thankful for. He is an honest businessman and a prolific father. With his four wives, he has sired more than two dozen children, all of whom expand his priesthood, increasing his godliness. More over, he is a giant of a man whose massive shoulders, at least according to his fellow church-goers, are wide enough to bear not only his familial responsibilities but the hopes and dreams of the church's congregants, all of whom pray often for a great man to reveal himself to them and lead them out of obscurity and into righteousness. But for as much as Golden has done what was required of him, as much as he adheres to the rules as best he can, as much as he strives tirelessly to give his family what they need, he is, in body, mind and spirit, exhausted. The demands of his large, diverse family, the stresses of his sputtering business, and the twin sorrows of the two beloved children he lost too early have combined to beat him down until there is left in him nothing but routine and the knowledge that to halt, even for a moment, will finish him.

But in this darkest hour, there is a glimmer of hope, hope and temptation. She takes the form of a young Guatemalan woman who, forced by circumstance into marrying the same pimp who has hired Golden to do construction on a brothel, falls in love with Golden and, in doing so, becomes, for this lonely polygamist, a reprieve from his troubles. In their quiet, forbidden passion, he finds both an escape from his burdens and a means by which to examine his life and how he arrived at his present misery. But nothing can happen with the young woman, can it? He cannot abandon his 32 dependents and flee with his mistress, can he? To do so would be to follow in his father's dishonorable footsteps, to confirm every moment of disappointment his fellow congregants have felt towards him, and to consign his family to dissolution and beggary. Duty or temptation, honor or freedom... Which shall Golden choose?

The Lonely Polygamist is a sprawling novel of rich landscapes, familial burdens and difficult choices which ensnare the reader as effectively as they do its extensive cast of characters. From the sexual frustrations of Golden's youngest wife, to the Byzantine schemes of his eldest, Mr. Udall draws a compelling and frightening portrait of plural marriage, both the joys it conveys by its solidarity and the miseries it imposes with its isolationism. For the extent to which Mormon fundamentalism is a cult cuts off the practitioners of plural marriage from the rest of the world, forcing them to depend upon each other for social, mental and physical sustenance that is not always forthcoming. The care with which the author handles this contentious issue is evident in the fact that the reader comes away not burdened by the biases of those for or against plural marriage. Rather, he is furnished with its pros and its cons, its celebrations and its sorrows, all of which are depicted with an authenticity that must come from first hand experience.

But regardless of how fair Mr. Udall is to plural marriage, his tale leaves little doubt of its costs. For humans were never designed to enter into relationships such as these, where the excessive burdens of the supersized family fall upon one man's shoulders, where his mates are locked into subservient relationships that cannot be dissolved, and where children are so plentiful that their names and their troubles are both too easily forgotten. We were designed to bond in pairs, to produce few enough children that we could physically protect and emotionally nourish all of them until they are equipped to face the responsibilities of adulthood on their own. To go against that evolutionary programming is to invite in problems we are ill-equipped to handle, a depressing reality with which Golden is all too familiar.

Mr. Udall takes a long while to arrive at his destination, but his journey, here, is characterized by fascinating emotions, complex entanglements and broken hearts. No, he does not make every word count, but he does ensure that the wellspring of his reader's emotions has been sucked dry by the time his conclusion hits home. Funny, moving and introspective work. (4/5 Stars)