Chronicles of Tornor by Elizabeth A. Lynn

From The Week of February 20, 2012

As much as we are seduced by the relative stability of the world around us into thinking that our culture, our traditions, our history, is eternal, nothing made by man can survive the erosion of the tides of time. Look back even a century and one will find a world dominated by steamships and horses, telegrams and unexplored frontiers. Look back even farther and not even language is comprehensible. No custom, no empire, has yet survived a millennia and it never will. For we are, at root, beings of change, of evolution, a process only accelerated when our change grinds against that of other cultures, producing conflict and chaos which only add fuel to this most mutable fire. Nothing ever lasts. Though Ms. Lynn wraps her tales in Fantasy's familiar trappings, it is this enduring lesson that pervades this contemplative trilogy.

In a land of summer and snow, Tornor, a keep cut out of the northern mountains, is an outpost against raiders and barbarians. Down through the centuries, as its stewardship passes from hand to hand, its power waxes and wanes, its fortunes forever linked to the severity of the threat its occupants must combat. Its inhabitants are hard of body and resilient of character for one must be so in this far-flung land of ice and stone.

In Watchtower, the first and shortest of the trilogy, we find the keep in flames, its master felled by a vicious attack from southerners set on conquest. Ryke, one of the few watchmen to survive the initial assault, is compelled to pledge his service to Tornor's new, rapacious lord in order to ensure the safety of its former heir, prince Errel, a promising youth who will surely be broken by the new lord's laughing cruelties if he is not soon rescued from the keep. Ryke, with the help of two of the Green Clan, southern neutrals possessed of mystery and skill, frees Errel, triggering an adventure through the southern lands, a journey of self-discovery whose path will eventually lead back to Tornor and vengeance for all that was consigned to the flames.

In The Dancers of Arun, centuries have past and there is peace at Tornor. Kerris, a young scribe who lost his arm in a violent assault early in his childhood, is plagued by dreams and visions he cannot understand. Though his job is a relatively straightforward one, transcribing, for posterity, the history of Tornor keep, he cannot concentrate for his Fits, which come upon him randomly, launching him into the minds of others, chiefly, his older brother who was, until recently, well away to the south. But then, to Kerris' surprise, his brother and his band arrive at Tornor, reuniting the separated siblings just in time for Kerris' powers to be recognized and named. He is, like many of the Cheari, a witch, a mentalist who, with training, can augment his powers into a formidable tool. Kerris, who has never loved Tornor more than his brother, agrees to venture south with Kel where their paths will take them into a dangerous rivalry between the Cheari and horse-born nomads of the desert who, in their desperation, turn to violence and extortion to learn the Cheari's secrets. Kerris will have to repair his damaged mind and find himself and his future amidst the tumult of clan conflict.

In Northern Girl, the concluding and best developed work in the trilogy, so much time has past that Ryke and Kerris, so prominent in the prior volumes, are lost to history. However, for as much as their names have vanished, their deeds echo down through time to impact on the present. The clans of Cheari, once so fledgling and small, have blossomed into powerful influences on southland politics, churning the waters of an otherwise peaceful land. Sorren, a servant bonded to the foremost house of one of Arun's most prominent cities, is a young woman who finds herself caught up in mighty events when she inadvertently brings to light a complicated plot to unseat her mistress and shift the city council's power into the hands of selfish interests. These agitators are more than willing to sink to bloodshed and assassination in order to realize their ambitions. While the lover of the city's foremost guardswoman, Sorren tries to find her place and her purpose in the midst of this chaos, a task made all the more complicated by the manifestation of a rare power that allows her mind to see a keep in the north that calls to her in dreams. Will she stay in the south, where life is settled and comfortable, where she can rely upon the loyalty of her prominent friends to keep her safe, or must she answer the call of her heart and explore her northern origins?

Originally published in 1979 and 1980, Ms. Lynn's three-volume epic is both spare and groundbreaking. In one of the stodgiest of fiction's genres, the author liberally populates her tales with gay characters, men and women who do not give a second thought to their lifestyles. They merely follow the wishes of their hearts, hoping this will lead them to happiness. Not only is this refreshingly bold, Ms. Lynn succeeds in this venture without a hint of pretension. She does not seek to overturn the conventions of, or sit in judgement of, the genre. Hers is a completely natural and welcome subversion that, even three decades on from its writing, is potent, a fact which demonstrates, quite clearly, that we have far to go in compelling Fantasy to reflect the broader, cultural trends of our era.

But as much as Ms. Lynn's characters are pleasing, her unusual prose leaves the strongest impression. She has chosen to tell her fascinating tale in what can only be described as Hemingwayan minimalism. The language is exceedingly spare. Characters are only occasionally described and the scenery is only drawn upon in order to provide a backdrop for the intricate dances of plot her puppets execute. There is nothing of the floweriness, or the stuffy innocence that so often characterizes Fantasy. The author, instead, adopts an everyday realism that manages not to be gloomy or grim. Life is what it is. We only fool ourselves if we think otherwise.

The Chronicles of Tornor is an uneven read. Watchtower is little more than a novella. The Dancers of Arun feels, at times, like it occupies a wholly different universe from its fellows. But Northern Girl is first class fantasy fiction. Rife with political machinations and coming-of-age drama, it is a wonderful marriage of character and story that successfully binds the trilogy. Overall, The Chronicles of Tornor may lack the majesty of Martin, the lost innocence of Tolkien, the apocalyptica of Jordan, or the grimness of Abercrombie, but its honesty carves out a niche all its own.

As stilted as it is potent. Memorable, to say the least. (3/5 Stars)

Shadow of The Titanic by Andrew Wilson

From The Week of February 20, 2012

We will each, at one time in our lives, experience a pivotal moment, a maelstrom around which the fortunes of our existence swirl. For some of us, these will be tiny events -- the train we were late for that carried our soulmate, the promotion we missed out on because we were sick and didn't stand out in that impromptu meeting --, the futures that never happened. But for others, these will be colossal disturbances in civilization's tapestry, incidents that not only define our lives but ripple out, infecting the broader culture and impressing upon it lasting legacies. The former is far more common, but the latter is utterly unforgettable. And it is to this that we turn in Mr. Wilson's compelling biography of those who survived the most famous maritime disaster in recent history.

Even if Mr. Cameron's now famous 1997 blockbuster had not re-inflated the legend of the Titanic, the sinking of the unsinkable would still occupy a place of prominence on any list of the top five incidents in the 20th century. Though its sinking claimed the lives of only 1,500 souls, a mere trifle compared to the millions who would later die in the two world wars, and though there were no cameras to capture footage of its demise, tape to be replayed over and over again for a rapt audience, the downfall of the Titanic captured the attention of the western world. For this was, at least from the perspective of 1912, the dawn of the Machine Age, the beginning of the century of progress that would finally banish the pesky problems of starvation and death and deliver humanity into its deserved destiny. The Titanic was a ship for such an age, a sea-born palace, a paean to capitalist prosperity, an indomitable symbol that could not be smote. But then came the fateful night of the 15th of April, 1912, when, while steaming hard through the north Atlantic, it met its fate against that most ancient of Earthly steel; ice.

It was hubris that felled it; no, it was an inattentive captain. No, it was the arrogance of the ship's owner; no, it was dumb misfortune. Buckets of ink have been spilled upon countless sheets of paper in an attempt to eulogize the sinking of the Titanic. Its victims, from the rich to the small, have been memorialized even while its class prejudices have been picked apart, its luxuries marveled over, its errors bemoaned. But what about its survivors? What of them? Yes, they've been interviewed, their impressions preserved in the archives of libraries and television studios, but the attention paid to their accounts has been dwarfed by the sensationalism of the ship's demise and what it said about humanity. No longer. In this, a compilation of the life stories of a dozen men and women who survived this most infamous disaster, Mr. Wilson sets out to balance these most skewed scales.

From the privileged to the poor, from the brave to the cowardly, Mr. Wilson, here, plucks out the most compelling threads of the 710 people who survived the Titanic and, with the benefit of a hundred years of perspective, lays out for us their futures after the most harrowing night of their lives. Vividly, he captures the extent to which, for some, the Titanic became an obsession, an event revisited over and over again as a means of avoiding the fact that it would be their defining moment. For others, it became a shadow behind their eyes, a thing not spoken of, buried pain best confined to the past. And for those most sad few, it became a defining tragedy that claimed the lives of parents and children, friends and loved ones, a darkness endurable for only a short while. All of these narrative strands Mr. Wilson ably weaves into a work far more about survivor's guilt than about the Titanic itself. For here, the ship is merely a means by which to expose both the frailties of the human mind and the unknowable quirkiness of fate.

Shadow of The Titanic is a sad but moving expose. Yes, Mr. Wilson often overreaches, claiming to know the thoughts of his subjects even as they die. But I can forgive him this. After all, he has otherwise assembled an admirable catalogue of the various ways we all try to grapple with tragedy. For while we do generally fall into types, there is no one way to respond to disaster. We are all, in the end, the sum total of our experiences and the extent to which these have shaped our baseline personalities. This alchemy cannot be replicated. And thus, when struck by the hull of fate, we, like bits of ice, scatter in all directions, none of us precisely the same. Fascinating and engrossing. (3/5 Stars)

Lost Kingdom by Julia Flynn Siler

From The Week of February 20, 2012

For those who possess only a passing familiarity with human history, the sins of colonialism are obvious. From the cultural and societal devastation of African nations to the systematic depopulation of North American Natives, virtually every time a superior culture has encountered an inferior one widespread exploitation has been the decisive and shameful result. Humans, after all, find it difficult, at the best of times, to avoid the abuse of power. Asking them to do so when there exists no check against their military or economic might is sadly unrealistic. However, while we are all-too-aware of the savage results of colonialism's corrosive caress, we are less familiar with the origins of these conflicts, the incidents and the moments of happenstance that lay the groundwork for disaster. And so, that Ms. Siler has, here, trained her powerful attentions upon this, western civilization's original sin, is welcome. That she does so while illuminating the fascinating life of a true queen is merely a bonus.

Born in 1838, to powerful Hawaiian chiefs, Lili;Suokalani was the last monarch of the Hawaiian kingdom prior to its annexation by the United States of America. Reared some 50 years after James Cook's discovery of the Hawaiian islands put her nation on the map, Liliu lived a life divided by the two Hawaiis, the Polynesian one that existed for centuries until the arrival of the great British explorer and the Christian one which bloomed with the subsequent advent of protestant missionaries from North America. Consequently, she, like many of her generation, became an amalgam of these two disparate cultural forces, preserving what she could of her tribal heritage while adopting the dress, the speech and the faith of the Anglo-Saxon missionaries invading her land. For make no mistake, theirs was an invasion, a cultural conquest that introduced, into the native population, the ideas of mercantile capitalism, the probity of Christian modesty and the lethality of European diseases which mercilessly ravaged the unprotected Hawaiians.

For all this, Hawaii might well have remained for the Hawaiians were it not for the sugar crop that thrived in its tropical environment. Supplied with an abundance of cheap, Asian labor, American entrepreneurs found Hawaii a profitable venture, settling on and cultivating the land in a manner that soon made the emigrants wealthy. This financial stake, combined with a built-in sense of superiority, emboldened the westerners to take a hand in Hawaiian affairs, to ensure that the good times kept on rolling. And so, when the Hawaiian crown finally fell from the bowed head of a profligate king and into the arms of the island nation's last queen, they felt entitled to act against her in the preservation of their power. In doing so, they, at knifepoint, imposed upon Hawaii a hated constitution that not only paved the way for American annexation, it guaranteed the death of the Hawaiian way of life.

Lost Kingdom is a spellbinding biography. Ms. Siler casts a wide net, fetching from the tides of history the preachers and robber barons, the governors and would-be do-gooders, who shaped Hawaii during its defining century. But as much as she wonderfully captures the excesses of David Kalakaua, the evolution of Sanford Dole and the greed of Claus Spreckels, it is the steadfastness and the tragedy of Lili;Suokalani around which her history pivots. For it is she who represents Hawaii's transformation from a tribal kingdom into the Pacific outpost of an imperialist America. It is she whose life is forever changed by the zealousness of missionaries and the self-interest of enterprising Americans. It is she who does all that she is asked to do, follows the westernizing plan her betters have laid out for her, only to find herself trapped in a loveless marriage, her people riven by disease, her kingdom abolished by force of arms, and her freedom constricted by interests far more powerful than she. Quite the reward for a life lived in the pursuit of western virtue...

Ms. Siler does eminent justice to a difficult and tangled history. In doing so, she lends gravitas to a story Ms. Vowell's breezy account failed to convey. This is no less the anatomy of imperialist expansion. Let its lessons not be forgotten. (4/5 Stars)

The Revisionists by Thomas Mullen

From The Week of February 13, 2012

Human beings are far from perfect. Whether it's the mundane error that manifests from simple inattention or the harsh words spat in a moment of anger, we do and say things we would give anything to take back. For while errors are instantaneous, their consequences can last a lifetime: ending relationships, ruining careers, destroying families. But while a single human's thoughtlessness has the power to wound, civilization's wrongs can end the world. After all, only a civilization's racism, xenophobia, stubbornness, can defeat entire populations. Only this groupthink can make possible the aggressive mindset necessary to create nuclear weapons programs and use their destructiveness against sentient beings. If we'd give anything to take back rash words, what would we give to take back 9/11, or Hiroshima, or the Kennedy Assassination, moments in time in which the world shuddered onto a newer, darker course? Mr. Mullen speculates in his fascinating and expansive novel.

In present day Washington D.C., the nexus of the world's greatest empire, individual events, insignificant in their singularity, are converging fast on a single moment in time. Though,separately, they lack the necessary momentum to throw the world into chaos, collectively, their power might well ignite a nuclear war that will devour civilization as we know it. The Conflagration, as it will be known, will plunge humanity into centuries of darkness and despair, survivors scrabbling to piece back together a few pieces of their broken world just in the hope of making the next day a bit better than the previous. Anything more ambitious than that will be beyond them for generations. But then order will re-emerge, an order that will allow the weaving together of a society, a newer and better evolution of humanity which will not make the same mistakes of the prior civilization, a humanity that will strive to be perfect, harmonious and pure.

In this future time, when confronted with evidence that a rebellious faction within this supposedly perfect society is using time-travel technology to return to previous eras, in an attempt to meant the broken past, this new and better civilization flails for answers. How could such an abomination occur right under their own noses? Feverishly, they train a small squad of special agents to follow the dissidents back into the timeline, armed with orders to kill the tamperers at every opportunity. History must be preserved. For if history is tinkered with, what will become of the perfect civilization? What if it never emerges? What if humanity is snuffed out and darkness reigns forever?

Zed, one such operative, is returned to the early 21st century where, in the shadow of the Beltway, he works and kills to preserve the future. Ruthlessly determined to execute his mission, Zed's belief in his destiny does not waver until he begins to encounter alarming discrepancies between what he was told by his handlers and the truth he can see with his own eyes. Afraid to return to his time for fear his growing suspicions will be confirmed, Zed turns, instead, to a grieving woman whose brother was killed in the Iraq War and an idealistic but disenchanted agent of the megalithic national-security apparatus to help him uncover a terrifying truth, that nothing is what it seems to be and that the fate of humanity now rests in his uncertain hands.

The Revisionists is a methodical and moving portrait of human desire and the lengths to which we will go to make our wishes reality. Zed, the operative from the future, is fuelled by grief born of tragedy which blinds him to the lies he's been told. But when the blinders come off, he knows he must act, if only to honor the memory of those he has lost. Tasha, the sister of the dead lieutenant, is radicalized by her despair into opposing an endless war that has claimed so many and done so little. Leo, the national security agent, tries to do one good deed to make up for a terrible mistake and, in doing so, sets off a chain of events that nearly brings down the whole house of cards, all for the affections of a woman through whom he can expunge his sins. Yes, this is fundamentally science fiction, but the author has chosen to deploy the conventions of the genre as a means of telling a human story about love and loss and their unparalleled power to change the world.

Mr. Mullen brings an essayist's gravitas to one of science fiction's most abused tropes (time travel), creating one of the most thoughtful examinations of this endlessly fascinating technology in some time. His conclusion, that it, like nuclear weapons, is a power we are not sufficiently wise to wield, rings true. After all, while technology is amoral, its wielders are not. They can put it to whatever use they desire, good or ill, a prospect that should rightfully dampen the enthusiasm of the proponents of time travel.

We learn from our mistakes. If we erase them, we learn nothing. If darkness is the price we must pay for our folly, then darkness it is. For anything else is just an easy way out. And we are already experts at that. (4/5 Stars)

The Nano Flower: Greg Mandel 03 by Peter F. Hamilton

From The Week of February 13, 2012

That our maturity lags behind our inventiveness is one of humanity's gravest shortcomings. For while our brains are capable of phenomenal feats of innovation, the results of which have transformed the world around us, our adolescent morality, in not growing at a pace with our intellectual might, has left us at a loss as to how to come to grips with our power. We are children who have been given handguns to play with. And lacking the training, the respect and the knowledge, we invariably fire blindly, only realizing, with experience, our mistakes.

. This is a difficult lesson to learn for it's not as though maturity is something that can be quantified. More over, it's not as though we can all collectively decide to stop innovating until we're ready to cope with the next step in the technological revolution. We have no choice but to hold on tight and ride the ride, praying that the power we have invented does not fall into the wrong hands. This is the theme of Mr. Hamilton's concluding novel of the Greg Mandel series. It is one that serves the work well.

Now fully on the mend from the twin devastations of political extremism and economic stagnation, England is once again a power to be reckoned with in the international arena. Having nearly been wiped out by anthropogenic climate change, the effects of which elevated its seas, destroyed its crops and turned its climate tropical, the UK is still afloat largely thanks to the powerful and ubiquitous Event Horizon, a corporate superpower with its countless, enterprising tentacles sunk deeply into every technological venture man's dreams have made into reality. Helmed by Julia Evans, its stoic and sound-hearted CEO and granddaughter of its founder, the business titan has almost singlehandedly transformed orbital space travel into a fairly common occurrence, deploying its numerous resources to the harvesting of materials from nearby asteroids in order to replenish Earth's dwindling non-renewables. All this while setting a benchmark of ambition to the rest of the human race which has been so beaten and battered by the Warming.

But after 20 years of largely steady growth, all of that precious progress is in jeopardy. For Royan, Julia's prince consort and one-time, big league data thief, has disappeared. The only clue left behind is a strange flower which is carried to Julia Evans by a high-tech courtesan who is no more aware of its mysterious origins than its recipient. But when Evans has the flower analyzed and realizes it is extra-terrestrial in nature, she is plunged into a race against her competitors to discover just what the flower means and what its consequences are to a human race still recovering from three traumatic decades of global upheaval. For the last time, she turns to her old friend Greg Mandel, ex-military, ex-PI turned orange farmer, for help. After all, Royan means as much to the one-time hardman as he does to Julia and, if he has anything to do with the alien heart of this tangled web, he is in serious danger.

While the Greg Mandel series has had its ups and downs, its successes and its misfires, The Nano Flower is a fitting end to a rewarding trilogy. In advancing the story 20 years from the previous novel, Mr. Hamilton has neatly dispensed with two of the trilogy's biggest problems, Julia Evan's awkward youth and the malformed Peoples Socialist Party whose collectivist policies ground England to a halt. The former, which was a significant drag upon the momentum of A Quantum Murder, is all-but forgotten here. For a middle-aged Julia Evans is far more capable of carrying off the machinations bestowed upon her by her creator than was the adolescent of the prior tales. The jackbooted latter is swept firmly into the past with the dawn of a new world that has replaced the nation state with superpowered corporations that have moved well beyond the restraints of state government. As grim as this future may be, it makes infinitely more sense than the era of the clownish PSP.

The Nano Flower has its weaknesses. Periodically, it devolves into interminable battle sequences customary of Alastair Reynolds. More over, it continues to put forward the argument that future will and ought to be written by business titans whose genius and eccentricity will be the engines that drive us onward. The former is a matter of personal taste. The latter, meanwhile, is at least redeemed by the author's acknowledgement that this approach is an ultimately problematic one in which humanity's future more or less becomes dependent upon the personal character of a handful of hyper elites. This is more than he was willing to grant in either of the prior novels. Given that I've pointed out the flaws in this argument twice before, it's only fair to acknowledge the extent to which the author has tried to shore up, here, the holes in his case.

A fantastic and memorable series... At times philosophical, vengeful, sexy and futuristic, it fulfilled its ambitions to be more than run-of-the-mill science fiction. These were as much experiments in sociology and human nature as they were high-tech thrillrides meant to take us on a vicarious journey into tomorrow. And though A Quantum Murder was the only true mystery in the lot, the plot here keeps the reader guessing, often enough. Lovely work. (3/5 Stars)

The Geography Of Bliss by Eric Weiner

From The Week of February 13, 2012

For many, happiness is an elusive utopia of the mind, a paradise glimpsed during life's greatest moments but whose glory can never be sustained for longer than ones wedding, or the birth of ones child. For more lasting peace, hobbies have to be tried, vacations experienced, drugs sampled, before the inevitable truth sets in, that life is a grind illuminated by periods of beautiful triumph. Maybe this is life's optimal configuration; after all, is it not discontent that drives us to improve our lives? Is it not discontent that makes the perfect moments all the more special? Or maybe this is nonsense and unhappiness is nothing more than one of misery's many facades. As an inveterate grump, Mr. Weiner endeavors to find the truth in this, his delightful piece of travel journalism.

From Dutch dope-houses to Bhutan's Gross National Happiness, from Iceland's icy darkness to Qatar's desert modernity, Mr. Weiner has embarked on a global search for happiness. Sure, some measure of every population is happy, but what society can claim to be the happiest and why? What social, political and cultural forces best promote societal happiness and are they replicable? Can they be adopted by more discontented societies in an effort to improve the general wellbeing? Yes, the orderliness of northern Europe appears to promote happiness amongst its citizenry, but is this simply an outgrowth of a homogeneous population? If so, is this lack of homogeneity a cause behind why the United States ranks so low on the happiness scale despite its abundance of wealth? Or is wealth a poor indicator of happiness? Mr. Weiner asks all these questions and more as he turns the search for happiness nearly into a spectator sport, journeying from the efficient peace of Switzerland to the decaying grimness of Moldova for answers which, while ultimately elusive, are enlightening and entertaining in the pursuing.

For all its author's droll humor, The Geography of Bliss is a fun romp across the planet in search of something that, it seems, can only be found in the mind. Though the general happiness can be enhanced by inculcating a handful of values into society, chiefly trust of ones fellows, ones government and ones public institutions, all of which appear to help score northern Europe so high on the happiness scale, it is ones own mindset that determines their degree of contentment. This is most evident in Mr. Weiner's stay in tiny Bhutan, a Himalayan kingdom which claims to be the happiest nation on Earth. For after exploring Qatar's rich but cultureless deserts, after philosophizing in the all-too-permissive marijuana shops in Holland, after experiencing the boredom of Swiss monotony, it is this deeply Buddhist nation that Mr. Weiner finds the most enlightening. For while Bhutan is fairly poor relative to the rest of the world, the country's citizens appear to focus less on material pleasures, which are finite and transient, and more on reveling in the natural glory of the world which they have chosen to preserve to the extent their sovereignty allows. This has granted them a serenity, a release from worry and obligation, that troubles so much of the world.

There are no grand revelations here. Mr. Weiner does not discover the key to happiness; far from it. But in the extent to which he explores the roles that culture, trust, faith and our natural environment play in societal happiness, he has touched on some important ideas that may well steer readers towards tips to improving their own happiness. For happiness is not a universal state. It is not a formula that, once cracked, can be applied to everyone. It is an absence of deeply personal anxieties that can only be soothed when their underlying causes have been addressed. An external cure-all cannot be found for a fundamentally internal disquiet.

Deeply entertaining and completely riveting. This is travel writing at its most introspective. (4/5 Stars)x

Europe's Tragedy by Peter H. Wilson

From The Week of February 13, 2012

There is no end to the abyss of human folly. It is an infinite chasm into which entire generations of humans have been consigned thanks to the arrogance and the superciliousness of the so-called great men of history. Their unwillingness to allow those beneath them to live as they wish, along with their petty need to impose their will upon events, have burdened decades, sometimes even centuries, with death, despair and the ruination of our hopes and dreams. If they were merely CEOs and we boards of their corporations, we could but fire them. But alas, history is not so tidy, or just. Instead, we can only look back and remember those destructive epochs and learn from them so that they might never again be repeated. Of all of these disturbing times, few were as nihilistic as the 30-years War. Mr. Wilson demonstrates this in exhaustive and soul-crushing detail.

Declared in Bohemia by the dramatic defenestration of two officials of the Holy Roman Emperor, and ended three decades later with the Peace of Westfalia, the 30-years War (1618-1648) was a savage conflict that convulsed most of Europe. Staged primarily in the Germanic states, it was the seemingly inevitable manifestation of long-simmering tensions between protestants and catholics, each of whom were compelled by circumstance to uncomfortably coexist in a largely Catholic empire. Though the Peace of Augsburg (1555) had sought to avoid this conflict by acknowledging Protestantism and Catholicism as official religions of the Holy Roman Empire, and by granting the princes of each of its 225 states the power to choose the dominant religion in his state, this peace would last only 60 years until the imperial elevation of the staunchly Catholic Ferdinand. Fearing that Ferdinand would betray the Augsburg peace, the protestants rebelled, triggering this long and terrible war that killed eight million people, deforested much of western Europe, lead to famine and disease that reduced by half the populations within the conflict zones, and drew in the kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden, France and Spain before the last gun was fired, the last sword swung.

For all of its destructiveness, for all of the price in blood and grief paid so that princes and kings could play at war, some good emerged from this conflict. The Peace of Westfalia formalized the notion of a sovereign state whose laws would have to be adhered to by all of its constituents; it ended the era of mercenary warfare popularized by Italian feuds, ushering in national armies to replace them; and, perhaps most significantly, it cemented the existence of the Dutch Republic and ruined the fortune of the Spanish Empire, events which helped to catalyze the rise of mercantile capitalism over authoritarian imperialism, setting into motion a 200-year trend that would eventually lead to the end of a world of competing empires.

This is a long and difficult tale, involving dozens of countries, hundreds of captains, and thousands of skirmishes. Consequently, we must cut Mr. Wilson some slack in the length of his telling. Nonetheless, while his thousand-page account is academically rigorous, its mind-numbing tedium makes it a nearly impossible read. Europe's Tragedy reads like the worst university textbook, an interminable bore so chalked full of dates and battles, kings and whores, captains and criminals, that the unanchored mind flails for something, anything, to grab onto in order to avoid being swept away by outgoing tides of data. Mr. Wilson possesses absolutely no capacity for distinguishing the crucial from the insignificant. Instead, he includes every detail, every shred of information, packing his work until its seams are stressed to the breaking. Whatever value this work had, whatever effort it made to educate, is lost in an undifferentiated sea of minutia.

This is an important war that proved to be a turning point in human history. Mr. Wilson does the conflict justice by thoroughly covering its every twist and turn. This service, this accomplishment, should be acknowledged and appreciated. But we learn best through stories, through narratives. Hell, we learn best wen our eyes haven't blurred over from a sea of charts and ink. Therefore, as much as Mr. Wilson has succeeded in presenting us a history of the 30-years War, he has failed utterly to make us care about, much less to immerse us in, its times. This is a flaw I cannot forgive. (2/5 Stars)

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

From The Week of February 06, 2011

Death comes in many forms. It can be slow and painful, devouring our loved ones with the mercilessness only the unfeeling can summon; or It can be swift and savage, a wrecking ball that smashes through our carefully constructed lives, leaving behind nothing more than the shattered remnants of our hopes and dreams. It can be sent into motion by the thoughtless actions of others, or it can arise from our own stars, our own careless words. Death's only certainty is that it will come for all of us eventually. How we face that reality, or how we endure being the ones left behind, is the only thing we can control. Lionel Shriver has penned a wonderful story about love, motherhood and the limits of what the human soul can endure, but it's the prospect of death that stalks every page, injecting the work with a quiet, dreadful intensity.

Kevin Katchadourian has everything a western teenager could want. His wealthy parents have furnished him with a beautiful home, the latest gadgets, the finest schools and limitless options for a bright future. But Kevin Katchadourian wants none of these things. In fact, he loathes all of them in equal measure, heaping contempt upon them with the same indolent smirk he's worn for most of his fifteen years. Kevin Katchadourian has never wanted anything; he has never felt that pleasure. There is only boredom, boredom and the game of life.

Kevin's puzzled parents try, in their own ways, to fix their son. Eva, his mother,attempts to overcome her maternal ambivalence by showering her first-born with attention and education. But when her years of effort and career-sacrifice are met with the same affectless cynicism, the same harsh apathy she's always received from him, she soon surrenders to her fear and dismay, emotions she deploys as a shield to protect her from the thing she bore. Franklin, his father, rejects his wife's fears for their son. Deeply protective of the strange boy, he chooses to overlook the dozens of sinister incidents that plague their years together, earnest in his unrealistic desire for a normal American family. The more Eva attacks out of fear, the more Franklin defends out of anger until that fateful day, in 1999, when their marriage and family are shattered forever. For Kevin has taken matters into his own hands and, for his family and his victims, nothing will ever be the same.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is exquisite torture. Lionel shriver seduces her readers into offering themselves up to her emotional rack where she shackles them and forces them to endure the darkest, most authentic conception of what it would be like to be the parent of a sociopath. Step by step, anecdote by anecdote, we watch as Kevin ruthlessly and masterfully plays off his mother's suspicions against his father's biases until his parents are tearing themselves apart, leaving Kevin to quietly go about the business of murder. From the beginning, we know full well the extent of Kevin's crimes. Nonetheless, we must journey back with Eva as, through her expository letters to Franklin, written in the wake of this darkness, we learn just how it came to be that a loving and successful couple fell to such ruin.

Though, here, Ms. Shriver's eye for detail is as sharp as her ear for language is sound, these virtues are secondary to the novel's foremost asset. In compelling us to read Eva's own meticulous reconstruction of her shattered life, we are exposed to the plight and the mindset of a parent whose son is a murderer. The guilt, shame and self-recrimination pour forth from Eva in a tide of emotion for which we can only feel sympathy. For only the cruel and the abused set out to raise monstrous children. The Katchadourians are good, honest, successful Americans who gave their son everything he could want. It wasn't their fault that he was born an emotionless sociopath. And yet, society, in need of someone to blame for the murderer's harmful ways, strings up the parents for the sins of the offspring, confident in their belief that ugly must have a root cause.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is an unmatched portrait of parents struggling with a child gone bad. Though Ms. Shriver imagines, here, an extreme case, we can all remember incidents in which our parents, or the parents of those we know, out of fatigue, or shame, or an unwillingness to see, looked the other way while their children wronged themselves, their friends, or even their parents. Once that pattern is set, it cannot be unmade. And in this, Franklin, the father, is perhaps Ms. Shriver's most successful character. For his stubborn desire to believe the best in his monster of a son provoked in this reader storms of anger and despair the likes of which I've rarely experienced with literature. He is, writ large, the symptom of a problem that plagues all modern, western families, that peculiar desire to believe the best in our flesh and blood despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

A work as devastating as it is pitch perfect. Expect to have only the tattered remains of a soul left when it is over. (5/5 Stars)

A Quantum Murder: Greg Mandel 02 by Peter F. Hamilton

From The Week of February 06, 2011

Though the twin forces of progress and innovation ensure that almost every aspect of our world is in a constant state of change, there remain, in our lives, a handful of immutable truths. The sun will always rise and fall; the seas will always ebb and flow; and the human mind will forever be ours. For as much as drugs can alter our consciousnesses and various meditative techniques can elevate our state of mind, our thoughts, our emotions, our essential selves, belong solely to us. No matter how hard they try, no one else can steal them from us. But what if, someday, this unshakable law could be violated by the advancement of technology? What if, in the future, our minds are open books that can be rewritten against our will? What would that world look like and how would we be safe? It is to this scary future that Mr. Hamilton turns in this, his second instalment in his Greg Mandel Series. His conclusions are chilling.

In a near-future Britain making a slow and painful recovery from political extremism and economic oblivion, life is hot, sweaty and difficult. Rampant Climate Change has banished the temperate British Isles to the history books, replacing this pleasant memory with a tropical reality beset by frequent monsoons which lash england with vengeful savagery. Perhaps the UK might have prepared for such disastrous weather by educating its citizens and implementing public works projects to help mitigate the damage. But instead of preparing for the inevitable, the country has spent the last ten critical years clenched in the authoritarian fist of the Peoples Socialist Party (PSP) whose ruinous collectivist policies have allowed England's infrastructure to decay to nearly pre-20th-century levels. Yes, the PSP has been defeated and political freedoms have since been restored, but the balance of power is tenuous and total chaos is beating at the door.

Through this socioeconomic maelstrom navigates Britain's best economic hope. Event Horizon is one of the world's most preeminent corporations. Focusing on bleeding edge technologies that hope to repair a battered Earth while eventually sending humanity to the stars, it is helmed by Julia Evans, the young but brilliant granddaughter of its now postmortal founder. Beautiful but deeply isolated, Julia must fend off rapacious attacks from both external and internal enemies while steering her grandfather's pride and joy through the tempestuous waters of the 21st century. It's no wonder then that when Britain's leading physicist, and Event-Horizon collaborator, is found grotesquely murdered in his own highly secure home, she's worried enough to summon Greg Mandel out of retirement to solve a most gruesome case, a case with chilling implications for the future of both humanity and the world it has ruined.

In almost every way, A Quantum Murder is an improvement on the novel that gave it life. Energized by a scalpel-sharp mystery, it is embittered the cynicism of Cyberpunk, sweetened with a splash of salacious sex and finished with a cast of interesting characters to create a heady concoction worthy of a techno-thriller. Like with Mindstar Rising, Greg Mandel is the novel's strongest presence. The military veteran turned hardman detective has just started to learn how to be happy in semi-retirement when his empathic abilities once again return him to the frontlines of a war dominated by unscrupulous humans and powerful corporate interests. It is a tangle a genius would struggle to unknot. Mandel's legendary intuition will have to suffice.

For all of the mystery's brilliance and Mandel's brutish charm, problems remain. Though the PSP is thankfully confined to a secondary role, it still occasionally makes its inane presence known. See my review of Mindstar Rising for a more in-depth critique of this somewhat bizarre conceit. More troubling is the extent to which Mr. Hamilton reduces Julia Evans to a lonely, obsessive whiner. Ambitious and clever in the trilogy's opening act, she is here reduced to a collection of unflattering, girlish cliches. It may well be that the author is using her to depict how a young woman might cope with possessing absolute power. If so, it is not believably done. Julia is maturer in the first novel than she is here and she had no less power then than she has now. It seems likely then that Mr. Hamilton was simply stumped as to how to deploy the character here. Whatever the cause, her third of the novel falls resoundingly flat.

Notwithstanding its flaws, A Quantum Murder is catalyzed by a top-shelf mystery from which Mr. Hamilton only occasionally diverts. Slimmer, meaner and sleeker... Excellent entertainment. (4/5 Stars)

Faceless Killers: Kurt Wallander 01 by Henning Mankell

From The Week of February 06, 2011

What is the cost to the human soul of looking too long into the abyss of crime? Can we be trained to slough off its ugliness, or must we always be tarnished by witnessing its destructive outcomes? It is a vital question not only for society, which seeks to understand and reduce crime, but for our police as well. For it is they who must repeatedly wade into the darkest corners of civilization, reconstruct there the grimmest crimes, and imagine from them the possible motives for such cruel deeds. Can they withstand such journeys without thinking the worst of us, or is it too much to understand the dark geography of the human soul without succumbing to its siren's call? Mr. Mankell deals with this question and more in this first, cold instalment in his famed series. His answer is not encouraging.

Hailing from the farmlands of southern Sweden, Kurt Wallander is a police officer as brilliantly insightful as he is self-destructive. For though he possesses all the characteristics one desires in a criminal investigator, diligence, doggedness and thoroughness, he is capable of bouts of anger, moroseness and self-pity all-too-typical of the average human. No wonder then that he has relinquished his wife to divorce, his best friend to horse-breeding and his daughter nearly to suicide, grave losses that have left him with only his father and sister as social connections to the broader world. The former, a painter, has never approved of his choice to become a cop and the latter has made her own life, well away from tiny Ystad in which nothing ever happens.

All that changes on January 11th, 1990, when, in the midst of a cold night, an elderly couple are brutally attacked in their farmhouse. Tortured and tormented, the husband dies before help can reach them while his wife manages to survive the week in hospital. There, before she joins her husband in death, she whispers to the police the only clue to the origins of her attackers, a single word that has the power to shatter the homogeneous peace of this sleepy town. "Foreign..." Armed with this trigger to a social timebomb, Kurt Wallander leads a team of local police on a search for the couple's ruthless murderers all while trying to prevent Ystad from succumbing to the savagery of ethnic strife.

As emotionally remote as it is chillingly authentic, Faceless Killers is perhaps the best example of that brand of Nordic crime fiction which has since been made so internationally famous by Stieg Larsson's best-selling Millennium Trilogy. One of Larsson's inspirations, Mr. Mankell, here, rejects the sensationalism of more Western crime fiction, so populated by mass-murdering fiends and the innocent women they prey upon, for a single act of violence which is all the more potent for standing alone amidst a sea of procedural drama. Here, less is very much more as the reader watches, through Wallander, a town try to come to grips with that which does not happen in peaceful Scandinavia.

The investigation, whose numbing monotony bleeds authenticity, is almost secondary to Mr. Mankell's journey of social anthropology which, without bias, reveals the limitations of homogeneity. Any crime, any negative development, is automatically blamed on external influences. After all, no native would be capable of such evil. In reality, every culture produces its own bad apples. Only multiculturalism has the power to remove our xenophobic blinders and allow us to see that, at root, we are all the same.

Wallander is the representation of this xenophobia. He is outwardly a pillar of the community while, inwardly, he is an impulsive drunk who can only flail helplessly as his various relationships deteriorate around him. He does his job with commendable skill and determination while a profound misery engulfs him. He does his duty while being pessimistic about the future of Sweden and, more broadly, humanity. His troubled goodness is a wonderful depiction of the life of a policeman in a world of white.

Not without its issues; the work is arid and overly procedural. However, given that these are qualities necessary for the novel to make its numerous points about the human condition, it's hard to imagine how the author could have avoided these drawbacks. Chilling work. (4/5 Stars)

Hedy's Folly by Richard Rhodes

From The Week of February 06, 2011

For some, life is a constant struggle between internal aspirations and external expectations, between what we want and what others want us to be. Customarily, these expectations flow from our parents who understandably infuse us with their own biases and beliefs. But for some famous few, they extend out to society as a whole which, seizing upon our talent at a game, a pursuit, a school of thought, compels us to do what they would have us be. No matter how much external pressure is applied to us, we have our own wishes. It does not automatically follow that being good at something means that it must become our life's aim. Sometimes the heart desires a different challenge, a different destiny, one which the world would, for reasons of bias, rather deny us. This is precisely the difficulty Hedy Lamarr faced throughout her long life. And though she never entirely overcame it, she ensured that history will remember her for that which she was most proud.

Born in Vienna to middleclass Jewish parents, Hedy Lamarr lived a long and fascinating life. Possessing a keen mind and a famous beauty, she was a willful adolescent transfixed by the arts. Initially a stage actress, at seventeen, she graduated to work in film at which time she performed her most infamous role as Eva in Ecstasy, a 1933 film made controversial by sexual content which, though tame by modern standards, was salacious for 1930s Europe. Her fame and beauty -- she was once declared to be the most beautiful woman alive -- earned her attention from one of Austria's wealthiest men, but marriage never appeared to suit Ms. Lamarr and she broke the arrangement to emigrate to the United States where, within a few years, she was one of Hollywood's brightest stars.

Never comfortable with being perceived as a beauty, Ms. Lamarr was given a chance to express her more intellectual talents when, with the onset of World War II, she and George Antheil, a film scorer, developed a new technique for frequency hopping which they patented and sent off to the Navy in hopes that it would be used to improve the remote control of American torpedos. The technique, which later became a cornerstone for wireless technology, was ignored by the US Armed Forces and shelved for decades before fresh eyes and opened minds in the 1960s and 70s returned it to academic prominence where, in subsequent years, it became the bedrock for many of the devices we use today.

Hedy's Folly is a slim but powerful biography of a remarkable woman. Though, for fans of Ms. Lamarr, the book contains few revelations, Mr. Rhodes, an award-winning historian, succeeds in interweaving her story with the even lesser known George Antheil to create a portrait of two inventive souls who, troubled by war and yearning for recognition, strove to create an achievement of the mind for which they could be proud. Though denied timely recognition, the extent to which their ideas helped fuel the technological revolution of the last 20 years ensures that their legacy will far outshine any glory Hollywood has the power to bestow.

As much as Mr. Rhodes pleases with his narrative and as welcome as the recognition might have been for both Lamarr and Antheil, the work's strongest virtue is the degree to which it exposes us to the minds of inventors. We live in a cultural age that venerates individuals. From Steve Jobs to Warren Buffett, from Bill Gates to George Soros, we are in awe of and marvel at the accomplishments of once ordinary men and women who shattered the rules of the game of life by shaping the world instead of being shaped by it. Consequently, we've become enamored with their stories and the secrets to their success, hopeful that, if we mine their wisdom long enough, some measure of their brilliance will rub off on us. Perhaps it will. Perhaps we can learn from them. Perhaps not all of their success is due to being in the right place at the right time. But such believers will find little comfort here for Hedy's Folly strongly suggests that inventiveness is a quality with which only some of us are blessed, that it cannot be bestowed like a gift. It is not reducible to an equation. It is the capacity to make intuitive connections that open up previously unconsidered avenues of thought. Sobering to say the least.

Quick and engaging work. Ms. Lamarr deserves to be remembered as a pioneer of our world. this volume certainly helps to make this a reality. (3/5 Stars)

Into The Silence by Wade Davis

From The Week of February 06, 2011

What are the limits of human endurance? It's fashionable to declare that we are only constrained by our expectations, that, if we could but throw off the mental and societal shackles we place upon ourselves, anything is achievable. Deep down, though, we all know this is nonsense. Yes, this pretty fiction may benefit us as a sop to our egos and a handy tool for motivation, but its utility ends there. Humans are animals and, like animals, our bodies can only endure so much pain and numbness, heat and cold, light and oblivion, before we surrender. But however compelling this logic may be, it does nothing to prevent the bravest and craziest among us from pushing themselves to that fateful line, to that moment beyond which death is assured. This is the macabre but fascinating theme that plays beneath Mr. Davis' intriguing but interminable history of the Mallory-lead expeditions to climb Mount Everest in the 1920s. Its affect will linger for some time.

In many ways, World War I destroyed the promise of the 20th century. In their arrogance, kings and politicians capitalized on all the grand, technological promise of their age and deployed it in a global conflict that sent millions of young men senselessly to early graves. The war, which lasted four painful years, ruined economies, ripped apart social fabrics, ended empires and inaugurated an age of mass-slaughter that characterized the whole of the century. The war was so costly that, In 1914, one out of every three British men, from 13 to 24, was killed. This was not a darkness from which any civilization could easily return. And yet, in his attempts to reach the summit of the world, one son of this slaughter would do his part to heal the wounded ego of a battered Britain and, in doing so, taste greatness.

The son of a clergyman, George Mallory was a tall and unusually attractive man who, after being educated at all the right schools, and after rubbing shoulders with the famed Bloomsbury group, was sent, like many of his friends, to war. But after making it through that terrible cyclone unscathed, he fixed upon a new mission, one that would take him far from the unimaginable devastation of western Europe. He would test himself against Mount Everest. The world's tallest peek at 29,000 feet, the mountain, nestled deep in the heart of forbidden country, had never before been summited. What's more, it was, or so its Tibetan natives believed, inhabited by great spirits whose wrath would be aroused by any attempt to climb its sacred slopes.

Accepting the former as a challenge and dismissing the latter as silly superstition, Mallory effectively lead three expeditions to the mountain from 1921 to 1924, each one financially and technically backed by Britain's prestigious Alpine Club. But even steeled by the Great War, supplemented by the finest gear, and willed onward by the most earnest desire for success and fortune, the first two efforts to scale the mountain ended in failure not a thousand feet from the elusive peek. The final ascent, in 1924, turned into the mystery of the century as Mallory and his climbing companion disappeared, pulled down into Everest's icy embrace and trapped there for 70 years until climbers in 1999 discovered their well-preserved bodies.

At nearly 700 pages, Into The Silence is a mind-numbingly thorough reconstruction of Mallory, his many companions and their three attempts to conquer the world's highest peek. Mr. Davis leaves no climber unacknowledged in his singlehanded attempt to fill out each man's background and to ground their collective achievements in the most traumatic event of their era. In this, the work becomes as much a history of war and its consequences as it is a paean the veterans of the Alpine Club whose ambitions knew no bounds. To the extent that Mr. Davis furnishes us with a detailed, chronological recount of the Mallory expeditions, Into The Silence is a success. However, the sheer voluminousness of the result is enough to cause the reader's eyes to blur with fatigue. For the author's exhaustive research overwhelms the reader, leaving him gasping for air as he is drowned in a sea of secondary players, most of whom have been lost to time.

At times, Into The Silence is compelling; the physical deprivations these men endured for the achievement of a goal is remarkable and well-deserving of celebration. Their lives are interesting, their pasts moving. But the work, otherwise, collapses under its own weight, leaving the reader flailing for purchase. the narrative too often digresses into detail that should have found the cutting room floor, causing the work to often lose focus. Oppressively informative... (3/5 Stars)

Far to Go by Alison Pick

From The Week of January 30, 2012

Though, as a world, we've come some way to restricting state power, it remains a potent force that can easily become pernicious when it is not checked by robust opposition. For with a few, clever manipulations, the state can tap into its people's worst fears, stoke them, inflame them, and then harness and shape the resulting anger into a blowtorch of violence and destruction, a righteous weapon that can be deployed against anyone foolish enough to stand in its way. Not only has this curse of nationalism been extensively discussed in countless works, its results are still visible in the ghost-filled battlefields of western Europe where two such bloody, propagandist wars were fought just in the last hundred years. Less visible, though, are the individual wounds inflicted by such conflicts, the costs, to families and their offspring, that are born in silent misery. It is to these small-scale pains to which we turn in Far to Go, the suffering of a single family who stand in for so many. It is a matter on which Ms. Pick speaks with passion and clarity.

The year is 1939 and, though Neville Chamberlain believes he has bargained with Hitler for "peace in our time," he has, in reality, purchased a few months of quiet at the cost of millions of souls. For in exchange for this brief respite, England has agreed to look the other way while Nazi Germany gobbles up Czechoslovakia and the Sudetenland, territories it considers German by dint of the ethnically German populations who live there. Though this is notionally true of at least a portion of the population, these territories consider themselves free actors, imbued with their own traditions and councils, cultures and notions. They are proud to be who and what they are. The prospect of being annexed by a fascist Germany, and having all that they know overturned, is as terrifying as it is inevitable.

Pavel Bauer is a proud Czechoslovakian who, until the coming of the Nazis, never thought much about his Jewish heritage. He filled his days with family and the operation of his successful factory which earned him a comfortable, quiet existence. But as the Third Reich descends upon him and his country, Pavel, for all his wisdom, spirit and kindness, is no more able to defend himself than his country. Abandoned by France and England, Pavel and his country are forced into a succession of humiliating retreats: armies absorbed, factories repurposed, Jews disenfranchised. Eventually, faced with betrayal on all sides, Pavel flees to Prague, attempting to plan an escape for his young family, but doom seems to stalk his every step and not even the love of a good woman can keep the Damoclesian sword from descending upon him and the country he loves so much.

Longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, Far to Go is a stunning novel. Told from the perspective of the Bauer's tender-hearted nanny, it is an exquisitely detailed reconstruction of everyday life in the midst of apocalyptic disaster. For the Bauers are witnessing nothing less than the end of everything they know. Though Ms. Pick succeeds in vividly reconstructing Czechoslovakia during World War II, crafting a cast of believable characters and embedding them in the midst of that nation's tragic circumstances, her genius truly shines in the extent to which she details the individual efforts of the Bauers to fend off the darkness. Holding onto his pride and his decency, Pavel tries to be stoic in the face of Nazi degradations, to endure their fists, their words and their deeds with silent courage that gets him nowhere. Meanwhile, his far more pragmatic wife, Anneliese, while fragile and emotionally remote, yields to the inevitable and tries to bargain with it in hopes of earning leniency. Together, they are the portrait of a marriage in war.

But as much as this is Pavel's story, Marta, the tale's narrator and the nanny to the Bauer's young son, is Ms. Pick's greatest success. Having never known her mother, and having been forced to bear the unwelcome attentions of her father, she is a damaged but lovely creature in a constant but silent search for love. Her life experiences tell her that she is too dirty to be the object of such pure emotion, to be the center of someone else's world, and so she is plagued by doubts that manifest in bouts of destructive self-sabotage. Nonetheless, she tries and in this we are witness to an achingly delicate girl trying to become a loved woman in one of our world's ugliest times. She is as exquisite in her sadness as she is beautiful in her gentle bravery.

Ms. Pick has a painter's eye for detail and a poet's emotional gravitas. Together, they have produced a novel as powerful as it is quiet. Rarely has war's devastation been writ small so well. (5/5 Stars)

Mindstar Rising: Greg Mandel 01 by Peter F. Hamilton

From The Week of January 30, 2012

The human being is a fascinating animal. He is capable of great goodness, acts of charity, selflessness and kindness that have the power to inspire a transformation of our world. But he is also capable of great ugliness, dark deeds driven by avarice and self-interest that have the power to infect and corrupt those he influences. How do we choose our paths? What factors, biological, environmental, circumstantial, shape that choice? And having once made it, can we go back and choose again? These are all questions that have been debated many times, in literature and in the culture, but they are questions no less potent for being so frequently posed. They underpin this gripping piece of cyberpunk from Mr. Hamilton, elevating it well above the fray.

In a near-future England devastated by climate change and political and economic upheaval, life is as tempestuous as it is treacherous. After ten years of communist rule, in which the country's infrastructure was allowed to decay, the Peoples Socialist Party (PSP) have been violently overthrown, their leader, along with much of Parliament, immolated by a powerful, non-nuclear bomb that could have only come from a handful of the world's richest nations. The conservatives, having been restored to power, try to implement economic reforms to get the country back on its feet, but ten years is an eternity in the arena of competitive advantage and England is sure to lag behind the rest of the advanced world for some time to come.

Enter Event Horizon, England's last, great corporate hope. Helmed by Philip Evans, an eccentric but brilliant billionaire, the British company, one of the world's foremost manufacturers of bleeding-edge technology, moved its operations into international waters to avoid the punitive collectivism of the PSP. Now that communism has left the isles, Event Horizon has welcomed itself back into the fold and is doing all it can to be the Atlas upon whom the British economy rests. And so, when its operations are sabotaged and its founders targeted for assassination by powerful but unknown interests, everything is at stake. For if Event Horizon falls, England may well fall with her.

A freak and a murderer, Greg Mandel is the result of a military experiment gone sideways. Attempts to breed a better soldier have left Mandel with hyperactive empathy, an ability which allows him to sense nearby minds and delve into them to sift truths from lies. Since his military days ended in a disastrous expedition in Turkey, he's been hiring out his gun to those who'll pay, keeping his head down and his conscience dormant while the world around him accretes towards oblivion. This chain of nihilistic jobs is broken, however, when Event Horizon comes calling. It's the job of a lifetime, a job so lucrative Mandel couldn't turn it down if he wanted to. It's a job that will take him to the highest orbits and into the most secretive of corporate enclaves to learn the truth behind the attacks on the Evans clan and the company they hold dear. He has a talent and they have a need. It's a match made in purgatory's shadow.

Mindstar Rising is quality science fiction that draws upon the conventions of the detective novel to create a compelling, high-tech thrillride. Originally published in 1993, it is the first entry in a trilogy conceived prior to the rise-to-dominance of the Internet and social media. And while this awkward timing leaves the piece feeling somewhat dated, like much of pre-millennial SciFi, the author is close enough for comfort. Even if one would wish to deduct points for his misses on the technology, Mr. Hamilton more than earns them back with his imagining of a future England savaged by Global Warming which, while discussed in 1993, certainly wasn't as ubiquitous a concern as it is today. His depiction of an overheated England is, to say the least, disturbing.

Though Mindstar Rising blends a solid plot with a decent mystery and seasons this mixture with interesting characters, flashy tech and a splash of sex, there's no doubt that the piece's unusual politics take center stage. In fitting collectivists with villainous black hats and then having the eccentric, ultra-capitalist billionaire ride in on his white steed to save the day, Mindstar Rising feels like a 1990s, science-fiction reinterpretation of Atlas Shrugged complete with all its unnuanced defenses of vulture capitalism. The author contends that he simply did not want to have fascists be the boogeymen for the umpteenth time and this is perfectly understandable. But what Mr. Hamilton seems to have missed here is that totalitarian regimes all desire to have power and to make war. They all invest in nationalistic symbols regardless of whether they are communist or fascist. The lengths Mr. Hamilton has gone to make the PSP seem bumbling and foolish compared to the unstoppable, inventive brilliance of his own Steve Jobs causes the piece to feel like a pretty lame argument for conservatism rather than a plausible glimpse into a dystopian future.

In any event, Greg Mandel is a fantastic hardman, a burdened man with a stained soul who finds a kind of redemption in Event Horizon. The author successfully animates both Mandel and his environment, investing them with sexy charm. I'll certainly be reading on. For while it's not Gibson, it's quality. (3/5 Stars)

Who Am I And If So How Many by Richard David Precht

From The Week of January 30, 2012

Ever since humans evolved into self-awareness, they have been searching for the universal truths that underpin both their environment and their souls. For we are sparks of life within an all-but-eternal experiment. And there is nothing grander than to try to best understand that experiment and our place within it before we die and pass on the torch of discovery to those who will succeed us. After all, the answers to such cosmic questions are too enormous to be found in a single lifetime. If they are to be solved, it will be by those who stood on the shoulders of the countless generations that preceded them. But just how will we arrive at those answers? What avenues of inquiry must we pursue? And while we're pursuing them, how should we live our lives? How can we be moral creatures? These are the musings that bring together Mr. Precht's treatise on philosophy and the human brain. It is an interesting if unoriginal journey.

From Mirror Neurons to Phineas Gage, from the morality of eating animals to the practice of euthanasia, Who Am I And If So How Many is Mr. Precht's journey through the dangerous and contentious jungles of philosophy and neurology. Without choosing sides in this increasingly quarrelsome battle between disciplines that attempt to explain the inexplicable, the author gives his readers a crash course in the history of philosophy while bringing them up to speed on the milestone discoveries of neurology. Along the way, he introduces us to the key figures of both fields, giants of thought and science who have done as much to shape our world as the generals and the politicians who so dominate our history books. In this, he creates a compelling portrait of the uneasy marriage between these two such disparate fields and the extent to which they will continue to be linked for decades and generations to come.

Who Am I And If So How Many is a swift and fascinating read. Mr. Precht is a charming guide through the thorny undergrowth that so defines the scientific ground over which philosophy and neurology are currently fighting. More over, he stays commendably neutral in the questions he raises, professorially extending to his readers the data they will need to draw their own conclusions about the mind and the brain. However, while Mr. Precht manages to educate and entertain in equal measure, I found myself frustrated by a total absence of original thought or research.

The author pays extensive homage to the historical giants upon whose shoulders he stands, but he does so without taking advantage of their discoveries and advancing the arguments further with his own contributions. Perhaps he does this elsewhere, in the classroom or in his other writings, but the piece certainly called out for Mr. Precht to supplement his account with his own conjectures. He is perfectly willing to do so on personal matters. But charming though his anecdotes are, his readers are surely eager for something from the author with more depth than personal reminiscences.

This is a delightful jaunt. Mr. Precht would be a fascinating man with whom to spend an evening, ruminating on the nature of man and his soul over a bottle of quality wine. But it seems to me that he conflated neutrality in the war between philosophy and neurology with neutrality on the pressing questions of the day, leaving others to venture their own opinions while reducing his own to witty bromides. A worthy but slightly annoying read. (3/5 Stars)

Champlain's Dream by David Hackett Fischer

From The Week of January 30, 2012

Why do we quest? Customarily, such journeys are dangerous, requiring us to brave the unknown, the unfamiliar, in order to either satisfy some personal desire, or to advance the sum total of human knowledge. Both ventures bring with them their own unique perils which can be completely avoided by living a normal life at home, surrounded by society and its well-established conventions. And yet, for some, the unknown is so powerful a lure that it trumps even the might of self-preservation, causing these inquisitive souls to brave unexplored frontiers in search of destiny. Samuel Champlain was just such a man. His legend is both honored and elucidated in Mr. Fischer's commendable and poetic biography of the famous adventurer.

Marinated in a 16th century France convulsed by a series of religious wars memorable for the extremity of their bloodshed and betrayal, Samuel Champlain was born to a modest family whose fortunes were suspiciously linked with that of Henry IV of France. The legendary king, who strove to end the conflicts and usher his country into a peaceful and united future, was famous for his love of women, a proclivity which helped give birth to the rumor that Champlain was one of no doubt many of his illegitimate sons. How else explain the rapid rise of a common-born man to the halls of power where he held sufficient sway with the king as to earn, for himself, captaincy of an exploratory mission to the new world? Oh, Champlain was loyal, having fought bravely in Henry's armies during the numerous civil wars of the period. And he certainly possessed a clear mind, a fair spirit and a dogged will. But were these virtues sufficient to earn such royal favor?

Regardless of Champlain's origins, he spent the next 30 years repaying the generosity of the French monarchy. For, after making 27 crossings of the Atlantic without losing a single ship, Samuel Champlain had founded the colony of New France, made peace there with numerous tribes of Native Indians, nourished the French fur trade and created a lasting legacy of courage and enlightenment in an enterprise (colonialism) so often wrought by racism, animus and discord. His colony, which would someday become the Canadian province of Quebec, flourished. And such was his influence upon it that, 200 years on, stories still circulated, within the First Nations of Canada, of the deeds of the great European explorer who was so unlike so many of his fellows.

Though Champlain's Dream is unquestionably a sympathetic account of the life of this most famous French explorer, it is nonetheless a moving and lyrical recount of a rare man. Mr. Fischer, a historian and professor, traces and illuminates the many deeds of Samuel Champlain without ever losing sight of the man's soul. For as much as the explorer's actions are legendary, the author wants his readers to understand the purity of spirit that infused him, to grasp how rare it was for a European of this time to rise above the biases of his supposedly civilized world and treat people unlike himself with respect and dignity. In this, he is deeply reminiscent of Candido Rondon, the 20th century Brazilian hero who also set aside the conventions of his world to embrace the fantastically foreign.

But for all that Mr. Fischer succeeds in laying before us the mind and the actions of the famous Frenchman, this is, to a disturbing degree, a pro-Champlain account. The author almost exclusively draws upon Champlain's own words to retell his story, relying on a few Indian tales and a handful of contemporary accounts that occasionally intersect with Champlain's deeds for corroboration. Though this is made somewhat understandable by the fact that most other accounts of Champlain have been lost to the rigors of time, I was left with the feeling that Mr. Fischer wasn't much interested in cross-examining Champlain's claims. He appears to be as much a fan of the man as the reader is by the conclusion of the piece. Perhaps this is all there is of Champlain's history and Mr. Fischer has been completely fair, but this is not the impression conveyed by this chronicle which effectively argues that Samuel Champlain was a man almost entirely above the destructive prejudices of his own time.

However sympathetic, this is a readable and lyrical biography of one of the formative figures in Canadian history. A deeply compelling narrative. (3/5 Stars)