The Long Price Quartet by Daniel Abraham

From The Week of May 21, 2012

Though civilization is an abidingly positive force that moderates human behavior, ignites social cohesion and encourages the very innovation that continually brightens our world, it is not without its dark side. Humans are profoundly hierarchical beings who take all manner of behavioral cues from both the friends that surround them and the society that shelters them. Before civilization, they worked out these hierarchies with violence and discord, using the fortunes of combat to find their place. Civilization has not removed these urges; it has shifted them from brawn to brain, from the battlefield to the boardroom. The thirst for power, the yearning for supremacy, the need to be king of the world is still in us; civilization merely provides nourishment from a different source, another means by which power can be distributed according to strength and guile.

This pursuit of power profoundly impacts our world. For as much as we hail and admire the victors, those shooting stars who inspire us to be better, there are many more losers, men and women for whom the vagaries of genetics and circumstance have not been so kind. Individually, these embittered spirits envy the high and mighty, wondering why they are not enjoying the lap of luxury. When such thoughts inevitably turn to resentment, it is not long before the kindling for rebellion has been lit and the hopes for a fairer system branded into the hearts and minds of the willing. This lesson, of the consequences of unjust hierarchies and uneven distributions of power, is as old as the written word, but it has rarely had a more skillful hand to wield it than that of Mr. Abraham.

In a world of sweat and silks, poets and merchants, kings and metaphysics, the cities of the Khaiem have emerged from the ashes of fallen empires to endure, even to flourish, in a world of politics and trade. This loose confederation of city states are places of opulence and grandeur, beautiful manifestations of human will that haven't felt war's destructive caress for centuries. This is not thanks to any particular wisdom on the part of the Khaiem and their subjects. Nor is it thanks to a dearth of enemies wishing to grind the Khaiem into dust and ruin. No, this profound peace flows from the terrifying power of the Andat.

Manifestations of perfect thought, the Andat are creations drawn from the energies that underpin the world of the Khaiem. Bound to the physical world by songs of exquisite language, they inhabit the minds of the Poets, men trained from boyhood to bear the twin burdens of the Andat and their phenomenal power. For as much as the Andat can cause rivers to flood and stone to melt, as much as they can convey wisdom and fertility, they are imprisoned beings, elemental essences of the universe who chafe at an unnatural confinement that wounds their pride and hardens their hearts. Summoning and binding them is a devil's bargain that has kept the cities of the Khaiem free, but at a terrible cost, both to the Poets who harbor the Andat and the enemies of the Khaiem who are tired of cowering before awesome power of these spirits made flesh.

In A Shadow In Summer, the quartet's opening volume, we are introduced to the bustle of Saraykeht, a city of merchants and prostitutes that is kept afloat by its dominance of the cotton trade. This advantage is conveyed by Saraykeht's Andat, Seedless, who plots to be free of his bondage to Heshai, his jailer and once great Poet, who has turned to drink to escape Seedless' exquisite attacks. The Andat's efforts hinge upon the innocence of an island girl who carries within her the beginnings of a crime that might well shatter the Poet's mind, an act that would both ruin Saraykeht and free the Andat to return to the elemental world from which he was so cruelly wrenched.

Into this twisted scheme is drawn Otah. The sixth son of a king who disgraced himself by rejecting the Poets and their cruel teachings, he has hidden himself away in Saraykeht, taken up the respectable life of a laborer and found comfort in the arms of a young, ambitious servant who wishes to some-day run the merchant's house for which she now toils. Together, they are drawn down into Seedless' web when their merchant house becomes a pawn in the andat's game. Will Seedless win his victory at Saraykeht's expense, or can another way be found to maintain this delicate balance?

In A Betrayal In Winter, the second entry in The Long Price, 14 difficult years have elapsed in the cities of the Khaiem. The ripple effects of Saraykeht's turbulence has been felt far and wide, even as far as cold Machi in the north where Otah has relocated, taking up yet another guise to hide himself from those who, even after all this time, still vengefully pursue him for his choices during the Saraykeht crisis. Machi, however, has bigger problems than Otah and his hunters. Someone is murdering the legitimate heirs to the Machi throne. Though contests for kingship in the cities of the Khaiem are never bloodless, this episode is particularly cruel, eventually claiming even the life of the Khai himself, an act which elevates his daughter, Idaan, and her ruthless husband to preeminence. Will Otah's bloodline as a son of the Machi be discovered? And if so, can he stand to have two powerful enemies, each wanting to spill his blood?

In An Autumn War, the passing of 14 more years finds the cities of the Khaiem enjoying peace and prosperity. The Andat are properly leashed, a fact which continues to frighten the enemies of the Khaiem into reluctant passivity. These decades of relative stability are, however, put at terrible risk when a mad Poet, having fled the school, falls into the welcoming arms of the Galt, a warlike nation which has only resentfully born the yoke of the Khaiem out of fear of Andat vengeance. But what if, at a stroke, the Andat could be removed from the board? Such an eventuality would leave open the soft cities of the Khaiem, states that haven't had to fight a war in generations. Their unbelievable riches could be plucked like ripe fruit and devoured by the Galt who would finally taste the dominance they have been so unfairly denied. The Khaiem without Andat... It is a thought as unimaginable to the Cities as it is horrific. All they have ever known would disappear. And yet the Galt are coming and it seems as though nothing can stop them.

In The Price of Spring, the quartet's concluding work, a final 14 years have come and gone, leaving Otah's ever-more-infirmed generation to bear a final burden. Galt and the cities of the Khaiem have deadlocked at an impasse, each now dependent on the other for survival but too proud to admit it. Meanwhile, in hopes of mending both his own past failures and what he considers to be the criminal decisions of his old friend, Maati, once Otah's ally and now his enemy, strives to bring back into the world that which only the most disciplined mind can stand. Poets were once years in the training for the task of summoning the Andat. Maati has a handful of grief-stricken women, souls too battered for the burden. Nonetheless, he must forge ahead with his plans to make Poets of them. For to do anything less would be a final betrayal he cannot let stand.

Though The Long Price is not without its flaws, let there be no doubt that it is a work of splendid vision and lovely poetry. With clever metaphors, topical allusions and a keen sense of fatalism, Mr. Abraham harnesses the finest tropes of the fantasy genre to produce a lyrical epic that explores the troubled relationship humans have with power: the holding of it, the coveting of it, and the resurrecting of it. The result is an Asian-infused quartet that, though lengthy, spells out the fullness of the lives of legends. For beyond the fabulous world, reminiscent of pre-industrial China, and beyond the story's depthless scope, which elevates poetic justice and artistic vision to an artform, his characters captivate. Driven by intensely human desires, they emerge, fully formed from the author's imagination, each with distinct personalities and capacities, goodness and darkness. The work is too well-rounded to claim that the characters carry it, but they are what separates it from the mundane.

For all its brilliance, The Long Price is still troubled by weaknesses. Mr. Abraham's relentless desire to paint so vividly in shades of gray prevents any of his characters from taking on heroic casts. Some certainly wear the white hats better than others, but the author does not play in such polarized archetypes. While this provides the series much of its realism, it also robs the reader of the opportunity for a rooting interest. In turn, this causes much of the jeopardy, so consequential to the story's actors, to be often punchless,much like watching a drama in which one has not yet emotionally invested. Moreover, Mr. Abraham leans too heavily on artificial enmity. As often as the conflict is earned, it is equally ginned up by the need for the author to connect the dots of his twisted plot. Most of the time, this is well-disguised by the cloak of Fate, but occasionally the fabric is too threadbare for the reader to maintain his credulity.

Nonetheless, this is excellent, imaginative work. As much as Mr. Abraham occasionally struggles to keep his story flowing towards its conclusion, his ruminations on the nature of power and envy, fate and fortune, more than make up for these lapses. Some powers are simply too great for even the wise to bear. Allowing them into the world is to open the door to a chaos capable of ending all that we know. And yet, often, the decisions to actualize such powers are in the hands of the bold few, not those of the cautious many, a fact which, every day, potentially damns us all.

Lengthy but grippingly sophisticated. (4/5 Stars)

Manhunt by Peter L. Bergen

From The Week of May 21, 2012

As much as our world continues to function thanks to the unique contributions of billions, we the masses are not the shapers of history. Yes, collectively, our desires are occasionally made manifest in the declaring of wars, in the overturning of governments, and in the shifting of cultural values, but few of us will singlehandedly cause governments to launch priceless, international manhunts to find us. Largely, this is thanks to the fact that we are lawful citizens who have done nothing to deserve such monumental scrutiny. But it is also because most of us were spared that unique blend of tragic circumstance that lead wayward souls down the path of nihilistic radicalization. And it's a good thing for the ugly chaos that these few can unleash upon the world is frightening. Sometimes, it is good not to be the shaper of history. Perhaps, if Mr. Bergen's subject, Osama Bin Laden, were alive today, he would agree.

On May 2nd, 2011, on a moonless night in Abbottabad, Pakistan, Osama Bin Laden's ten-year flight from the United States government came to an end. In mere moments, a team of supremely trained American Special Forces personnel tumbled out of two combat helicopters, stormed his sleepy compound positioned just blocks from a training base for the Pakistani army, and, with two bullets to the chest and a final, decisive shot to the head, killed the world's most notorious terrorist before he'd even left his bedroom. After two wars, three major terrorist attacks and military and civilian casualties in the thousands, Osama Bin Laden, a man who had devoted much of his adult life to Islam, terrorism and hatred for America, was dead and the world, for one night, could breathe a bit easier. But though this dramatic raid understandably claimed the attention of the world and its media which poured over the details of the daring mission, this was merely the culmination of years of tireless effort, to locate and punish the man who had organized, funded and greenlit the infamous Al-Qaeda operation that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington D.C. on September 11th, 2001.

Manhunt is the icy reconstruction of that decade-long search for Osama Bin Laden. From his escape in the Tora Bora mountains during the early part of the Afghan war, to his eventual death in Pakistan, Mr. Bergen, an American journalist, details the CIA unit that hunted him, the Al-Qaeda operatives who protected him,the breaks that eventually lead to the locating of the Abbottabad compound and the raid that would eventually end his life. Most dramatically, Mr. Bergen describes the weeks of intense debate among President Obama and his civilian and military advisors on whether or not to risk the lives of American personnel to attack a compound they were only half-convinced contained the Saudi-born terrorist. In this, the author brings to life the many actors in a drama fit for a Hollywood film.

Manhunt is a sublime piece of dramatic non-fiction. Mr. Bergen's relentless, linear account of the hunt for Bin Laden is as concise as it is cinematic. His animation of the complicated and competent minds which turned their focus to Bin Laden's capture is winning, doing respect to men and women who might otherwise be lost in the thunder of the terrorist's death. Mr. Bergen accomplishes all this while wasting none of the narrative's natural tension by lingering too long on any one incident, or focusing overlong on any one player in this surprisingly gripping pursuit of a man who, in his religiously inspired insanity, managed to change the course of the 21st century.

This is noteworthy work from a pleasingly ordered mind. As sleek as it is chilling... This will be made into a movie. It is only a matter of time. (5/5 Stars)

The Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan

From The Week of May 21, 2012

Of humanity's many pursuits, none can claim to have changed our world more than war. Since civilization began, it has forged nations, imposed cultural norms, popularized languages and redistributed wealth. It has created some empires while it ended others; it has elevated some gods while it smashed the idols of others. It has been the armory for technological advancement and the arsenal for democratic rights. For good and ill, for better and worse, war and its fickle fortunes have shaped all that we know and all that we hold dear. Few incidents in history provide as vivid an example of this principle than the great Peloponnesian war. Mr. Kagan's account demonstrates.

Launched in 431 BCE by an insignificant skirmish between minor players in ancient Greece and ended in 404 BCE with the destruction of the Athenian navy and the subsequent fall of the empire that floated it, the Peloponnesian War was a conflict that pitted the Delian League, lead by democratic Athens, against the Peloponnesian League, captained by oligarchical Sparta in a war for all of Greece. Though hostilities between these rival forces were halted on several occasions, their 27-year grudge match still managed to claim the lives of thousands of combatants, the freedoms of dozens of city states, the honorable civilizing customs of the Homerian age and the internal economies of all of the Greek powers. It began in Spartan fear and Athenian hope; it ended in the fall of Greece and the rise of Rome. Greece, with its philosophers and its innovators, its statesmen and their ideas, would never again occupy the center stage of human existence.

From Pericles to Lysander, from the tangled webs of Athenian politics to the exacting discipline of Spartan life, The Peloponnesian War is Mr. Kagan's simplified account of perhaps the most consequential conflict of the ancient world. Before Octavian and Brutus, before Caesar and Pompey, before Rome, there was Greece, a loose confederation of remarkable thinkers and warriors, statesmen and laborers who, at the height of their powers, drove the mighty Persian empire into the sea. They gave us science and mat, philosophy and culture. But this wisdom, this strength, was not enough to keep them from being tipped, by rivalry and envy, into barbarism, chaos and the end of all they held dear. Step by doomed step, Mr. Kagan reveals the events that cast Greece into shadow, paving the way for the rise of a new and familiar world.

Though plagued at times by the 2,500 years of change that stand between us and the apocalyptic events it chronicles, The Peloponnesian War is a challenging and rewarding read. Mr. Kagan, the Stirling Professor of Classics and History at Yale University, successfully translates ancient disputes and customs into a language comprehensible in the 21st century. Consequently, many of the actors in this most ancient drama spring to life from the pages of his dry text, fighting for dominance and victory in a warrior's world. But as much as the work lends skills and motives to individuals otherwise lost to the vicissitudes of time, its most enduring contribution comes from the extent to which it chronicles a war that seems shockingly similar to far more recent conflicts, particularly, World War I which was also launched by a relatively insignificant conflict and which was continued despite the participants being fully aware that it might well destroy the fabric of their societies. Such were the needs of honor that this reality seems to have been made secondary to the thirst for victory.

For all its value,The Peloponnesian War is troubled by a notable flaw. While, yes, Mr. Kagan is forced to reconstruct this most ancient war from only a handful of incomplete sources, he does very little to supplement the readers knowledge of the actors here with his own scholarly expertise. For instance, though he spends some time draping Pericles in honors and greatness, he does very little to explain why the Athenian statesman was held in such high regard. Thus, while we come to understand how these men and the powers they helmed came to rack and ruin, we understand them only shallowly, their motivations discarded in favor of seemingly endless rounds of negotiations, machinations and war. Moreover, Mr. Kagan does little to relate these events to our times, an addition that would have been decidedly welcome in a tome this long.

Fascinating work, but burdened by its relentless focus on the facts of the war in lieu of valuable context. (3/5 Stars)

The Demon Child: The Hythrun Chronicles Trilogy by Jennifer Fallon

From The Week of May 14, 2012

Destiny can be a cruel mistress. For she demands from us a fealty it is not in our nature to grant. As intelligent creatures endowed with the freedom to act as we choose, we are accustomed to behaving as we wish, pursuing our interests as a means of satisfying our desires. But this cannot always be so. For there are moments in time upon which fortunes, cultures, even worlds, turn, moments of such gravity and consequence that the few who stand closest to such moments must sacrifice for the rest in the hopes of brightening all our tomorrows. For some, the glory that will come from bearing this burden will be enough, but for those who do not seek such recognition, the task is a thankless one, weighing down the shoulders of the unready with the hopes and dreams of unimaginable multitudes. Ms. Fallon explores this theme in her delightful, if plodding, trilogy.

In a world populated by gods and magics, demons and sorcerers, one would not expect to find a country of atheists. And yet Medalon, a sprawling nation of cultural and spiritual minimalists, thrives in its unbelief. Organized and ruled by the pitiless Sisterhood of the Blades, an order of powerful women who have replaced religion with politics and mercy with ruthlessness, Medalon has eschewed not only the weak, pagan gods favored by the kingdoms that surround it, but their demigodal servants as well. And why not? After all, the Sisterhood, now so deeply enshrined into Medalese culture, rose to prominence on the back of the Purges, centuries-old exterminations of all those who would summon magic to aid them. If the gods will not step in to help the Harshini, men and women who carry in them a measure of the divine, then the divine is not divine at all.

This narrowminded view will not serve Medalon well in the dark days to come. For the Sisterhood has claimed, as an acolyte, the Demon Child, a 20-year-old Harshini half-breed whose destiny is to slay one of the very gods they reject. Spawned by the union between a mad Harshini king and a helpless human girl, the Demon Child is the answer to an ancient prophecy that will not only bring to a head a war for the heavens, but will overturn the world Medalon knows so well. If they do not adjust, if they hold stubbornly to their convictions, refusing to acknowledge the danger, then they may well plunge the world into chaos and, worse yet, zealous slavery to a cruel and jealous god.

In Medalon, the trilogy's opening act, we are plunged into a tangled world of politics and rivalry. Rshiel, the daughter of the First Sister of the Sisterhood of the Blades, is a beleaguered acolyte, a young woman who has never pleased her demanding mother. With her brother, Tarja, a promising warrior in the ranks of the Defenders, soldiers sworn to protect the Sisterhood and uphold their laws in Medalon, they make a truly miserable pair, battered spirits who have spent too many years suffering beneath the weight of unachievable expectations. And so, when events in the Sisterhood turn disastrously against them, Rshiel and Tarja flee everything they've ever known, falling into a rebellion that seeks to make right what the Sisterhood has put so tragically wrong.

The theistic rebels, who stand no chance of defeating the Medalese state, may well be doomed, but no moreso than the fugitive offspring of the First Sister, both of whom are subjected to trials that not even their harsh upbringings have prepared them for. Fate seems, at times, to take pleasure in thwarting them, kicking them back down into the mud every time they escape their torment. Could there be another force at work, a divine will that has its own purpose behind increasing the suffering of Rshiel and Tarja? Anything is possible in a world where gods draw their strength and characteristics from the infinitely cruel human will.

In Treason Keep, the second instalment in the series, the drama shifts away from Medalon to the warlords and empires that live upon its borders. Considered heathens and pagan provocateurs by the Medalese, these kingdoms, rich in culture and intrigue, wealth and weapons, do believe in the gods and their Harshini representatives, but the Medalese purges have largely consigned these mythical beings to legend, stories spun for children. Ironically, like Medalon, these kingdoms are much more interested in conquest and politics. One victim of these machinations is Princess Adrina of Fardohnya. The most capable of her monarchical father's many, many heirs, she is nonetheless sold in marriage to Karien, a powerful kingdom of zealots whose worship of their one god, the Overlord, is a threat to the freedom of all intelligent beings and to the mind and body of this clever but powerless princess.

In Harshini, the trilogy's concluding work, the conflict between the zealous, combative Kariens and the rest of the continental powers comes to a head when the Karien priesthood manipulates the Medalon leadership into an alliance against the Demon Child and her uneasy amalgam of foreign powers. Pressed for time and bereft of the means by which to fulfil her destiny, this half-blooded heiress to the power of the gods must soon uncover some weakness in her Karien enemy. For failure will plunge her world into the darkness of authoritarian, monotheistic rule, condemning her friends and their innocent subjects to lives of emotionally crippled servitude.

Though at times burdened by unnecessary digressions, The Demon Child is, in every other respect, fantastic fantastical fiction. Populated by winning characters who are as animated by their foibles as they are burdened by their flaws, the series is an engaging romp which finds a pleasing balance between the questing heroism of high fantasy and the gritty, backs-against-the-wall fatalism of darker, more realistic offerings. Magic is present and potent without being a cheap means by which the author can exert her will upon the plot. In this, it bears a striking resemblance to David Eddings who must surely have been, in some regard, one of Ms. Fallon's primary inspirations.

Though the series handles questions of destiny and leadership with grace and skill, the manner in which its gods are woven into its plot is most compelling. Rather than having her characters abdicate personal responsibility to omnipotent gods upon whom all the ugliness and darkness of the drama can be blamed, Ms. Fallon flips the paradigm. The gods are the extension of human will, waxing and waning in power and influence based upon the number of people who believe in them. This owes more to metaphysics than it does to religiosity. It binds all of her actors to their own actions, making them responsible for the darkness in their world. It demands that the balance between light and dark be found by the humans, not by the gods who are largely exogenous actors. This may not be an original idea, but it is wonderfully imagined and charmingly executed.

There are flaws here. Not only does Fallon struggle to realize the full potential of the series' climax, she often loses control of the narrative, allowing it to lead her off in directions that do little credit to the core plot. Moreover, the stubbornness of some of her characters defies logic, serving only to provide contrast the openmindedness of her heroes. But regardless of its warts, Ms. Fallon has demonstrated, in The Demon Child, a delightful sense of humor, a solid grasp of tragedy and a downright entertaining yarn , all of which ensure that it will be some time before I forget her players.
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@emit An unexpected gem... (3/5 Stars)

Bottled Lightning by Seth Fletcher

From The Week of May 14, 2012

Of the many pillars that keep human civilization from collapsing upon itself and returning its members to the short, brutal existence of pre-industrial feudalism, hydrocarbons are surely one of the most important and problematic. Oil, natural gas, and coal all release, when burned, phenomenal, and here-to-for unequalled, amounts of energy, a sufficient portion of which we are able to capture and use to electrify our cities, power our planes, motorize our vehicles and charge our devices. Were these resources to suddenly vanish tomorrow, we would have no means of energizing our world, an ugly reality which alone is enough to catalyze fear within the hearts of optimists and pessimists alike. With so much riding on these non-renewable fossil fuels, it's no wonder then that research departments at universities and corporations the world over are searching for answers, alternatives that will help us keep the lights on when we've finally sucked our planet dry of its abundance. One of the most promising solutions to a cleaner world lies in building better batteries, a fascinating and complicated endeavor whose story is tackled here by Mr. Fletcher.

From the A cell to the GM Volt, from iron phosphate to lithium ion, Bottled Lightning captures the history of the battery and the promise of its future. After all, for as long as we've harnessed electricity, we've tried to store it, to save its immense potentiality for future use. But though the process for generating power is relatively straightforward, often requiring little more than a match to light a fire all-too-eager to burn, the process for locking that energy away for a rainy day has been infinitely more elusive. Giants of science as noteworthy as Edison have tried and failed, managing at best partial successes of complex chemistry that, because they cannot store enough electricity, cannot store it reliably enough, or cannot discharge it with sufficient speed, fail. Consequently, every day, our power plants generate obscene amounts of electricity that is necessarily wasted for want of a means by which to harbor it.

Enter the minds of the 21st century. Business leaders and scientists, politicians and environmentalists, are all looking to discover and capitalize on the battery breakthrough that will transform our civilization. For if we could find that perfect balance of chemistry that would allow for storage of immense amounts of energy, that could then be deployed at a moment's notice, we would have the key to solving not only the problem of greenhouse gas emissions, but the challenge of deep dependence on what are swiftly depleting non-renewable resources. The person who could crack this problem would not just be rich, he would be hailed a hero.

Though troubled by its overly Americanized view of the search for the breakthrough battery, Bottled Lightning is a brief but compelling examination of this most critical and simultaneously vexing problem. Mr. Fletcher successfully animates the characters in this interesting drama, highlighting the scientific rivalries, the political disputes and the commercial enterprises which have come to characterize this largely futile search. What's more, he details these confrontations alongside the science they are advocating, furnishing readers with a basic understanding of the underlying challenges that have so-far plagued this pursuit.

However, despite the informative nature of his account, Mr. Fletcher appears, at times, obsessed with novelties like the GM Volt which, while chapters in the battery's story, fall well short of the importance assigned to them here. The author seems enthralled with the slick publicity that surround such enterprises, ignoring the stark reality that these cars simply do not sell well on the open market. The work cries out to be 50 pages longer, to have Mr. Fletcher speak to the psychology that underpins the reluctance of the customer to buy what seem to be competently built vehicles.

This is interesting work populated by fascinating minds who offer hope for a solution to an existential problem. But the extent to which Mr. Fletcher seems limited by nationalism causes the account to feel, at times, unfocused, caught between the story of the battery and advocacy for electric cars. Compelling, but troubled. (3/5 Stars)

Private Empire by Steve Coll

From The Week of May 14, 2012

For two centuries, the western world has been dominated by the nation state, a concept which unites, under the banner of lawful, representative government, all of a country's peoples and faiths, traditions and institutions. While the nation state is prone to fostering dangerous skeins of nationalism in those it harbors, this downside is more than compensated by the extent to which it gathers up the disparate and forges of their factiousness a common cultural identity that is moored by the rule of law and equality for all.

Recently, however, the nation state has come under increasing strain. For the British Empire showed us all the power of the economy, that everpresent engine of innovation that advances our world while keeping our people employed. As the nations of the world have progressively given themselves over to this pursuit of profit, the companies nourished by this capitalist climate, have grown more powerful. Many have even shaken off their nationalist chains to become global entities which answer to no government and heed but one god; money. For good or ill, they are here to stay, bound to only grow in power in the years ahead. Exxonmobil is foremost among these international entities and this is Mr. Coll's vivid history of its life.

One of the many offspring of the 1911 dismantling of Standard Oil, Exxon has honored its Rockefellerian roots by becoming one of the 21st century's most profitable corporations. Infused by a potent strain of American Protestantism, it has deployed a mixture of ruthlessness and prudence to navigate some impossibly bleak nights on the way to prominence. The worst and most scarring of these calamities came in 1989 with the disastrous sinking of the Exxon Valdez. No matter how grim the circumstance, however, Exxon has endured, learning from its mistakes and writing its subsequent reforms into its very DNA in hopes of ensuring that, come the dawn, it will sail into clear skies and profitable seas. In light of the fact that Exxon's annual profits often exceed the GDP of entire countries, its capacity to find daylight cannot be questioned.

But just how has Exxon been so successful? Mr. Coll, an award-winning journalist, dives into the company's corporate culture, surfacing with a treasure trove of clues that lead back to the fateful 1989 spill which was nearly the company's ruin. In the disaster's aftermath, Exxon was a discredited institution, a humbled giant whose employees were the butt of late-night jokes and whose practices were the target of environmentalist scorn. In the years since, Exxon has been one of the world's most profitable companies with a sterling safety record, a propensity for avoiding some of the world's worst conflict zones, and record profits which gave it more than enough leverage to purchase Mobil, a sibling from the Standard Oil days. This turnaround, argues Mr. Coll, stems from the powerful leadership of Lee Raymond, a career Exxon man who rose to helm the company through the Spill's aftermath and the years that followed. A scientist by training, Raymond transformed Exxon's practices by ruthlessly demanding the absolute best from his employees, standards which culled the weak and the non-compliant from the Exxon herd, leaving behind loyal troops willing to follow in the wake of Raymond's abrasive but competent leadership.

Private Empire is first-rate journalism. Mr. Coll's clear, linear reconstruction of Exxon's history, its sins and its lessons, is as digestible as it is compelling. From the White-House politics to Exxonmobil's corporate culture, from insurgencies in Indonesia to dictatorships in western Africa, he walks us through the politics, the science and the realities of the world's biggest oil giant and the conflict-riddled regions in which it operates and competes. What emerges is a captivating portrait of a hyper-efficient company governed by an ethos that insists upon both excellence and conformity to the exclusion of all else. Nothing must interfere with its core principles, for which it is proud, or its core business, for which it is willing to stop at nothing to protect.

Private Empire is a vivid history of a fearsome multinational corporation, an entity so vast and so profitable that it cannot be shackled by government. For our world runs on oil. It provides the power that fuels our cars and the trucks that carry our goods, our food, our capacity to live as we do. Worse yet, oil is a necessity that, absent any breakthroughs in alternative energy sources, will only continue to grow in importance in the decades to come which, in turn, will only make companies like Exxonmobil all the more potent. How long before, in the face of attempts at government regulation, companies like Exxonmobil simply deny the right of government to interfere with them and declare themselves sovereign? How long until the nation state is replaced by the corporate state? It is both a chilling and a fascinating prospect which this captivating work makes seem imminent.

An outstanding read with any number of jaw-dropping moments... One of the best reads this year. (5/5 Stars)

The Throne of Amenkor Trilogy by Joshua Palmatier

From The Week of May 07, 2012

Though shared responsibility is, at present, the most generally advantageous method for decision-making, for a group, in a time of peace, other, more authoritarian resources must be marshalled in a time of war. Democratic ideals, which serve society so well in relatively tranquil moments, become slow and inefficient when time is short, when the stress of the group's survival is pressing upon every possible course of action. At such pivotal junctures, the wisdom or strength of an individual can often rise above the confusion of egalitarianism, imposing decisiveness and focus upon a problem that requires swift action. We need only glance at the history of the Roman Republic to be awash in examples of the efficiencies of dictatorial power.

But what if the chosen dictator is not ready for that power? What if, having been selected because of talent and necessity, the individual is ill-prepared for the crisis to come? Is the individual's natural talent, combined with his will to survive, enough to obliterate doubt, the fear of choosing badly? Or is unreadiness a fatal flaw that will be the dictator's downfall before the virtues for which he was chosen can be properly brought to bear? This is the intriguing question that occupies the heart of Mr. Palmatier's dark, competent trilogy. It serves the series well.

Perched at the edge of a western sea, Amenkor is a powerful city state that, for 1,500 years, has been governed by the Skewed Throne. The gestalt of now mostly forgotten magics, the throne is a metaphysical construct that harbors the personalities, and perhaps even the souls, of all of the Mistresses who have, over the centuries, claimed it. Bestowing its occupier with the power to see and know all within the city limits of Amenkor, the throne, and the women who have sat upon it, has slowly transformed the city state into a dictatorship in which all the powers of law and order rest in the hands of the Mistress, her first advisor and the Seekers, trained assassins who are the violent manifestation of the Mistress' will.

Despite the omniscience bestowed upon the Mistress by the Skewed Throne, Amenkorian society is still riven by injustice and inequity. The city state has drawn its financial nourishment from a guild of powerful merchants whose profits have elevated the men and women of this class far above the lowly drudges, Amenkorians forced to live and labor under the most impoverished conditions. The Mistresses, who have possessed the influence to amend this injustice, have refused to act against the merchants, no doubt buoyed by the goods they provide the city and its leadership. This fateful decision, however, has effectively divided Amenkor into a city of haves and have nots, the latter of which are invariably abandoned to short, brutal lives.

In The Skewed Throne, the trilogy's first instalment, we meet one such hopeless wretch. Fourteen and orphaned, undernourished and forgotten by the world where people matter, Varis is a shadow, a ragged bundle of anger animated by little more than the will to survive. Given aid by no one, she wouldn't have even lived this long if it weren't for the strange, white fire that, years earlier, washed in from the western sea and momentarily blanketed the coast, imprisoning everyone it touched within nightmares of their own making. About to be raped by a guardsmen, the fire was a blessing for Varis, giving her both the time to escape her attacker and the strength to kill him, taking from him the knife she'd use to keep her alive in the years to come.

When the white fire soon receded, it left devastating change in its wake. While Varis slowly began to explore her new powers, Amenkor's Mistress went swiftly and decisively mad, a reality which has plagued Amenkor ever since. For where the Mistress once sent her Seekers out into the Amenkorian night to bring justice to the beleaguered, now, she lays her mark upon the innocent as often as the guilty. This, for the city's movers and shakers, is an untennible injustice. The resulting struggle for power will position Varis, a here-to-for unconditioned force, at the heart of world-changing events, events which will bring her uncomfortably close to the dangerous, enigmatic throne.

In The Cracked Throne, the second entry in the trilogy, Amenkor has a new Mistress. Hampered by youth but energized by her rare blend of powers, Varis has elevated herself from the dredges to become the ruler of the city who, but weeks ago, didn't even know her name. Forgotten and neglected no longer, she seeks to reform the city's leadership and steer it through a winter made all the more devastating by the recent upheaval that put her upon the throne. And if all these challenges are insufficiently troublesome for a girl who still does not know how to read, let alone rule, an old enemy has left its chain of oceanic islands, searching for a new, more hospitable home. The arrival of these blue-skinned myths from the sea promises to overturn everything Varis knows as she's forced to summon every scrap of wisdom she gleaned from a life in the darkness to fight for her life and for the life of the city with which she is now bound.

In The Vacant Throne, the trilogy's concluding work, the war between the coastal city states and the invading Chorl reaches fever pitch when, having been thwarted in their attempts to claim the amenkorian throne, the blue-skinned islanders turn their attention upon a new target. Having once been home to the man who first conceived of the thrones, Venitte is an old power which still bears some of the scars from the last time it was attacked by the Chorl, an attack which claimed the lives of the wife and children of the inventor of the thrones. Now, centuries later,driven by desperation and domination, the Chorl return to this old battleground in search of a power that has been hidden for centuries, a power that could secure a home for the Chorl on this eastern coast, a power that one throbbed in Amenkor. The power of the thrones...

Though Mr. Palmatier fails to weave together all the disparate threads of his narrative, The Throne of Amenkor is pleasingly realistic Fantasy fiction. Drawing inspiration from Mediterranean geography and mixing in some inventive magic, the author successfully generates an engaging, blood-spattered world hobbled by social inequities and cutthroat politics. What's more, by embedding the narrative in the first person, never allowing the reader to depart from the ultra-pragmatic mind of his heroine, he vividly and disturbingly conveys the life of an orphan abandoned by this society, how her harsh experiences have shaped her into a creature that can only claim to be halfway civilized. Watching the rich and the powerful react to her, seeing their prejudice through her eyes, provides the trilogy some of its best emotional punch.

. But for as much as Varis' journey from forgotten wretch to Mistress of Amenkor entertains, while honoring the rags-to-riches trope, very little of the story's promise is actually realized. The enigmatic White Fire which is used teasingly to ignite the main drama is little more than an afterthought, a weapon shown to the audience in act I that is not fired in act III. Furthermore, the magic that underpins the plot here appears to have been poorly thought through. Feats thought impossible in the first novel are commonplace in the third, even though little time has past and little knowledge acquired to justify such advancements. This gives rise to the strong impression that the author constructed an enemy too powerful for his protagonists, hence the expansion of their talents. These underutilized and inexplicable plot threads prevent this icy trilogy from truly taking flight.

The Throne of Amenkor is inventive work. Its action sequences are as apocalyptic as its social criticism is unsparing. But Varis herself is not strong enough to carry what is otherwise an underperforming plot. Interesting but flawed. 93/5 Stars)

House of Stone by Anthony Shadid

From The Week of May 07, 2012

Though we are enlightened by education and defined by careers, though our spirits are elevated by art and our minds refreshed by vacation, we are rooted to the world through family. From our parents to our most distant cousins, from the current generation back through antiquity, our lineages not only shape our destinies, they swell our chests with pride. They tie us to ethics and standards that must be generationally maintained. They ground us in a world that, absent these connections, would be a merciless hurricane, a maelstrom capable of leaving us shiftless and alone. Family is the tie that binds, the thread running through all we know. This is a truth quietly celebrated in Mr. Shadid's somber memoir.

Wearied by the cruelties of war and left isolated by the dissolution of his marriage, Anthony Shadid, an award-winning reporter for the Washington Post and the New York Times, relocated, in 2006, to Lebanon, the land of his ancestors. Aware that his great grandfather's house has been left to decay into disrepair, a dilapidation he equates with wider Lebanon, Shadid sets about on a months-long odyssey to restore the house to its former, Ottoman glory. Warned frequently by his pessimistic neighbors that the project is both pointless and foolhardy, Shadid ignores such wisdom, intent upon a mission of rediscovery. For as new concrete is poured and gardens cleared, as debris is removed and old fixtures buffed to new glory, Shadid ventures into his family's past to retrace their arrival in America where, beginning with his grandmother, they settled in Oklahoma, opening a local market whose financial nourishment would elevate their subsequent generations to university and then to professional careers, prospects unlikely to have been realized in the unsettled Middle East.

As the project to rebuild the old house hits snag after snag, as his dream of restoring some measure of the alluring past to the troubled present fades, Shadid appears on the brink of breaking, his soul too burdened by what his eyes have seen to press on in the face of endless obstacles. But then he comes to understand the house and its culture in a new light that burns away doubt and leaves behind the same, steely resolve that sustained his immigrant grandparents through the trials of journeying the new world. The project will be completed. The past will be restored. There will be a future for all that he holds dear.

Penned with a war correspondent's quiet, clenched grace, House of Stone is a memoir as beautiful as it is tragic. Mr. Shadid animates rural Lebanon with a painter's skill, breathing life into the attitudes that govern its people even while he does his best to understand and explain the enduring pessimism that hangs over this cursed country like a dark, forbidding cloud. But as much as he succeeds in coloring the landscapes and vivifying the people, aims which grant the reader a glimpse of Lebanon's tortured soul, it's the poignancy of his mission of reclamation that elevates the piece from the mundane to the exquisite.

Every page bleeds with Mr. Shadid's sincere attempt to restore something lost. Principally, this is in the service of his family, its name and its honor. However, he swiftly dives deeper than these important but superficial drives, reaching for something far more powerful. Hope, that he can find peace, that he can begin anew, that he can have a hand in leaving behind a legacy, that he can overcome the DNA of tormented Lebanon to create something beautiful, something new that honors the old while speaking to the continuum of human life and experience. This is as wonderfully conveyed via his attempt to build the house as it is through his artistic reconstructions of his ancestors immigrant journey to America, that distant and unfamiliar land.

This is as heartwarming as it is heartaching, not only for its content, but also for the fact that Mr. Shadid's dreams will necessarily remain half-formed. For not long after completing the restoration, he would die, in the spring of 2012, having been robbed, by death, of the full appreciation of his earnest endeavor. This is tender work worthy of a first-rate journalist. (4/5 Stars)

A Theory of Justice by John Rawls

From The Week of May 07, 2012

Though intelligence separated humanity from the animal kingdom, allowing us to invent the tools that would eventually steer us onto a new, evolutionary course of profound self-discovery and world domination, intelligence is but the key to a much greater lock, a necessity for the grander goal of society. For it is society that harnesses that raw intellect and capitalizes upon it, chronicling its many inventions and innovations and putting them to widespread use not only for the general advancement of all, but so that others might improve upon what came before, creating an endless chain of advancement that will one day elevate us to the stars. Without society, the genius of one is never remembered, savored only by those he happens to encounter. His death causes his knowledge to pass into the ether, obligating humanity to sputter along at a level not much higher than the apes from which we branched.

Being that society is critical to our development, it would be advantageous to discover society's ideal form. What rules should it enshrine? What principles should it uphold? Should it favor one class over another, or should everyone be equal? Should innovation be the cornerstone, or should it be the acquisition of knowledge that begets wisdom? Mr. Rawls, a famous 20th century philosopher, grapples with these vital questions in this his classic 1971 treatise on the ideal society.

From the principles of justice to the Veil of Ignorance, from the ethics of civil disobedience to the sins of freeloading, A Theory of Justice is Mr. Rawls' systematic attempt to logic out society's most beneficial form. To do so, he requests that the reader join him in a most detailed thought experiment. The reader is asked to imagine that he is society's ultimate architect, free to work upon a blank and perfectly malleable canvas. He is free to set any rule, to impose any right, to pass any law, to harbor any prejudice. He may shape and contort his society to his heart's content. However, there is one critical stipulation that he must adhere to while he molds his world.

Upon the completion of his experiment, when it comes time for the reader to enter his ideal society, he will do so without any knowledge of where, in that society, he will appear. He does not know what job he will hold, what family he will have, what class he will belong to, or what talents he will possess. He may be the highest of the high, or the lowest of the low. Over this one aspect of his experiment he has no control. With this veil of ignorance in mind, what will his original position be? Will he engineer a society that is fair, fearing that he might enter it as a drudge in need of external support? Or will he engineer an unequal society, trusting himself to rise on the back of his natural abilities? Will he enshrine equal rights to all as insurance against his position at the bottom, or will he opt for unequal rights, confident the powerful will not need such flimsy protections?

Though A Theory of Justice is a challenging read, written more for the benefit of the author's colleagues than it is for the layman, it is nonetheless a powerfully persuasive piece of political philosophy. The Veil of Ignorance, an idea as revolutionary for philosophy as Einsteinian Relativity was for physics, is surely one of the 20th century's most powerful thought experiments. For it forces the reader to recognize that birth is random, that the extent to which we succeed is at least partially based on the luck of the draw, and that opportunity has a huge bearing on our quality of life. Taken altogether, these principles demand that we examine anew our successes, not only to be thankful for the moments in which we were helped by others to achieve our dreams, but in order to recognize that whatever we are is as much to the credit of others as it is to the credit of ourselves. This notion has widespread implications for our future and the societies it will birth.

As much as this work is understandably dominated by the Veil of Ignorance experiment, it is as much a 600-page logistical construct that makes a profound and profoundly simple argument for equality. While we know that society cannot grant us all equal shares of resources or income -- endeavoring to do so is nightmarishly complicated and utterly senseless --, we do all wish to live in a society with equal rights to liberty, to conscience, to life. So how do we justify creating a society that has equal rights but not equal opportunity? By creating a society whose laws, institutions and instruments are designed to consider first the least among us. For to do otherwise is to not only consign the most vulnerable among us to short, pain-filled lives, it is to abandon even the conceit of the notion that society is based on logic and reason.

A Theory of Justice is, at times, interminable and insufferable, a volley of intellectual arrows fired at targets most of us will never meet or know. But within its megalithic logic there are shattering truths that possess the power to reform the reader's conception of society and fairness. In this, it is deeply and enduringly transformative. (4/5 Stars)

The Shaol Sequence Trilogy by Gary Gibson

From The Week of April 30, 2012

Though colonialism has left behind a legacy of racism, classism and economic decay from which half the world is still trying to make a slow, painful recovery, its practice nonetheless imparted one enduring lesson that humanity would do well never to forget. In the name of self-preservation, of ourselves and our society, our interests and our resources, we will do anything. There is no crime too heinous, no betrayal too bitter, no compromise too dark, capable of dissuading us from preserving that which we consider ours.

If we are willing, in the name of ideology, to send our young off to die in the jungles of foreign wars just as readily as we are willing, in the name of self-interest, to make deals with the devils of our world, so long as they benefit us, then we certainly won't hesitate to exploit inferior societies with whatever technological advantages we have over them, not even if those advantages are nuclear, capable of annihilating entire populations when deployed. Though Mr. Gibson's cyberpunk-inspired space opera is packed with action and aliens, alliances and betrayals, this enduring truth is what underpins his epic. He uses it to thoughtful effect.

By the 26th century, life has become complicated for the human race. Having taken to the stars and colonized over a dozen worlds, humanity ought to be prospering thanks to a wide array of technologies which have improved the quality of life of its many members. However, all of this prosperity is contingent on a single technology, faster-than-light travel, a feat of engineering that, though still beyond human understanding, is essentially leased from the Shaol, an imperious aquatic species as long-lived as they are mysterious. Aware that they have humanity over the proverbial barrel, the Shaol can essentially write the treaties they have with humanity and the other races in the local arm of the galaxy, laying down terms they know their client races will tolerate in exchange for interstellar transportation.

One such Shaol stipulation allows them to evict their client races from their own colonies if said colonies are less than 20 years old. This mysterious clause is more of a curiosity to humanity until, for the first time in their history, the Shaol invoke it, forcing a human colony to relocate to Redstone, a human world dominated by a violent strain of political libertarianism that has inculcated its subjects with a dangerous bellicosity that, perversely, may eventually prove the downfall of the Shaol.

In Stealing Light, the sequence's first instalment, we meet the trilogy's three main actors. Dakota Merrick is a Machine Head, a military pilot who has been augmented with surgical implants that allow her to telepathically communicate with her craft. A human, deeply scarred by a genocidal incident in her past, she is manipulated, by some of Redstone's most virulent leaders, into hiring onto a mission to excavate an ancient, derelict spacecraft from the depths of a dead world.

On this mission, she meets Lucas Corso, one of Redstone's beleaguered academics. A scholar of ancient languages, Corso is blackmailed by the Redstone faction leading the expedition which requires his expertise to break the codes that have locked away the Derelict's systems for all these countless centuries. Understandably reluctant to cooperate with his enemies, he eventually finds an ally in the mission's strange machine-head pilot, but will they be able to overcome their distrust to extricate themselves from their bondage?

Though the mission is meant to be a secret from the Shaol, it is closely monitored by one of their oldest and most highly ranked members. Fearful of the consequences to the Shaol should the Redstone faction succeed in harnessing this ancient power, he attempts to steer events to a more satisfactory conclusion, but it may well be that not even his legendary experience can bring fate to heel.

In Nova War, the sequence's second entry, events have overtaken the ability of any faction to control. For a new alien race has appeared on the scene. The Emissaries From God are enormous beings whose destructive powers are on par with their religious zealotry. Here-to-for kept from human space by the machinations of the Shaol, they have surprised their old enemies with their proficiency and their willingness to weaponize faster-than-light technology to devastating effect. Intent upon destroying the derelict, and its kind, that Dakota and Lucas have worked so hard to understand, they will stop at nothing, no depravity, no amount of annihilation, in order to realize their merciless vision of the universe.

In Empire of Light, the trilogy is brought to a shattering conclusion when the Shaol and the Emissaries From God engage in a contest for the local arm of the galaxy, a conflict that promises to leave subordinate races on both sides devastated, their home systems laid waste by weapons of unimaginable power. Within this Long War, as it comes to be called, Merrick and Corso, now powers in their own right, struggle to steer the war away from its apocalyptic conclusion by pursuing a dangerous but critical piece of technology that is more myth than reality. Should they locate it and bring it under their command, then perhaps the long night ahead of all the known races can be avoided and something like sanity restored to all the parties involved.

Though plagued, at times, by poor pacing and repetitive plot elements, The Shaol Sequence loudly hits most of the notes it aims for. Having clearly drawn inspiration from the uneasy nuclear peace that troubles our own world, Mr. Gibson is successful in his attempt to broaden the question of nuclear deterrence, inject it with galactic gravitas and then position it at the philosophical heart of what is otherwise a futuristic techno-thriller. When technological innovation outstrips our wisdom and our morality, what do we do? When we invent weapons that have the capacity to annihilate us all, and then hand those weapons over to an elite over whom we have remarkably little sway, what is the expected outcome? These fascinating and momentous quandries are imagined and then spun out, to devastating effect, across a lively universe.

But as much as these philosophical musings lend the trilogy some intellectual heft, they cannot entirely rescue it from its myriad flaws. Mr. Gibson subjects his characters to amounts of abuse that, by the series' conclusion, have reached the ridiculous. Worse, when his characters understandably seek revenge for the stupendous violence heaped upon them, the author shamelessly manipulates events to block them from fulfilling their desires. Yes, all plot is, in some sense, a manipulation of events in order to reach an imagined conclusion; Mr. Gibson is merely following in the footsteps of a few thousand years of dramatic tradition. However, the extent to which he clumsily fails to hide these deus-ex-machina contortions leave the reader both frustrated and annoyed by the unrealistic circumstances his characters find themselves in. This, along with the author's inability to give depth to his universe, beyond the template necessary to tell his story,, burden the work.

Its challenges aside, The Shaol Sequence is quality science fiction. While a sizeable swath of the galaxy is being loudly and obnoxiously pounded into oblivion, the author's protagonists and his questions of morality and power are, respectively, pleasingly flawed and eminently engaging. A solid diversion... (3/5 Stars)

The Man Without A Face by Masha Gessen

From The Week of April 30, 2012

Of all the many maladies that can afflict society, corruption must be considered among the most destructive. By allowing power to be channeled into the hands of a handful of elites, it hampers economic growth and institutionalizes complacency and inequality, grim realities which not only discourage innovation and progress, but sap the will of those laboring to make positive change in a stagnant system. While some societies can recall better and fairer pasts to help fight darker presents, others lack this encouraging history to draw upon. These nations have struggled with corruption for the entirety of their existences. Their citizens are only aware of a better way through witnessing it in other nations, countries where the history is not so stark and the present not so hopeless.

How does this corruption arise? More over, how is it extracted once it has taken root? Who are the men and women who nurture it and who are those best positioned to attack it? In this biography of Vladimir Putin and the Russia he's made, Ms. Gessen asks these questions and more. Her answers are not always so clear.

Born into modest circumstances, far from the halls of power, no one could have imagined, much less predicted, the rise to prominence of Vladimir Putin, the now three-term president of a new, authoritarian Russia. Diminutive and pugnacious, he was, admittedly, a thug, a self-interested adolescent searching for somewhere to belong in the troubled USSR of the 1970s and 1980s. After a handful of false starts, he would eventually enter into a mutually beneficial marriage with the KGB, the infamous Russian spy service, a relationship that would endure for decades and see him trained and embedded into various governmental posts while the Soviet Union died and gave birth to a new, oligarchical Russia.

Invested with the hopes of desperate Yeltsin loyalists, Putin completed his rise to power in 1999 when he was tapped to succeed the unpopular president. It would take him only a matter of months to betray that faith, engineering convenient crises which he then used to roll back the political reforms of the 1990s. This centralization of power into the hands of the Russian president, completed by 2003, shifted the balance of power in the world's largest country, jeopardizing the interests of powerful oligarchs who were instructed to either get in line or suffer the wrath of Russia's newest Czar. For while this new Russia was definitely not the Soviet Union of distant memory, its tactics were no less deadly, leaving no room for dissidents unwilling to play by the rules of Vladimir Putin.

Penned by a Russian journalist, The Man Without A Face leaves the reader in no doubt of its position on Vladimir Putin and the new Russia. An outspoken critic of Putin's heavy-handed presidency, Ms. Gessen does her best to piece together the admittedly sketchy histories of the rise of Putin and the fall of the Soviet Union, contemporaneous events which fuelled the birth of the new, corrupted Russian state. Though the absence of corroborative accounts hinders her effort to create a definitive biography of the man or the dying regime, she nonetheless lays down a logical narrative deeply informed by the thoroughly documented terrorist incidents that plagued Russia in the early aughts. Putin's abominable responses to these attacks, attacks he likely had a hand in creating in the first place, are rendered, here, in chilling detail, dispelling any questions the reader might have about Putin's willingness to act, at any cost, in the advancement of himself and his strongman agenda.

There's no doubt that The Man Without A Face suffers from the deceptions and the confusion that surround Putin's rise. Ms. Gessen is forced to rely on accepted history and the personal recollections of a handful of compromised witnesses to key events. This is far from ideal for it leaves the author too much room to guess and pontificate, to reaffirm her own biases. However, for all these drawbacks, the author has nonetheless built upon the work of others to make a devastating case against Vladimir Putin, a case there's no doubt he will ignore. For while the faces and the ideologies are different, this is the same Russia in one respect. Corruption is still rampant, corruption which gives the elites a great deal to protect. And when they stand to lose so much, there is very little they are not willing to do in the name of power and self-preservation.

quality work troubled by its suppositions. (3/5 Stars)

Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets by David Simon

From The Week of April 30, 2012

Despair has many faces. It lives in the crumbling facades of vacant buildings relinquished to economic decay. It beds down with the homeless, encouraging them to surrender to the cruel vicissitudes of fate. It aids criminals, allowing them to take financial nourishment from the hopeless. And it saps at the will of those good souls who try to make a difference. Despair is not only pernicious, it's cancerous, metastasizing through the body of society until it's driven its corrupting tentacles into every aspect of life.

For all of despair's power, it can be attacked. After all, it does not just appear from nowhere; it has a source from which its darkness flows. But what is that source? We may have our own opinions, but they will not sway Mr. Simon. For he is firmly, and understandably, convinced that this despair flows from institutions which all-too-rarely function as they ought. Homicide is a masterful illustration of his contention.

The year is 1987 and Baltimore, Maryland's largest city, is awash in corpses. Stabbed and beaten, shot and crushed, they appear crumpled on her streets, sprawled on the floors of her apartments, and abandoned like trash in her alleys. Young and old, male and female, gangsters and citizens, they are Baltimore's murdered, victims of a thousand crimes. Some were felled by a more violent culture while others were ruined by an ever-more competitive drug trade. Some were cut down out of opportunism while others were discarded by whim. Whatever the cause, whatever the circumstance, they will all, more than 200 of them this calendar year, find their way into the minds and the casefiles of the homicide division of the Baltimore Police Department.

Overworked and underpaid, plagued by problematic bosses and burdened by foolish policies, they are the men and women who labor to solve murders in one of America's most violent cities. Every day, they are called into Baltimore's poverty-riddled streets, to bloody crime scenes with bodies chalked out in the dust. And from this, they must find truth, to pull it from silent witnesses and lying relatives, to lift it from trace evidence and leaps of logic, to rest from the cosmos the knowledge necessary to collar a murderer. After all, a society that allows its killers to roam free, unafraid of the long arm of the law, is no society at all.

In Homicide, Mr. Simon, then a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, chronicles his year attached to the homicide division of the BPD. For twelve long months, he rides in their cars, drinks with them at their bars, watches them in their interrogations and looks on as they collar their suspects. Night after night, case after case, he is a witness to men and women who overcome all of the obstructions placed before them to find some measure of justice for the fallen. This accumulated experience, the joyous and the painful, the exquisite and tragic, he bundles together, forms into a coherent narrative and lays down in this 600-page paean to police work in "the darkest corner of the American experiment."

Had Homicide merely liberated police work from the cliches of television, it would have been a success. Had it merely built on this achievement by painting vivid portraits of the colorful murder police who roamed Baltimore's streets in the final years of the 20th century, it'd be wonderfully instructive. In Homicide Mr. Simon digs deeper, beneath the cases and the headlines, the criminals and their pursuers, to mine deeper truths, that we are all part of a corrupt system; that systems generally, no matter how large, are corruptible; that to sin against those few souls who try to keep the system functioning is itself criminal; and that to fail to recognize this, to fail to act against this corruption, is not only a sin against those who are murdered and victimized by the system and its policies, it's a crime against those few brave and battered souls who risk their lives and their mental health in order to keep the system functional. This is why Mr. Simon's work here rises to the level of masterpiece. It is why The Wire is, even years after concluding its run, still considered by the wise to be one of the most powerful television shows in living memory.

A read made both momentous and memorable by its subjects, its themes, its world, and its author's devastating prose. Outstanding work... (5/5 Stars)

The Darkness That Comes Before: The Prince Of Nothing 01 by R. Scott Bakker

From The week of April 23, 2012

Though the countless generations of humanity that have lived across the centuries have little of custom or culture in common, they do each share one disturbing characteristic. Each generation produces, at one point or another, a few tortured souls who believe that the apocalypse is nigh, that the world they know so well is ending, and that only they are capable of warning the poor, ignorant masses of their collective fate. We may, at some point, discover the source of the strange, existential impulse that empowers this eschatology, but such knowledge is almost secondary to a deeper truth, that, on some profound level, we must simultaneously want and fear the end of the world and whatever that may herald for ourselves and those we love. We must want, in short, to live in interesting times, to play our parts in an epic drama that dwarfs all else that has come before.

In all this desire, though, in all this fervor for the end times, do the doomsdayers truly comprehend what they are anticipating? Can they grasp the bloodshed, the chaos, and the darkness that would arise from an actual apocalypse? And if so, would they rue what they were so eager to declare? This apocalyptic novel from Mr. Bakker leaves little doubt that heralds of end times are but children playing with shadows, that true darkness is far more profound and fearsome than any of us can imagine.

On a world riven by magic and faith, destiny and prophecy, sorcerers, priests and emperors vie for control of Eaerwa, a diverse continent home to both urban cities and rural steps, self-indulgent nobles and war-hardened tribesmen. Of course, Eaerwa wasn't always so ripe for power-plays. Not 2,000 years earlier, it was all-but-depopulated by the First Apocalypse, a continental conflict that turned both the people and their culture to ashes. But the passing of two millennia has not only restored imperial government and mercantile trade to the land, it has allowed the lessons of the past to slip into shadow, forgotten by competing forces whose yearning for power and dominance compel them to violent action.

The result is the Holy War, a conflict that pits two deeply divergent sects of the same faith against one another in hopes of reclaiming a city holy to both sides. But though this conflict is bound to claim the lives of countless souls, selling their families and the continent at large into economic and social chaos, it is almost secondary to deeper forces at play, forces that are awakening after centuries of being thought banished or dead. And for all of the terrors war can summon, they are as nothing to the nightmares this new darkness heralds. A second apocalypse is imminent, ready to return this still wounded world to rubble.

The first instalment of an ambitious trilogy, The Darkness That Comes Before is a fascinating piece of fantasy fiction that arguably has more in common with epic poems and Greek tragedies than it does with its genre's customary fare. Rife with philosophy and violence, it is both sacred and profane, as drenched in the fanaticism of zealots as it is the opportunism of tyrants attempting to capitalize on such faith. In this, it is an deeply political novel that boldly sets out to suck the reader down into a world as intensely drawn as it is utterly foreign, a world of godlike magicians and beleaguered whores, spoiled emperors and holy prophets. These opposing and competing forces occupy the heart of this blood-soaked work, fighting for dominance over a sprawling and, at times, bewildering tale.

But as much as Mr. Bakker succeeds in injecting his fiction with the philosophy of high literature, as much as he manages to bring Eaerwa to light in all its complex depravity, The Darkness That Comes Before is nonetheless a decidedly unlikeable novel. Its characters are all-but-universally hateful. Yes, there are moments when Mr. Bakker's protagonists manage to elevate themselves from the mire, but even these moments are characterized by despair, confusion, and an overriding sense of doom. There is not a spark of joy to be found anywhere within these 700 unpleasant pages.

Mr. Bakker should be commended for his achievements here. It is a rare talent who can conceive of such a rich world and animate it with such violent flair. But his characters are mere two-dimensional puppets, pieces to be moved on the cosmic chessboard. The author never allows his readers to empathize with them, let alone love or admire them. All such emotion is lost in the everpresent sense of gloom and repulsiveness that clings to each of his actors who are, for all their sweat and toil, uncompelling.

For me, the journey ends here. For what Mr. Bakker forgot, in the creation of his nuanced world, was to imprint upon his story something like a reason for the reader to keep turning the page. For all its art, distasteful and disappointing... (2/5 Stars)

Drift by Rachel Maddow

From The week of April 23, 2012

Of all the institutions spawned by human civilization, the military must surely be considered among the most consequential. For other than the nation state, no organization has done more to influence the tide of history. Across the millennia, countless men have been assembled, armed and trained in the art of war which is nothing less than the force that shapes our world. The military gathers up men from different faiths and backgrounds, generations and dispositions, and forges among them unbreakable bonds of brotherhood that transcend all other temporal ties. But for all its power, the military has a dark side as well. For powerful institutions attract those who wish to wield power over them, take them into their hands and steer them as they see fit. The military is a weapon in the arsenal of politicians and visionaries, a tool capable of flattening any opposition in its path. Consequently, how and why it is used is a matter of critical importance. Ms. Maddow illustrates.

Since the advent of World War II, the United States has made it a mission to perfect the art of war. Bringing to bear proficiencies in science, engineering and tactics, this nation has, over the last 60 years, created the most powerful and technologically advanced war machine our world has ever seen. And it hasn't been afraid to use this supreme weapon either, engaging in dozens of conflicts, large and small, over the latter half of the 20th century, both in the name of liberty and its own self-interest. At one time, these wars required the full mobilization of the homefront to prosecute. They required munitions factories to be built and worked, food distribution systems to be re-doubled and re-routed, civil defense forces to be trained and outfitted, all while regular citizens were called away from their families and their jobs to fight and die in distant lands, under different suns. No longer...

Now, in the 21st century, in a world of private contractors and Predator drones, in a world of unlimited credit and overmatched foes, the United States can fight its wars without the bad PR of flag-draped caskets. It can engage in operations all over the world without having to spend the political capital associated with Drafting private citizens. Relying on its reservists to faithfully and uncomplainingly execute dozens of deployments to the world's conflict zones, it can outsource all the burden of fighting a war upon a tiny percentage of its population, leaving the rest to go peacefully about the business of their lives.

How did this happen? How did the United States go from the general mobilization of the Second World War to relying upon less than one percent of its population to prosecute wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? With admirable doggedness, Ms. Maddow reaches back across 60 years of military and political history to, step by painful step, reconstruct the fateful decisions that gradually uncoupled the United States from its military. From the demagoguery of Ronald Reagan to the political expediency of George H. W. Bush,she describes how a succession of powerful presidents overpowered a succession of compliant congresses to get what they felt was their right, the use of military force against their country's enemies without having to bow to the constraints of the Constitution. At the same time, Ms. Maddow describes the many efforts made, from the Abrams Doctrine to the War Powers Act, to halt this dangerous uncoupling. But not even these bulwarks have withstood the desire of powerful men to command the most menacing military the world has ever seen.

Drift is an exceptional read. With a mixture of sardonic humor and cutting sarcasm, Ms. Maddow pillories the self-interest of the numerous presidents whose combined efforts succeeded in resting control of the military out of the public eye and into the private sphere where its influence could be deployed without fear of political fallout. In this, the author is far from partisan, measuring Bill Clinton for as much scorn as she does Bush Senior. If her liberal leanings show at all, it is in the length of time she devotes to savaging Ronald Reagan whose actions here comprise about a third of the narrative. However, the 1980s were a pivotal time in the separation Ms. Maddow is highlighting. And so most of her fire reads as warranted rather than political.

Ms. Maddow has raised, here, a vital concern, one that has been rarely discussed. Given its importance, she should be commended. However, the extent to which she downplays the role technology has played in her tale is problematic. Yes, political expediency has clearly been the primary cause for why much of the United States military has been privatized, but technology has also made it much easier for military power to be exercised in parts of the world where there are few American boots on the ground. Her unwillingness to incorporate technology into her explanatory narrative prevents Drift from fully grasping a complex and worrisome issue.

This is frightening work. The idea that this much power can be concentrated in the hands of so few should sober us all. It certainly will trouble those who consume this worthy read and stay with them for some time to come. As slickly written as it is compellingly argued... (4/5 Stars)

A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts by Christiane Bird

From The week of April 23, 2012

The freedom to live as we choose, unconstrained by the tyrannical whims of the few, is humanity's deepest desire. Food may satiate our hunger and water quench our thirst, but only liberty can satisfy our souls. For notwithstanding the unproven promises of religion, we each have but one life to spend in this world of varied treasures. TO waste that gift in political bondage, forced to labor at the behest of others, is a crime against us all.

Many of us understand this truth intellectually, having had its wisdom handed down to us from the visionaries who fought for and enshrined our freedom, but we do not truly understand it. We cannot taste it for we have not had it ripped from us. No, to truly understand freedom, we must look to those who have lived and toiled beyond the protection of liberty's shadow. Who better to teach us then the Kurds, masters of living at the behest of abusive powers greater than they. Ms. Bird elucidates.

A land of mountains and deserts, tribes and rebellions, Kurdistan is home to the largest population of stateless citizens in the world and is, consequently, one of its most cursed regions. Surrounded by Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, it is beset on all sides by strife, quarrelsome nations who have, at various times, slaughtered its people, coveted its oil, suppressed its language and pilloried its culture, all in the name of self-interest. Not all of these attacks have been malevolent in nature. Some have arisen out of earnest desires to forge new national identities and modernize the region. However, though these assaults may forego the warlike depravities of other attacks, they are nonetheless destructive, tearing at the fabric of Kurdish life unto extinction.

Far from suffering these attacks meekly, the Kurds have violently resisted the efforts of their neighbors to claim their lands and steal their resources. Many of their sons and daughters have built strongholds in these mountains from which reprisals can be launched in the name of Kurdistan which, for decades now, has been nothing more than an idea, a region without a nation, a people without a home. It is into this churning sea of conflicting forces that Ms. Bird plunges her readers headlong. Over many trips and many months, she absorbs Kurdish culture, immerses herself in Kurdish life and is hosted by Kurdish people eager for their stories of love and betrayal to be heard by the broader world. Beginning with Kurdish-controlled cities which preserve the purest form of Kurdish culture, she soon travels to the Turkish, Iranian, Iraqi and Syrian controlled fragments of Kurdistan, documenting the various ways in which these nations have received and treated their Kurdish minorities. What emerges is a diary of 21st century Kurdish life that is, in every respect, unforgettable.

A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts is a mesmerizing documentation of a people scarred by war and poisoned by tyranny. Ms. Bird, a western journalist, largely foregoes grizzly reconstructions of the various atrocities the Kurds have suffered. Instead, like a photographer of culture, she takes snapshots of the Kurdish people, allowing their tortured faces and their resilient souls to speak for themselves. Through these faces, these lives, we come to comprehend the rhythm of life in fractured Kurdistan: the burdens of the past they bear, the political challenges they face, and the fear of an uncertain future they confront. All this is made painfully and vividly clear while Ms. Bird's narrative introduces us to to the people, the culture, the language, the religion and the society of a civilization at risk of being ground to dust by the powerful, conflicting forces surrounding it.

Though A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts is not precisely a history of the Kurds, it serves the same purpose. For it introduces us to a beautiful and beleaguered people who have been betrayed so many times, by so many different nations, that it's a wonder they have the will to carry on. And yet, these experts in suffering are revealed, here, to have the endurance of saints and the industriousness of builders, proving, once and for all, that, though the strong body can be broken, the strong spirit cannot be made to wither.

Exceptional work that is outshined only by the amazing souls it uncovers... (5/5 Stars)