The Tielmaran Chronicles Trilogy by Katya Reimann

From The Week of June 18, 2012

For humans, nothing is more central to who we are than identity. It is the sum of us, the gestalt of our life experiences, our neurological responses and our physical makeup, all of which come together to create an individual self that, thankfully, cannot be duplicated. For if it could, then we would be nothing more than clones, definable programs that have run their course before and will again, predictable beings stripped of that most essential aspect that distinguishes us from unthinking organisms.

But what of twins? Are they not, in some sense, clones? Are they not created from the same recipe, reared by the same parents, released to experience the same environment? Or are they different sides to the same coin, halves of a whole that can only be made one by union? Ms. Reimann harnesses the energy of such philosophical questions in this sweeping, fantastical trilogy.

In the ancient empire of Bissanty, a place of gods and storms, sacrifice and slavery, justice is as scarce as mercy. Llara Thunderbringer, the highest of the twelve Gray Gods, commands the five corners of the empire, her power on earth secured through the Bissanty emperor and his five princely sons who ensure symmetry throughout the realm. Thus, when Tielmark, its most southern province, rose in rebellion against this most cruel of imperiums, throwing off Bissanty's oppressive yoke and pledging itself to the service of Eliante and Emiera, the twin goddesses of the hunt. Under their protection, Tielmark thrived for three centuries, safe from the machinations of the ritualistic empire which never forgot this most grievous betrayal. Pride and symmetry would not allow it.

Still, their are holes in every plan, gaps that can be exploited and widened to let through vengeance and darkness. In Tielmark's case, this weakness stems from the pact its heroic prince made with the twin goddesses. In exchange for their protection from Llara and Bissanty, he vowed that his heirs would forever marry women of common, Tielmaran blood, ensuring that Tielmark would forever be ruled by its own. Failure on the part of any of its subsequent princes to fulfil this pledge would destroy the agreement with the twin gods and leave Tielmark unprotected against the holy wrath of its powerful and ruthless neighbor to the north.

In Wind From A Foreign Sky, the trilogy's opening volume, 300 years have past since that fateful agreement and Tielmark is vital and peaceful. The common folk ply their various trades largely free of the dominion of their betters who are raised to respect the finest noble traditions. But stirring in Tielmark's capital is a dark plot that might well see the relatively young kingdom toppled into ruin. For representatives from Bissanty have secreted themselves at the prince's court, deploying a combination of magic and temptation to subvert figures at both the heart of the government and the ceremony of marital renewal that must be soon made in order to honor the twin gods. Their aim? To make an abomination of the ritual, leaving Tielmark bereft of divine protection.

Standing against this plot are two adolescent sisters only now coming into their mystical powers. Gaultry and Mervion are twins, the bastard offspring of a father who, upon being elevated to the nobility, abandoned them to a woodland life with their grandmother, unable to acknowledge them as his own. This is at least Gaultry's angry view of her father's betrayal. Mervion, the gentler of the two, harbors less enmity for a man who has been recently slain in what appears to have been a hunting accident. His slaying triggers a series of events that sees Mervion captured and an accomplished soldier sent to guard Gaultry's life. But not even this wolfish warrior can keep her safe when she fixes her mind upon rescuing her sister, an act that causes her to take center stage in Bissanty's insidious plot.

In A Tremor From A Bitter Earth, the Chronicle's second entry, the danger has only escalated. For Bissanty has sharpened its attacks on Tielmark, sending sacred assassins into her lands to butcher the powerful witches that both keep Tielmark safe and ensure the continuation of her most important rituals. When Gaultry prevents one of these assassins from killing Tielmark's prince, she spares his life, beseeching her sister to help her protect the boy from the poisons imposed upon him to ensure his loyalty.

While the sisters work to heal the young assassin, showing him far more mercy than he showed his victims, Martin, Gaultry's protector, rashly ventures into the heart of the Bissanty empire, on a mission to see his honor cleared. But when he is captured by Bissanty's most powerful sorcerer, Gaultry, with the young assassin in tow, must follow his trail. For love and duty demand nothing less. She is not at all prepared for the truths she discovers in this most exacting of empires.

In Prince of Fire And Ashes, the trilogy's concluding effort, the war for Tielmark's future is brought to a head when the aligning of the stars opens a small window of time in which the fledgling country can raise a prince to the kingship and forever banish the claims the Bissanty empire has to Tielmark. In order to make this elevation a reality, however, royal blood must be shed, blood that will pave the way for a monarch's crown to be rested, by the hand of the gods, upon the head of Tielmark's highest noble. As a priestly conspiracy works behind the scenes to fulfil an ancient prophecy the bloodiest way possible, Gaultry, now a seasoned witch, endeavors to untangle 50 years of lies in hopes of finding, at the heart of this web of secrets, truths, of her origins and of the means to create a king.

Though its plot is troubled by clumsy, post-hoc rationalizations conjured up to justify the dangers its characters are subjected to, The Tielmaran Chronicles is, on the whole, entertaining work. Steeped in the finest traditions of female mysticism -- witchcraft and taro readings play prominent roles throughout --, Ms. Reimann has created a feminine response to the all-too-common chauvinism of fantasy fiction. This alternative energy provides the story with style and punch that elevates it above the ubiquitous trope of farmboy-fights-the-dark-lord that dominates high fantasy.. Gaultry is convincing as a young woman who, while struggling to come into her powers, is burdened by the rejection of her father and overwhelmed by the political intricacies of life at court. In this, Ms. Reimann has successfully animated a heroine that galvanizes her epic.

However, the series suffers from two major flaws that prevent it from achieving greatness. In the main, Ms. Reimann struggles to animate any of her characters beyond Gaultry, her heroine. Everyone, from the prince she's tasked to rescue to the darkly dispositioned soldier who earns her loyalty, is a caricature, floating in and out of the story. They exist only to provide something against which Gaultry can act: a man to be besotted with, a prince to save, a boy to aid. True, most secondary characters are designed to bring out the virtues of the story's protagonists. However, when done well, they have their own personalities, the foibles of which lead them into the blunders from which the heros rescue them. Ms. Reimann cannot even muster this much for Mervion, Gaultry's twin sister. Which leads us to t he series' second flaw. After investing so much time and thought into the symbolism of twins and polarities, dominant and submissive, hard and soft, darkness and light, she reduces Mervion to a plot zombie, a piece to be moved about her chessboard.

Notwithstanding the shortcomings of plot and character that burden her trilogy, Ms. Reimann largely succeeded in her mission here, to create a mystical world of angry gods and intricate prophecies. Both serve these three novels well, creating an escapist atmosphere full of crackling power and divine destiny. Were that these virtues had been married to a strong story, this series might well have coalesced into a tale worthy of the masters of the genre.

A decidedly mixed bag, but certainly work that will be welcomed by those fond of magic and fate. (3/5 Stars)

In The Middle of Nowhere by Terry Underwood

From The Week of June 18, 2012

As much as our lives are shaped by the circumstances, both national and parental, into which we were born, we remain the choosers of our own destinies. After all, even those from the most meager backgrounds can wind up in positions of power. They invariably work much harder to realize their ambitions than do those from greater privilege, but their goals are nonetheless achievable, provided that, like all of us, they are blessed with both luck and dogged determination. Our choices are our own. They reflect who we are and what we desire. And it is this truth that grants memoirs their power. For even while the memoirist is relating the tale of their experiences, we are analyzing her choices, her desires, her fascinations, her biases. Few memoirs demonstrate this truth more clearly than this tale of family and isolation from Ms. Underwood.

In 1963, while working as a nurse in a Sydney hospital, Terry Underwood would meet a man who would forever change her life. A daughter of the Australian countryside working in the nation's largest city, she would aid and befriend John, a cattleman from the Outback recovering from the first of many serious wounds he would accumulate in a life devoted to this most gruelling of occupations. Enchanted by his charm and resilience, the young nurse would stay in contact with the cattleman after his release, entering into a relationship of letters with a man whose lonely world could not be more different than the hyper-urban existence Terry inhabited. And yet, should this otherness be a bar to her happiness?

As friendship kindles into passion, Ms. Underwood accepts two proposals from her future husband, one of marriage and one of life with him, on some of the most remote territory claimed by man. Full of sizeable spiders and venomous snakes, gruelling temperatures and horrific storms, the Northern Territory of Australia is thousands upon thousands of miles of red rock and dry riverbeds, vast plains and scraggly bush. Close enough to the equator that its seasons are differentiated by precipitation rather than temperature, it is some of the most forbidding land on Earth. And yet, it is the home of John Underwood and his kind, a hardened band of Australian homesteaders who'd sooner die than live in the soft lap of civilization. Here, Ms. Underwood helps her man build a home, raise numerous children, cultivate a healthy herd of livestock and create a home full of family and godliness, far away from the distractions of urban life. For this is the bushman's world, one in which there are no higher virtues than honor and self-sufficiency.

Though In The Middle of Nowhere purports to be an account of the trials and tribulations of living in the Australian Outback, Ms. Underwood quickly hijacks her own narrative, refocusing it upon the highs and lows of her family's existence at Riverrun. Rather than dedicating herself to the education of her readers on all matters Bush, its creatures and landscapes, its hazards and its glories, the author describes, in obsequious detail, her love for her husband, her admiration for his trade, and her unshakable faith that, together, they have been blessed by god to perpetuate his grace. Long passages are devoted to the detailing of the Underwood clan and all the wonderful gifts John and Terry have given to them by raising them to be creatures of the bush in the mold of their father. Consequently, the most instructive elements of Ms. Underwood's chronicle are neglectfully abandoned and given only passing reference. What are they, after all, next to the glory of god's little masterpieces, her children?

There is value here. While Ms. Underwood lacks anything like a lyrical pen -- her prose is so linear, it might've been constructed by a child --, she manages to convey a sense of the immensity of the Outback. Moreover, she succeeds in portraying its hardship and the extent to which this challenging terrain tests its human occupiers to their limits, requiring them to endure more than any citydweller could imagine. And yet, tragically, these virtues are almost entirely lost in the thunder of Ms. Underwood patting herself on the back for being such a fine Christian woman. Yes, some measure of this self-aggrandizement is bound to occur in every memoir, but this author does an especially poor job of disguising it.

In The Middle of Nowhere could have been a wonderful journey through life in the Outback. Unfortunately, instead, it is a self-congratulatory primer on how to raise a family in total isolation. The scope is damningly narrow and more than a little conceited. (2/5 Stars)

A Great Improvisation by Stacy Schiff

From The Week of June 18, 2012

Though wars are most visibly and vividly contested on the field of battle, they are arguably won and lost by diplomats wielding nothing sharper than their pens and their wits. For while soldiers are trained to kill with frightening proficiency, they are merely the most obvious manifestation of the will of those who comprise the government. They make and break the treaties; they pay and provision the soldiers; they even give them their orders, telling when to fight and when to hold their fire. They hold the reins of power. And so it's little wonder that a diplomat has been credited with perhaps the second most influential contribution to American independence, behind only that of George Washington. Benjamin Franklin, and his years in France, secured the existence of the fledgling republic. Ms. Schiff explains in this her history of the great inventor's time there.

For the first nine years of the American republic (1776-1785), Benjamin Franklin, that most famed inventor and rebel, was the ambassador to a country without whose support America would have never won the war. France, the shining light of cultural Europe and a staunchly monarchical country with a centuries-long rivalry with England, had little in common with the breakaway colonies attempting to rid themselves of their British masters. Not only were most Americans emigrants from England, they had just recently participated in a war with England against France, culminating in a French defeat that saw them lose virtually all of their North American holdings. What's more, no matter how much enmity the French crown had for england, no matter the outstanding grudges yet to be settled, America was a pathetically weak power with virtually no international profile and, thus, no reputation as a nation capable of keeping its promises and punching above its own meager weight.

And yet, for three, long, frustrating years, Mr. Franklin toiled and schemed, negotiated and cajoled, manipulated and wheedled, until France finally agreed to financially and materielly support the Americans in their bid for independence. Grunts, gold and gunpowder were all dispatched to American shores where they were received by George Washington and his desperate army. With this fresh infusion of support, the Americans turned the tide of their rebellion and thrust the Tories from their shores, forever altering the course of history. And all of it made possible by the cunning, the charm and the cleverness of one man, 3,000 miles away, at the court of a French king...

Full of contentious rivalries and venomous disputes, selfish agents and pompous egos, A Great Improvisation is a vivid reconstruction of the heady years of the American war for independence. Entirely focused on Franklin's machinations at the French court, Ms. Schiff, an American historian who most recently penned a captivating biography of Cleopatra, animates Benjamin Franklin to a wonderful extent, revealing a man of breadth and power. For this most libertine of diplomats was intoxicated by both women and wine, reality and abstraction. A giant of his time, he possessed a powerful mind capable of manipulating kings into going against their own best interests all while fending off treasonous attacks, from his own delegation, which sought to undermine his authority, thus jeopardizing his most critical mission.

But as much as Ms. Schiff succeeds in bringing Mr. Franklin to life, her work's greatest virtue is the extent to which, with an archaeologist's care, she removes the shroud of legend that the American founders sought to wrap about themselves, revealing them to be mere mortals, driven by grudges and biases. She vividly details how the depth of their discomfort with licentious France, coupled the desire to believe in their founding mythology, lead them to commit the age-old sin of nation-builders the world over, to whitewash their own history, downplaying the contributions of their allies in order to make their own efforts, to repel and even defeat what was then the world's most powerful empire, seem all the more extraordinary. This whitewashing caused Franklin's reputation to suffer a double blow. For not only was he himself licentious, and thus worthy of the same suspicions directed at France, his efforts at the French court to secure aid for the American rebellion could hardly be significant if, indeed, the mythologizers were right and America sprang, fully formed, from the womb of liberty.

A Great Improvisation is compelling history lyrically told. Ms. Schiff does, at times, assume that the reader has more knowledge of events of this period than is perhaps reasonable or wise to expect, but then this is nothing a quick trip to Wikipedia can't cure. Fine work... (4/5 Stars)

True History of The Kelly Gang by Peter Carey

From The Week of June 11, 2012

Given sufficient time for a man and his life to pass into legend, to become the stuff of heros and villains, love and tragedy, the truth of a thing becomes virtually impossible to grasp. For too much first-hand knowledge of legends, and the world they unfolded within, have been lost to the rigors of time. Robbed, then, of context and neutrality, we impose our own wishful narrative upon these important, cultural events, viewing them through our own biased lenses and judging them by the standards of our times, not those that birthed them. But what if there were compelling, contemporary accounts of these events, accounts that survived time's erosion to inform our present? Would they change our view? Would they add flesh to bloodless myth? Mr. Carey speculates and demonstrates in his sweeping, epistolary novel.

A key figure in the early history of Australia, Ned Kelly (1854-1880) was a legendary robber of banks and a thief of horses, a lover of women and a giver to the poor. The son of Irish immigrants, his father a convict and his mother a landholder's daughter, he came of age in a brutal period of colonial history in which the unforgiving law listened obsequiously to the rich while deeply ignoring the poor. This pervasive sense of injustice, along with the difficulty of making it in the hard-scrabble world of frontier Australia, combined to limit Ned Kelly's options and set him upon the path of crime that would earn him so much fame.

In boyhood, he was tasked with providing for his family. Having lost his father early, he spent his youth laboring to clear his family's uncultivated land while his mother managed his half-dozen siblings, earning coin for the table through the selling of spirits. Apprenticed, in adolescence, to a bushranger, the young Kelly learned the skills that would one day make him famous. However, in the process, he also earned himself the enmity of the police whose watchful eyes would never long stray from him. Consequently, the authorities would not be far afield when a combination of family disputes and police corruption exposed Kelly, now an adult, as an outlaw. Their subsequent pursuit of him would force Kelly deeper and deeper into banditry and crime until, pushed to his limits, he made one last stand against the men who had hassled, harangued and hobbled his him, his wife, and his family for the whole of his short life.

The winner of the 2000 Man Booker Prize, True History of The Kelly Gang is an engrossing tale of life in the face of corruption. Narratively driven by a fictionalized, 12-part autobiography of Ned Kelly's life from boyhood to demise, it captures not only the impossible challenges faced by settlers in 19th century Australia, but the extent to which its stratified culture all-but precluded those at the bottom of the social ladder from climbing out of the lawless and soul-crushing poverty into which they'd been sold. And so, as much as Mr. Carey should be commended for authenticating his account with the lively and colorful vernacular of the period, utterly convincing the reader, at times, that this is Ned Kelly's voice, the extent to which he vividly depicts the inescapable degradation of the poor is the virtue that carries his thoughtful, funny, harsh and ultimately tragic novel.

There have been, certainly, more worthy recipients of the Booker. After all, at root, Mr. Carey has simply re-imagined the biography of a real man's life. Yes, he has animated it with relationships and shootouts, glossed it with a sympathetic sheen and packaged it with an outlaw's captivating voice, feats all,but it remains another man's story, not one conceived of by the author's own mind. His is, I'm sure, not the only winner to draw inspiration from history, but surely Mr. Carey's stands alone in the fact that all of its creativity flows from its shaping,not its content.

Notwithstanding the extent to which the work has been cribbed from history, True History of The Kelly Gang is full of colorful cutthroats and crooked cops, legendary feats and tragic calamities, polished by a memorable brogue. This well-spiced stew is more than sufficient to drag over the line Mr. Carey's fascinating and sympathetic re-imagining of one man's life. (3/5 Stars)

The Cut by George Pelecanos

From The Week of June 11, 2012

Though war produces many devastating consequences, levelling cities, ruining economies and changing the destinies of nations, perhaps it's profoundest affects are reserved for those who prosecute it. For even in this technological age, war requires warriors to fight, men and women plucked from normal lives and sent to do hellish deeds, the enduring consequences of which no amount of training can prepare them for. Their only defense is the necessity of their mission and the approval of their brothers in arms, a potent combination of drivers that make possible the ultimate sacrifice.

But what if this bulwark is insufficient? What if the necessity of the thing cannot guard the warrior against the depravities he's forced to actualize? What if the action, the killing, gets into his blood and refuses to depart even when he's returned home to the stability of his old life? Mr. Pelecanos speculates in his spare but striking novel.

A veteran of the most recent Iraq War, Spero Lucas has Washington D.C. in his blood. The adopted son of hard-working Greeks, he was a head-strong boy of 19 when the September 11th Attacks changed the history of his nation. Feeling the pull of patriotism, he entered the marines and was shipped out to Iraq where he lost a sizeable chunk of both his innocence and his twenties. Home once more, he contents himself with freelance, investigative work for a high-profile attorney who isn't above defending the odd violent drug-dealer.

Missing the action and the camaraderie of the war, Lucas is receptive when one of the attorney's clients,currently in jail pending trial, approaches him with a deal. Someone has had the temerity to steal from the marijuana kingpin while he's incarcerated and that simply cannot be allowed to stand. If Lucas agrees to recover his stolen property, he can keep 40 percent as his cut for making right what fools put wrong. With memories of the war singing in his veins, Lucas agrees to the arrangement, plunging himself into the underbelly of a city that not so long ago was the murder capital of America. Remnants of these violent times linger on in the American capital, remnants that might well allow Spero to feel like he's once again a warrior.

Comprised of the fatalism of The Wire, the cool of Elmore Leonard and the mystery of the classic detective novel, The Cut is crime fiction at its most engaging. Spare unto skeletal, Mr. Pelecanos prose could well be criticized for a lack of affect and sentiment were such expressions and emotions not left to flow from the words and deeds of his small but vivid cast of characters, rather than from the author's own flowery pen. In this, he asks of his readers more than is obvious in the first few pages. For it is an easy thing for an author to euse prose to omnipotently fill in the gaps for his readers, to use the thoughts of his characters to spell out what cannot be said. In assiduously avoiding this convenience, this crutch, Mr. Pelecanos insists that his readers peel the literary onion, that they feel out the scenarios his characters get themselves into, that they understand the urges and the drives of a world they will likely never know.

But more than the work's structure has made The Cut a success. For Spero Lucas is a captivating presence. A young man possessed of vitality and drive, he is as urgent as he is hampered by inexperience, as eager as he is damaged by war. For while he has managed to re-engage with civilian life more or less successfully, re-awakening all the hungers of a vibrant, healthy male, he has been forever changed by the war which has imprinted upon him a dangerous desire for action that must be sated. For this thirst has become the cornerstone of Lucas' life, the guide by which he tracks through this half-forgotten world. To abandon it would be to abandon who he's become. And yet this need is a sire's song that will lead him down a dark and treacherous road.

This is both breezy and affecting, quiet and thunderous. It is easy to see why Mr. Pelecanos and The Wire formed such a devastating partnership. (4/5 Stars)

Da Vinci's Ghost by Toby Lester

From The Week of June 11, 2012

As much as we distract ourselves with the mundane pursuits of work and play, shelter and sex, the search for meaning is a siren's song inside all of us, driving us to seek out the universal truths that underpin our lives and the universe that encapsulates us. How is it structured? What are its organizing principles? What, or who, created it? Is humanity nothing more than a random outcome of evolution, or are we a purposeful result of something more aware,more divine? In some of us, these questions are only flirted with during times of intense self-reflection. In others, however, they catalyze the mind, compelling it to travel down roads to self-discovery that have the power to change the world. Few men produced so much from this marriage of drive and introspection than Leonardo Da Vinci. And few of his ideas and drawings have had as much symbolic power as Vitruvian Man.

Reproduced in textbooks and stamps, paintings and poems, Vitruvian Man is both the culmination of a thought experiment and the representation of the intersection of man, his world and the universe that houses them both. First theorized by the Roman General Vitruvius in his treatise on architecture, the image -- a man fit within a circle within a square -- is the illustration of the idea that man, specifically the properly portioned man, is the universe writ small, a microcosm of the world he inhabits. In his organs and his dimensions, his aptitudes and his limitations, are the blueprints upon which all else is built. For like everything else in the world, he is subject to proportions, proportions that can be reduced to mathematics, mathematics that govern the design of every godly organism.

Though Vitruvius conceived of this homo-centric notion 1,500 years before Leonardo Da Vinci's birth, it took this giant of the Renaissance to actualize the thought experiment, to prove at least that man could fit inside a circle inside a square. Of course, not even Leonardo was able to prove the philosophical implications of this discovery. Answers to these mysteries, if available, lie many years ahead in our turbulent future.

Da Vinci's Ghost is a charming and concise examination of Vitruvian Man and the master who gave him form. Despite spending the majority of his time here meandering through any of a number of historical digressions, Mr. Lester engagingly establishes the background to both Vitruvian Man and the ideas and biases that dominated the world that spawned him. And so, when the author is finally ready to confront the thought experiment head on, the reader is well-armed with the context necessary to fully comprehend the philosophical implications of just such a notion. For to fit man within a circle, representing the perfect celestial form, and a square, representing the building blocks of the world around him, is to position man within a universal continuum. It is to conceive of him being either the perfect form upon which all else is modeled, or simply one more iteration of a design fundamental to the universe. It is to marry man to both the cosmos above his head and the earth beneath his feet, a relationship that forever embeds him in the grand scheme of life.

Mr. Lester could have taken more time here. For as thorough as he is with the lead-up to Leonardo's sketching of Vitruvian Man, his account of its impact upon the world ends rather abruptly thereafter, leaving his readers only to muse at the myriad ways in which this notion has intrigued and shaped the thoughts of philosophers and mathematicians alike. However, in every other respect, this is wonderful and compelling history, precisely that kind of narrative non-fiction that excites the mind with the tantalizing mysteries of an unknowable universe.

Imaginative work... (3/5 Stars)

Destiny Disrupted by Tamim Ansary

From The Week of June 11, 2012

Though the claim that history is written by the victors is too glib to be entirely true -- the vanquished always have their say so long as they are not exterminated --, the triumphant certainly dominate and control history's narrative. Every great deed, every wonderful invention, every significant event, is filtered through the lens of the preeminent culture which, as its power waxes, lays claim to more and more of the virtues that once belonged to the societies it bested or even consumed. This isn't conscious plagiarism; this is the result of the dominant culture's attempt to explain and justify its primacy. After all, how else does one reach the top but through being the best?

Good fortune. For the tides of history are as fickle as they are tempestuous. A lost battle, a devastating storm, a chance encounter, could all, in their own ways, change the course of local events which ripple out to impact on broader trends which, in turn, decide the fate of our world. This is at least the contention of Mr. Ansary in his fascinating history of the world through Islamic eyes. His is a most compelling case.

Before the West was lifted out of darkness by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the printing press and the longbow, Newton and Galileo, the Islamic world thrived. Emerging in the wake of the collapse of the Roman Empire, Arab civilization arose to conquer and command the majority of what we now refer to as the Middle East. Organized around a faith that taught its practitioners as much about law and morality as it did about god, the Islamic world quickly flourished, producing scholars of religion, astronomy, mathematics and philosophy whose thirst for knowledge was unquenchable. This earnest desire to understand drove them to recover and then preserve Roman and Greek texts then lost to a West drowning in barbarism. In might and wisdom, in numbers and in learning, they had no peer save for perhaps the Chinese of the far east.

For 300 years, the Islamic world was civilization. But then disaster struck. Off the Asian step came the Mongols, an indomitable wave of horse-mounted warriors who smashed the Islamic armies raised against them. These defeats re-opened deep wounds long festering in the body of the Islamic world, accentuating the extent to which corruption, political rivalry and decadence had divided and fractured the people who called themselves Muslims. Within 200 years,withered by misrule and misfortune, there remained but the faintest traces of this golden civilization, its peoples either co-opted or returned to the deserts, leaving behind only a legacy of literature and light to sustain the remnants while the West ponderously rose to shake the world with a succession of industrial, philosophical and technological revolutions.

Penned by an Afghan-American academic, Destiny Disrupted is an enlightening and enchanting journey through the history of Islamic civilization. From the birth of the Prophet to 9/11, Mr. Ansary describes, with loving care, 14 centuries of Islamic life. From the wonders of its golden age to the horrors of its fall, he winningly captures its virtues while carefully exhibiting the fundamental flaws which contributed to its decline and subsumption by western Europe. But as much as the author impresses with his breadth of scope and his engaging prose, the extent to which he compares the Islamic world with the West provides his account most of its highlights.

Mr. Ansary contends that, though the Islamic world possessed all of the key ingredients necessary to ignite the Industrial Revolution, centuries before the West managed this feat, it failed to capitalize on its advantages mainly because it lacked a centralized church. The author argues that it was rebellion against the authoritarian bureaucracy of Roman Catholicism that inadvertently instilled in Europeans that particular strain of individualism that catalyzed philosophical, political and economic thought in the west. Islam, meanwhile, lacking an domineering church, had no means of instilling in its own people that same freedom of the individual. Without this, it simply could not produce, educate and properly position the key innovators necessary to spark the same revolutions that would energize the western world. Though this is a long bow to draw, it remains, nonetheless, a compelling argument.

This is not an academic history. Mr. Ansary freely opines on his subject. Moreover, he injects his account with personality and anecdote, elements which raise the specter of bias. However, the clarity of his thought and the thoroughness of his account allow his forthrightness to be an asset, not a drawback. Stimulating stuff... (4/5 Stars)

The City of a Hundred Rows Trilogy by Ian Whates

From The Week of June 03, 2012

Despite our best efforts, despite our planning, our yearning, and our needing, our lives are often beyond our control. For while we make our own decisions, from the trivial to the consequential, from when to cross the street to what career path to pursue, we have no control over the millions of other variables that impact on our choices: the car that unlawfully belts us, or the economic circumstances that render obsolete the jobs our education promised us. Control is an illusion, a construct of ego that helps us to sleep at night, secure in the knowledge that we hold destiny's reins, not the other way around. Mr. Whates harnesses this fallacy and uses it to hammer home our helplessness before grand events. The product that results from this abject lesson, while limited in vision, is quietly entertaining.

Thaiburley is a city of hopes and sorrows, magic and crime. The centuries-old vision of powers time has faded unto legend, Thaiburley has endured war and chaos, riot and despair, fire and nightmare to become a crowded home for humans and aliens who live, side-by-side, in a place like no other. For Thaiburley is a city of 100 stratified rows that reach for all of the promise of the heavens.

Though not initially designed to sort out the haves from the have-nots, these 100 stories (rows) have, over the years, sorted themselves into cliques, each row making a particular contribution to the Thaiburley whole. But while such specialization has its advantages, serving to leave no doubt in anyone's mind where citizens can find what they require, this form of stratification is wide open to abuse. For it is a simple matter to slowly but continuously compel the less fortunate onto lower and lower rows, into the forgotten and neglected depths of the city and far from the law and order of the Heights, where government resides, where law-enforcement patrols the streets, where the sun is yet visible.

In City of Dreams and Nightmares, the series' first instalment, we encounter the vivid consequences of this neglect in the form of Tom, a young street-nick whose short and difficult life has been marred by gangs, violence and darkness. Born to the lowest rows of Thaiburley, he is raised by the streets, welcomed into their thieving arms, and put to their purposes. He, like his brothers in the blue Claw gang, grift, steal and work to protect their turf against the other street-nick gangs that seek to take it from them.

The familiar rhythm's of Tom's dystopic life are shattered, however, when he is charged with making a long and daring climb to the heights of Thaiburley's fabled rows. Skilled in hiding and evasion, he is helped past the rival gangs until he is away and free to climb all the way to the top. But just as Tom is adjusting to the marvels of the lawful world around him, so rich with color, freedom and wealth, the likes of which he's never seen, his reverie and his mission are shattered when he chances to witness an early-morning murder. Brimming with jealousy and privilege, one of Thaiburley's senior officials has stabbed his student to death. Quickly, the murder is blamed on Tom, igniting a city-wide search for the street-nick which not only forces Tom into uncertain alliances, it compels him to flee into the strangest and darkest corners of the city in search of safety and salvation.

In City of Hope and Despair, the series' second volume, Thaiburley has settled into the calm eye of the storm that promises to shake its ancient walls. For though the immediate danger, for Tom and the city, has past, a deeper game is still underway, one that dredges up old nightmares. For while Tom is dispatched to an icy, northern citadel in hopes of fully realizing his talents, Katrina, the young, embittered independent operator who recently helped Tom avoid the wrath of the city's authorities, is forced to confront her grim past when her mother's killer re-emerges to stalk the sin-stained streets of Thaiburley's lowest rows.

How foul is a thing that prays on the unfortunate? Who devours what little hope they have? A thing that requires their sustenance to live, a thing that understands full well that the best victims are ones no one cares about. And so, while a strange and deadly flu sweeps through Thaiburley's most powerful assemblies, preoccupying the authorities, Kat draws upon old allies and friends to combat a nightmare that haunts her dreams with the ruination of her childhood.

In City of Light and Shadow, the most recent entry in the series, the war for control of Thaiburley finally comes to a climactic head when the animating force behind the chaos at its core is identified and engaged in combat by a steadier, wiser Tom. While the city's wisest minds continue to be felled by a mysterious and devastating illness, all of the remaining resources of the Prime Master's administration must be gathered and hurled at this threat lest the source of the city's power lose control of its agents and darken the city forever in powers beyond anyone's command.

Though it suffers at times from a lack of focus and imagination, The City of A Hundred Rows is solid fiction that, in delivering on many of the fantasy genre's legendary tropes, breezily entertains. Mr. Whates will never win any awards for his elementary prose, but he compensates for this lyrical shortcoming with a roster of familiar, charming characters and a story which, though unoriginal, serves the reader with a sizeable helping of satisfaction and amusement. Moreover, the extent to which he grounds his magic in some kind of logic provides the story some welcome framework for what is, ultimately, a mashup of the best elements of fantasy and science fiction.

While Mr. Whates' primary purpose here is entertainment, his tale is not without social commentary. The City of A Hundred Rows is best imagined as a series that the immature lovechild of Charles Dickens and J. R. R. Tolkien might have produced. Stratified Thaiburley strongly evokes images of Victorian-age megacities like London and New York which beseeched visitors and inhabitants to buy into the pretty fiction of their opulence and ostentation while ignoring the grim reality of the impossibly difficult lives endured by their forgotten underclasses. Law and justice exist only for those who matter, those who are visible, those who live in sunlight. The wretches, most in need of support, guidance and protection are beneath the notice of all but a rare, fairminded few.

Unfortunately, this attempt to speak to a broader theme is also the source of many of the work's flaws. For Mr. Whates in no way explains how a dystopian city could continue its descent into degradation despite having a benevolent and all-powerful ruler with legendary warriors at his disposal. The author clearly wished to burden Tom and Katrina, his two protagonists, with miserable backgrounds while also using the corruption and the moral decay within the city as a wellspring of enemies for his heroes to battle. But in choosing to cast Thaiburley's Prime Master as a force for good,and to grant him extraordinary powers, he leaves the reader wondering why the city's leader doesn't simply fix the problems endemic to this place when he's clearly capable of doing so. The conceit, then, that these are challenges only Tom and Katrina must face, as a means of serving the story and accelerating their maturation, is tragically obvious.

No doubt fans of heroes and quests will find the journey depicted in The City of A Hundred Rows enjoyable. Much of its plot reprises much of fantasy's most hallowed tomes. And yet there are too many disharmonious notes here to allow the reader to forget that he is in the hands of an apprentice playing a master's tune: too many characters introduced and forgotten, too many plot threads woven and then neglected, too many moments of deus ex machina for the victories to feel earned.

Compelling for its heroism in the face of corruption and the extent to which it mixes and matches science fiction and fantasy, but in every other respect derivative... (2/5 Stars)

Gifts of The Crow by John Marzluff & Tony Angell

From The Week of June 03, 2012

Intelligence is a wonderful virtue. The catalytic force that empowers our every endeavor, it allows us to process and act upon the information we receive from the world. It makes possible our schemes to provide nourishment to our bodies and our minds while flooding our world with art and literature, ideas and accolades. But for all that human civilization would not exist without intellect to actualize and perpetuate it, it does have one consequential flaw. For it allows its possessor to imagine himself superior to others, a being not only above his fellows, but above all the lesser creatures with whom he shares his world. It would be bad enough if this arrogance had merely caused the wholesale slaughter of his fellow human beings, or the hunting for sport and not predation of his fellow animals. But it has also caused him to assume that no other creature in his world is like him, capable of reason, dignity and insight. It is this myth that Misters angell and Marzluff puncture so effectively in this captivating examination of a winning creature.

Corvids, that family of birds that claims as members both ravens and crows, have, for decades, stunned scientists with their mental capacity. Initially thought to be on an intellectual par with their fellow avians, with evidence to the contrary dismissed as embellishments, years of systematic study of these large-brained birds has revealed some shocking similarities with humans. For Corvids have been seen to mourn their dead, to hold grudges against those who have harmed them, to trade kindness for food, and to enter monogamous relationships with their partners. They share food, raise their young, encourage them to play as a means of learning, and then send them into the world. They use tools and memories; they have friends and foes. By any measurement, they are intelligent and self-aware, displaying all the behaviors humans do, though, in a much more rudimentary form. After 600-million years of evolution, they stand with us as the intelligent outgrowth of the great experiment in life known as Earth.

Combining legends and anatomy lessons, tall tales and scientifically rigorous experiments, Misters Angell and Marzluff, both avid observers of wildlife, document, in Gifts of The Crow, the breathtaking capacity of a remarkable creature. Descriptions of the Corvid's willingness to learn and adapt through play and experience are as eerie as they are compelling. For one cannot help but recognize the numerous ways in which Corvid maturation is like our own childhoods. The life-long bonds of friendship juxtaposed against their ability to feel enmity, to sew discord, not only charges the reader with the excitement and the delight of seeing and knowing that we are not alone, it reminds him that the world was not made for him, that we are as much a beautiful accident as the Corvid, and that intelligent life is, in some fundamental way, universal, an outgrowth of neurons and not a blessing of the divine.

While maintaining an academic tone throughout, while steeping their work in research not hearsay, Gifts of The Crow is, nonetheless, a moving treatise on the quiet, pervasive spirituality of intelligent life in all its mystery, its grace, and its beauty. Utterly potent without being, in any respect, ideological, or polemical, which is, in and of itself, an achievement. (4/5 Stars)

The Vikings by Robert Ferguson

From The Week of June 03, 2012

Time is a corrosive force. For as much as its passing allows us to order and contextualize our lives, lending structure to the narrative of existence, its abrasiveness erodes the landmarks of culture and civilization we erect in honor of ourselves and our achievements. Of course, certain substances stand up better to time's rigors. Stone, for instance,has underpinned some of our longest-lasting edifices. But though stone has permitted structures like Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid to exist for thousands of years, untroubled save for the occasional damaging earthquake, even these achievements serve only to demonstrate time's power. For the paper upon which these societies may have transcribed the meaning for such structures have disintegrated with the passing of millennia, forcing us to only guess at the beliefs and the motives, the methods and the practices, that lent meaning to these monuments and to the cultures who built them.

Oral cultures suffer most grievously at time's hand. For they rely upon story and song to hand down their accumulated knowledge, eschewing the relative permanency of paper and stone for the intimacy of the poetical word, so rich with metaphor and meaning. Nonetheless, any number of calamities, manmade and otherwise, have the power to sever this rich, cultural inheritance and leave priceless stores of knowledge lost forever. Few peoples have suffered the consequences of this truth more than the Vikings. Mr. Ferguson explains in this engaging history.

Today, the Vikings are best remembered for their fearsome appearance, their violent practices and their captivating ships which grimly sailed the Atlantic seas in search of conquest and bounty. Efforts by cultural authorities in Denmark and Sweden, to claim these legendary raiders as their own, have only accentuated their mythology, obscuring the truth that the Vikings were far from the united monoculture depicted in modern renderings. A loose confederation of clans and families, warbands and self-styled monarchs, they were the warlike face of Scandinavia during the dying days of the Norse religion. For 300 years, from roughly the midpoint of the eighth century, through to the Battle of Hastings in 1066 which sounded the death knell for their power, the Vikings imprinted themselves upon western Europe, imparting their genetics, their gods, their culture and their ideals upon those too soft for their axes and arrows.

But as much as they were slavers and pirates, the Vikings were also explorers and colonizers. They sailed to unknown shores and, in as much as they could, compelled their cultivation. A hardy people steeled by bone-numbing winters, they were pragmatic and forceful, willing to do whatever it took to survive until Ragnarok, an armageddon born of doctrine at which their gods would die. They accepted that they lived in a world of chaos beyond their control. And so they adhered to a code that, though brutal by our standards, kept them alive and independent in a world of ice and stone.

Though limited in its scope, The Vikings is an edifying examination of pre-Christian Scandinavia and the warriors, customs and politics it produced. Though much of the finer details are lost to us, Mr. Ferguson deploys the research of geneticists and archaeologists to reconstruct a fairly thorough portrait of Viking life. He is at his most illuminating, though, when elucidating the fractured and factious nature of this warrior culture and the extent to which this disunity energized many of their efforts at colonization. The author also effectively communicates the fearsome strength of the soldiers produced by this culture, unyielding men who managed, at various times, to conquer swaths of Germany, France and pre-feudal England. Consequently, the quick histories Mr. Ferguson provides for the houses of Charlemagne and Godwin are handy and informative.

For all its virtues, The Vikings suffers from a dearth of cultural detail. Mr. Ferguson does yeoman's work dredging up what he can, but is account is nonetheless inflicted by that most pervasive of diseases common among cultural histories, an obsession with the deeds of kings and the rise and fall of dynasties, neither of which contribute much to our understanding of Viking life and cause our eyes to blur over with fatigue and dislocation.

Notwithstanding its drawbacks, The Vikings is a fine work that does what it can to animate a fascinating people in a troubled time. (3/5 Stars)

The Sunflower by Simon Wiesenthal

From The Week of May 28, 2012

Forgiveness is a powerful and vexing pursuit. For to forgive is, in a critical sense, to absolve, to wipe clean the slate of past wrongs in hopes of normalizing relations between perpetrators and victims. Considering that, by and large, more is gained from friendship than from enmity, such a normalization is beneficial to both sides, draining from an emotional wound that ugliest of poisons which harden our hearts and calcify our grudges.

Such logic, however, depends upon the perpetrator being, to some degree, sane. It depends upon him grasping the incentive not to wrong in the future. It depends upon the wrong not reaching the level of the heinous. For how can we forgive the unforgivable? How can we allow our most wicked crimes to be absolved with but a few heartfelt words? Are some sins not too grievous, too nihilistic, for forgiveness? Mr. Wiesenthal compellingly ruminates on this question in this short but moving work.

The year is 1943 and much of Europe is awash in war. Though Nazi Germany has recently endured two decisive defeats in their efforts to conquer Great Britain and Russia, their ubermensch war machine churns relentlessly onward in hopes of realizing its Fuhrer's dreams for an Aryan world. In the path of that terrible destiny stands Simon Wiesenthal, a young, European Jew, whose life is irrevocably altered when he is condemned to unimaginable deprivations in the Lemberg concentration camp for no better reason than he is Jewish.

While at the camp, as he and his fellows suffer, Mr. Wiesenthal is approached by a nurse who leads him to a wounded Nazi soldier. Over an afternoon, the blinded warrior describes, to Mr. Wiesenthal, the circumstances and the tragedies that lead him to this moment, asking, at the culmination of his tale, for the Jewish man's forgiveness. Struggling with this burden, Mr. Wiesenthal solicits the opinions of others in the camp, agonizing over his responsibilities in a matter both consequential and insignificant. After all, one soldier's appeal for forgiveness does not absolve the Nazis. And yet, is it not a key piece of information in the understanding of how this horror came about and how it can be made right in the future? Haunted, Mr. Wiesenthal is liberated from the camp and seeks out the soldier's mother, in hopes of finding some cruelty there that will ease his conscience, but when she only has sadness and regret to offer him, his search must go on.

The Sunflower is a momentous and disturbing search for the truth to an unanswerable question. What are the limits of forgiveness? Harnessing the malevolent energies of perhaps the worst, most systemic crime in human history, Mr. Wiesenthal, a man who would eventually become a noted hunter of Nazis, confronts the notion that forgiveness might well be too small, too soft for crimes against humanity. For when faced with a collaboration of men and women intent upon the arbitrary extermination of a people, what can be gained by forgiveness? What future is there after the apologies are made and closure found? The dead remain. The atrocities remain. History cannot be undone, nor paved over. Some stains cannot out.

And yet, there must be an end sometime. The burdens conveyed by such wicked crimes must be laid down. For to clutch close such pain is to allow ones life to continue to be ensnared by the cruel ideologies that once sought to be dominant in the world. They cannot be forgotten, but nor can they be allowed to rule what time the victim has left. If forgiveness can be a means through which peace can come to the victim, and it seems to me a necessary component to the finding of peace, then it must be granted, if only as a means of smoothing the victim's return to something resembling normality.

As a piece of literature, The Sunflower is intriguingly composed. Divided into two parts, it first relates Mr. Wiesenthal's experience and then answers that with essays from prominent figures who have consumed the story, digested its philosophical nourishment and provided, in turn, their individual answers to his ultimately subjective question. Can one man grant a regime absolution? Does forgiveness even matter in a secularist world? How do we weigh the need to move past horror against our need for justice? All such thorny aspects to this persistent problem are raised and addressed by the luminaries, both light and dark, who speak to Mr. Wiesenthal's brief but telling experience with his wounded captor.

There are no limits to forgiveness. There cannot be. For what has been done cannot be unmade. What has past cannot be rewritten. It is. It must be met, assimilated, and, finally, fatefully, laid to rest. To not forgive is to be consumed by the crime, to extend the suffering conveyed by it. there must be an end.

Moving and provocative work... (4/5 Stars)

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

From The Week of May 28, 2012

Myths, like narratives, rule our lives. From the kindness of Santa Clause to the immaculate sacrifice of Christ, from the reassuring order of justice to the pacifying power of the vote, we are raised on potent ideas to which we bind ourselves in hopes of not only smoothing life's passage, but providing ourselves with a common cultural framework that allows us all to be part of a greater, grander whole. Myths permit us to tell stories about ourselves that soften our edges and promote our virtues, closeting the harshness of absolute truth. But given that myths are, at root, lies, useful but ultimately unavoidable fictions, they will eventually fall apart, tattering under the scrutiny of our maturing eyes and breaking under the stresses applied to them by a changing world. When the myths are dispelled, what will we be left with? Can we handle the truths so cruelly revealed to us? Or must we build new myths to replace the old as a means of cushioning ourselves from that which we dare not regard? Ms. Russell cogitates in her intriguing but flawed novel.

Once a bustling amusement park, home to the best alligator wrestler in Florida, Swamplandia has fallen on hard times. Its star attraction, Hilola Bigtree, has succumbed to cancer, a tragic circumstance that has, in one stroke, deprived Swamplandia of its remaining shining light while unmooring the three teenaged, Bigtree children from the quiet, eccentric lives they had been accustomed to. As the locals throw Swamplandia off for the World of Darkness, a new and tacky park on the Florida mainland, the Bigtree clan struggles to adjust to this new and unexpected reality. While the Chief, their father, vanishes into the mainland to sort out the park's abysmal finances, Kiwi, his only son, takes on a job as a janitor at their hellish rival, sending back all the funds he can spare in hopes of keeping his home afloat.

Meanwhile, on their island home, Ava Bigtree watches her sister slowly descend into madness, searching for understanding amidst the ghosts of Swamplandia's past. This journey will compel Ava to follow her into the swamps that surround their home, driven to save her sister from the underworld she's so eager to fall into.

A surreal novel that breezily transitions between reality and myth, casinos and spirit realms, Swamplandia! is a work of painful nostalgia, a recollection of both the innocence of childhood and the brutality of growing up. It chronicles the discomforting expansion of the world as we age, how simplicity must needs give way to complexity, how morality abandons the comfortable polarity of white and black and enters into a nuanced gray that must be experienced before it can be understood. It acknowledges that such experiences are scarring, but that there is no other way but through. For to reject the harshness of reality is to reject sanity. It is to cut oneself loose from the bondage we all submit to when we grow up and agree to be shackled by civilization.

As much as Swamplandia! tries to dance between myth and reality, as much as it labors to tease us with the seductions of adolescent and familial dislocation, it is ultimately flawed work. Its ventures into spiritualism are as unconvincing as its plot is predictable. The tragedies that befall its characters are, at times, so obvious that the reader is left wading through dozens of pages in order to reach the inevitable. Such threadbare puppeteering on behalf of the author prevents the work from ever reaching any kind of emotional awakening. Every action, every episode, is one step removed from us, a reality that precludes the reader from feeling the novel's traumatic jeopardy.

Swamplandia! claims some lyrical prose and some moving moments, but it would have been much more effective if it had dismissed its flirtations with spiritualism and confined itself to an examination of the disillusionment of adulthood. For this was, by far, the work's strength. In every other respect, this is a half-realized dream. 93/5 Stars)

Eva Braun by Heike Goertemaker

From The Week of May 28, 2012

From chiefs to presidents, from visionaries to celebrities, humans have always responded to strong leaders. A consequence of our hierarchical coding that demands we cohere around powerful personalities, we have allowed them to create our culture, establish our social norms and organize our governments. We have let them inspire us to be better and we have permitted them to terrify us into committing to ruinous war. For good and ill, we remember them better and longer than anyone else, their potent legacies handed down to us through fables, a gallery of giants with lessons to teach. But what attracts us to these luminaries of history? What gives them the power to compel our fealty? Surely it is more than a quirk of evolution that allows them to master us and imprint upon us their ideas for a glorious future. Of all such figures, few have been responsible for more horror and more fascination than Adolf Hitler. This is the history of the woman who followed him unto death.

The product of a seamstress and a schoolteacher, Eva Braun was born and raised in tumultuous times. Germany, an empire at her birth, collapsed, during her adolescence, into a doomed republic burdened by hyperinflation and the punitive reparations the Treaty of Versailles compelled it to grant to victorious France. This scarred and defeated country was the place of Braun's formative years, a giant brought to its knees by trickery and betrayal. Or this was at least the palatable fiction pedaled by Hitler and his Nazis, a movement comprised of proud and angry men who could not stand to abide the notion that mighty Germany could have been vanquished in war fair and square.

Fascinated by photography, Eva Braun fell in with this vehement crowd in 1929 when she was hired on by the National Socialist's official photographer. By 1933, she was not only committed to the cause, she had graduated to Hitler's inner circle of confidantes, rejecting the moderation of her parents to become a creature comfort to a dictator at the age of 21. Deploying the real threat of suicide as a means of binding herself to the standoffish Fuhrer, Braun eventually became Hitler's most loyal supplicant, willing to keep herself clear of his public life if only he would share with her his private one. The mutual bond grew throughout World War II until, finally, when all other hope for victory was gone, they married in the rubble of Berlin, at the heart of a world annihilated by their actions.

Eva Braun is fascinating work. Dismissing the popular notion that female Nazis were merely dragged along in the wake of their powerful husbands, Ms. Goertemaker constructs a portrait of Eva Braun that leaves little doubt that Hitler's only wife was devoted to both her man and his cause. Successfully placing Braun at key meetings throughout the war, the author convincingly argues that Braun was in a better position than most to understand the extent of the devastation her lover was visiting upon the world. Moreover, it is clear that it was well within Braun's powers to reject the ugliness into which she'd happily sold herself. That she refused to do so, that she contentedly and knowledgeably followed him into death sets up, for the reader, the age-old question of immoral leadership.

Do electrifying leaders use their innate charisma to compel their followers to abandon reason for cruelty and war, or do the followers themselves enchant their leader with the very charisma they then credit him for bewitching them with? Does the monster make himself, or is he the gestalt of the pain, the suffering and the wounded pride of all his creators? Eva Braun is a case study for the latter for Ms. Goertemaker leaves little doubt that the young woman was like the millions of fellow Germans who joined the Nazi party, desperate to believe in something and someone who could erase their degradation, who could give them work, and who could imbue them with worldly purpose. It did not matter if the result of sewing this corrupted seed would be a blighted crop. All that mattered was the restoration of what should have always been.

Ms. Goertemaker adopts an academic's scholarly remove to narrate the history of a woman at the center of a fascinating time. Her account suffers somewhat from a lack of correspondence that would have allowed us to hear Braun's own voice, but the author fills in the silhouette of her subject with the backgrounds of relevant figures with whom she interacted, using their biased opinions to help complete the image of a youthful woman utterly devoted to her man. (3/5 Stars)

The Idea Factory by Jon Gernter

From The Week of May 28, 2012

As much as we might wish otherwise, our world is built upon the genius of a few. We play, of course, a key role in actualizing their vision by mining their materials, building their factories, paying their salaries and adopting their products, but ultimately we are merely the audience for sublime imaginations, guinea pigs upon whom brilliance can be given form and purpose. the pride of some may be wounded by this stark reality, but it cannot be ducked. Every device we use, not to mention the traditions and habits they produce, is a manifestation of intellectual might and first-rate vision the likes of which we can only dream of. So let us revel in that genius; let us marvel at it. For such transformative times are rare and priceless, few moreso than the episode captured here, so well, by Mr. Gernter.

The research and development arm of the telecom monopoly that dominated the United States for the first half of the 20th century, Bell Labs transformed our world. From the vacuum tube to the transistor, from the video phone to the transcontinental cabling that would one day make the Internet a reality, this collection of quasi-corporate scientists, operating on a sleepy campus in suburban New Jersey, was responsible for a series of inventions and innovations that catalyzed the technological revolution, providing critical momentum for our hopes of becoming a post-industrial civilization. Though operational for decades prior, its most productive period came in the feverish times after World War II when the United States was awake to the possibilities of technology and their liberating power. From 1947 to 1962, Bell Labs laid down the basics for the personal computer and sent the first American satellites into space, all in the furtherance of a single, organizing mission, the creation of a system that would connect every human on Earth and allow them to communicate whenever and however they desired.

From these revolutionary technologies to the geniuses and the eccentrics who envisioned and birthed them, Mr. Gernter returns us to the limitless promise of the 1940s and the 1950s. He tours Bell Labs, its architecture and its workspaces, its corporate structure and its core mission, in order to capture the essence of this special time while attempting to excavate and identify the key factors -- money, minds, monopolies and mentalities -- that spur innovation. For without it, our civilization stagnates, its problems left to fester and grow in the face of feckless opposition.

The Idea Factory is a masterfully thorough history of the origin of our modern, technological world. In clear, linear prose, Mr. Gernter gives equal attention to all the critical aspects of Bell Labs and its story, its structure, its results, and the many personalities that made it legendary. From its early years to its inevitable death, the author enchants us with the excitement and the energy that filled its halls without ignoring the uglier truths propagated by its scientists and its masters. In this, Mr. Gernter manages, here, that rare and wonderful feat of journalism, to infect his readers with his enthusiasm and his awe without sacrificing his objectivity, an admirable balance perhaps helped by the five decades between now and the heyday of this remarkable place.

But beyond a piece of elegant history, Mr. Gernter convinces us, here, of a deeper truth, that our world hinges on pivotal periods in time, that our customs, our tools, even our toy are defined by these periods, and that, but for quirks of fate, all that we know might have a very different shape. The possibilities for humanity and the planet that birthed it are endless so long as we remember that anything is possible so long as we ignore dogmas and doubters, leaving our minds open to every potentiality, every idea. For to do any less is not only to deprive ourselves of our best future, but to forget the lessons of these men at this time.

A captivating subject... (5/5 Stars)