The Coldfire Trilogy by C. S. Friedman

From The Week of August 20, 2012
As much as we yearn to know ourselves and our loved ones as profoundly as possible, divining the depths of the human soul is a dangerous and oftentimes scarring experience. For down in that abysmal chasm churns the darkness of our grim nightmares, our secret desires, and our raw emotions, none of which should ever be allowed to rise up into the light of day. For these are the antecedents of our animalistic heritage, the leftovers of our primal urges that have been tamed by both the strictures and the structures of civilization. They are the ghostly shadows of who we might have been had we been born a million years ago, when there existed nothing other than the law of the jungle.

What if they were brought into the light? What if all of our worst thoughts and fears, needs and passions, were given form, made reality by nothing more than the wishing of it? What kind of world would result from such unleashed animae? Ms. Friedman speculates in her sprawling trilogy.

On a world thousands of lightyears from Earth, life has evolved along profoundly different lines. For while some conventional animals prowl the surface of Erna, these are but offspring of an immense, unknowable force that emanates from the very heart of this enigmatic world. In ways unfathomable to anyone else, Erna is alive, its eminently malleable power distributed along spiritual and physical faultlines that cover the planet's surface, ever changing to perfectly reflect the wishes and the needs of the creatures that call Erna home.

e Having known only tranquility for millennia, this power is profoundly disturbed when human colonists first descend upon this strange new world. Refugees from thousands of years of cold sleep, this small band of men and women were lead to Erna by the judgement of their ship's AI which, having been designed to comb the galaxy for worlds habitable to humans, decided that Erna was hospitable to human life. But the AI could have never imagined the threat into which it sold its creators. For Erna's lifeforce can now learn the patterns of the nightmares fostered by human fears, turning once peaceful Erna into a dangerous world of darkness and despair.

In Black Sun Rising, the trilogy's opening salvo, more than a thousand years have elapsed since humanity's disastrous arrival on Erna and, though humans have lost the knowledge and the use of the advanced technology that delivered them to this exotic world, life has stabilized. For not only has humanity managed, to a limited degree, to work these energies unique to Erna, a powerful church has also risen to impose order upon the chaos of human civilization, teaching its followers to control their emotions and their dreams, to redirect those energies to a benevolent divine. It's clear that this divine does not exist, not initially, but if sufficient numbers believe in him, then he too shall be conjured into being by Erna in the same way the vampires and ghosts, demons and ghouls, have been.

A ranking member of this church, Rev. Damien Vryce is one of the sorcerous few who can influence the native Fae, a fact which earns him nothing but suspicion and standoffishness from the notoriously anti-Fae church. Still, the church will require Damien's specialized talents if they are to discover just what kind of nightmare is stalking the streets of its capital and devouring the memories of some of its citizens' brightest minds. Taking on the duty to find and kill this nightmare, Vryce initially sets his sights on the legendary Hunter, a vampire-like nobleman who has fed off of the fears of young, impressionable women to stay alive for centuries. But when the answer to this mystery proves to be far more profound, Damien is forced to make unpleasant alliances in order to cross half the world to find and uproot the source of this destructive evil.

In When True Night Falls, the trilogy's second instalment, Rev. Vryce finds himself at the heart of an even more insidious web. For his most recent mission has revealed that a deeper game is afoot, one that will require he and the Hunter to leave everything they know to travel east, into an empire from which no westerner has returned in living memory. Received warmly by the empire's matriarchal version of the Church, Vryce is initially taken by the peace and the cohesion the Church has managed to exert over the notoriously fickle subconsciousnesses of its human subjects. But when a series of shocking revelations expose the truth of this place, Vryce embarks upon a dangerous journey south, into the very lair of a demon, in hopes of averting a war that will drench his world in blood.

In Crown of Shadows, the trilogy's concluding work, events come to a climactic head when Rev. Vryce discovers that a class of powerful demons has been ruthlessly manipulating recent disasters, conjuring threats that have not only cost Vryce his friends but the support of his Church. Left isolated by his enemy's maneuverings, Vryce is forced to once again draw upon the knowledge and the power of the hated Hunter to try to steer the world from the demonic vision of the future his enemies are trying to bring about, one in which everything he knows and cares for is sold into slavery to a dark power made manifest by their own dark desires. What hope have two almost men have against a thing that can draw power from the pain of millions?

Though troubled, at times, by poor pacing and burdened, throughout, by an over-reliance on quests, The Coldfire Trilogy is imaginative work that withstands the test of time. In her attempt to externalize, to make real, the fears of mankind, Ms. Friedman has conceived of a darkly fascinating world with the atmosphere of Gothic, Victorian England married to the tropes of the classic, questing high-fantasy novel, the union of which has produced a series that is as readable as it is chilling. The Fae as manifestation of human emotion is not precisely novel, but the vigor with which it is applied here causes the work to rise well above the fray, confronting, head-on, the profound costs, to our environment and our fellows, of the arrogance of the human-centric worldview.

Ms. Friedman is, here, positively ruthless. Whereas many authors of fantasy shield their heroes from not only the worst of what their evil enemies have to offer, but the consequences of their own actions, she is willing to pervert what is pure, to defile what is holy, to end what is innocent. She compels her characters to compromise themselves in every imaginable way and then she demands they surrender yet more of their humanity in a kind of cosmic test of their endurance, to see how much they can take before they break under her remorseless hands. In this, she is well ahead of her time. For this work, initially published in the early 1990s, calls to mind trends from much later in that decade, and the next, in which authors and television-show creators tested their heroes on the wrack of their wills, pushing them beyond their stress limits, demanding that they take more, more, more, until they, and the illusions they were responsible for, give way. We are meant to love what is unclean and rebel against what is pure, not as an exercise in simple, dumb hedonism, but in order to shed our prejudices and our blinders, to embrace ourselves in all our flawed glory.

But whereas Ms. Friedman excels at dark storytelling, each work in this trilogy is troubled by lethargic pacing and relentless questing. Each novel is easily a hundred pages too long, bloated by repetitive details that do nothing to deepen the already rich mythology, or advance the already elaborate story. They serve only to hammer away at the grimness of the reality which has been already thoroughly established. Moreover, the high-fantasy conceit of a quest to save the world seems decidedly out of place in a story this dark. Yes, they are handled well in each volume, but Ms. Friedman is a talented enough storyteller to leave aside this tired structure that, anyway, poorly fits her world. The against-all-odds questing merely serves to re-enforce the specialness of her characters, none of whom require such gilding.

The Coldfire Trilogy is engrossing work. It establishes a challenging world and sticks to it with enviable consistency. Moreover, its characters are as flawed as its environment is Gothic, a fact which should please anyone who appreciates darkly flavored fantasy. Well ahead of its time... (4/5 Stars)

I Am A Soldier Too by Rick Bragg

From The Week of August 20, 2012
Though the realities of war and disease, cruelty and selfishness, bombard us with evidence to the contrary, life is a precious gift. For notwithstanding the unsubstantiated beliefs of religionists, we are all afforded but one lifetime, one chance to love and be loved, to influence and be influenced, to inspire and be inspired. This is self-evident. And yet wars are still waged, crimes still committed, sins yet spun into existence, all of which are actions that violate the principle of preciousness.

There is but one conclusion that can be drawn from this paradox, that we consider the lives of others to be cheaper than our own, that we are willing to do onto others what we would not want done to us, that we do not recognize that most enduring truth about life. That it can be taken from us in an instant, leaving us broken and bewildered on its merciless horns... Few people are more aware of this than Jessica Lynch. Mr. Bragg elaborates in this captivating biography.

On March 23rd, 2003, life as Jessica Lynch knew it was shattered. A 20-year-old private in the 507th maintenance company of the United States Army, she was part of a supply convoy, supporting the US military's invasion of Iraq, that was ambushed by enemy combatants in the Iraqi city of Nasiriyah. Having been lead into danger by the navigational errors of the convoy's commanding officer and the failure of other nearby military units to alert them to the danger, the convoy was trapped and cut to pieces by enemy fire which claimed the lives of dozens of US personnel. Lynch, who was riding in the back of a vehicle driven by her best friend, remembers very little of the next three hours of her life, recalling only that her weapon, the notoriously fickle M16, jammed just prior to a firefight that would claim the lives of her friends and the sanctity of her body which, over the next several hours, was subjected to torments her conscious mind cannot recall.

Ms. Lynch would come back to herself in an Iraqi hospital, being tended to by Iraqi medical practitioners, in the heart of an Iraqi city being bombed back to the stone age by American warplanes. Over the next eight days, she would lie in her hospital bed, semi-conscious, being kept alive by the Iraqis until a dramatic April 1st rescue by US special forces returned her to her family and the small town in West Virginia that she had called home for the totality of her life. Having enlisted in the military to pay for college, she could have never imagined her life being ripped apart on that fateful day in Iraq. She was a country girl, who wanted to teach elementary school. And now she was a wounded veteran of a politically tempestuous war, made, without her knowing, into a symbol of patriotism, none of which would help her to heal her many, grievous wounds of body and soul.

Published eighteen months after her sensational rescue, I Am A Soldier Too is an arresting biography. Mr. Bragg, an award-winning American journalist, is welcomed into the lives of the Lynches, recounting here not only Jessica's harrowing crucible in Iraq but the torments of her family and friends who were forced, over the eight days of her disappearance, to hang on every phone call, every shred of news, every glimmer of hope. He chronicles the town's prayers for a miracle, a miracle for a girl most of them didn't even know, prior to her being reported missing on that fateful day in March. And he captures their unrestrained joy at her rescue, an event around which her hometown rallied and celebrated, that is, until they were made aware of the severity of her circumstance.

It would be easy to criticize Mr. Bragg's account, to label it a sappy, saccharine love letter to the beautiful ideal of small-town America. But such a critic would have to have a heart of stone. For this slim volume has captured an astonishing degree of kindness, a generosity of spirit unleashed by Jessica Lynch's ordeal that easily possesses the capacity to temporarily convert the most hardened cynic into a dewy-eyed optimist. If the men and women of Palestine, West Virginia, weren't building Ms. Lynch a new, wheelchair-accessible home, they were supporting her family and throwing parades in her honor, any gesture that might ease the pain of a girl coming to grips with not only her broken body but the loss of her best friend cut down in the sands of Iraq. It is true that such communal good feeling is notoriously brief, lasting only as long as the difficulties of every day life can be set aside, but awareness of this fact does nothing to diminish the display of human solidarity that ought to make a mockery of the war that made it necessary.

From her dreams to her rehab, from Iraq to West Virginia, Mr. Bragg has put together a moving document that cannot but convince us of the preciousness of life. For not only can it be taken from us at any time, it can be broken as well, turned into brittle shards of a whole we once loved and now can only lament. Captivating work that serves as much as a reminder as an edifier... (4/5 Stars)

The Quiet World by Douglas Brinkley

From The Week of August 20, 2012
To what extent should we value nature? It is as glorious as it is fearsome, as beautiful as it is merciless, an unimaginably ancient system that has nurtured countless varieties of organisms through the eternal cycle of life. For this, as well as being the cradle of humanity, it should be respected and cherished, an ecosystem that is beyond our right to control. And yet, is it not, in some sense, a means to our end? Humanity is, as far as we know, the only intelligent species of any consequence to have evolved on Earth. For the sake of our future potential, for the limitless ways in which a hyper-technological humanity could ignite life on thousands of dead worlds as it spreads across the stars, is it not acceptable that Earth's biosphere be sacrificed to achieve that end?

It is not ours to sacrifice, or it is the means to our end. Millions of species depend upon it to survive, or none matter as much as we do. It seems, at times, an eternal debate, a clash of irreconcilable ideologies that will forever prevent a healthy consensus from coalescing around this most critical issue. But while the debate is perpetuated, Mr. Brinkley asks us to consider the wilderness we'd so willfully tame before taking to it the axe of civilization.

When, in 1867, Alaska was sold to the United States by an imperial Russia made poor by the Crimean War, it was thought, by Americans, to be a boondoggle. Coined as Seward's Folly, Alaska was dismissed as a worthless tundra, an unimaginably cold stretch of sub-Arctic land farm ore suited to wolves and bears than man. All this would change in the closing decades of the 19th century when the Klondike goldrush transformed the image of Alaska from a worthless, wintery stone into a glittering gem in the American crown, a forest of fortune where any man could pluck a lifetime of wealth from branches sagging under the weight of abundant fruit. These initial strikes only fuelled speculation in Alaska which would eventually yield up rich deposits of oil, minerals and timber, plentiful resources that, if cultivated, could bloat the coffers of American corporations for decades to come.

But to a group of adventurers and hunters, explorers and jurists, to cultivate Alaska would be to destroy it. It would mean carving highways through its forests, shafting mines into its soil, blowing the tops off its mountains and felling its trees. It would mean forcing the species that called Alaska home to make yet another retreat before the constant encroachment of a civilization that had already thoroughly thoughtlessly despoiled lands to the south. Determined to prevent the speculators and the capitalists from taking away what they considered to be North America's last wildlife refuge, this movement of disparate souls banded together to drive legislation through the American congress that would forever preserve a huge swath of Alaska from the cruelties of cultivation. For fifty years, they scratched and clawed, fighting interests both special and selfish to keep pure the magnificent and quiet world they called home. For some places are simply too grand and too beautiful to be torn apart by industry. And so, when, in 1959, President Eisenhower signed their victory into law, they rejoiced. For humanity would have to find its resources somewhere else, leaving pure this last, great wilderness.

Though hobbled by a narrowness of focus, the Quiet World is, nonetheless, a thorough and engrossing document of a generational effort to create the Alaskan wildlife Reserve. Penned by a first-rate historian whose chronicle of Hurricane Katrina sits in the first rank of disaster stories, it devotes its full attention to the men and women without whom Alaska's wilderness would have surely been allowed to succumb to speculators. Colorful enviornmentalists from John Muir to Mardy Murie, from Charles Sheldon to William O Douglas, feature prominently, their lives and their deeds venerated by an author who cannot hide his deep admiration for their accomplishments which were as improbable as they were immense. And yet, they are, to a crusader, overshadowed by the looming figure of Theodor Roosevelt, that most rugged of individualists whose conservationist speeches and letters are celebrated here with reverence and relish.

But though Mr. Brinkley does a wonderful job capturing the rugged individuals who spearheaded the effort to preserve this rare and immense wilderness, his account fails to do justice to the Alaska that must surely have inspired this project. Though there are some passages that convey general impressions of trees and flowers, mountains and wolves, they are exceedingly rare, scattered glimpses that fail to coalesce into a memorable impression of what must be an extraordinarily beautiful land. Ironically, the author has chosen to relate the history of the lifting up of nature out of the grasping hands of humanity through the eyes of humans. Yes, these are humans who helped save this wilderness from being sullied, but the why of it will necessarily escape us until we are better informed on the nature and the variety of the land in question.

Mr. Brinkley has committed his delightfully ordered mind and his eminently skilled pen to the telling of a necessary tale. In doing so, he has unearthed any number of courageous people who would have otherwise been remembered by only an environmentally conscious few. In this, he has done a worthy service. But in failing to leave the reader with a stronger impression of the Alaska that has captivated these crusaders, he falls short of his lofty best. Fascinating but flawed work... (3/5 Stars)

Gardens Of The Sun by Paul McAuley

From The Week of August 13, 2012

Tyranny has always been a powerful and destructive force. For it gives over to the one the authority and the freedom of the many, an authority which can then be used as a powerbase from which the tyrant can impose his ideas, his values and his will upon the world. But until recently, tyranny has been hobbled by certain limitations, chiefly, the tyrant's inability to directly command those who are not within his immediate vicinity. After all, a tyrant's will is considerably less fearsome when it is conveyed by letter, or by messenger, and not in person where the receiver can be influenced by all the trappings of the tyrant's station.

With the dawn of the technological age, however, the rules of the game have changed. With instantaneous communication across the length and breadth of the world, tyrants can impose their wills like never before. They can augment their powerbases with technologies that manipulate media, suppress dissent and annihilate resistance. And if such is possible today, what will be possible tomorrow? What will be possible in a century? Can democracy survive such powerful tools falling into the hands of tyrants? Mr. McAuley speculates in a novel that brings to a close the saga begun in The Quiet War.

It is the 23rd century and humanity has reached the stars. Fuelled by enormous leaps in genetic engineering, which have made possible the growing of crops in non-traditional environments, planets and moons from Mars to Saturn, Io to Titan, have been colonized by explorers and adventurers, philosophers and fortune-seekers, all of whom have fled Earth's political corruption and environmental decay. The Outers, as they come to be called, found their communities on utopian ideals of democracy and free will which help to harness the powers of experimentation and creativity which allow them to make huge, technological strides. They consider themselves the future of humanity, a species capable of adapting to any environment, of taking on any guise, of embarking on any adventure.

On Earth, meanwhile, the necessities of repairing a broken climate have nudged Earth-bound humans in an entirely more authoritarian direction. A toxic combination of radical greens, opposed to any form of genetic engineering, and hardline militarists, intent upon holding the reins of power, have abolished all forms of democracy and due process, replacing them with various strains of fascism that range from simple dictatorships to political clans. And so, while the people scrub and scrape at the torn, gray earth, trying to inject life into the corrupted soil, the powerful descend deeper and deeper into intolerance. Finding that they can no longer abide the democratic threat of the Outers, they move against them with nukes and warships, trying to impose upon them the fascism and slavery in such vogue on Earth.

But though the Outers are vanishingly few compared to the billions on Earth, and though they have been decisively defeated in the opening salvos of the Quiet War, they possess what the Earth powers do not, freedom, freedom to change, freedom to adapt, freedom to think beyond the narrow confines of their world. Their weapons are their ideas, viruses that, once they take hold, are almost impossible to uproot. But can these weapons work fast enough? Can they bear fruit before the last of the Outers are wiped out? Only time will tell.

Though at times troubled by aimlessness, Gardens of The Sun nonetheless builds on the creative successes of the work that gave it form. Where The Quiet War preoccupied itself with familiarizing the reader with the various influential factions in the author's fascist future, Gardens of The Sun is much more of a rumination on rebellion and the pros and cons of various forms of government. Here, the environmental alarmism of the first novel gives way to a re-imagination of a kind of American Revolution 23rd-century style, with a band of overmatched freedom fighters trying to live beyond the clutches of a corrupt and cruel aristocracy. All the characters from The Quiet War reappear, though, it's by no means essential to have read that novel. For, here, time moves much more swiftly, covering decades where the prior work managed only months.

For as much as Gardens of The Sun brings this duology to a satisfying conclusion, it is equally clear that Mr. McAuley was, in large part, at a loss as to how to reach the ending he envisioned. Substantial swaths of the work read like summaries of events that either needed to be covered in far more depth or ignored altogether. For the middle road the author has chosen causes the work to read like a book review more than a work of literature. Moreover, in as much as the novel's conclusion is pleasing, it is one of the least earned endings to a successful series I've ever encountered. After spending hundreds of pages building up to the series' political climax, events proceed without hardly any agency being exercised by any of the author's characters. They are, like the readers, left to look on while the world radically changes around them. Perhaps Mr. McAuley was endeavoring to make a point about the nature of change, that it takes whatever form it desires, ignoring the wishes of its prime movers, but it seems far more likely that he did not know how to bring about his denouement.

For all of the work's flaws, let there be no doubt that Mr. McAuley possesses a formidable intellect and a passion for biology. Any science junkie will be well-entertained by this duology while most political animals will find, here, much to maintain their interest. But these talents cannot, here, make up for the deep-seated flaws in plot that prevent the work from reaching anything like its full potential. Solid but disappointing... (2/5 Stars)

How The Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill

From The Week of August 13, 2012

As much as the march of history may appear to have steadily progressed towards the present, this is a false impression created by the ways in which we learn of our past. We are taught that history is linear, an impression re-enforced by the memorizing of dates and events, people and politics. We're told of the milestones in humanity's development, moments in time in which we came to key truths that helped us to achieve the now and that, without which, the now would not exist. But this assumes that the now was not only the goal all along -- absurd given that no one in our past could have imagined our present --, but that the now which we enjoy is somehow better, or more valorous than the alternative, that we should be rooting for the now that we have over the now that we'll never know. History is a muddle, full of incidents and forces which grind together to grudgingly, and eventually, produce the present. Unfortunately, this is not a view of history shared by Mr. Cahill.

When, in the fifth century, the Roman Empire in the west fell to the Germanic hordes, civilization in Europe was all-but extinguished. The city of Rome, which had been, for a thousand years, the spiritual home of the most advanced society west of China, was sacked and burned, its treasures stolen, its people vanquished, its temples toppled. A light that had shined over Europe since the height of the ancient Greeks had gone out, plunging into a wild and savage darkness a continent of people who would be generations dead before Charlemagne, in the eighth century, ould restore something like order to a world gone to seed.

Three centuries is an eternity, far too long for ancient writings to survive and be handed down to a civilization restored. Such works would have quickly rotted away, consigning their troves of knowledge to the illegible tides of time. Who, then, preserved those works of ancient literature? Who preserved for Charlemagne and his descendents, Cicero and Caesar, Plato and Aristotle? Who kept undammed the river of culture forged by the ancients for the betterment of man? According to Mr. Cahill, this honor goes to Irish monks who, inspired by St. Patrick, toiled fearlessly and relentlessly, in stony scriptoriums perched on the edge of the Northern Sea. Charged by faith and the hunger for knowledge, they devoted their lives to letters and illuminations, labors that would eventually gift to a revived Europe the wisdom of antiquity.

In How the Irish Saved Civilization, Mr. Cahill, an American historian, contends that our civilization would not exist were it not for the efforts of a band of Irish monks to preserve ancient thought. He points out that, had Europe stayed any longer in its self-imposed darkness, it might well have become Islamic, unable to stand up to the existential threat from the east. But while this may have been a possible consequence of losing the knowledge of the ancients that was then used to fuel a European revival, it is an argument that also supposes that ours is the proper civilization. It rejects the idea that another, better civilization might not have risen to take its place. Moreover, it depends upon the idea that this ancient knowledge could not have come from another source, like, say, Byzantium where efforts were also made to preserve ancient knowledge.

Mr. Cahill believes in the idea that history has nexus points, consequential moments in which history is profoundly shaped. And though this theory has merit, it is a stretch to apply that view to this case. The author assumes that this preserved knowledge was vital to a European revival when this is impossible to know. And if we cannot know the degree to which such knowledge influenced Europe in centuries subsequent to its preservation, then we cannot properly value the preservation itself. Yes, the preservation of knowledge is invariably to the good. For it takes time and good fortune to have profound realizations about the world. Preserving those revelations is vital if subsequent generations are to be able to fly higher than their ancestors. But How The Irish Saved Civilization doesn't make this argument. It goes well beyond to make a point for which it has little evidence.

How The Irish Saved Civilization is not without merit. It is an entertaining biography of Augustine and St. Patrick, throwing in for good measure a summation of the fall of the Romans and the rise of Charlemagne. But its failure to convince us of the validity of its central conceit hamstrings the work. Interesting but challenged... (2/5 Stars)

Fordlandia by Greg Grandin

From The Week of August 13, 2012

As much as we endeavor to be creatures of rationality and logic, there is yet room in our scientific world for curses. For how else can one explain the inexplicable failures, the improbable collapses, or the unimaginable outcomes that spring up to dog our actions and our dreams? Yes, we are all prone to errors and these can certainly possess the power to undermine our efforts, but what of the disasters that occur despite our meticulousness, our thoroughness, our expertise? Perhaps some things are simply not meant to be. Perhaps the energy to force their actualization is such that it makes them inherently unstable. Perhaps the collective will, or cynicism, of people involved in a venture can have a deleterious effect on the outcome. Or perhaps hexes are real, deciding what shall and shall not be. Henry Ford must have pondered this very question after 1930 and the failure of his grand experiment. Mr. Grandin illuminates.

Carved out of the Amazon rainforest, fordlandia was meant to be a place of power and promise. The dream of Henry Ford, one of the world's most influential industrialists, it was a planned community hacked out of the Brazilian jungle, a beacon of civilization that would beget others of its kind while helping to foster the ideas and the practices of the modern world in a Brazil lagging well behind the developed West. Created in 1928, its purpose was to revitalize Brazil's rubber industry, after it had been stolen and transported to Asia by ambitious Europeans eager for profit and control, while granting Henry Ford a controllable supply of rubber and an opportunity to spread his philosophy, a marriage of agriculturalism and industrialism that promised to happily marry man and his work in a union that would bring peace and prosperity to the the newly mechanized world.

And yet, despite all the expertise of the Ford Motor Company, despite the willingness of its founder to lavish Fordlandia with funding, despite the determination of successful men to make the prefab town a going concern, and despite the handsome wages offered to its Brazilian workforce, Fordlandia was an unmitigated disaster, plagued by bad management, bad science and bad relations with both the men who worked it and the government that sanctioned it. It was beset with riots and ruined harvests, a toxic brew that mercilessly destroyed its industrial capacity and made of the promising town nothing but a playground of broken dreams.

How could something so promising turn sour so swiftly? In Fordlandia, Mr. Grandin, an author of non-fiction, explains this failure by introducing the reader to the first few heady decades of the 20th century. He illuminates a world rapidly evolving out of the labor-intensive 1900s and into a world of efficiency and productivity, factories and mechanization. He describes how the men who catalyzed this transformation naively imagined that it would bring about a future free of war, starvation and tyranny, that it would engender a sense of universal brotherhood that would knit humanity together in ways inconceivable to any prior generation. And then, devastatingly, he reveals the extent to which these men were wrong by highlighting what might well be the most enduring lesson of that most bloody century, that the promise of the future can never be a cure-all for what ails society, that society's ailments are, in substantial part, caused by the failings of its own members, and that no amount of technology can bestow upon humanity morality or wisdom. As long as we are humans, there will always be greed and envy, jealousy and avarice, failings that have more-than-ample power to make nightmares of the dreams of great men.

Fordlandia is excellent work. For it not only captures the false optimism of the period; it examines, in some depth, the incredible contradictions in the life of Henry Ford. It chronicles his rise to prominence, his influence upon the world, and his confusing array of values which range from the the admirably universal to the shamefully narrowminded. Most importantly, it captures the central irony of Ford's life, that, in contributing mightily to the creation of the modern world, he destroyed the very existence he championed, one that combined the rural and the mechanical, the farm with the factory. He showed the world how to be productive like never before and, in exchange, the world left him behind. There can be few fates crueller than knowing that your own creation helped to make strangers of you and the world around you.

Yes, Mr. Grandin, at times, is, here, heavy-handed. But as much as his touch sometimes fails him, his thoroughness is admirable, recreating the cultures, the habits and the hopes of a world now lost to us by the passage of some eight decades. An enjoyable lesson in historical forensics... (4/5 Stars)

The Apotheosis Trilogy by S. Andrew Swan

From The Week of August 06, 2012

Through science, humanity has gained access to unimaginable power. It has conveyed the knowledge to level cities and decode genes, measure the stars and explore the ocean depths. It has even allowed us to create synthetic life while blunting the attacks of terrifying diseases. From healing to history, from war to wealth, all has been made possible through science except for one critical element. Science cannot grant wisdom. Science cannot bestow the kindness to deploy its secrets only for good. Science cannot transmit morality. It has no tests to pass, no thresholds to meet. Knowledge simply is, waiting for anyone to harness it. This has been a difficult lesson for humanity to learn. It has come at the cost of nuked cities and experiments gone terribly awry. And even then we are left to wonder how long the lessons stay learned. Mr. Swan ruminates in his expansive and fantastic space opera.

The year is 2525 and, despite numerous, bone-jarring bumps along the way, humanity has survived its rocky ascendance into an interstellar civilization. Dictatorial Revolutions and interspecies wars have come and gone, leaving behind a legacy of fear, paranoia and religiosity. For experiments with genetic engineering, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence have all ended badly enough that a species-wide taboo has grown up to ban their use. Nonetheless, remnants of these experimental eras live on, not only in the fearsome tiger men of Grimalkin but in the optimalized humans of Dakota. They persist in the posthuman mindscapes of the Proteans and in the generational memories of the lost colonies. These unsubtle reminders of humanity's boldly investigative past have bequeathed the 26th century with a tangled knot of desires and prohibitions that have fractured human space into three basic factions.

Siding with Earth and it's surrounding systems is the Roman Catholic church. The only institution to have survived the various upheavals of the last three centuries, it has effectively become Earth's government, providing moral guidance while rigorously enforcing its various bans on forbidden technologies. Locked in a cold and polarizing alliance with the church is the Caliphate, a cluster of Islamic worlds which have overcome the political chaos of their turbulent past to cohere around a notionally liberal interpretation of both Islam and its law. Between these two frictional forces reside various unaligned worlds, planets where political, economic and societal experiments have been allowed to unfold, adding to the diversity of life in this corner of the galaxy.

In Prophets, the trilogy's first instalment, this delicate balance of powers is unsettled by two seemingly unrelated but eminently disturbing revelations. First is the re-discovery of a series of lost human colonies which have kept themselves separate from the rest of the galaxy for nearly 200 years. This self-imposed seclusion is shattered when a protean egg ship, a vessel containing a theatre of digitized minds, crashes onto the surface of one such colony, bearing a terrifying message, that, in the course of its mission to transport the minds to their eventual destination, it stopped to investigate an anomaly around CY Virginis, a nearby star. Its encounter with the unknown force nearly destroyed the powerful Protean egg, forcing it to limp away in hopes of finding a safe harbor to repair itself.

Thought to be a threat, the colony distrusts the Protean warning. For two other ships have arrived on the heels of the egg, not only further violating its seclusion but dispelling any notion amongst the colonists that the egg was acting alone. The first of these visiting vessels is composed of mercenaries captained by a banned intelligence that has been lured to the lost colony by a foe thought long dead. The second ship proves to be of far greater concern to the wider human community when it is revealed to be a new class of Caliphate vessel, one that has made a quantum leap forward in sophistication. Where did the knowledge to make such sudden and remarkable progress come from and does it have anything to do with the thing that attacked the Protean egg? Actors from each of the human factions converge upon the lost colony to bear witness to a new, dark era of humanity. In Heretics, the trilogy's second volume, Adam, the name given to the enemy threatening all of human space, has, with a single, incomprehensible stroke, damaged many of the vessels, communications networks and political alliances that once gave order to the region. The resulting chaos has prevented anything like a concerted resistance from forming against Adam's relentless march of destruction. Unleashing his energies against overmatched worlds, the humans who have witnessed his atrocities can only look on as he forceably redesigns entire civilizations, first reducing them to rubble and then rebuilding them into a configuration pleasing to him. This awesome application of force causes increasing numbers of frightened members of all factions to join him, become a small faction of Adam's overall essence, diversity to be added to the ideal new world he will create when he is through annihilating the old.

Despite Adam's best efforts, however, Father Malory, an agent of the Vatican who conned his way into the mercenary crew that first witnessed Adam's coming, has escaped back to Bakunin, a free world where there is at least some assets to deploy against this overwhelming threat. His efforts to create an alliance among the notoriously individualistic residents of Bacumin, however, prove fruitless until new developments properly convey the urgency of the moment. For Adam has finally reachedEarth and there seems little hope of stopping him from crushing the cradle of humanity.

In Messiah, the trilogy's climactic entry, the war for human space reaches its zenith when Adam's advance is momentarily halted by a loose alliance of human and posthuman forces resisting his tyranny. The rebellion, which is bound together by nothing more than the desire to survive free of Adam's destructive will, threatens, on any number of occasions, to fragment under Adam's relentless pressure. But every moment they fight extends a meager window of time in which a small group of mercenaries and scientists can burrow under the surface of Bacunin, desperately searching for answers to an power left behind by an ancient civilization. Perhaps, if it's power can be harnessed, Adam can be turned back. After all, should they fail, there will be nothing, for anyone, but servitude or death.

Though Mr. Swan relies too much upon the tropes of the genre, and though he is perhaps too fond of the religious allegories that underpin his story, Apotheosis is nonetheless outstanding science fiction. It possesses the moralizing of Star Trek and the nihilism of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, the pomposity of religion and the geekiness of futurism, stirring these heady ingredients into an unholy stew of entertainment and philosophy that thrills far more than it bores. Yes, the author's characters trend towards the archetypical, and his plot twists succumb too often to the obvious, but these deficits are more than offset by his consistency of vision and his relentlessness of execution. For when it's time for Mr. Swan to play his difficult cards, to compel his audience to endure the same devastation imposed upon his characters, he does not shy away. He acts with the resoluteness of a hangman, shoving us far from the redemption offered by the easy path. In all of this, he has earned my respect.

A review of this trilogy would be incomplete were it not to comment upon its two primary virtues. Firstly, Mr. Swan rejects the all-too-common deployment of religion in science fiction. Instead of casting it as the extremist boogeyman against which his individualistic heroes can act, he takes the more nuanced approach that religion will still likely possess its moral authority in the centuries to come. It may lose all else to science, but when tragedy strikes and humanity requires something solid and ancient to fallback on, our various faiths will be there to fill that gap. And should the tragedies be of sufficient devastation, doctrinal faith might well take back the mantle of power, promising to steward humanity through an immoral time. Secondly, Mr. Swan's discussion of banned technologies and the taboos that will inevitably arise from their misuse, while not in any way new -- Frank Herbert has him beat by 40 years -- nonetheless holds the reader's attention. The author's refusal to give voice to his own position on the matter allows the reader to pick a side in the inevitable war between the forces that wish to advance swiftly and those who wish to do so cautiously. This allows his chronicle to be different things to different readers, a pleasing outcome given the degree to which science fiction can oftentimes be polemical and narrowminded.

Apotheosis is not perfect, but the degree to which it strives to be different while relying upon the trappings of the old bestows upon it a freshness that is exceedingly welcome in a space rife with derivations. Bold work... (4/5 Stars)

Songlines by Bruce Chatwin

From The Week of August 06, 2012

As much as we tell ourselves that we are rational beings living in the scientific era, our lives are shaped by myths. Large and small, obvious and subtle, they ripple across society, influencing the significance with which we view everything from the oceans that give us life to the stars that give us dreams. They provide us a narrative along which we can trace our heritage, connecting us in an unbroken line back to humans who walked the earth millennia ago. They even bring their formidable powers to bear upon the ways in which we conceive of the future and the paths we will follow as individuals and as societies. Consequently, studying these myths can tell us a great deal about ourselves and our destinies. After all, we authored them. We fostered them. We empower them. Mr. Chatwin takes up one of humanity's most enduring mythologies in this timeless piece of travel journalism.

Cut off from the rest of the world for nearly 40,000 years, the aboriginal people of Australia are an anthropologist's dream. Deprived of any external, cultural contaminations, they possessed, until the arrival of Europeans, a pure strain of belief that stretches back 400 centuries to their landing on these strange, rocky shores. Carefully cultivated by the countless generations, the Dreaming conceives of the world as having been named into existence by the songs of giants, distant ancestors who left buried in their paeans and their deeds the knowledge of the world and the many creatures who inhabit it. This spiritualistic naturalism not only kept the aborigines alive for 1,600 generations in a less-than-hospitable land, it engendered in them a fundamental respect for their environment as deeply at odds with our modern, extractive world as their naturalism must have been to the white puritans who invaded their shores 250 years ago.

In 1988, Mr. Chatwin, originally from England but a wanderer at heart, travelled to Australia to chronicle the Dreaming. Beginning his journey in Adelaide, he and his Australian guide embedded themselves in some of the world's remotest communities, viewing through a humanist's eyes the practices of a people so unlike us as to seem anachronistic, as if time cruelly displaced them from the proper course of events. He chronicles the aboriginal concept of community, of Payback, of songlines. But more than this, he communicates the remoteness and the sameness of a place and a people that might have continued to be as they were had adventurers not interrupted their isolation. For this is a people almost congenitally opposed to change, a people so deeply rooted in who they are and their idea of the world that to endorse change would be to violate the Dreaming and the songs that give the world life. Imaginative and lyrical, Songlines is first-rate non-fiction. Mr. Chatwin, who tragically died a year after his journey into Australia's distant past, is, here, not only linguistically clever and attitudinally charming, he evinces a breadth of knowledge and a depth of inquisitiveness that is both endearing and engrossing. For this is more than just a book about a culture as fascinating as it has been mistreated by the white man. It is an adventure into the nature of modern man, into the ideas that give his life meaning, into the science of his evolutionary history, and into his compulsions to explore, to wander, to investigate, to learn. In this, Songlines is as much a rumination on the essence of life as it is a rumination on the Dreaming which is fortunate given that both pursuits have much in common.

Mr. Chatwin is reluctant to speak directly to the degree to which aboriginal culture has been degraded by the arrival of westerners, but he does allow the anecdotes transcribed here to strongly suggest his admiration for a people whose place in our modern world is less than certain. For our cultural frameworks stand in such stark opposition to one another that it's hard to imagine finding any common ground. Mr. Chatwin's description of aboriginal belief seems almost anti-modern. For to create the world we enjoy, one needs industry, the exploitive nature of which is antithetical to their way of life. However, this position also serves to highlight the shortcomings in our own extractive system. For our civilization only operates so long as it can be materially fed. Once those resources run dry, once the land as been exhausted, the machine grinds to a halt and then where are we? Far worse off than the aborigine's, certainly. Mr. Chatwin has the kind of mind that cannot but be a pleasure to see sprawled out on paper. For in its meanderings and musings is a kind of expansive wisdom that goes some way to bridging the gap between such disparate cultural outlooks. As winning a piece on the nature of man as it is on the aboriginal world... (4/5 Stars)

Hirohito by Herbert P. Bix

From The Week of August 06, 2012

Self-delusion is a remarkable and underrepresented aspect of human nature. For it has the capacity to convince us that we are right when we are wrong, righteous when we are sinning, strong when we are weak. In an effort to ease the pain of the cognitive dissonance we experience every time we compare our actions to our morals, self-delusion sands down the rough edges until our two worldviews, the internal and the external, are once again in harmony. But of course, this way lies disaster. For eventually, after the internal has had its way with the external, our conception of the world is so far out of step with how things actually are that calamitous mistakes are inevitable. We have lost all perspective. And with that goes any hope of relating to anyone of consequence, much less anyone we care about. For the powerless, this is simply pitiable, but for the powerful, for those in whom society invests authority, the consequences can be disastrous. Mr. Bix demonstrates in this lengthy, scholarly biography.

The child of centuries old Japanese nobility, emperor Hirohito stood at a vital crossroads in 20th century history. Born in 1902, he was trained from the cradle to not only be the imperial ruler of an emerging world power, but to be a man of the military, to be disciplined, to be regimented, to be efficient. But more than a leader, more than a man invested by his people and their government with an authority second only to fascist dictators like Hitler and Mussolini, Hirohito was thought by many to be divine, to be a force through whom the will and the superiority of imperial Japan could be made manifest on the world stage. A warrior became the focus of a war machine that had but few rivals in the century's early decades.

With no checks in place to mitigate this unimaginable power, Hirohito used it. He shaped his government to suit his desires; He authorized territorial conquests in Manchuria and China, looking the other way when his soldiers committed abominable war crimes; he even bid that war be declared on world powers like the United States, heedless of his military's own assessments that Japan would be overmatched in such a conflict. He did all this while endorsing the very culture that kept him in power, believing in the conceit that he understood both his place in history and his family's position in his country's destiny. Such hubris drove his empire into ruin, causing the deaths of millions of soldiers in war and hundreds of thousands of citizens in the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It destroyed the Japanese economy, ended imperial rule and directly lead to the American occupation of Japan. It lead to the end of the world that his family had so carefully imagined and that his supporters had so imprudently endorsed. It created a new Japan.

However, as Mr. Bix argues in this, his exhaustive biography of the last true emperor of japan, Hirohito himself escaped the consequences of his actions with only a few moderate wounds. He had to surrender his power and take up a largely ceremonial role in Japanese culture. He had to sit by and watch his country be transformed into a democracy. And he had to swallow the humiliating concessions made to japan's reformer, the United States. There would be no war crimes trial for Hirohito. For he was useful to japan's masters in Washington, Americans who, ignorant of Japanese culture, would invariably blunder in the country's westernization. He could glue the nation together while it was reborn into a new form, a new state.

This usefulness, contends Mr. Bix, lead to the suppression of Hirohito's role in WWII and the events that preceded it. Instead of the mastermind, Hirohito had been the victim of a militarized state. He was held captive by the influence of bellicose forces within Japan's government which foolishly sought out a war with the west. He was helpless to prevent the inevitable and destructive outcome. Perhaps, as the decades accumulated, he even believed this notion. But Mr. Bix does not. Arguing against the tide of popular opinion, he calls upon government records and the accounts of Hirohito's contemporaries to paint a different portrait of the man, one consistent with what we know of human nature, that power is corrupting, that to use it is destructive, and that to relinquish it is impossible. The idea that a man invested with ultimate authority refused to deploy that authority goes against everything we know about man and of Hirohito.

This is fascinating work. There can be no doubt that Mr. Bix has strongly held views on the role Hirohito played during WWII. But his scholarship and his willingness to declare his position on the matter, openly and honestly, lends his work here credibility. There's perhaps too much attention paid to the machinations of Japanese politics in the 1920s and 30s which must have been bewildering even then. But he nonetheless leaves us with a captivating portrait of a fascinating man who deserves both our pity, for the extent to which he was born into a life he could never change, and our scorn, for not rising above the world around him to be a visionary for his country. An intriguing study of a powerful man in a turbulent time... (3/5 Stars)

Chronicles Of The Lescari Revolution Trilogy by Juliet E. McKenna

From The Week of July 30, 2012
No matter how pleasing the narrative we construct in the wake of its triumph, revolution is a bloody business. For its divisive net is cast over every aspect of society, compelling everyone that it touches to choose a side, for or against change. In light of the reality that most souls, regardless of the conditions under which they live, want only to pass their days in peace, this compulsion is as unwanted as it is perilous. However, for much as revolution divides, it makes just as many promises. It can deliver the oppressed from their bondage; it can abolish the casts of society; and it can dispel the corruption that so often plagues an entrenched system. Are these, then, benefits worth warring for? Are they freedoms worth dying for? Ms. McKenna muses in her sprawling trilogy.

In a world of dukes and emperors, magics and mercenaries, the duchies of Lescari have been at war for as long as anyone alive can recall. Devoid of a king to unite them under a common banner and a common cause, ducal armies are deployed to blight the land at the whimsey of their noble masters who look on from afar, safely ensconced in the pleasures of their castles. From such glittering removes, they do not see, or choose not to see, the degree to which this reflexive, seasonal fighting ensnares the lives of the common born in a vortex of violence and misery from which there is seemingly no escape. The dukes do not care what harm their games cause to the small. After all, rule is their birthright and such conflict is simply part of the game.

But now change is afoot in the Lescari lands. Sparked by the agitations of a young and crippled nobleman, exiled for his infirmities, a rebellion has kindled, its flames drawing in every malcontent from the empire in the east to Solura in the west, welcoming them around the fire of revolution that, if properly tended, might well burn away the decadent dukes and their cruel games. But at what cost failure? Having put the fear of god into powerful men and women unaccustomed to its bitter taste, how harsh will the reprisals be? For if the dukes have nothing to lose, will they not be willing to fight until their dying breaths to win back every drams of power the revolution seeks to steal away? Moreover, what will replace the dukes if they are swept from the board of life? Will the coalition of disparate forces fall apart once their reason for being is removed, or will they find a way to forge a lasting good from the sacrifices they have made? Destiny awaits...

In Irons in The Fire, the trilogy's opening act, we are introduced to both the Lescari lands and those chosen by fate to challenge Lescari history. Born in different dukedoms, to exceedingly different lives, Tathrin, a merchanter's son, and Aremil, a deformed exile, come together at the heart of contested lands and share a dream. For the collapse of the old empire has plunged their kingless homeland into centuries of war and depravity. The dukes who have gathered up the reins of rule have cleverly harnessed the dark side of economics to perpetuate not only their lives but the conflict upon which their supremacy rests. For in the name of defending their people against attacks from other duchies, they have raised taxes so high that the only life truly worth living is that of a soldier, a reality which forever ensures that the dukes have an endless supply of desperate men to hurl at the battlements of their rivals.

Aremil, the brains, and Tathrin, his strong right arm, seek to change this unpleasant reality by recruiting key, disaffected members of this society, enrolling them in a conspiracy that seeks to deprive the dukes of this endless warchest. If they can convince the mercenary companies to refuse to sign on with the dukes, they will eliminate, with both a stroke of a pen and a heavy purse of gold, the prime means by which the conflicts are fought. However, in their idealism and naivety, Tathrin and Aremil cannot imagine the depths to which the dukes will sink in order to maintain their ennobled birthrights. This grim reality is left to other members of the conspiracy, the whores and the thieves, the desperate and the angry, to demonstrate to them, educating them in the true realities of life under the dukes.

In Blood In The Water, the trilogy's second instalment, the revolution is preceding apace, but its early victories have given way to a calcified stalemate. The dukes, though yet divided, have been given, by the rebellion, a common cause around which to bind themselves. Distrust and distaste yet remain, undermining their cooperation, but if even or two or three of these powerful forces sign on together, they might well be able to bring more men to the battlefield than the rebellion can claim. This difficult truth obligates the rebellion's inner circle to reach out to rabblerousers and agitators,mercenary armies and mountain men, knowing that to lose now is to lose everything they've fought for. Getting into bed with some of those they set out to reject seems a small price to pay for victory.

In Banners In The Wind, the trilogy's concluding volume, everything Tathrin and Aremil have fought for hangs on a knife's edge. For, in their attempt to overwhelm the dukes with force, those less-than-reputable companies they took into their fold have rebelled from the rebellion, splintering off to take advantage of the chaos by reaping power for themselves. These factions deeply damage the revolution's reputation when they begin to commit atrocities ostensibly in the name of the rebellion. The inner circle of the conspiracy, now so close to their goal, are forced to absorb one of war's most grievous lessons, that it is an uncontrollable beast. Desperation may prompt one to justify compromising their principles, but once that door has been opened, other nightmares are free to walk through it. Now, the rebellion must fight on two fronts, against the dukes and the disloyal factions in hopes of finalizing the dream for which they've sacrificed so much.

Though at times burdened by episodes of lethargy, Chronicles Of The Lescari Revolution is, in most respects, winning work. A talented fantasist, Ms. McKenna draws upon the genre's many tropes without allowing her work to become derivative. Lescari's cast of characters, both heroic and villainous, do, at times, wear their story hats proudly, be they white or black, but it's clear that the author has labored to justify this behavior with reasonable backstories that inform their actions. This effort is as appreciated as the broad and dynamic world in which her chronicle is set, one that is as subject to the vicissitudes of fortune and economics as the frills of magic and epic.

What sets this trilogy apart from the countless others that share its trappings is the extent to which Ms. McKenna has grounded her chronicle in reality without relinquishing the escapism from which it was born. Not only does the author punish her characters, good and bad, for the mistakes they make, she forces them to face up to their decisions. She demonstrates that desperation is as corrupting a force as power. For it compels us to compromise ourselves in ways unimaginable under normal circumstances. Moreover, she captures the reality that, no matter how hard we try, we cannot maintain perspective when ensconced in a great endeavor. We cannot remember where we draw the line we swore to ourselves we would not cross. For if it would but move our cause forward, we'd be willing to move that line at whim, making its distinction meaningless. All this is conveyed by the author without allowing her chronicle to descend into the kind of savagery that would elevate her chronicle from one readable by teens to one only digestible by adults.

For all its virtues, though, this is far from perfect work. Ms. McKenna does a poor job justifying the presence of magic in this story. In fact, magic is invariably used as a cheat, a device through which the author can keep her characters in communication with one another across great distances while shielding them from the certain death that would befall them were they common born. This is a forgivable sin; after all, Ms. McKenna is hardly the first to fall back on such a tactic. However, the degree to which she disguises it is quite feeble. Deus ex machina indeed... Moreover, the author appears to have come from the Robert Jordan school of storytelling in which far too many pages are consumed by unnecessarily internal monologues and overly detailed descriptions. Neither of these sins cripple the work by any means, but they do make their presence felt.

This is entertaining work. It likely won't come under consideration for awards within the fantasy genre, but it ought to. Ms. McKenna has strived to convey meaningful truths about human nature while telling a tall and fantastical tale. That alone is enough to lift it out of the mire of mediocrity so commonplace in this space. (3/5 Stars)

Emergency by - Neil Strauss

From The Week of July 30, 2012
As much as we strive to be rational beings, as much as the dawn of our modern, technological world has nurtured in us the virtues of reason and patience, fear yet rules us all. With every twist of fate, with every consequential choice, with every random act from a chaotic world, fear hounds us, lurking in the darkness at the edge of our intellectual campfire, just waiting for panic to give it a path through our defenses where it will paralyze us, cripple us and deprive us of the joys of a bold life. Worse yet, fear is a subtle foe, sneaking so stealthily into our hearts that it is often influencing our actions long before we are aware of its debilitating presence.

So what do we do with fear? Do we reject it and live loudly, free of its constraints? Or do we welcome it close, allowing its anxiety to influence our actions but only to a limited degree? Is it an enemy to be conquered, or a seduction to be carefully heeded? Mr. Strauss' funny, charming, disturbing and riotous effort is a long and successful rumination on this question.

Though the aughts was a decade of political change and technological promise, it was also witness to some dark developments which augur grimly for the years ahead. Islamic terrorism and economic turmoil marred most of the decade, leaving behind deep scars unimaginable to the optimistic multitudes who, way back in the halcyon days of the 1990s, imagined clear skies to an unfathomably bright future. But more than wound the decade's reputation and the political parties that ruled during its zenith, this toxic brew of religious nihilism and monetary greed injured, psychologically and otherwise, the countless millions who lived through it. By eating away at their sense of safety, and by diminishing their trust in the national institutions who promised to nurture that safety, it created the perfect breeding ground for the fearful to indulge their trepidations. It enticed them to view differently the signs around them, finding in them not the promise they had seen before but the herald of the apocalypse conveniently interpreted from their books of faith. It prompted them to turn away from trust and hope and to embrace a new, more cynical view of the days ahead.

Mr. Strauss volunteers himself as a classic case of this conversion. Riding high just prior to the millennium, he finds himself increasingly disenchanted by the political trend of his home country, the United States. He sees an election stolen, a terrorist attack 1r\&
, a war on terror launched and an economic system nearly brought to its knees. And with each successive catastrophe, he becomes increasing convinced that the best has come and gone and that the future holds only the promise of disappointment. Thus, he begins a long and winding quest to prepare himself for the dark days ahead. Over nearly ten years, he solicits advice from billionaires and separatists, EMTs and survivalists, all in an attempt to transform himself from an intelligent but physically incompetent citydweller into a well-prepared and hardened soldier of non-civilization, capable of living without power, off the land, in a world that prides itself on skills, on knowledge and on readiness for anything that comes. This is his journey...

Though it deals with the decidedly grim subject matter of the potentially final act of human civilization, Emergency is, shockingly, both funny and warm. Characterized by its author's unequivocal commitment to the subject, and blended with his rank incompetence at anything remotely rural, it serves up a hilarious stew of missteps and mishaps that impact on the bumbling Mr. Strauss. However, despite the severity and humorousness of these largely self-inflicted wounds, the author continuously manages to pick himself up off the ground, dust himself off, learn from his obstinacy and progress to the next challenge, the next achievement, knowing all the while that he is that much closer to realizing an independence the rest of us can only dream about.

There can be little doubt that some of the more extreme behaviors depicted here are influenced by the nature of Mr. Strauss' experiment. He would have known, full well, that theatrics would serve his book far better than blandness. Thus, some of the stunts and the scenarios must be taken with a healthy measure of salt. However, the author's efforts here also reflect the many millions of people who, like him, are, to varying degrees, traumatized by instability. In their fear, they turn away from dependency in order to nurture in themselves a self-sufficiency that will carry them through the imagined dark times ahead. There's wisdom here. After all, these individuals are bound to be better off if civilization does stumble. But they seem to overlook two key points that trouble their argument, firstly, that preparing for the apocalypse, in many cases, seems to lead them down a road to wishing that it would come so that they might get to use their new-found skills and, secondly, that the world they imagine would be so grim, would have lost so much of its light, that surviving the transition into it would not be worthwhile. After all, having gloried in the light of civilization, what would be the point of grubbing out a difficult, daily existence in the darkness and the dirt?

This is a wonderful and amusing journey through the strange and the macabre that is made eminently livable by Mr. Strauss' self-deprecating humor. Surprisingly uplifting for all the anxiety bedded down in its pages... (4/5 Stars)

Dark Green Religion by Bron Taylor

From The Week of July 30, 2012
Though the evidence is not yet conclusive, it seems very likely that, for as long as humans have had verbal communication, they have also had religion. For dig site after dig site, museum after museum, ancient codex after ancient codex, we witness our ancestors praying, begging, beseeching and cajoling gods from the sky to the hearth to alter the course of events. This is strongly suggestive of a nearly universal desire for some sort of metaphysical force to be out there, shepherding our destinies while harboring the wisdom of eternity. But what is religion? Is it, as the dictionaries claim, obeisance to a divine around which a coherent doctrine springs up, or is it nothing more than the need to trust in something bigger than ourselves, something that, on some level, understands and sympathizes with us? To some, this may seem like semantics, but not to Mr. Taylor who has penned a work on a new kind of faith that's as fascinating as it is problematic.

From the trees that give us wood to the fields that give us grain, Humans have always relied upon the fruits of the land to survive and flourish, but it wasn't until the advent of the agricultural and industrial revolutions that we transitioned from being Earth's children to being Earth's exploiters. With the harnessing of electricity and the drilling for oil, the logging for wood and the quarrying for stone, we left behind our fellow species as benefactors of our planet's largess and became creatures ravenous for more fuel, more materials, more stuff by which to effect our collective destiny. Understandably, this harvesting has had enormous consequences for the world we've cultivated, acidifying its oceans, desertifying its grasslands, carbonizing its atmosphere and toxifying its riverways. Moreover, it has thrust further and further into the shrinking wilderness the other species which once roamed free, causing the extinction of some and the endangerment of many.

In response to these consequential changes, a movement has arisen to alert humanity about the depth of these alterations. Stirring in the 19th century but truly taking flight in the 20th, it argues that the planet has been devastatingly degraded by the thoughtless practices of the human multitudes who have been born and sheltered by it, that these degradations are in all likelihood permanent, and that they have not only jeopardized the future of humanity but the future of her world as well. This green movement contends that there must e a universal adjustment in our attitudes, not only with regard to Earth but in regard to our own culture which promotes a kind of disposability of things, of objects, of inventions, which, in the manufacturing and in the throwing away, harm the planet. This movement lacks a traditional godhead around which to coalesce, but in place of the divine it has substituted Mother Nature, engendering her with the same kind of consciousness and purposeful drive that traditional theists grant their creators. Consequently, this strand of environmentalism is not so much a movement but a faith, a green faith, for the 21st century.

Though at times suffering the dryness characteristic of academic work, Dark Green Revolution is, nonetheless, an edifying journey through a growing subculture. Mr. Taylor makes a valiant attempt to categorize the various branches of green religion by primarily measuring the degree to which they believe in Gaia. But more potent than his attempts to organize the various forms of belief are his explorations of the numerous groups that practice such green faith. He identifies their high priests and their shibboleths, their desires and their non-negotiables. And in doing so, he makes a compelling case that, yes, that this form of organized environmentalism is, in fact, some kind of faith. All this without committing his own views to paper...

For all the fascinating and courageous people we encounter here, for all of the history covered and the failures chronicled, Dark Green Religion is problematic. Let us suppose that organized environmentalism possesses some trappings of religion. Do we not completely dilute the term's power by including it? It may provoke passion amongst its adherents, it may even claim to have some sort of force in whose name followers are animated, but filing it under the same definition as the Abrahamic religions seems highly dubious. After all, if we only define religion as having high priests, followers and some sort of organizing principle, we'd have to also include under this banner purposes as ubiquitous and unreligious as DIY, as organized labor, as bird-watching. For they too have their elders, their advocates and their codes, but no one would describe them as religions.

We're forced, then, into a philosophical discussion of terms that distracts from Mr. Taylor's strength here, his investigation of a minority that is both exceedingly colorful and increasingly powerful. Here, he does himself and his subjects justice by leaving his readers deeply informed on the underlying drivers and beliefs that empower those who follow the green faith. However, the obsession with terminology does blunt the degree to which the virtues here can be enjoyed.

Compelling work... (3/5 Stars)