Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

From The Week of November 19, 2012
For all that we aspire to achieve freedom, few of us manage to ever taste its glorious fruit. For even if we succeed in throwing off the government-imposed shackles that bind our bodies -- no simple feat in its own right --, the cognitive chains that burden our thoughts yet remain. These limitations, imposed by our ideologies, by our biases, by our prejudices and by our classes are so potent that it matters not if our bodies are free. For if the mind is enslaved to a cruel or destructive worldview, then what does it matter if the flesh is free to move about as it pleases? The mind is the engine. The mind is the light. The mind is the seed of civilization and the only defense we have against the lies and the deceptions that are imposed upon us and that we impose upon ourselves. Mr. Mitchell vividly demonstrates this truth in his narratively complex but eminently readable piece of genre-busting speculative fiction.

From the unfathomable expanse of the South Pacific to underground hideaways in Korea, from the industrializing colonialism of the 19th century to the despotic, technocratic states of the near future, six disconnected souls wage their own little wars against ignorance, deception and the vicissitudes of time. A gullible notary, a frustrated musician, a dogged journalist, a hapless publisher, a brave martyr and a curious villager should not have anything in common, particularly when each of them belong to their own space and time. And yet not only do they each battle against the lies that hope to bind them, they each manage to relate to the reader their histories in a way that will leave, at least in some, a lasting legacy of truth and determination. Of love and war, of justice and corruption, these are their stories.

Though it falls short of the lofty heights to which some have uplifted it, Cloud Atlas is a work rewarding thanks to its tangled nature, not in spite of it. Comprised of six loosely connected narratives, the plot is essentially one, long boomerang toss, with each of the stories progressing in chronological order until their midpoints at which they are each interrupted and compelled to give way to the next story in the chain. This succession ends at the farthest point in the future, or halfway through the book, where upon the narrative curves back on itself, telling the latter half of all six tales in reverse order until it concludes not long after the point at which it began. This not only generates suspense by making something of a mystery out of each of its tales, it allows Mr. Mitchell to unleash upon his readers the book's greatest virtue, its patois.

Each protagonist is given distinct and sometimes difficult dialects, each of which, while at times labyrinthine, wonderfully embed the reader into the different periods in which he finds himself. This spares Mr. Mitchell the laborious effort of constructing vivid settings for each of his tales. His use of language does it for him, conveying not only social trends but the degrees to which the characters are educated, foolish and idealistic. Rarely has this device been deployed so effectively. For at times, the reader needs only a paragraph or two to understand that he has entered a very different mind locked in a very different world.

For all its linguistic and structural virtues, though, Cloud Atlas is at times overly simplistic and tonally deaf. His book envisions a future in which corporate branding consumes not only our culture but the nation state itself, a fear which largely spent its energy in the last two decades of the 20th century. Here, it smacks of a means by which Mr. Mitchell can express his skills at wordsmithing which is beneath the dignity of his novel. Moreover, the author's decision to transition between humor and seriousness, from tragicomedy to deathly struggle, left this reader cold. At times, the humor helped to make the work seem human, but this came at the cost of the gravity of some of its tales, leeching them of the import I would have otherwise bestowed upon them.

Cloud Atlas is an ambitious work that rises well above the fray of modern-day speculative fiction. For this, it should be celebrated as a success. However, it is also reminiscent of a wonderful golf shot that pulls up a few feet from the hole. Almost brilliant, but just...not...quite. (4/5 Stars)

Seasons In The Sun by Dominic Sandbrook

From The Week of November 19, 2012
In spite of every human effort to avoid it, life appears to be subject to eternal cycles, disruptive ups and downs which excites creation as much as it energizes destruction. From the climate that shapes our planet to the fads that define our culture, these cycles are as ubiquitous as they are influential, leaving humanity no choice but to adapt in the face of constant change. But while, for the most part, we have done well to incorporate these cycles into our daily lives, some have proven to be so profoundly devastating to our way of life that men and women have devoted their careers to ameliorating them, simply in the hope that some measure of suffering can be mitigated.

The most obvious case of this self-made category is the Business Cycle, that here-to-for unsolved byproduct of the modern economy that churns relentlessly onward, aiding the fortunate while drowning the blindsided. And where economics resides so human government dares to tread, hoping in its half-formed wisdom to make for its people a square deal out of the unknowable morass that is the national economy. Mr. Sandbrook captures just such an episode in Seasons in The Sun. Its effects are as consequential as his account is thorough.

Though much of the world has advanced considerably since the 1970s, few countries have undergone a socioeconomical facelift as profound as the United Kingdom. Less than 40 years ago, during the heyday of the Rolling Stones, Britain was a country ravaged by colossal gaps in everything from income inequality to equal opportunity. Lacking even basic necessities like toilets in a significant percentage of its homes, england had emerged from the Second World War a scarred but victorious nation. However, despite its triumph in that most consequential conflict, it enjoyed few economic successes. In fact, it lagged considerably behind its vanquished foes in West Germany and Japan, both of which benefited from finely tuned workforces, economic aid and industrial-based economies.

Meanwhile, england, which was once the world's workshop, a nation that once claimed to be at the throbbing heart of an empire upon which the sun never set, found itself burdened by absurdly high taxes, a highly unionized labor force, and cruelly misguided monetary policy which eventually culminated in the IMF having to extent England a line of credit. The British Empire, with its hand out... This was a humiliation few could bear, least of all the Conservatives who, after more than a decade of Labour-party rule, finally seized power in 1979 and, under their Iron lady, implemented sweeping changes that transformed the country forever.

But before that renaissance, there was Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan, punk rock and the IRA, labor disputes and institutional corruption, all of which would be summed up in a single, suggestive phrase, the winter of discontent. This is the history of those tumultuous years, before Thatcherism, when the final dreams of empire were relinquished to others.

Though it comes in at a staggering 990 pages, Season of The Sun is a tome as moving as it is lengthy. While it primarily concerns itself with British politics from 1974 to 1979, and the events that shaped it, it sinks its many, inquisitive tentacles into most aspects of British society, recounting the major theatrical, comical, controversial and even salacious events of the decade. Mr. Sandbrook masterfully collects the full expanse of this material, deploying it in the furtherance of a single, subtle argument, that most aspects of British society, at the time, were influenced by the calamities spilling out of whitehall. This assessment, though difficult to prove, seems all but certain given the degree to which the ruling Labor government bungled the administration of national affairs, preoccupied as it was by internal politics and fear of the country's powerful unions.

Yes, Seasons in The Sun might well have done better to surrender some of its political focus and turn its eye more thoroughly to art and music; after all, the politicians here are rendered in near excruciating detail. However, in every other respect, this is marvelous work. On any number of occasions, it could have slipped into the dryness of self-absorbed academia. And yet, astonishingly, Mr. Sandbrook not only avoids such a fate, he injects his colossus with consequence and pathos, energy and argumentation, making it easily the most accessible scholarly work I've read to date, an absolute credit to its dogged creator. Excluding fiction, I doubt the activities of the IRA, nor the desperation brought on by labor unrest, nor the perfidy of politicians, nor the riotousness of the Sex Pistols, have been more vividly rendered.

For all its ponderousness, a wonderful book. Highly recommended for anyone even mildly interested in cultural histories, economics, politics and fate. (5/5 Stars)

The Immortal Game by David Shenk

From The Week of November 19, 2012
As much as our lives are marked by a yearning for the fundamental desires of food, sex and shelter, game-playing is of similar significance. For it si the primary means by which we alleviate the monotony of our days, a source of entertainment that makes the burdens of work and obligation bearable. But while some games are simply mindless diversions, fantasies into which we can all-too-easily escape, others engage our minds, our instincts and our passions in ways that provide us with challenges both delightful and maddening. These are the games that endure the test of time. These are the games that occupy our smartest minds. For it is these games that speak to who we are and who we want to be. Mr. Shenk highlights perhaps the most famous of these in his wonderful biography.

Since it emerged from the sands of sixth-century Persia, chess has been one of the world's most successful obsessions. Played by everyone from politicians and poppers, generals and geniuses, its secrets have withstood the test of time, enduring in the face of millions of games across hundreds of years. On the surface, it is a relatively simple contest, a grid of eight by eight in which pieces, of six different ranks, are strategically moved in the furtherance of a single goal, to capture the opposing king at which point the opponent is required to surrender the game. And yet, despite its straightforward rules, chess has been the subject of obsessions and fashions, feuds and fascinations. It has even inspired us to a greater understanding of computational systems, clearly delineating the tasks with which the human brain is far more equipped to cope than the soulless machine. It is a game of war and manipulation, of honor and trickery. It is a game that knows no bounds, sees no social barriers, plays no favorites. It is chess.

Describing the game as having more outcomes than there are atoms in the universe, Mr. Shenk leaves no doubt, from the first page of The Immortal Game onward, that chess is a game of both myth and reality, beauty and brutality. Across some 300, well-researched pages, he illustrates the degrees to which it has inspired and crushed, uplifted and destroyed, the minds of the exceptional and the ordinary. But while he fascinates us with the history of chess and its evolution, his work's greatest strength is the extent to which it highlights chess' place in the tapestry of broader human events. For not only has it played a role in world history, being the pivot around which peoples and nations have drawn justification for their supremacy, it has shaped the thinking of the men and women who have built our world into what it is today, a reality as surprising as the game itself is durable.

While this is a wonderful, fast-paced snapshot of chess and its place in human cultures both here and gone, I would have liked to have seen more women represented here. Chess may well be a game that appeals more to that particular strain of geeky, computational thinking more present in men than women, but there are surely many women who have played over the years as well. And but for a few brief references, they are almost entirely left out of the author's history. This is, however, the only oversight in what is otherwise an excellent and enjoyable read.

As revealing of our character as it is of the game itself... (4/5 Stars)

Night Watch: The Watch 1 by Sergei Lukyanenko

From The Week of November 12, 2012 Until we better understand the laws of our universe, destiny will remain a tempting enigma. For if destiny exists as a force in our world, then we are relieved of responsibility for the choices we make. After all, in such a world, the arcs of our lives are predetermined, their outcomes set. And if we are incapable of altering our individual fates, we might as well sit back and enjoy the ride. Of course, this is a considerably easier position to accept if the outcome in question is positive. What if our destiny is to be hit by a bus, to be betrayed by our most dear, to be kept from the stage of world events? What if our destiny is to never connect with the one we love most? Then destiny's blessings become shackles, the cruel impositions of a heartless god. The certainty in which we took comfort becomes a curse we'd do anything to avoid. Mr. Lukyanenko expands in his interesting but troubled work.

In present-day Moscow, life is not all that it seems. Beneath the radar of the millions of Moscovits living and working, hoping and yearning, a cold war is being waged between two eternal foes, light and dark, good and grim. It is a war with civilized rules, a war with codes of conduct. It is even a war with a declared truce, but this does not make it any less of a conflict, schemes and games, traps and plots designed to ensnare the unwary.

Occasionally, these games spill out into the wider world, affecting the humans who dominate Earth. However, for the most part, they are confined to an underworld populated by the Others, a collection of mages and shapeshifters, witches and demons, who have existed in parallel with humanity for as long as anyone can remember. For centuries, they senselessly clashed, seeking advantage for the side they'd sworn to advance, until the great truce, brokered by both sides, imposed upon all of their members restrictive rules that no one liked but most adhered to. In order to enforce those rules, three powerful bodies were created: the Day Watch, tasked with monitoring the followers of the light; the Night Watch, sworn to police the denizens of darkness; and the Inquisition, a neutral body designed to adjudicate conflicts between the two.

Anton Gorodetsky belongs to the Night Watch. A magician of unremarkable powers, he is caught up in greater events when a supremely gifted sorceress for the light unexpectedly comes into her powers. In love with the young woman, anton attempts to protect her from the machinations of their broader community, but the forces arrayed against him hunger to use her powers for their own games, their own gain, and anton is ill-equipped to stop them. This is the world he knows. This is the world bubbling beneath the surface of human reality. These are the happenings in twilight.

From political machinations to eternal powerplays, from the pettiness of cruelty to the fickleness of joy, Night Watch is an engaging rumination on power, both its uses and its abuses. Casting its protagonists as pawns in a much grander game played by masters of light and shadow, Mr. Lukyanenko re-imagines the daily conflicts in the human world, hedonism versus noble self-restraint, authoritarianism versus individualism, deploying Gorodetsky and his friends as metaphors for each of these forces. In this, he makes a worthy and worthwhile attempt at highlighting the strengths and the pitfalls of each of these positions without biasing the reader in any particular direction. Such a nuanced approach is welcome in its rarity.

However, while the novel's broader themes work well, Night Watch's actual plot leaves a lot to be desired. Not only do Mr. Lukyanenko's characters spend considerable time brooding over and bemoaning their fates while waiting for the story to move forward, the work's plot hangs on several tenuous coincidences which, while explained, fall far short of being convincing. Some of this is surely intentional, as the author attempts to pass onto the reader Anton's mounting frustrations and delusions with the world and his work, but this doesn't entirely account for the awkwardness of the story's construction. Moreover, the degree to which the author transfers the responsibility for the consequential conflicts of the 20th century, and the social movements that were energized by them, from humanity to magic-users is less than satisfying. True, this is fiction; what's more, Mr. Lukyanenko's magicians may well be stand-ins for the human powers who run our world from beyond our purview. However, neither explanation helped much to rinse the distastefulness of this conceit from my mouth.

This is a cold novel that, though it pre-dates Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden by two years, nonetheless channels some of the energy present in both that character and his series. However, Night Watch sacrifices the humor and the superficiality of such works to speak to deeper truths about ethics and the good life that, ironically, function better than the actual plot. The author is trying to make broader points about human existence while couching them in tropes and themes a general audience will enjoy and understand, making the work as commendable as it is flawed. (3/5 Stars)

Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal by Jeanette Winterson

From The Week of November 12, 2012 As much as our lives, and thus our personalities, are shaped by a million unpredictable incidents, spanning decades, which are as uncontrollable as they are unavoidable, our parents define our existences. For when we are but blank slates, unformed in childhood, they are there to impart upon us codes of morality and conduct that we cannot reject. To do so would compel us to reject our parents as well and we are ill-equipped, at such an age, to be on our own. Thus, we conform. For good or ill, we learn at their feet, uplifted by their generosity, degraded by their abuse. We are encoded by them in ways we will never escape. No one knows this better than Ms. Winterson, much to her cost.

One of Britain's more famous, contemporary authors, Jeanette Winterson rose to prominence in 1985 when, at the age of 26, she published her first and to-date most successful novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. This coming-of-age tale of a young lesbian suffering the stones and arrows of her narrowminded, fundamentalist mother was as raw as it was vivid, capturing, in its two main characters, both the profound, generational divide that separates postwar parents from their Gen-X children -- repression versus freedom, authoritarianism versus individualism --, and the degrees to which these differences, born of time and circumstance, prevented anything like understanding from forming between the two disconnected groups.

At the time, Ms. Winterson acknowledged that this work was inspired by her own history. However, Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal makes clear just how much, introducing the reader to the author's tortured childhood in which her exquisitely miserable adopted mother heaped upon her atypical but talented daughter the sins and the disappointments of her own repressed existence. Obsessed with sin, the elder Winterson could not see past her disapproval to recognize that her daughter possessed an unusual love of literature and poetry, a passion that would carry her to the heights of Oxford and beyond, leaving behind the gray and narrow world in which her mother had boxed herself. From painful, childhood episodes to the search for her biological mother, Ms. Winterson recounts her life, leaping as freely through time as she does from prose to verse, forever exposing the scars of a broken relationship that will never have the chance to heal.

Why Be Happy If You Can Be Normal is a fascinating read. While it is burdened by episodes of distasteful self-indulgence, it is, in every other respect, a revealing portrayal of a damaged person's most private pains. Enchained by her mother's scorn and the secrets of her own origins, Ms. Winterson spends much of her life plagued by an abusive circuit that she cannot break. For as much as she possesses the mental powers to reason her way clear of the wounds her mother burned into her soul, she cannot teach herself how to love. For all her powers, for all her success, this is beyond her talent. It is beyond anyone's talent. For allowing oneself to be loved is something that has to be nurtured in the young, cherished until it can grow armor against life's thorns. It cannot be imposed later on. For the scar tissue has already formed. And this is far from fertile soil in which to plant the seeds of trust and tenderness.

This is a commendable autobiography. For it is as raw as Ms. Winterson's most laudatory work. It is nothing less than the expose of the frailties of one person's mind and soul. And yet, this is also its most grievous flaw. For this is almost too personal, too acute. I feel like a voyeur, like I have been witnessed to something not meant for me. Still, to the degree to which it may help those who have suffered the same or similar dignities from those they trusted most, to make them feel less alone it is worthwhile.

As honest as it is sad... (3/5 Stars)

A More Perfect Heaven by Dava Sobel

From The Week of November 12, 2012 Insight is a strange and mysterious quality. As unquantifiable as love and as elusive as freedom, it comes and goes as it pleases, subject to no man's whim. It cannot be summoned. It cannot even be channeled. It is a blessing that is as quick to leave us as it is to come to us. Such characteristics would normally bestow a bad reputation on just such a force. And yet, so welcomed are its truths, so treasured is its warmth, that we plead for its caresses, considering ourselves fortunate to have spent time in its luminocity. For insight brings enlightenment, knowledge that can alter the future and change the lives of millions. That is a power that should be respected, not quibbled with. Ms. Sobel demonstrates in her short but edifying biography.

Of all the giants who contributed to the ignition of the scientific revolution, none stands higher than Nicolaus Copernicus. A 15th-century son of Poland who spent most of his life as a canon in the Catholic church, he is responsible for early astronomy's most central insight, that the Earth, rather than be the fixed point around which the universe turned, was merely one world orbiting one star in a much greater, sun-filled cosmos. This shattering revelation not only ran counter to the scientific understanding of the time, it deeply undermined the most fundamental conceit of Catholicism, in particular, and Christianity in general, that Earth was the crown jewel of the home of life in the universe and that the star-filled heavens were simply that, the heavens in which god, his angels, and those most worthy human souls resided.

Though Copernicus, unlike Galileo, largely escaped Church sanction for holding such heretical views, this was merely a sad twist of fate. For Copernicus only published his revolutionary work in the months prior to his tragic death, after which he was safe from the narrow minds of the men who would seek to judge his genius. Here, Ms. Sobel reconstructs those final few, dramatic years of Copernicus' life, imagining his homelife, sketching out his duties and pondering the blockades that might have stood in the way of the publication of a book that would eventually transform the lives of untold millions. In this, she channels jealousies and suspicions, loves and secrets, to reconstruct a life the likes of which comes around but once in a century, a life that only a few of us will be blessed to touch.

Though A More Perfect Heaven is far from a thorough biography of Nicolaus Copernicus, it is a read as smooth as it is moving. Ms. Sobel foregoes a dry recitation of the accepted facts of her subject's life and, instead, revivifies him with a small play sown neatly into the heart of her otherwise non-fictional chronicle. Reasoning out who the man might've loved and feared, protected and conflicted with, she animates his central genius with a series of scenes that concern his final months. In this, she rescues him from both the dryness of history and the remoteness of legend. She gives us a man with needs and flaws, with troubles and torments, a man who was as certain of his scientific conclusions as he was concerned about the consequences they would have on a world enshrouded in the darkness of ignorance.

Much of this is supposition, but the author sandwiches her play with enough biography to grant her version of events the sheen of plausibility, perhaps even probability. Time has a habit of eroding the truth of the way of things. The passage of five centuries has a habit of obliterating them altogether. This is, then, a welcome snapshot of one of the most critical moments in our recent history, one that we will look back upon for as long as we have science.

If you are looking for a well-rounded biography of Copernicus, look elsewhere. Ms. Sobel leaves off much of the detail that would have characterized his every day life. However, if you're interested in the ways and means of early scientific insight, and how that insight might affect the minds of 15th-century humans who knew only faith and war, then look no further. Charming work... (3/5 Stars)

Exogene: The Subterrene War 2 by T. C. McCarthy

From The Week of November 5, 2012

The malleability of the mind is an essential aspect of human evolution. It allows for us to be individuals, to learn, to prioritize, and to specialize in the disciplines and pursuits that we care most about. But for all its virtues, this same malleability that catalyzes so much personal growth also leaves us wide open to the manipulations of others. Known euphemistically as brainwashing, this systematic conditioning is the cruellest weapon in the toolbox of dictators and cult leaders, generals and gurus, allowing them to commandeer our freewill in the name of a righteous cause, their righteous cause. It permits them to mercilessly hollow-out their followers, filling in that emptiness with codes and commands that will ensure fealty. Rarely has its consequences been so vividly demonstrated than in this, the second instalment in Mr. McCarthy's war-torn depiction of the future.

It is the 22nd century and Earth has been sucked dry. Exhausted by hundreds of years of accelerated extraction, its resources have been pulled from the ground to shape cars and cities, weapons and civilizations that were never efficiently recycled. They didn't have to be. There was always more mines to dig, more ore to find, more materials from which to craft. But now that this extractive free ride is at an end, the world's many powerful nations, believing that they have no other choice, are forced to go to war with those few invaluable pockets that remain, turning the surface radioactive in order to preserve the treasures that lie beneath.

In the pursuit of this endless war, the various factions have turned to genetic engineering to augment their war machines. Human casualties are politically unpopular, not to mention costly. If these priceless units can be armored with battalions of tank-grown soldiers, who can be ordered to fill out the front lines of combat, the human cost can be reduced without the unwanted necessity of halting operations. In the United States, males were the first to be grown, but their aggression proved uncontrollable, compelling military geneticists to turn to more pliant females into which they poured a toxic blend of theology and patriotism to create the perfectly obedient and yet perfectly deadly supersoldier. From the wintery front lines of Russia to the warm freedom of Thailand, this is their story.

Exogene is a march through Hell. Swapping out Germline's established characters for a new roster of American genetics, it is a relentlessly savage demonstration of the death cult, that most destructive skein of brainwashing. Through the eyes of Katherine, a combat veteran approaching the end of her young shelf-life, and Megan, her lover and unit leader, we come to understand the terrifying and degrading plight of cannon-fodder, watching all semblance of morality and human decency give way to political and military necessity. Indoctrinated into a life they never chose, the Gees are living beings reduced to serving a single, nihilistic purpose, to kill in the name of a god invented to control them.

This is the work's primary virtue. For in holding up this albeit extreme example of slave labor, Mr. McCarthy reminds us of our species' dubious history when it comes to expediency. Be they the soldiers hurled into war or the subhumans forced to toil in factories and plantations, generations of humanity have found ways of excusing away their immorality. Why? Because they stood to profit from it. They stood to reap rewards that were too desirable to turn down, even if they came at the cost of that most universal right of any living creature, personal freedom. It's a lesson worth teaching. For we stand now at the threshold of unimaginable science ranging from artificial intelligence to genetically modified humans, advances which will allow us to once again selfishly capitalize on the work of creatures it's convenient to not consider human.

It was a bold decision to switch away from the war-correspondent ethos of Germline to the themes detailed above. It ensures that Mr. McCarthy's series stays fresh and confrontational. And yet, for all of Exogene's value, there is a relentlessness about the violence and the depravity here that numbs the spirit. This may well have been Mr. McCarthy's aim; for anyone would be numbed if forced to suffer the degradations herein. And yet, the novel's power lies in the extent to which it is a gauntleted punch to the face, in which case numbness is not a benefit. I felt myself wanting a reprieve, a moment to catch my breath, to rest, but none was forthcoming.

As raw as it is demonstrative... Potent science fiction... (4/5 Stars)

The Signal And The Noise by Nate Silver

From The Week of November 5, 2012

Though human progress relies on several critical pillars in order to function, none are more vital to the survival of the species than predicting the future. For it's only through the reasonably accurate anticipation of what's coming that we have any notion of how to act. The world around us is rife with data: dark clouds that presage rain, the approaching roar that announces an oncoming car, the rot that decays our food. If we were suddenly unable to use these data to draw logical conclusions based on past experience, we'd be dead in short order, felled by an inability to understand, to know, to make an educated guess. It's not a quality often valorized; we're rarely stripped of our predictive powers, a reality that leads us to take its virtues for granted. But this blindness has not stopped Mr. Silver from properly identifying it as a key aspect of progress and change. He explains in his captivating treatise.

From meteorology to poker, from elections to personal relationships, our world runs on guesswork. There are simply too many unknowable variables involved in the interaction of an ecosystem with the seven billion souls it shelters. There is no way for us to possess all of the information necessary to understand all. Thus, ever since we've been endowed with the powers of intellect, we've used a clumsy combination of guesswork and past experience to anticipate the future. But this is a deeply flawed model of deciding how to act. For we are, all of us, profoundly ill-equipped to be objective about ourselves and our world. We place far too much emphasis on our own actions, our own positions in the world, for our memories and our predictions to be trustworthy. But what if we could harness the understanding of the masses? What if we could eliminate errors of bias by using the average of the many to correct for the skewed and skewable beliefs of the few? Could we then have a reasonable expectation of a true future?

Perhaps, but correcting for bias is only half of the equation of understanding. The rest is rooted in the reality that, though we cannot know all the variables, we can grasp some of them. We can tease out of our world statistics that reveal some of the laws that underpin our actions in the micro and the universe in the macro. And we can use these statistics, along with what we know of ourselves and our fellows, to build models that can finally begin to conceive of our we act as a whole.

Mr. Silver understands this truth. A self-described math geek and a lover of baseball and poker, his youth was marinated in stats, stats that, if they could only be plugged into a broader matrix, could be made to reveal knowledge of how certain systems function. Armed with such information, one could reasonably maximize one's opportunity to win at all manner of endeavors, from trivial games to consequential bargaining sessions. For one would not need to waste time with bad strategies shaped by desperation and ego masquerading as intuition. One could simply possess a superior comprehension of the game and play within that framework, never descending to the muddy realm of unquantifiable speculation. After dabbling in the numbers of baseball and poker, Mr. Silver applied precisely this logic to the prediction of American elections. The result? A nearly flawless scorecard in the last two presidential races, an astounding level of accuracy that flirts with the magical until one absorbs the lessons in his wonderful book.

From sportsbetting to weather prediction, The Signal And The Noise walks readers through the worlds of statistics and of predictive modelling, illuminating the revelations of all manner of far-flung disciplines that all of us rely upon but few of us respect. But though it bestows upon us a welcome understanding of how parts of the world function, its truths are far more profound. For this is nothing less than a tome on how humans think and act, on how we can harness that data to our individual and societal advantage, and how we ought to couple that data with our scientific understanding of the universe to see more clearly where we are going. But in order to do this, we must relinquish our biases, all of them. We must reject the pretty fictions we cling to in order to ground ourselves in this shared reality. For to do anything less is to give up the exercise entirely. It's to reject the objective world for a subjective one, one in which there are no universal truths, one in which story supplants hard data. And though this might have been acceptable a century ago, when we lacked the tools to gather these data, we no longer have any excuses. Understanding is out there. We've merely to embrace it in all its definable glory.

For the degree to which it educates and philosophizes, illuminates and ruminates, this is one of the year's best reads and arguably one of the humblest books I've ever read. As profound as it is exquisite.. (5/5 Stars)

Dragon Sea by Frank Pope

From The Week of November 5, 2012

Though many would argue otherwise, there are few among us who can resist the lure of the glorious score, that incredible, transformative moment in which one's life fortunes are completely changed, vaulting them into the stratosphere of wealth and status. In our classist world, the rewards are simply too rich, too plentiful, for anyone short of a saint to turn down the opportunity to abandon drudgery for the soft lap of luxury. However, such moments rarely just arrive on one's doorstep. They have to be sought out and pursued, wooed with a mixture of prudence and persistence. They have to be planned for, every detail anticipated, if success it to be achieved. And even then, Lady Luck has her say. Thus are the many fortune-seekers weeded out, the soft bark falling away to reveal the hardness within. What kind of mind does such a treasure-hunter possess? And is all the planning and the yearning worth it? Mr. Pope is deeply qualified to answer this question. He does so with thoughtful skill in Dragon Sea.

Packed to the gills with Vietnamese pottery, the Hoi An was a 15th-century merchant vessel that plied the warm seas of Southeast Asia. Sunk before it could deliver its payload, the wreck spent 500 years entombed under more than 200 feet of water, just 22 miles off the coast of Vietnam, until it was chanced upon by fishermen in the 1990s. The discovery was a fateful one for the Hoi an and its long-dead crew. For its re-emergence caused it to tumble onto the radars of treasure-hunters and archaeologists, pragmatists and idealists, each of whom wanted nothing more than to get their hands on this ancient prize. But recovering artifacts from a 500-year-old wreck, half-buried in the ocean floor is no simple feat.

Enter Ong Soo Hin, a Malaysian businessman with a hunger for profit and mastery. Enchanted by both the retrieval of the wreck, and all that it would earn him, Hin sought out and received the blessing of the Vietnam government, assembled a diving team, chartered a pricy boat as his base of operations and, with collaborations from archaeologists and conservationists, began to pull up what had lain buried for so long. But no sooner was the pottery rising to the surface then problems began to plague the mission, a series of calamities that not only sapped the morale of the expedition's members, but culminated in profound disharmonies between Hin and the mission's lead archaeologist which would eventually leave both men feeling as though they'd been betrayed by the other. An appropriately Shakespearian end to a tragic enterprise...

From its re-discovery to the epic calamity of the sale of its goods, Dragon Sea is an engrossing journey into the world of treasure-hunting. Something of an understudy to the expedition's archaeologist, Mr. Pope is by no means an objective narrator. For he spent months with the international dive team that retrieved the Vietnamese pottery, helping to catalogue it all while being sheltered by the very man (Hin) who was trying to sell it. However, for all that we must take Mr. Pope's account of events with a grain of salt, his detailed description of the treasure-hunter's life is as vivid as it is enlightening. In the course of his tale, the author not only elucidates the history of diving and the saturation system that allowed Hin's team to retrieve valuables under conditions that would kill an unprotected human, he generates dynamic profiles of the divers and academics, the businessmen and the thrill-seekers, who made up the expedition's roster. In this, he admirably entwines edification with entertainment to create an excellent product.

For all this, Dragon Sea is not without its blindspots. Though Mr. Pope touches on the moral dilemmas inherent in allowing treasure-seekers to claim salvage of cultural relics, selling off substantial amounts of invaluable art to pay for their expenses en-route to filling their pockets with profit, he fails to touch on the degree to which looting shipwrecks is, for all intents and purposes, graverobbing. People died on the Hoi An. Some were even buried with it. And yet no one, from the moneymen to the academics hesitate for even a moment to consider that, were this graveyard on land, no one would allow them to sell off grave goods to the highest bidder, on Ebay of all places. Instead, it's simply accepted that, because treasures at sea are harder to get to, and consequently more expensive to fetch, a compromise has to be made; some loot is given to the expeditions' backers to sell and other pieces go to the academics and the museums to study and display. This is not only insensitive, it's narrowminded. Even If we assume, for a moment, that it's morally acceptable to loot the wreck, then ban all public sales of the relics. Compel museums to contract with treasure-hunters to retrieve the loot and hand it on to the museums. The excuse that museums cannot fund such projects seems incompatible with a world in which substantial sums are frequently raised for all manner of projects consequential and otherwise.

This is quality work. Mr. Pope pulls back the curtain on a dark and sleazy world we'd do well to familiarize ourselves with. For perhaps then its practices would be all the cleaner for the scrutiny. (3/5 Stars)

Alif The Unseen by G. Willow Wilson

From The Week of October 30, 2012 No matter what faith we follow, no matter if we have any faith at all, belief shapes our selves and our world. For it sustains our hopes and dreams even while motivating us to attempt the improbable, to never surrender in the face of daunting odds. It is with us in our lowest moments, when the darkness of despair seems to drain even the sun of its brilliance. It is the stuff of life, the shaper of purpose, the teeth in our determination. But for all of its strengths, belief has two faces. One is open-minded, the face most of us put to the world, the face that allows in the light of many ideas and gives them all equal consideration. But the other is closed off, a fist of iron-hearted ideology that nourishes the hardest of hearts and discourages any sort of deviation from the proscribed path. Wisdom and mercilessness, generosity and cruelty... These are the skeins of belief and Ms. Wilson does a wonderful job demonstrating them both in this eminently readable genre mashup.

In an unnamed, Middle-Eastern state, controlled by an authoritarian monarchy zealous in the preservation of its power, the people are growing increasingly restless. The dawn of the 21st century has placed into the hands of its eager citizens smartphones and laptops, satellite dishes and websites, communication technologies the country's old guard is no more suited to comprehend than it is prepared to fend off. Consequently, the state's control over its message, its agenda, is slipping, losing ground to a host of young revolutionaries who have learned more about the distribution of information and the exploration of truth than the authorities have learned in a lifetime of political repression and state-sponsored propaganda.

Swimming through this new Arab reality is Alif, a 23-year-old hacker who is forever standing between two different worlds. Half Indian and half Arab, he is a gray hat, a hacker who rejects both the black hat's destructive grandstanding and the white hat's noble self-sacrifice. He is an information distributer, an enabler of dissident speech, a conduit for both radical Islamists and socialist revolutionaries to speak free of government censorship. And so he is the perfect pawn for a broader war, a piece on the chessboard of the gods, light against dark, freedom against tyranny, that threatens to consume his country. The key lies in a book that has come into Alif's possession, a book that promises its possessor mystical and technological powers beyond their imaginings, but what will be the cost of using it? Will it consume the world he knows? And is Alif willing to pay that price?

Drawing upon Islamic mythology, information theory, and the upheavals of the recent Arab Spring, Alif The Unseen is a glorious intersection of fantasy and science fiction, that has a little for everyone. For this is a work as much about faith as it is about botnets, a tale about self-belief as much as it is about tyranny, qualities and polarizations that appear pervasive in the Middle-eastern world's tumultuous present. An American convert to Islam, Ms. Wilson, who now lives in the Middle East, has clearly incorporated her own experiences of immersing herself into an environment foreign to her upbringing, suffusing her well-drawn protagonists with a kind of multi-faceted twilight, neither moral or immoral, neither socialist nor conservative, neither democratic nor authoritarian. They are, instead, oft-frightened pragmatists who find themselves plunged into events larger than themselves, in a world that only half-accepts them, and not having the faintest idea of how to deal with any of it.

While the novel occasionally stoops to cliches and tropes typical of popular fiction, these are exceedingly forgivable sins in light of the deftness with which Ms. Wilson has juggled issues of religion and society in a book any interested fifteen-year-old could read. There is no vehemence here. There isn't even any judgement. Ms. Wilson adopts the practical view that nothing is inherently wrong. It is just a way of being that is promoted or discouraged based on our reactions to it. This open-mindedness allows her to make some observations about belief and commitment to the cause that are as engaging as they are refreshingly free of bias. This is a wonderful piece of post-Arab-Spring fiction that goes a long way to demonstrating the gray realities of revolution and technology to those who do not immerse themselves in the news.

As entertaining as it is engrossing. One of the better reads this year... (4/5 Stars)

From The Ruins Of Empire by Pankaj Mishra

From The Week of October 30, 2012 Though we, particularly in the West, have come to understand the crimes and the pains of colonialism, this enlightenment has come at a terrible cost. After all, to learn these lessons, we were compelled to plunge the better part of three continents, Africa, Asia and South America, into chaos and brutality, perfidy and corruption. We created entire ruling bureaucracies which, though their names and their masters have crumbled into dust, have born lasting legacies that have lived on decades, even centuries, after they were forced on the nations subjected to the will of industrialized powers. We cannot avoid the truth of this. We cannot look away from the costs of what those men did. We all bear a measure of responsibility for righting that epic wrong. But there is a deeper truth exposed by colonialism's practice, a truth about power's universal destructiveness that Mr. Mishra does well to expose in his intellectual history of colonial and post-colonial Asia.

For the better part of 250 years, western Europe did its level best to subjugate the world. Casting themselves in the role of light-bringers, men of skill and knowledge who would bring wisdom to the wild, mysterious east, they addicted these monarchies and fiefdoms, empires and tribes, to trade and narcotics, money and wealth. In the name of free trade, that most celebrated of freedom fighters, these nations conquered half the world, not so much with their navies and their cannons, though, these weapons were deployed when necessary. No, victory came through infestation and strong-arming, economic trickery and smart politicking, which saw the unstable eastern powers succumb to the western spell.

There were, undoubtedly, western men who endeavored to do well by their eastern brothers, but whatever blessings such rare gems provided to the newly acquired peoples of the east were more than offset by the darkness of economic depravity and the humiliation of cultural inferiority. This was at least the view of the Chinese, Indian and Arabic intellectuals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who rose to prominence within their lands. From Tagore to Al-Afghani, from Gandhi to Sun Yatsen, Mr. Mishra reconstructs the thoughts of these bright but tragic Asian stars and their hopes for a new, united Asia, one that acknowledged its own cultural weaknesses by accepting and benefiting from western strengths without sacrificing those spiritual virtues that helped create civilizations millennia older than the one subjecting them. Their dreams are expansive and glorious, their struggles noble and inspirational, but were their messages for pan-Asian unity listened to? Were their visions implemented in an Asia free of colonialism?

From The Ruins of Empire is a staggering and revelatory read. Energized by the thoughts of Asian scholars envisioning a better, brighter future for their continent, it perfectly encapsulates the fundamental tragedy that emanates from revolutionary thought and the revolutions they ignite. Subjugated people naturally blame their conquerers for ill-treatment that occurs in any inequitable relationship. But in levying this blame, the defeated imagine that if they were themselves but better, purer, smarter, if they but adopted the best of what made their enemies great while preserving the core of their own identities, they could throw off their imperial shackles and be born as free peoples, bound together in common and glorious unity. They see themselves capable of creating lasting peace and stable, centralized governments if given the chance. For are their cultures not older and wiser? Are their motives not purer and higher?

But of course, this is only half of the truth. We are all weak. We are all corruptible. For it is power that corrupts us. Colonialism is merely a symptom of the lust for power. Asia is the proof. For once the great wickedness that was colonialism was banished from its shores, there was no utopia realized, no stable government implemented. Asia went on as it has always been, as most of humanity has always been, dominated by powerful men who answer to no one but themselves and the armies and the structures that prop-up their dictatorships. These nations may well be democracies in name, but they are not so in reality. These are merely pretty fictions that conceal two darker truths: that power is the ultimate corrupter and that we are all equally unwise.

From The Ruins of Empire is a wonderful demonstration of power's corrosiveness, of how dreams of cultural superiority are bound to succumb to their own gravity and be sucked down into the black hole of arrogance. Mr. Mishra has captured the lives of tragic men and their tragic dreams and used them to reveal these truths. And he's done it with force and flair. Colonialism's legacy must not be forgotten, but it is merely the surface of what plagues this most populous, diverse and fascinating continent. Perhaps, in the future, greatness will blossom from the seeds planted by the intellectuals who threw themselves at colonialism's battlements, but it will not come until these deeper truths are understood. (4/5 Stars)

The Story Of Earth by Robert Hazen

From The Week of October 30, 2012 How does life begin? We live on a world teeming with plants and trees, insects and eagles, microbes and whales, a world on which life has coalesced in the depths of the oceans and on the peaks of our mountains. It is so prolific, so constant, that it has made it impossible to imagine its empty opposite, a barren rock, home to nothing more than ice and stone. But how did all of this begin? And what are the necessary conditions to ignite the wonder that lives beyond our doors? As much as it pains the mind to conceive of something blooming from nothing, Mr. Hazen challenges us to do precisely this in his epic examination of the origin of planet Earth.

Birthed during the violent tumult produced by the solar system's formation some 4.5 billion years ago, Earth is something of a miracle. For not only is it currently the only world in the known universe to support life, it survived comets, asteroids and even planetary collisions to become so much more than an icy rock. Certainly, its fortunate position in the so-called Goldylocks Zone, that advantageous band of cosmic real estate far enough from a star not to be fried and close enough not to be frozen, helped its cause, but this is far from the only necessary virtue for life's evolution. There must also be tides to stir the oceans, planetary rotation to evenly bake the surface in sunlight, a molten core to spur volcanic activity, and mechanisms for capturing and releasing carbon dioxide and oxygen in a beneficial, self-sustaining cycle. And even these are but a few components to providing life a warm and comfortable cradle.

However, the factor we consider least is the most important to Mr. Hazen, time, time for acids to learn how to become bacteria, for bacteria to learn how to be multicellular, for multicellular organisms to spread out and diversify, and for that life to populate the oceans and finally the land with the varieties of the ecosystem we see today. Time... For the planet to evolve, for our star to strengthen, for our moon to grow more distant, for our species to build upon millions of years of fortunate mistakes. Through rocks and mathematical modeling, from the mirrors on the moon to the fossilbeds in our seas, Mr. Hazen examines the fullness of that time, charting life's growth through Earth's successive eras, most of which would have been hostile to human existence. For even if we managed to survive the poisonous atmosphere, we would have surely been trampled by creatures out of our nightmares, manifestations that are now nothing more than ghosts trapped in ancient bones. These are the many faces of our Earth, an Earth that isn't really ours after all.

Though at times soupy with statistics, The Story of Earth is, in the main, a delightful journey through Earth's largely unrecognizable past. Drawing upon a career spent studying Earth's many and varied rocks, Mr. Hazen, a researcher at Carnagy-Mellon University, highlights the major eras in Earth's development, challenging our minds to imagine the strange and deadly faces that Earth has worn in eons past. For while we naturally think of Earth as a possession one, an ancient creature claimed by propagation and technology, it has existed infinitely longer and in infinitely harsher environs than we ever will. Mr. Hazen drives this home in a human-ego-deflating demonstration of research and discovery, mathematical modeling and reasonable imagination that, while occasionally numbing, is never thoughtless.

While we seem no closer to an answer on precisely how life, like the universe, kindled into being, Mr. Hazen infects his work here with a delightful sense of childlike awe and excitement that one imagines he has never lost. The thirst for discovery combined with the thrill of understanding provides the work a heartening momentum. Science and imagination mix together here into a well-spiced stew that is worthy of being sampled and appreciated. (4/5 Stars)