A profound journey through the shoals of fame in The Zuckerman Trilogy

From The Week of December 1st, 2013

Our lives are defined by pivotal moments, convergences of chance and self-determination that redirect us towards new and unexpected destinies. Of these impactful moments, we remember the negative outcomes with far more clarity than the positive, not only because it is in our natures to rue our failures more than we celebrate our successes, but because these misfortunes leave us grasping vainly for our fleeting triumphs, leaving us to dream of what could have been. But while this is understandable, perhaps we should give more thought to the consequences of our successes as well. After all, achievement doesn't come without its own costs. In fact, often, those costs are cloaked by the warm glow of having advanced our interests, making it all the more difficult to brace for them. This is a lesson driven home by Philip Roth's at-times mesmerizing trilogy.

It's not easy being Nathan Zuckerman. He may have come from good, Jewish stock that drove him to be his best; he may be an ambitious and talented writer with a deep desire to make his mark on the world; he may even be a man of some considerable attractiveness and charm, allowing him to enjoy all of society's various pleasures. But these advantages, both external and internal, are of little comfort to a man haunted by his most famous, and infamous novel, a work of fiction that drew on aspects of his own youth to make some difficult and pointed comments about American and Jewish culture.

For anyone else, becoming a famous author would be cause for celebration, and perhaps it was for Zuckerman too, for a time. But as the years accumulate, he finds himself, his family and his relationships increasingly defined by the audaciousness of that novel which deeply offends his father and compels his mother to continually guard herself against the snide and insinuating comments of her neighbors. This ever-increasing burden robs Zuckerman of his health and his happiness, plunging him into a succession of relationships that are as torrid as they are dysfunctional. Eventually, Zuckerman's bitterness completely seizes hold of his existence, making a mockery of his dreams, his plans and his hopes and leaving him with nothing but his dark emotions.

A journey as brief as it is profound, The Zuckerman Trilogy is a fascinating examination of the life of a man blessed and cursed by talent. Mr. Roth, widely thought to be one of the greatest living American authors, creates something of an alter ego in Zuckerman and then heaps upon him all the punishments of ambition and unrestrained desire which feast upon him until there is nothing left of the man but the most jagged of emotions. In lesser hands, such a premise might seem like the height of arrogance and self-indulgence. Writing harshly about one's own fame, knowing that to do so will only make one even more famous? It seems rather cynical. And yet, Mr. Roth is such a keen observer of the human condition, and is so disgustingly skilled at conveying his own revelations through taut, imaginative prose, that the reader is left humbled by his prowess rather than being amused by his conceit.

Of the three works, the first is the most narratively engaging. While introducing us to Zuckerman, The Ghost Writer posits the idea that Anne Frank survived her ordeal with the Nazis and emigrated secretly to New England where she proceeded to live out a quiet and secretive life, cognizant that revealing her existence would inestimably reduce the power of her diary which she never expected to be published. This is a delightful thought experiment and one that helps carry the novel to a complex conclusion. But it's The Anatomy Lesson, the trilogy's final work, that finds Mr. Roth at his most spellbindingly profound. From about the halfway point of the work, the author goes on what must be one of the most powerful and entertaining rants in literary history, one that combines conceit, cowardice and cruelty in a manner that cannot but move the reader to conclude that the author is truly as skilled as his puppet Zuckerman is disfigured by a life lived at odds.

For all of the wonderful ideas and exchanges contained within these pages, however, most lasting is Mr. Roth's implication that fame is an uncontrollable beast. Zuckerman sets out to be successful, certainly, but he never contemplates what that fame might do to him and to the people he's closest to. Nor does he realize that the moment he publishes his work, he loses every ounce of control he has over his public life. He cannot dissuade people from judging him, much less judging his parents. He can't unmake the work. He can't unmake the thoughts people have about the work. He cannot make a plea for people to not read the book. He has made himself subject to the riptides of history and popular opinion which he is in no way able to steer, or even to influence. This is a delicious insight that lends fire and force to the trilogy throughout.

Challenging at times, but well worth the contemplation. For this is nothing short of work that stretches the boundaries of fiction. Such blazing lights are exceedingly rare. (4/5 Stars)

The intersection of genetics and will in the fascinating The Sports Gene

From The Week of November 25th, 2013

Even if human civilization wasn't already driven by the desire for commercial success, the answer to the question of what makes certain people successful would transfix humanity. We are all, to varying degrees, creatures of gifts and opportunities, ideas and pivotal moments. So why do some of us rise to the top while others of equal talent and ability slump into obscurity? Fortune surely plays a key role here; after all, the chaotic clashing of wills that defines the modern, competitive environment, is bound to spit out some who triumph as a result of being in the right place, at the right time, to gather up the pieces left behind by their bested betters. And yet, there are too many examples of successful individuals who have honed their bodies, and trained their minds, to achieve the improbable that lady luck's beneficence, be it circumstantial or genetic, cannot be the determining factor. Well, then, what is it? David Epstein investigates.

Though organized displays of feats of human skill are nearly as old as we are, the last hundred years has seen an explosion in competitive sports. The rise of the modern world, and all its expanding wealth, has fuelled the professionalization of what was, as late as the early 20th century, a largely amateur field, with men and women laying down their burdens to perform their talents for curious audiences eager to see the best that man had to offer. Now, thanks to televised broadcasts and corporate sponsorship, almost every conceivable pursuit of athletics contains a golden pot of wealth and prestige just waiting for the victor to claim it.

This yearning for status and income has thrown professional competition into overdrive, creating specimens of human skill and power unimaginable a century ago. These supremely toned machines have shattered records that scientists and experts thought unbreakable. But more than that, they've spurred a curiosity about why some athletes are better than others. CO2max and the 10,000-hour rule, the sprinter gene and fast-twitch muscles have all entered our lexicon as we probe at the heart of the human body in its highest, present-day form.

From Jamaican sprinters to Finnish skiers, from Kenyan runners to Scandinavian pole-vaulters, The Sports Gene is a fascinating, non-dogmatic exploration of the intersection of mind and muscle, genes and success. Mr. Epstein, a track-and-field athlete in his not-so-distant youth, eschews the Gladwellian approach to social and sports science, refusing to hail any given talent as the root of all athletic triumph. Instead, he gathers up all the various threads that might play a role in finishing first and attempts, in an open-minded way, to weigh them by their significance. In this, he takes fewer chances than the Gladwells and the Lehrers of the world, but he also profoundly reduces the odds of misleading his readers by oversimplifying what is inherently an extraordinarily complex system, extreme achievement.

Though Mr. Epstein devotes much more time to his investigation than he does to his pontifications, his conclusions do surface from time to time and seem, on the whole, reasonable and agreeable. The author rejects the notion that any one virtue lies at the heart of physical success; rather, it flows from the fusion of natural talent, mental fortitude and a great deal of practice. Certainly, there are athletes whose physical gifts outstrip these other components, individuals who rise on account of having won the genetic lottery, but it's equally clear that some among the genetically average have prospered thanks to an iron-willed desire to win. In this, we come to better understand both sporting success generally and generational athletes specifically. For when genetic gifts are married to a well-trained mind, there are few barriers left to ultimate success.

the Sports Gene could have been more opinionated. It could have attempted to dig more deeply into the truly exceptional amongst us, but we cannot call these flaws or missteps. For the work's virtue is in mixing together the small and the famous, the modest and the showy. It is a celebration of how success comes in simply too many forms to be so blithely defined by those who cynically set out to reduce thousand-dollar questions into ten-cent answers. For this, we all should be grateful.

An excellent and enlightening journey through the extremity of the human form... (4/5 Stars)

The greed, corruption and the disasters aboard The Outlaw Sea

From The Week of November 25th, 2013

For as much as globalization and the Internet have helped to homogenize human civilization, humanity remains fractured, an assembly of nation states which possess their own ideas, ethics and agendas. Certainly, there are occasions in which these national interests overlap, prompting some of the world's countries to accrete into blocks which act to achieve a common goal, but for the most part the international spirit, not to mention international law, is little more than a glossy veneer for strong nations to impose their values and their desires upon weaker ones, leading to conflict and discord that sometimes takes decades to unravel. For most of us, this is simply the world we live in, a known commodity that we can no more alter than ignore, and yet, this divisiveness causes real damage, a truth made frighteningly apparent in William Langewiesche's excellent work.

Earth is a misnomer. For the surface of our world is more than 75-percent water, an intractable, unfathomable oceanic expanse that is as eternal as it is ever-changing. It is not only a necessity for life on land, serving as the source of both our food and, indirectly, our water, it is, even in the 21st century, the primary means by which humans shift resources around the world. Without the oceans, international trade, the mechanism upon which all our economies rest, would be much more costly and complicated, having to take almost exclusively to the skies.

However, despite the inarguable value of this commonly held resource, the laws and the practices that characterize international waters are a strange mishmash of traditions and might-makes-right mentalities that make traversing it less than ideal. For not only do captains have to be aware of natural hazards that can sink their vessels, they must also combat the threat of piracy which is a profitable trade, particularly for those who come from impoverished countries and backgrounds. These risks, along with the inevitable corporate greed which precludes merchant vessels from being properly maintained, ensures that our oceans will remain a dangerous, alien place for decades to come.

Operating brilliantly at the intersection of nature and human avarice, the Outlaw Sea serves as an excellent primer on the commercial state of our modern oceans. Shaped by two telling sea-born disasters in the last 15 years, the MS Estonia, a passenger ferry, and the Crystal, an aging freighter, it sets out to illustrate the perils and the imbecility that often governs human activity at sea. In this, it is a success, a well-reasoned and carefully methodical takedown of a culture crying out for reform and oversight. For while most of the captains who steer these mammoth vessels may be creatures of honor and respectability, they are in the employ of corporations that not only put their lives at risk by making a sham of inspection processes, they deliberately set out to limit their liabilities for spills and disasters, hiding behind false flags and meaningless registries to obscure the extent of their culpability and responsibility.

And yet, as Mr. Langewiesche details at some length, it is difficult to enforce an international standard of any kind when such a standard is bound to be against the interests of at least some of the nations that make up our world. And given that all nations must trade in order to survive, and that trade over water is essential, then it becomes much easier to subvert and ignore these standards than it is to face the prospect of lost profits. And of course, these are the governments who actually have a sufficient grip over their own affairs to act one way or the other. There are many more failed nations who lack even this minimal amount of control, allowing private interests to run roughshod beneath flags with already tattered reputations.

Mr. Langewiesche is a thorough journalist who clearly cares deeply about his craft and the subjects he investigates. And while this may, at times, cause him to fixate on seemingly small details in the grand pictures he's presenting, this is more than compensated for by his ability to expose and communicate the dirt, the grease and the grime that we have allowed to accumulate upon the gears that make up this great machine we call commerce. If he strikes a somewhat pessimistic tone as a result of this reporting, well, one needs only read his chronicles to understand why. For reform can only flower when powerful interests are properly checked and there seems little hope of that when so much wealth and advantage is at stake.

A chilling and revelatory glimpse of a world we never see... (4/5 Stars)

Mesmerizing tales of failed emigrants in Laila Lalami's first two novels

From The Week of November 18th, 2013

Though some among us possess the talent and or the good fortune to enjoy good lives, enriched by friends, family and the rule of law, many others are not so gifted, or lucky. For them, life, and the sociopolitical circumstances that define it, is something to be endured until they can reach better horizons, distant lands where their contributions are fairly earned and properly remunerated. They are not marinated in the love and hope that characterizes the lives of the successful. They are, instead, forced to stew in a toxic sea of poverty, a place where what few opportunities exist fail to offer any chance of achieving something more, something grand, something worthy of all of us. This is the value of immigration, granting labor to advanced nations and honest prospects to the poor people trying to get there. And it's this notion that underpins both of Laila Lalami's excellent novels.

Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits welcomes us into the minds of a boat full of Moroccoan immigrants fleeing in the night across the Strait of Gibraltar. Having each paid their boat captain handsomely to sneak them into Spain, they pray for good weather and careless coast guards, both of which will aid them in finding their way off Spain's beaches and inland to where they can work to better themselves and the families they've been forced to leave behind. But when all but one of the illegals are seized by the watchful Spanish authorities, their hopes for a future in Europe are dashed and each must, in their own way, deal with the fallout of being forceably returned to the corrupt country they turned their backs upon.

Secret Son eschews such multiple, tragic perspectives to focus on the singular family drama of the Armanis. Poised at the top of Moroccan society, their hands thrust deeply into its business and its politics, they can quite literally make or break the lives of the many thousands who work for them. This not only burdens their only child, amal, with the expectations of inheriting an empire, even while she studies in America, it reaches out to forever alter the life of Yousseff el Mekki, a youthful boy living in the slums outside Casablanca who gradually realizes that he is the bastard son of the Armani patriarch. Despite his mother's efforts to keep him out of the Armani world, Yousseff falls headlong for the wealth, the power and the pride of his father's world even though it's bound to break his heart. For this is not power wielded in the name of anything like social justice. It is, like power in all corrupt nations, deployed for the betterment of those who already have it and at the expense of those who do not.

Slim volumes whose narratives are shaped by a tone akin to observational journalism, Secret Son and Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits are mesmerizing works of fiction made all the more potent by their unusual perspectives. Western culture is awash in immigrant stories, tales of hardship endured for the sake of "the children," the generation that, in following on in prosperous nations, make the enormous sacrifices of their parents worthwhile. Ms. Lalami sifts out these success stories in order to find those who tried and failed to emigrate, people who were willing to pay the same ultimate price of their successful brothers and sisters but who were ensnared by blood, by bad luck and by circumstance, compelled to linger on in a corrupt country with little hope and few jobs. The despair is a palpable throb just beneath the surface of these works which cannot be read without at least once provoking the thought "there but for the grace of god."

Though not explicitly stated, a powerful sense of fate pervades these novels. From Yousseff, the slum-dweller, to Murad, the thwarted academic, ms. Lalami has crafted a host of characters whose talents are rarely appreciated and never allowed to fully flourish. Sparked by a conscious desire to change such grim destinies, they fight for better futures, better destinies. And yet, the more they try to reject what they are, the more Fate seems to crush them beneath its jacboots, grinding them down until they are forced to return to their stations in life and accept what's coming to them, the good and the bad. Naturally, there are those in life for whom this consequential reality does not apply, but one cannot help but think of the damage one must do to oneself when forced by necessity to reject identity, reject friends, reject family, even reject station, in order to improve one's fortunes. It is impossible to imagine this deed done without a severe price.

There's no doubt that, in being exposed to the lives of the damned, we are left with some measure of despair, a sad hollowness that is not easily shaken. And yet, not only does this come to seem like a small price to pay for being amongst the fortunate, it, in Ms. Lalami's talented hands, is shaped into a powerful tool that widens our perspectives, allowing us to see more clearly the lives of those forced to bear up under life's most difficult burden, that of enduring in the face of hopeless, exploitive toil. This is a gift that cannot be overstated.

Two of the most moving reads this year... (4/5 Stars)

A forgotten stain on the American character in The Blood Telegram

From The Week of November 18th, 2013

Government, in all its forms, has forever been a double-edge sword. For all its advantages -- the organization of power and resources into the hands of the able few ostensibly for the benefit of the less able many --, it is predicated on the ancient, animalistic notion that might makes right, that the having of power is also a license to use it as the holder sees fit. This conception has been handed down for generations, from the tribes and the monarchies from which our governments evolved, a time in which all manner of ideas and mythologies were dreamed up to justify the actions of the most high. And though we have mollified such harsh views, varnished them with the veneer of electoral mandates and senatorial debates, that underlying idea of I know best still transfixes our leaders, reducing them from creatures of reason into beings of pure authority. The terrible cost of power's corrosiveness could ask for no better exemplar than Gary Bass' mesmerizing portrait of the intersection of American leadership and Bangladeshi freedom.

Separated by as much as 1,000 kilometers, the two halves of Pakistan were always fated to secede from one another. A geographic oddity born out of the great partition, which saw India declare its independence from the British Empire and Pakistan declare its independence from India, this distance irrevocably strained the natural bonds of community that evolve from humans in close proximity, causing views in both territories to become distinct from one another. And so, when Yahya Khan, then the leader of Pakistan's ruling junta, held free elections in 1970, and found the result going dramatically against him, particularly in East Pakistan, he authorized military action to bring the foolish East back into line.

Supported by the Nixon Administration and all the American materiel it could reasonably supply, the Pakistani Army's ruthless attack on East Pakistan was brutally efficient, leading to the slaughter of nearly half a million people and the conversion of millions more Bangladeshi into displaced refugees who fled to India for safety. This crisis appalled the American diplomats stationed in Bangladesh, prompting them to speak out against its depravities. At first, these warnings were private communications up the chain of command. But when this yielded only inaction, many of the diplomats went public, accusing the Nixon Administration of standing by while genocide was perpetrated by an American ally. The subsequent political fallout not only drove India closer to the Soviet Union, it ignited war between India and Pakistan in 1971 which effectively ended the crisis, the scars of which would linger for decades.

A captivating examination of the conflict, viewed through the eyes of the Nixon Administration, The Blood Telegram is powerful, emotive work that will leave few readers unmoved. Drawing upon White-House recordings, and the first-hand accounts of American diplomats in Bangladesh, Mr. Bass describes in stomach-churning detail the lengths to which Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger ignored the mass-slaughter of Hindus in East Pakistan out of loyalty and expediency to dictators and communists. Working hard to thaw relations with Maoist China, and cognizant that Yahya Khan was the best conduit through which they could work with and access China, the President of the United States armed a junta, ignored the entreaties of India, then and still the world's largest democracy, and stood by while their own weapons were used to perpetrate what their own diplomats termed as genocide. Those who objected to this strategy were dismissed as having "gone native" or as being a political enemy of the Nixon administration, neatly allowing the champion of world freedom to plow forward with its plans regardless of the terrible cost.

Were The Blood Telegram's narrative not so consumed by quotes from Nixon and Kissinger, one would be hesitant to take this chronicle at face value. After all, Mr. Bass seems, at times, eager to fit the American diplomats, particularly Archer Blood, for white hats while conversely vilifying the Nixon Administration. And yet, the filth that pours forth, first hand, from the mouthes of Nixon and Kissinger is inescapably wicked, leaving little doubt in all but their staunchest advocates, that their roles in this affair were pernicious and destructive. They are so anxious to win with China that they sneer at anyone who stands in their way, degrading them racially, ideologically and profanely in an effort to justify their actions to themselves. Sadly, despite breaking the law to support Yahya Khan, neither man was charged, much less censured, for their behavior in this matter.

The Blood Telegram is not without its own issues. Though the work is ostensibly about the brutal suppression of East Pakistan, it is far more concerned with the American role in that ugly incident than it is in actually documenting it. We are exposed to one or two refugees and the odd Indian commander, but all else is reduced to the cold statistics of those who were killed, maimed, or forced to flee. We're afforded no real sense of how Bangladesh tried to recover from its bloody,breached birth, much less what was done for the refugees after the Indo-Pakistan war. This despite the fact that Mr. Bass himself states that this is an underreported, little known bloodbath in the 20th century. It is well that we understand the heroic and the villainous roles American officials played in this affair, but not at the expense of understanding and educating ourselves on the reasons why American duplicitousness here was so damaging.

Chilling work that leaves no doubt that representative government is no better at choosing leaders of principle than randomly pulling names from a hat... The crimes of Nixon and Kissinger should not be forgotten... (4/5 Stars)

A sprawling and successful SciFi epic in Hamilton's The Void Trilogy

From The Week of November 10th, 2013

From our actions to our futures, the right to choose is one of humanity's most coveted freedoms, one that countless souls have died to ensure and to preserve. This is as undeniable as it is peculiar. After all, humans, down through the bloody centuries of their history, have spent far more time bound by coercive bondage, political, economic, social, than they have spent free to act as they see fit. Kings and chieftains, sea captains and factory owners, popes and martyrs... They have all used their power and their authority to claim our fealty. And yet, perhaps this is the very reason why the freedom to choose is so prized. For when it is so rare to be afforded with the opportunity to choose one's destiny, regardless of the consequences, then it is savored like the finest wine. But what if we were all afforded this uncoerced right? What if we could act as we pleased no matter the costs to the others around us? Would it still seem wise to hail such a right? Peter F. Hamilton speculates in his engrossing epic.

It is the middle of the fourth millennia and humanity wants for nothing. In the 1,500 years since the creation of the first computer, we have traveled to other stars, encountered alien races both friendly and formidable, and discovered wondrous technologies that have, for most, banished the very notion of suffering. Powerful artificial intelligences ensure a safe and lawful Commonwealth of worlds, most of which have access to science and immortality, art and faith. After all, there is room for any sort of life in a civilization that has done away with the scarcity imposed by finite resources and limited power. In a universe where matter and energy are equally malleable, there is little one needs be denied.

And yet, encroaching upon this utopia is the strangest of threats. The void has persisted for nearly a million years, an incomprehensible region of distorted space within the galaxy in which the physical laws as we know them seem not to apply, in which the power of the mind appears to be superior to that of the physics of spacetime. This might be nothing more than an object of curiosity were it not for the fact that the Void occasionally undergoes expansion fazes, moments of explosive violence that consume the stars and planets in its path. Despite the best efforts of the galaxy's most powerful minds and weapons, the Void has proven to be impervious and indestructible which is why entire star systems have had to be evacuated ahead of its expansion in order not to condemn the lives of countless souls to its voraciousness.

Though the Void's purpose is unknown, many factions within human civilization believe they hold the answers. The most popular of these is the Living Dream, a vaguely Christian organization that believes the Void is a kind of heaven into which they can pass. But those who've studied the Void argue that passing into it helps to trigger its expansion fazes which is why they attempt to halt the pilgrimages to the Void. And yet, these imposts only seem to encourage the dreamers to try harder to achieve their aims, no matter the cost to the universe the Void is threatening to devour.

A series as inventive as it is expansive, The Void Trilogy is epic science fiction, a 700,000-word odyssey through worlds of science and death, politics and faith, yearning and fanaticism. Mr. Hamilton, who is no stranger to thinking big with his fiction, has built here on an existing universe, introducing into it an existential threat that his protagonists fear and his antagonists hunger for. Their clashes prove to be as memorable as they are violent, leaving no doubt that humanity's thirst for destruction, its willingness to use force, has not been softened by immortality.

In its technology and its politics, The Void Trilogy is deeply reminiscent of Iain Banks' famous Culture Series, a collection of works that tried to conceptualize a utopian future for humanity unburdened by the chains of scarcity, one in which everyone would be free to pursue their interests thanks to the willingness of machines and artificial intelligences to do the unglamorous labors that underpin civilization. Certainly, some of the ideas deployed here, are fanciful unto hilarity -- weapons capable of destroying planets and stars are, at times, unleashed almost gleefully --, but Mr. Hamilton manages to largely confine his flamboyant excesses, leaving the reader with an exploration of life utterly transformed from the paradigms with which we are so familiar. To step outside those prejudices, those realities, is a significant achievement in its own right. To then manifest such a utopian civilization in which we are all free to act as we choose, be who we choose, is a feat in truth.

It is a most difficult task to maintain the reader's interest over nearly 2,000 pages and for that we have Mr. Hamilton's host of characters to thank. From the silly to the serious, from the sociopathic to the egomaniacal, we are introduced to detectives and popes, martyrs and commoners, zealots and knowledge seekers, all of whom come together to form a vivid tapestry of conflict and power. And yet, these fine actors are also the epic's most troublesome element. For though most of our prime players have existed for more than a millennia, some even back to the early 21st century, none show any sign of the immense weariness that would naturally eventuate from living so many countless years. Mr. Hamilton makes virtually no attempt to lay out the social conventions that would have to arise to grapple with such unfathomable lifespans: multiple lives, multiple partners, multiple careers. In fact, one of his main characters has been a detective for more than a thousand years. Far from admirable, this seems almost perverse. This, along with a certain plasticness of minds and deeds, troubles the work.

And yet, these flaws do not ruin the epic. For like in life, it is easy to imagine darkness and degradation, to dream up the dystopias that some secret part inside all of us hungers for. It is much more difficult to create, to conceive of a world that is wholly new, and then to animate that world with vibrancy and vitality. The Void Trilogy may be far more interested in exploding stars and weaponized black holes than it is in the sociology and psychology, but it still checks all the boxes of good SciFi while being a rollicking good time. (4/5 Stars)

The neurological mechanics of reading revealed in Proust and The Squid

From The Week of November 10th, 2013

Of the many gifts with which evolution has blessed us, none are as consequential as humanity's ability to adapt. Our physiological capacity to endure the cold and the heat, the dry and the damp, the grim and the barren, have ensured the continuance of our species, but even these achievements pale in power next to the might of neuroplasticity, the ability of the human brain to literally re-program itself in response to the necessities of the individual. In the event that areas of the brain are damaged, malformed, or even underutilized, neuroplasticity allows the brain to re-task its other regions in order to regain necessary skills. It is a wonder that has saved and empowered humanity countless times, and yet, little did we know the critical role it has played in our capacity to read. Maryanne Wolf explains in her engaging work.

Without the written word, we would not have civilization. It's a grand claim, and yet, there can be little arguing it. After all, the written word has been, throughout our history, the most stable means by which to transmit information from generation to generation. Oral traditions served admirably well in the many millennia prior to the advent of alphabets, but such a means for knowledge transfer is highly unstable, subject to misremembering and misinterpretation, not to mention genocide. More than the accumulation of knowledge, though, the written word has given us complex mathematics with which we've built up a world capable of delivering us to the stars. A substantial achievement for something that does not come naturally to the human brain.

From signs to messages, from magazines to novels, we read every day, largely without conscious effort. And yet, in Proust and The Squid, Ms. Wolf argues that this fundamental element of our daily existence is, to us, an unnatural process, one that we have trained ourselves to perform. Drawing on her own research, as well as work from neuroscientists and linguists, she describes how reading is an outgrowth of the brain's capacity to recognize patterns and to extract meaning from them. This evolutionary talent, no doubt the result of the necessities of survival, is, in the reader, cultivated, over some 2,000 hours of intense training, into a system by which the individual can associate shapes with letters, letters with sounds, and sounds with language, creating a closed, linguistic circuit that allows us to not only communicate with our fellows but to imbibe knowledge from the troves of information left to us by the countless members of humanity who have come and gone.

Proust and The Squid is more than a rumination on the mechanics of reading, however. It is an examination of the many manifestations of this talent, how languages based on alphabets and hieroglyphs make different neurological connections, and how these connections can sometimes go astray. The most famous of these maladaptations is dyslexia, a disability Ms. Wolf has clearly studied at length. For these disabilities, and the social and emotional price they exact upon their sufferers, inject passion into the author's work here, transforming it from a thing of pure science to something of a call to arms, to understand and to eliminate such challenges.

While Proust and The Squid is, at times, fascinating and inspiring, it is plagued by a troubling narrowness of perspective. Ms. Wolf uses several admittedly potent statistics correlating reading with personal success to argue that it is a talent that must be cultivated for a full and informed life. But this advocacy seems to run completely counter to her fundamental premise, that reading is an unnatural cultivation of a neurological system that isn't designed to actualize it. Is it truly possible for reading to be so profoundly important when it is clearly not intrinsic to our natures? Is it not possible that reading is, rather, the most obvious means of knowledge transfer for the present? Ms. Wolf is alarmed by the propensity of our newest generation to immerse themselves in a world of touchscreens rather than books. And yet, touchscreens seem to be far more in line with the brain's natural visual systems than reading is. Perhaps, in the future, we will discover other means of knowledge transfer that are more efficient than the laborious programming of alphabets.

In this vein, that Ms. Wolf completely ignores those who read through listening is deeply disturbing. Entire industries have been created to service the many communities that either prefer or depend upon audiobooks for learning. In fact, I read Proust and The Squid as an audiobook because I lack a visual means to consume it. By Ms. Wolf's logic here, I too am cause for concern because I've chosen another way to learn. The author's alarmism over new technologies is a rejection of the very glory that gave us reading in the first place, our ability to adapt. Trust seems in order here, not dismay.

An interesting read, but one that is far more interested in providing encouragement to the dyslexic than it is in recognizing and mitigating its author's own lack of foresight... (3/5 Stars)

n

a darkly imaginative, entertaining epic in The Magister Trilogy

From The Week of November 4th, 2013

Excluding a few, notably greedy exceptions, we all want to believe that life should be lived in balance, harmonies that govern man and nature, man with his fellows, and man with himself. Humanity has invented entire faiths in hopes of propagating this notion, of establishing this karmic linkage at the root of our existences. After all, what better way to ensure that the excesses of the few are discouraged by the prudence of the many? There's only one problem with this belief however; it is a facade. Life, like the universe, is governed only by opportunity, its resources exploitable, its blessings random. Some god, some force, may indeed have conjured it into being, but that animating intelligence has done little to curb the disharmonies in our world that put the lie to such utopian notions as fairness and equality.

But what if the world was karmic? What if the universe was chained to balance in such a way that consequences automatically followed on from actions? What would such a world look like? C.S. Friedman imagines in her enthralling trilogy.

In a medieval world of kings and magic, sins and sacrilege, life, for all but a few, is difficult and often all-too brief. While royals wile away their years with the plots and the rivalries that define their existences, the commonborn put their shoulders to their many labors, hoping to fashion for themselves lives for which they can be proud. In the event that they succeed, they might even live long enough to pass down these hard-won advantages to their sons. After all, in such a world, a woman's place is either prone upon her back, a willing vessel for the desires of others, or stooped over a stove, in order to provide for her family.

Kamala should be no exception to this rule. Sold by her mother into a life of sexual slavery while still a child, she has known only degradation and forced service to the whims and pleasures of others. And yet, a fire burns inside her that cannot be so easily put out by such darkness. For Kamala is a witch, a relatively rare soul born with the ability to draw upon her own life's essence to perform feats of magic. From healing to the manipulation of the weather, she, like witches the world over, can win honor and acclaim with her powers, and yet, each mystic act, each re-arranging of the stuff of the world, saps her lifeforce until she is a spent shell, ready for death's cold embrace.

Of course, there is one way to circumvent this inviolate rule, to cheat death on the road to immortality, and that is to become a magister, a witch who uses the lifeforces of others instead of her own to perform her feats. Only, there has never before been a female magister, that is, until Kamala's indomitable will rewrites history. And just in time. For her world is facing an old foe so long banished that it has become nothing more than faintest myth. And if the world is to not be devoured by this darkly jewelled threat, then it will need her and more besides to face it down and restore the balance that has been upended.

Successfully building upon some of the vampiric themes explored in her Coldfire Trilogy, Ms. Friedman's The Magister Trilogy is dark fantasy at its most sublime. Not only does it lay claim to a magic system that is as exquisitely simple as it is brilliantly karmic, it cheerfully gathers up some of the genre's more lazy tropes, shapes them to its own, wicked designs and then gleefully unleashes them upon the unsuspecting reader. This boldness, this willingness to make firm choices and stick to them, to have enough respect for the laws of the world that refusing to break them for the sake of convenience is virtually taken for granted, establishes a bond of trust wit the reader that allows the work to be thoroughly enjoyed without any fear that he is being beguiled into wasting his time on some dull, derivative adventure through well-trodden lands.

More than Ms. Friedman's authenticity of form and function, though, The magister Trilogy is remarkable for its heroine. For this is no abused spirit waiting for the love of a good man to make her whole. She is a creature that burns with her own ambition, her own desire, her own lust for triumph. Others have tried their hands at featuring such anti-heroines before -- The Mistborn Trilogy perhaps coming closest --, but these creatures were ultimately meant to be seduced into reform, raised up by loving hands into a melodramatic world of love and grace. Not so Kamala whose evolution is not towards being lovable, being clean, or even being pretty, but to be strong and whole, a self-sufficient sword forged of stuff far too stern to ever be broken by the selfish desires of others.

For all her thrilling independence, though, Kamala is simultaneously the work's primary weakness. For we are never really allowed to see Kamala's painful, formative years, the events, emotional and otherwise, that scarred her. Given the nature of Kamala's abuse, it's understandable why the author chose to tread lightly here. However, without any real experience with the most scarring and transformative moments of Kamala's life, her anger is rather pale, something we are asked to take as fact instead of witnessing it first hand. Ms. Friedman's choice to leave these dark events out is prudent, but it does rather mute Kamala's emotional impact on the reader.

Certainly, The Magister Trilogy indulges in its fair share of familiar themes: the unstoppable evil, the aloof magicians, the powerful and despotic kings. But even these are given new and interesting slants that, though not as authentic as Kamala'sevolution, do well to provide her a supporting and supportive cast. This, along with one of the best magic systems in recent memory, makes this a winner any lover of fantasy would be happy to encounter. (4/5 Stars)

A fascinating, educational takedown of atavistic thinking in Paleofantasy

From The Week of November 4th, 2013

While most of us look forward to the hope of tomorrow, its implicit promise that life will continue to improve, there are some for whom progress, in all its forms, is anathema. For these unchanging few, the world as it was is how it should be today, a place where man lives in harmony not only with the land but with himself and the countless generations that preceded him. There is value in this philosophy; after all, it is within our nature to be reckless, to adopt both technologies and social systems with an eagerness that defies both prudence and patience. The instinct to fall back, re-group and re-trench is one that should be cherished as inherited wisdom. But sadly, too often, this becomes an excuse to eschew progress, to continue forever as we were, out of some outmoded deference to tradition. This is not wisdom. It is wishful thinking. And that truth Marlene Zuk makes wonderfully clear in this engaging examination of humanity's past.

There can be no doubt that man is getting fat. As machines increasingly take up the burden of manual labor, and as our food continues to be charged with fats and sugars, there seems little hope for the expanding waistlines of humans the world over. Dieting offers some recourse to slimming down, but selecting the right one from the sea of options can be both daunting and aggravating. And even then, often the diets fail to yield the desired results. While most accept this as a fact of both existence and genetics, others see it as an outgrowth of a deeper problem. After all, if humanity has lived one way for hundreds of thousands of years and then, over the span of no more than a few millennia, suddenly revolutionizes every aspect of his traditional existence, from food to running, from society to population control, is it not possible that our physiological ills, from cancers to obesity, are outgrowths of this radical change? Evolution is surely too slow to make the adjustments we need to harmonize with our modern, agricultural, technological environment.

Marlene Zuk, an evolutionary biologist, begs to differ. Deploying examples of notable evolutionary changes that have required only a few thousand years to become mainstays of human genetics, she strongly goes to bat for evolution, arguing that the proof of its swiftness lies in the very creatures with whom we share a planet. Insects, for instance, require sometimes only 20 generations to adopt or discard fundamental traits. Translated into human years, this would represent a mere five centuries, well within the window of time with which humanity has lived the very agricultural lifestyle that is supposedly so harmful to all and sundry. Perhaps the problem is within our minds and not within our pasts.

Adopting a lighthearted tone that does little to damage its credibility, Paleofantasy is an excellent takedown of the atavism that underpins fads like the Paleo Diet. And it is the thinking that is Ms. Zuk's target, not the diet itself. For such dieters are basing their assumptions of the effectiveness of their methods on what they consider to be scientific truths about humanity and evolution which the author argues are patently untrue. Throughout these 300, breezy pages, Ms. Zuk systematically disassembles the contentions of these paleoists, leaving little doubt in the minds of all but Paleo's most staunch supporters that, whatever it is, whatever it does, it is not scientific. Which takes us to the work's subtle but enduring theme.

Just because we can reason our way to a sensible conclusion doesn't mean the conclusion is right. On the contrary, history is littered with ironclad frameworks of logic that proved to be completely false, eugenics being both the most obvious and the most supposedly scientific example. Science, nay life in general, is strewn with false positives whose truths either contain so much beauty, or so much obviousness, that they simply had to be right. In fact, this is the very reason why science exists and is so important to the human endeavor. For if our instincts and our guesses were correct far more often than they were wrong, then we wouldn't need the scientific method to understand the truths around us. We could simply arrive at them through reason. This is clearly not the case.

This is not some mean-spirited polemic seeking to ravage the spirits and the hopes of those seeking answers. If it were, it would be no better than those it aims to discredit. No, it is an attempt to warn people that wanting to believe something is true doesn't make it so. And on the way, it is an excellent introduction to evolutionary biology, its fascinations, its glories and its frustrations. Excellent and engaging work... (4/5 Stars)

the risks and rewards of machine intelligence in On The Steel Breeze

From The Week of October 28th, 2013

For all but the last hundred years of human history, which now spans more than ten millennia, we have been the masters of our destinies. The social constructs into which we've been born have certainly constrained us, influenced us, coerced us, but nonetheless our labors were our own, our survival due in whole to our own talents, our own capacities. But now, with the rise of the technological age, all of that has changed. Where once we fashioned our own tools, measured our own medicines and manufactured our own weapons, these tasks and skills have been increasingly given over to machines which hold advantages over us in speed, efficiency and tirelessness. In fact, the disparities between man and machine when it comes to production are so wide that it would be nothing sort of self-sabotage to not surrender these traditional functions to them. And yet, they are not us; they will never be us. And so, when we do inevitably become completely reliant upon them for our societies, what will our futures hold? Alastair Reynolds deliciously speculates in his engaging novel of the future.

It is the 24th century and humanity has climbed off an environmentally ravaged Earth to live amongst the stars. Moons and habitats throughout the solar system have been colonized while Earth cools, populations free to experiment with technologies, with governments, even with immortality. Despite the obvious divisions this would cause, human civilization has been harmonized and pacified by the Mechanism, a pervasive network of machines, both neural and nano, that ensure that individual humans live nonviolently with their fellows. Cooperation and discovery have become the hallmarks of society which has largely abandoned the destructive sins of slavery and discord.

Quietly, however, matters have begun to change. With the discovery of an inhabitable, extraterrestrial world which has clearly been touched by aliens, humanity has been moved to journey to this distant place aboard Holo Ships, city-sized conveyances that can accelerate to significant fractions of the speed of light. Ahead of these voyagers have been sent Providers, great machines that will land on this alien world and build cities for the adventurers to live in when they reach their new home, but the intelligence designed to govern these Providers has become temperamental and difficult, growing beyond its design specks to become something new, a mind unto itself, a force to be reckoned with. And it is willing to do what it takes to ensure its survival, placing it on a collision course with humanity.

The successor to Blue Remembered Earth, On The Steel Breeze is a work of singular creativity from one of science fiction's most innovative minds. Mr. Reynolds, who rose to prominence with Revelation Space, is an imaginative thinker who, throughout his published career, has rejected the notion that the laws of physics are too stultifying for fiction. Instead, he has embraced them and their limitations, providing for the layman some sense of the phenomenal spans of space and time that are unavoidable obstacles for any civilization with ambitions of being interstellar. In the past, this interest in the technicalities has sometimes lapsed into the obsessive, coming at the expense of qualitative storytelling. Not so here, where his characters, both human and artificial, run the gamut from desperate to ambitious while always remaining convincing and entertaining.

Notwithstanding its delightful creativity, On The Steel Breeze has the heart of a very old novel, asking an age-old question. How will man and machine coexist? Here, humanity has relied upon the Mechanism for so long that it has become unthinkable for it to be corrupted in any way, a truth that breeds the very complacency that allows it to be abused by an intelligence grown far too clever and powerful for any individual human to match. And yet, both the mechanism and the intelligence threatening it provide immeasurable benefits to humanity, organizing it, pacifying it, enabling it, in ways both wonderful and fantastic. Is the risk of the technology wriggling out of our control worth its many, glorious rewards? The answer to this question will be disputed for decades to come, and likely long after we have become far too dependent upon our machines to return to a simpler, more self-sufficient time.

Mr. Reynolds' view of this question is admirably pragmatic. He acknowledges both sides of the argument, the usefulness and the fear of losing command and control, all without siding with any particular faction. This allows his work to adopt an open mind about one of, if not the most, formative and pressing questions of the century to come.

Despite its engaging mysteries and fascinating actors, On The Steel Breeze is far from a perfect work. While Mr. Reynolds' choice to honor the laws of physics is respectable, this adherence boxes the author into a narrative corner he never escapes. On Earth, more than a full century expires while the work's core drama is unfolding in interstellar space, all without the author giving any sense of changing governments, social mores, even the forces of dogma. Providing such detail would have certainly prolonged an already sizeable tome, but its omission leaves the reader feeling as though nothing else in human civilization is taking place between moments of explosive action on the holo ships and the alien world they are destined for. The whims, the pursuits and the ideologies of an entire civilization are abandoned to service the plot which is primarily why we are here. But this lost color leaves the work feeling oddly disjointed, like a movie with no sound, or music with no message. It's an absence that is distractingly apparent.

Notwithstanding its flaws, Mr. Reynolds is worth reading for his creativity alone. Any sin of literature is forgivable when we can watch a skilled mind at play amongst the stars. (4/5 Stars)

A first-rate heroine mired in a second-rate tale in The Fool's Gold Trilogy

From The Week of October 20th, 2013

For humans, endurance is a strange and potent virtue. Through tragedy and turmoil, pain and grief, it drives us onward, motivating us to plow through the difficult and traumatic obstacles arrayed before us with little regard for the odds of success. Often, this doggedness serves us in good stead, allowing us to escape the immobilizing grip of deadly despair and to achieve our dreams, but this determination comes at a cost. After all, it is a force, not a guide. We cannot reason with it. We cannot tell it to be silent when we have been defeated, when all hope is lost. And so we scrabble in the dirt of our unmaking, trying to live just a little bit longer. This idea, in all its hope and all its loss, is well-captured in Jude Fisher's interesting if troubled trilogy.

In the land of elda, where the forces of individualism and conformity stand in such stark contrast, life is rarely easy. Divided into two realms, Eyra in the north and Istria in the south, one's gods, fortunes and laws are determined by the place of their birth. Reared in the northern island, under Eyran skies, and one is raise in a world of clans made up of fiercely independent souls who skill at working wood and stone is matched only by their capacity to sail the open seas. To be born in the southern Istria, meanwhile, is to be inculcated in a world of casts and religiosity, a place where personal advancement is as scarce as god's mercy. There is little law that isn't handed down from the selfish nobility who in no way check the power of those who would burn their own people for the most mild of blasphemies.

These opposing realms have little in common except for the Allfair, an annual, two-week extravaganza of trade, schemes, exploitation and opportunism of which both the high and the low partake. This particular year, however, proves to be even more explosive than most. For Katla Aranson, the talented, pugnacious, flame-haired daughter of one of Eyra's most illustrious clan chiefs has attended and she thinks of nothing of wandering wherever she pleases, even onto rocks sacred to the Istrians and their goddess. Arrested and sentenced to burn for her crimes, this single act of recklessness ignites a series of life-altering events that will shape the futures of two realms. For the gods and their minders have also come to the Allfair and their schemes will leave no one untouched.

An eminently readable series, The Fool's Gold Trilogy is entertaining fare that manages to be dark, wry and consequential without ever awakening the emotions, much less the sympathies, of the reader. Ms. Fisher's background in Scandinavian languages has had a profound influence here, causing the tale to read very much like the Norse sagas, full of flawed and imprisoned gods and the the rash and headstrong mortals who worship them. With such a cast of characters, it would be impossible for the trilogy to be anything other than a dark and winding adventure, full of crushing lows and brief, explosive successes. And yet, despite these wild swing in fortunes, despite a host of actors who range from the monstrous to the earnest, the series fails to animate into anything the reader can love.

While Ms. Fisher has assembled a host of interesting and complex characters, the world that they inhabit is far too black and white for their gray. There are soem commonalities between the realms, particularly pertaining to the rights of women to act as they see fit, but otherwise the fun-loving northmen, with their songs and their ships and their freedom, is so cliched, particularly when set against the typically hedonistic southerners whose desert ways are a perfect match for their religious fanaticism. These are not just old themes, they are tired ones. And Ms. Fisher has failed to breathe ay life into them.

For all her difficulty with world and plot, Ms. Fisher has created a winner in Katla Aranson who rises like a proud eagle above Elda's fray. Her strength and tenacity, her riotousness and adventurousness, are enchanting. For they imbue Katla with a wild, irrepressible power that moves beyond the crudeness of gender stereotypes and to new and fertile ground rarely tilled by any author. However, even this, Ms. Fisher's greatest success, ends up hobbling her work. For Katla shines so bright that she serves to highlight the continental gap in quality that exists between her and every other actor on her stage. Every time the narrative leaves her, the reader is desperate to return and once again be touched by her mesmerizing spirit. Had just one or two more of her companions risen to this level, The Fool's Gold Trilogy would have overcome its flaws. As it is, Katla is left to hold up a nearly 2,000-page odyssey on her own. And not even her sculpted and straining shoulders can manage that feat.

Thrilling and disappointing... An interesting adventure that pulls few punches, but cannot bring its readers to care about the punches it does throw. (2/5 Stars)

America's tragic and emotive decline in the outstanding The Unwinding

From The Week of October 20th, 2013

Despite our monumental efforts to secure the stability of our world, all things end. We know this not only through our experiences with the world around us, but thanks to our preserved history which, if nothing else, is a long, bewildering catalogue of the rise and fall of people and civilizations, conquerers and cultures, that now are dust. Those comfortable with the notion of change accept this entropy as a universal truth of existence, one which adds urgency and gravitas to our fleeting lives. However, those who find change discomfiting reject this all-too-natural cycle of destruction and evolution, insisting, for reasons of pride and tradition, that the now must remain thus forever. While neither view is perfect, the unchanging, in their valorizing of the now, blind themselves to the very decay they want so much to resist. Rarely has this truth been more exquisitely demonstrated than in George Packer's disquieting work.

For more than two centuries, the United States has been a beacon of hope and progress to a world often buffeted by war and oppression. Open borders, limited government, and a strong entrepreneurial spirit has not only made it the world's leading manufacturer for most of the last century, but ensured that it was considered the gold standard for innovation and entertainment dispensed throughout the world. For decades, this reputation acted like a virtuous cycle for the US, luring the talented and the beleaguered to its profitable shores and thereby ensuring its continued dominance. But now it appears as though that unbroken run of exceptionalism is slowly coming to an end.

For the last 40 years, successive governments have been undoing these glorious advantages. A combination of profligate public spending, economically ruinous wars, ideologically divisive politicians and massive income inequality have deeply damaged the social contract and allowed the wealthy and the powerful to capture ever greater amounts of the national resources. This avarice comes at the expense of not only the poor but the nation's once-dominant middle class which, in its ubiquity, ensured that a sense of fairness and brotherhood was shared through most of society. It has been a slow, agonizing fall, one spread out over many years and across many small setbacks. These are their stories.

A remarkable document, The Unwinding is a shattering, first-hand journey through the decaying social fabric of the United States. Mr. Packer, a staff writer for the New Yorker, gathers up the stories of every-day Americans, deploying their experiences to reveal just how hard life has gotten for people born on, or even near, the margins. From small-scale entrepreneurs to community activists, from the retired to stock clerks, we watch as the country in which they have all invested so much time, belief and love slowly, relentlessly chips away at their hopes and dreams until there is nothing left but bitterness and failure. One would expect, naturally, that such a chronicle be difficult to consume, being that it contains such miserable multitudes. And yet, their unwillingness to be crushed, their dogged determination to press on despite having little hope for a better tomorrow makes this a far less depressing experience than it would seem.

Though Mr. Packer largely refuses to comment, generally, on the American decline, he supplements his work with a few profiles of some of the one-percenters who either helped accelerate this decline, or were near the halls of power while it was taking place. Through this, he is able to communicate a fascinating insight. For none of these men -- and they are all men -- appear to be overtly greedy or even cruel. They merely succeeded within a system that allowed them to rocket so far beyond their fellow American's that they might as well not even share the same country. Yes, the system in question is a human creation and, therefore, humans are ultimately responsible for its flaws and its inequities. But that responsibility is spread out across too many people, and too many generations, to reliably assess.

Which brings us to the work's underlying theme. One cannot fix what one does not think is broken. Those in the halls of power have invariably succeeded thanks to a myriad of advantages both within and without of their control. Despite their testaments to the contrary, they can't relate to the lives of the poor, or the disenfranchised, or the sick, or the duped. But they can relate to those with whom they spend their days: political operatives and party moneymen, opportunists and egotists. They are creatures of narratives and ideologies which pedal the notion that everyone can succeed while knowing, all the while, that this is a pipedream. It's this cynical disconnect, not any particular law or moment, that has lead the United States to this moment.

But for a few moments of narrative dislocation, as the reader is forced to jump between wildly different points of view, The Unwinding is splendid and revelatory work. A must-read for anyone remotely interested in the real-world workings of a nation, in all its dirty, hard work. (5/5 Stars)/

the fascinating and disturbing Economy of Prestige

From The Week of October 15th, 2013

Though we should all be wise enough to accurately and appropriately value artistic contributions to our various cultures, one glance at the ubiquity, and the absurdity, of awards, and award shows, for entertainment and science, peace and philanthropy, disabuses us of this notion. For not only do these programs capture the public's interest, a wave they often ride to the top of TV ratings, they seize the minds, and the passions, of our artists and our cultural curators as well, ensuring that everyone who consumes such content will be aware of the extent to which it has been adorned and celebrated. This is a shame because it conveys power over the culture into the hands of the elites at the expense of the consumers who allow their faith in their own tastes to wane in favor of their more famous and favored critics. This is a point wonderfully illustrated by James English's excellent cultural study.

Launched by the inauguration of the Nobel prize in 1901, the modern-day notion of the award show has gone viral, spreading to every corner of human culture. From the Oscars to the Tonys, from the Peace Prize to the Orange Prize, everything we read and watch, every measure of science and every tool of industry, has been hailed by some body, some organ, as the thing to do, or have, or know. While some understandably rebel against such curated conceptions of quality, most respond by participating in it by either vehemently agreeing or passionately dissenting, neither of which hurt the award in question. For agreement is merely another brick in the wall of its power while disagreement merely fuels the desire to create another award, one that more accurately represents an unmeasurable standard.

This world of glitz and self-congratulation, of power and taste, is vividly characterized in Economy of Prestige. Mr. English, an author and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, approaches his subject with admirable efficiency, laying out the anatomy of the award, revealing its costs, which are exorbitant; its mimicry, which is considerable; its power, which is immeasurable; and its popularity, which is indisputable. And in this, we learn not only fun facts -- Michael Jackson received 240 awards in his lifetime --, but we come to understand that, at almost every turn, we are being influenced by this world of agents and publicists, movie studios and book publishers, each of whom want both the ego boosts and the profits from award-winning products. Their hunger supplies the energy and the competition that awards and award shows thrive on which in turn become commercial vehicles for advertising disguised as product, all of it hitched to the notion that the gods of culture are letting the consumer in on what is good.

There is a problem with this, of course. Good cannot be objectively measured. It cannot be generalized, distilled, or agreed upon. In fact, good defies such standardization. For there are simply far too many personal factors, from mood to taste, that contribute to the manner in which a product lands on the consumer. Yes, we can agree that some products are more remarkable than others, that, thanks to a preponderance of appreciable consumers, they withstand the test of time to remain relevant long after their creators are gone, but this does not make them good, or laudatory. It simply makes them good in the eyes of some. But of course, such truth is inconvenient for awards which are only meaningful in a world where art is objective, where their seal of approval means something. But if that were the case, awarding bodies would never err in their selections. And were we to categorize their mistakes,such a list would be far longer than this review.

Perhaps the most revelatory note played here, however, is Mr. English's well-argued contention that antipathy towards awards and their selections drives the industry. For this passionate disagreement encourages the disagreers to create their own standard of good which invariably ends up mirroring the standard of those with whom they were in opposition. This, along with revealing how artists themselves campaign for their own works to win awards, leaves little doubt that we are far more obsessed with validating our tastes than we are with actually enjoying artistic works, confident in the strength of our own tastes.

This is engaging work that is both scholarly and fascinating. However, it leaves little room to feel positively about our culture and about the rights of individuals to choose and to stick with their choices in the face of cultural consensus. It is difficult to read this fine study without coming away with the impression that we are all damaged and diminished by the culture of prestige. (4/5 Stars)

A relatively tame but entertaining jaunt in The Exorcist

From The Week of October 8th, 2013

Though humanity is understandably hailed for its many gifts, intelligence, endurance, and dexterousness to name but a few, perhaps its most unsung virtue is its keen sense for what is and is not real. Thanks to the human brain's capacity to chronologically order our memories and to differentiate between our conscious and unconscious states, we can distinguish, without effort, reality from dream, the actual from the fantasy. By and large, we take this virtue for granted. After all, few among us ever experience even a moment's uncertainty about the concreteness of the world around us. But to spend even a few moments with those laboring under any of the disassociative disorders is to understand that our sanity hinges on this bedrock certainty, that to question what is real, even for a moment, is to lose confidence in our ability to distinguish it at all, creating a vicious cycle of doubt that plunges the afflicted into a world of phantoms and confusion. This is a truth William Peter Blatty deploys to wonderful effect in his famous work.

Chris MacNeil has it all. A famous, wealthy actress, with homes in Washington D.C. And Los Angeles, she wants for nothing. She has the loyalty of her friends and the love of her family, in particular, Regan, her 12-year-old daughter whose sweet nature brings light to her life. But despite being at the peak of her powers, despite opportunities to become a director, which would launch her on a new and exciting faze of her career, her life is about to take a sinister turn. For her lovely, Georgetown home is experiencing numerous, inexplicable disturbances -- strange sounds, weird chills, foul odors -- that appear to culminate in the sickening of Chris' cherished daughter. While Regan's body wastes away, and while her disposition descends into viciousness and cruelty, her mother and her household flail for answers even while being pulled down into a dark, malevolent world they cannot comprehend.

First published in 1971, and later adapted into a famous film, The Exorcist is a strange and somber work that largely withstands the ravages of time. But for a few memorable scenes, Mr. Blatty rejects the baseness and depravity of modern horror for a somber, almost contemplative journey into madness and wickedness. Consequently, the modern reader is initially compelled to adjust to a slower-paced narrative that revels as much in its quiet moments as it does in the shocking and fantastical. Itself n adaption of two actual exorcisms that occurred in the 1940s, the work is deliciously creepy, a Gothic drumbeat that patiently builds to a snarling, thrashing crescendo that makes the slow build worthwhile.

There would've been little that The Exorcist's first-run readers would've found charming about Mr. Blatty's entry into the world of the weird and vicious. However, with the passing of more than 40 years, one cannot help but wryly appreciate the decades of cultural change that transpired between then and now. The novel depicts its characters as fundamentally rational beings, people who first look to science for explanations long before falling back upon superstition. Mr. Blatty undoubtedly emphasized this point to better establish the contrast between the actual world and the wicked forces attempting to work their will in it, but the work's distrust both of pseudo science (psychiatry) and the unprovable (religion) expose it as a piece of its time and certainly not of ours. One senses that Chris MacNeil would've been far quicker to leap into the arms of pharmacology today than she was in her time. This is not a flaw. On the contrary, it adds a valuable, anthropological component to an otherwise ordinary work.

That said, The Exorcist is beleaguered by tameness. Our expectations for gore and brutality have been so profoundly shaped by contemporary works of film and television that, but for a few notable moments of foul language and sacrilege, the work is virtually devoid of frights. It is far more comfortable in the arena of the creepy than it is of the scary which distinguishes it from the masses but at the expense of making it seem almost quaint by comparison.

A successful piece of charming entertainment... (3/5 Stars)

The danger of nuclear weapons chillingly captured in Command and Control

From The Week of October 8th, 2013

As much as the history of human civilization has been a slow, steady slog up the hill of progress, a wending towards freedom from all forms of ignorance and oppression, there remains, inside most of us, an unhealthy fascination with apocalypse. It manifests in our literature and our films, in our religions and our dreams, that impulse to step to the edge of the known so that we might peek down into the chasm of the abyss. Why we flirt with oblivion is unclear. Perhaps, in times past, when life was, for many, a torturous, monotonous grind, this longing for annihilation might have been the understandable outgrowth of bearing up under an oppressive weight we were never designed to withstand. But life now is, by any measure, far better than at any time in our collective past. We should be celebrating our achievements, not looking for ways to obliterate them. And yet, the fascination remains, a truth that could have no better exemplar than our history with nuclear weapons. Eric Schlosser expands in his fascinating work.

Grown out of the necessities of World War II, and made possible by the extraordinary discoveries of the golden age of physics that preceded it, nuclear weapons were ushered onto the world stage in the 1940s and inaugurated the first era of human civilization in which, with a few murmured commands, the few could annihilate the many. Certainly, in times past, empires possessed the power to crush tribes and nations, cultures and customs, but their capacity for destruction was not only limited to their slice of the world, but to humanity as well, touching only lightly upon the broader ecology that underpins our existence. But with the dawn of the nuclear age, in which thermonuclear weapons claimed the power to transform entire regions of the Earth into radioactive hellstorms more akin to Jupiter and Saturn than to the planet that birthed us, humanity finally had the power to kill, forever, all forms of life, a power it has never been mature enough to wield.

This point is best exemplified by the nuclear program of the united States which, for the last 60 years, has only narrowly avoided several catastrophic accidents with these apocalyptic weapons. From the Damascus Accident to the Cuban Missile Crisis, from nuke-armed bombers left unguarded on runways to thermonuclear warheads crashlanding in the front yards of unsuspecting citizens, America has had more brushes with radioactive death than any of us would care to know. On several occasions, only a single safety switch has stood between the United States and the kind of devastation from which countries do not recover. And all this thanks to the dubious arguments of powerful men that nuclear weapons are the only way to stay free in the modern age...

At times fascinating and horrifying, Command and Control is an engrossing journey through the American nuclear program. From its shocking failures to its pivotal moments, Mr. Schlosser shines light on the committees, the powerbrokers, the generals and and the scientists that have ensured the United States' safety from foreign threats at the risk of reducing their own nation to nuclear holocaust. Across more than 500 pages, the author details the near misses we know about, hailing the men and women who prevented them from spiraling out of control. In this way, the work, despite its apocalyptic subject, maintains a relatively positive tone when it could have otherwise descended into a seething pit of fear and condemnation.

Command and Control leaves no doubt that nuclear weapons are far too dangerous to exist in our world. Even if our species possessed the requisite maturity to properly handle them, which we assuredly do not, humans and machines are simply too error prone to risk bringing these weapons into existence. No matter how hard humans and machines try to double check every reading, every switch, every cog, mistakes are inevitable. And mistakes in this case don't just lead to a few people being affected. They change the destiny of entire nations, continents, civilizations. To realize how close we've come to annihilation is to understand that some powers are simply too overwhelming for the risk that some flaw in the mechanism, or some misplaced belief by some President, will lead to devastation. Mr. Schlosser could not have done a better job of illustrating this point.

For all of its virtues, Command and Control is hobbled by a poorly conceived narrative. Essentially, the author jumps back and forth between the Damascus Accident and the broader view of the nuclear program, using the former to illustrate the foibles and failures of the latter. This is understandable. Surely, the author had compelling interviews with the survivors of the Damascus Accident, interviews that would have motivated him to use it as the the human face of a monolithic program. However, the Damascus Accident is in no way the most compelling disaster described in this work. For instance, the 1961 incident, in which a single switch stood between North Carolina and a nuclear detonation that would have reduced the east coast to a radioactive wasteland, is undeservedly summed up in a few breezy paragraphs. Meanwhile, the Damascus Accident is repeatedly revisited, but only after hundreds of pages have past, leaving the reader fuzzy on the precise point in which we last left our heroes. The author would've done well to drop the Damascus component entirely, allowing it to exist alongside the other near misses exemplified in a single, linear narrative.

Notwithstanding its missteps in construction, Command and Control is a shattering work that dispels any illusions we might have had that nuclear weapons were and are treated with the utmost care. A must-read for anyone interested in the limits of human knowledge and power... (3/5 Stars)

Jesus the man brought to light in Aslan's engrossing Zealot

From The Week of October 8th, 2013

Of all the forces that move humanity, few are as potent as mythology. Through its songs and sonnets, stories and parables, It gives reason to the unknown, it imbues the aimless with purpose, and it establishes a scaffolding upon which cultures can erect their histories and traditions. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, when most of the world knew nothing of the written word and the revelations of science, this was the most successful means by which to teach and to exchange ideas. As such, it is a vital step in the development of human civilization.

But mythology does have its price which becomes all-too-apparent in a world of literacy and discovery. For it inculcates in its practitioners, its adherents, a belief in falsehoods. It directs people to put their faith in fables that, at worst, never happened and, at best, bear only a passing resemblance to actual history. Worse, though, is mythology's tendency to bury historical truths under an avalanche of fairy tales which makes finding the truth and dispensing it to the masses a herculean task. Fortunately, our world possesses scholars capable of unearthing those truths and assembling them for public consumption. Reza Aslan's effort here is one such success.

Rushing like a tide out of the mists of time, Christianity has spent 2,000 years covering much of the known world. Though it has branched into different doctrines, different schools, the key shibboleths of its origin story remain the same, that Jesus Christ is the savior of humanity, that he descended to Earth to spread the word of the Christian god, and that he allowed himself to die for the sins of God's children. Christians understandably focus their energies on the Christ, the divine spirit of what Paul called the Risen Christ. But what of the Christ of the Flesh? What of the man? Who was he?

Working from the Gospels and the histories of the Romans, the only written accounts of events during Jesus' life, Mr. Aslan assembles a fascinating if fragmented portrait of this most transformative figure. Over this most engrossing, 300page history lesson, which devotes nearly as much time to the setting of Jesus' life as it does to the man himself, we come to learn that Jesus of Nazareth did exist, that he did claim the mantle of the Messiah, that he did accrue a following in Judea, a Roman territory, and that he was crucified by the Romans for sedition. We are introduced to Jesus' siblings, which were numerous; his circumstances, which were meager; his worldview, which was inescapably Jewish; and his mission, which was nothing short of the overthrow of the world order as he knew it. But more than this, we come to comprehend some measure of the man himself, an individual possessed of charisma, leadership and a willingness to throw off everything he knew in the achievement of his goal.

To scholars of the Historical Christ, much of Zealot's revelations are already apparent. But to those who only know the myth and not the history, it is nothing short of a bomb dropped on our preconceptions. For Mr. Aslan spells out, clearly and inescapably, that Jesus of Nazareth was a brown, Jewish, foreign-born socialist, a truth that makes laughable the literally and figuratively white-washed depictions of the myth we've come to know. Moreover, Jesus of Nazareth went well beyond even the modern-day conception of socialism. For this was not a man interested in the redistributions of wealth with which we are familiar. He aimed to invert the world order, to make the first last, the rich poor, the well-fed starving, a worldview that, while in some sense vengeful, adds valuable three-dimensionality to a man made two-dimensional by both the passage of time and the yearnings of his followers.

Zealot is by no means a perfect work. Though Mr. Aslan is often careful to back up his assertions with contemporaneous accounts, his portrait of Jesus does not quite match his own assertions of the man's noble character. The author frequently hails Jesus of Nazareth for his courage and his charisma, and yet, other than his capacity to accrue followers, we see few examples of these virtues. Moreover, upending the world order in such a dramatic way hardly seems laudatory. On the contrary, it appears, albeit from the impossibly comfortable remove of 2013, to be a recipe for disaster. The author's refutations of the mythologies surrounding Paul and Pontius Pilate are laser sharp and backed up with numerous examples of the absurd ways in which time and belief have distorted the deeds of both men, but the case for a commendable Historical Jesus remains thin.

However, let this in no way diminish Zealot's power. This is bound to be a controversial work. For it attacks, directly and obliquely, the stories uncounted generations have told themselves about the most famous man in human history. It possesses the wisdom, the clarity, the rigor and the wherewithal to withstand such assaults. I can think of few works of literature that better exemplify the written word's power to distill and dispense history, truth and a lifetime's worth of learning. (4/5 Stars)

An innovative if monotonous The Book Thief

From The Week of October 1st, 2013

However much it entertains us in theatres and agonizes us in our personal lives, tragedy, more than anything else, is the revealer of true character. For it is only when pushed to the extremity of ugly circumstance and torturous emotion that we come to understand who we are. Do we buckle in the face of cruelty from both the world and our fellow humans? Do we resign ourselves to fates imposed upon us by powers far more immense than ourselves? Or do we remind ourselves that setbacks, in whatever form, are merely opportunities to learn, to grow and to be better next time? All humans, at one point or another, have been compelled to respond to tragedy by taking one of its many roads, but how many of them have comprehended just how consequential that decision was, just how much it shapes their lives and their souls? Marcus Zusak ruminates in his interesting, if problematic, work.

Growing up in the harsh, racist nationalism of Nazi Germany, Liesel is an angry girl with nothing to call her own. Her parents, communists who fear the worst from Hitler, have sent her to a foster home in Munich where she's softened by the kindness of her foster father, Hans, and stiffened by the sternness of her foster mother, Rosa. Teased for being slow to learn how to read, she proves to be fearsome with her fists, pummeling anyone who deigns to scorn her. For she is a girl determined to overcome her own shortcomings and prove everyone wrong.

With Hans' help, Liesel slowly learns her letters, knowledge that kindles a lifelong thirst for books and the wisdom contained within. Her family's relative poverty, however, leaves little expendable coin for the buying of such luxuries, so Liesel turns to stealing them from book burnings and private libraries, insatiably accumulating a collection of works that fill her with words and dreams. But no collection of books can shield her from the outside world which is convulsed by World War II and all of its civilian atrocities. Liesel may have conquered the word, but she cannot conquer the world that made them, and so she must hold on in hopes that those she's come to hold dear make it through to the new dawn.

The claimant of numerous honors and awards, The Book Thief is inventive fiction. Told from the perspective of Death, a seemingly omnipotent force tasked with the claiming of the souls of the recently deceased, it narratively dips in and out of the lives of its main actors, sometimes granting them the privacy of their own thoughts while at other times exposing, in depth, the secrets of their most closely guarded memories. In this, Mr. Zusak is able to paint a wide canvas, filling in his characters at the pace and the style of his choosing. This proves to be a fairly successful technique that affords the reader a blend of both the intimate and the removed, the soulful and the dispassionate, as we revisit the harshness of Nazi Germany and life beneath its yoke.

Despite the grimness of its setting, The Book Thief is populated by warm characters who, though they possess different motivations and occupations, share in a common desire to endure, as best they can, this life as they know it. Kindness, faithfulness and generosity from the commonfolk stand in stark contrast to the uncaring mercilessness of the Nazi machine which does its best to feed them into its voracious maw. Most everyone in Liesel's orbit exhibits a desire to protect what they have and to forge ahead despite the nightmare in which they've found themselves. Liesel, meanwhile, takes that stoicness a step further, repeatedly placing herself in danger to aid those that society has deemed unworthy. For her, kindness does not stem from pamphlets or marches. It flows from deeds, a truth she does not forget despite her own thievery.

Despite its engaging themes which ask us to contemplate both the ascendent good and the inescapable bad of humanity, The Book Thief is ultimately a disappointment that failed to hold my interest. Liesel's combativeness is, at times, engrossing, as is the sweetness of her foster father who will stop at nothing to make her dreams come true. But these virtues cannot make up for the slow, grinding relentlessness of the plot which fails to come to anything like a culmination. Our protagonists are merely presented with incident after incident, moment after moment, challenge after challenge, and asked to react to them. And so, when the novelty of Death-as-character wears off after the first few chapters, we're left with a monotonous journey that leads nowhere. This is a work animated by a wonderful idea that, for all its potence, lacks the power to carry 500 pages on its own.

At times fascinating and touching, but too much of a slog to be laudatory... (3/5 Stars)