The sins of Scientology revealed in Lawrence Wright's Going Clear

From The Week of January 21, 2013
While the right to freely practice ones chosen faithmust be considered a fundamental right of any free state, there can be no doubt that it is a right that comes at a grievous cost. For while the world is bettered by the good works of the peaceful multitudes who faithfully hold with creeds out of the need to believe in something greater than themselves, it is also darkened by those other practitioners, men and women who twist, pervert and prey upon our need for salvation to sew unimaginable misery. It does not matter what corrosive force motivates these madmen, revenge, ego, spite, or even envy; it matters only that the world has been blighted by their existences, the lives of innocents corrupted by the chains that bind them to these preachers and prophets.

And so we come to the vital questions. How can we guard the innocent without violating their right to practice? How do we distinguish between a cult and a religion as a means of stamping out the former while respecting the latter? How can we promote the values of the good while minimizing the damage of the unhealthy? These are weighty queries which may not be answered any time soon, but perhaps we can come closer to an answer by studying the anatomy of a cult. This Mr. Wright has most thoroughly done in Going Clear.

Though it has been a faith for less than 60 years, Scientology has left its mark on the world. Teachings distilled from the life and times of L. Ron Hubbard, a prolific American author of science fiction with a penchant for bending the truth, it is the systematic attempt to rid oneself of burdensome influences as a means of elevating ones spirit and enabling ones dreams. Through great discipline and concentration, through the rigorous deployment of honest self-examination, the scientologist ascends through the ranks of his faith, each plateau revealing to him more secrets of his religion, secrets carefully measured out in order to encourage him to continue seeking the pinnacle of purity. This seems innocent enough; the world can hardly be made the poorer for having yet another faith capable of providing a ladder up which the struggling can climb to peace and enlightenment. And yet, Scientology has a darker side, one that hides behind the Hollywood glamour that so often shields it from scrutiny.

Scientology is more than a religion; it is a machine for making money. Promising to be the owner's manual with which the troubled can be lead out of darkness, it encourages its adherents to surrender their self-determination to their elders who, by dint of being higher in the church, ostensibly have the best interests of their souls in mind. Money in exchange for knowledge, service in exchange for enlightenment... The faith may be new, but the game is ancient, a truth Mr. Wright documents here in stunning detail. For while Scientology may put handsome faces to the world, Tom Cruise and John Travolta to name but two, it is built atop the labors of thousands of faceless souls sold into its servitude, souls blackmailed into continued obedience through the heavy-handed use of confessions practitioners are all-but forced to make. It is the gestalt of the voiceless and the vulnerable upon whom it rests. Their names, their deeds and their punishments occupy these pages.

Going Clear is mesmerizing work. Building upon a thorough biography of L. Ron Hubbard, a fevered genius whose desperate need to be a hero lead him into the seductive arms of megalomania, Mr. Wright uses the experiences of dozens of men and women to capture a stunning portrait of one of the world's most successful young faiths. From its secrets to its rituals, from sea voyages to Hollywood screenings, Mr. Wright weaves a portrait of a belief system that capitalizes on the credulity of innocents and the desperation of the lost to forge for itself a powerbase from which it cannot be challenged. Endless research and informative prose march us through the faith's history, from its inception as an outgrowth of Hubbard's ego through to its acknowledgement, t least by the government of the United States, as a religion worthy of the First Amendment's protection, a decision that, to this day, bewilders parts of the world who clearly view Scientology as nothing short of a cult.

Those who sympathize with Scientology will find cause to criticize Mr. Wright's work regardless of its rigor, but rational readers will find here an exceptionally researched document that is supported by extensive interviews with key men and women within Scientology. Their harrowing tales provide the work its most devastating punch by acknowledging that Scientology utilizes child labor and perhaps even stoops to child enslavement, as a means of compelling enlightenment. Practices that would land regular citizens in jail for years at a stretch are commonplace in Scientology which hides behind the firewall of the first Amendment to escape responsibility for these crimes. For they are crimes, make no mistake, crimes of coercion, crimes of violence, crimes of bigotry and crimes of self-delusion, all of which leave in their wake the wreckage of lives that will not be easily mended.

Mr. Wright won himself great respect with his examination of the lives and deeds that paved the road to 9/11. He only furthers his status as a first-rate researcher and revealer of truth with Going Clear. Outstanding work marred only by its minor fixation with Scientology's Hollywood overtones. (5/5 Stars)

Life of Peter of Morrone detailed in The Pope Who Quit

From The Week of January 21, 2013
Life is a contest between what we want of the world and what the world wants of us. Every decision we make, every interaction we have, is in some way marked by this fundamental clash that can resolve itself in either harmony or discord, unity or chaos. Our will against the world's need, our stubbornness against the world's relentlessness... This, more than any other conflict, is the battle of existence. How can this war be managed? For it must be controlled in some way. To oppose outright is to be worn down, but to yield completely is to be subsumed. There must be a balance, found somewhere in the middle, a balance that only wisdom can strike. This is a lesson few of us learn before we pay a terrible price. Mr. Sweeney exemplifies in his concise and intriguing chronicle.

Forgotten by those not steeped in Catholic history, Pope Celestine V was an unusual creature. Known as Peter of Morrone prior to his elevation to catholicism's highest earthly seat, he was a thirteenth-century hermit who devoted his life to the contemplation of and harmony with the divine. He undertook this journey through the denial of all of life's pleasures, rejecting the comforts of hearth and home, of wife and family, even of sex and fine food. For it seemed to him that wisdom could only flow from the singular contemplation of god.

History might well have never recorded the asceticism of Peter of Morrone. For this was an age of poor record-keeping. In fact, much of his life remains shadowed in mystery and hearsay. However, it is known that, at a time of profound moral crisis for the catholic church, a movement began from within the faith to elevate to the papacy a man who would put morality above political reality, a man of such goodness that he would battle corruption instead of accede to it. It did not take long for Peter of Morrone's name to be put forward for such a post. And, with his candidacy backed by a powerful king, who saw in peter a man he could manipulate, Peter of Morrone was made Celestine V, for a little while at least. For no sooner had the new pope understood the task he'd accepted, the poisons and temptations that surrounded him, then he rejected them, sensationally quitting the papacy to return to the life of a solitary seeker and leaving catholicism to lurch forward into the dark centuries to follow.

The Pope Who Quit is an entertaining examination of a most peculiar event. There are few souls who possess the fortitude and the humility to accept, and the courage to reject, nearly absolute power. And so, when we encounter one such, there is cause to pause our journey for a time and consider him, understand him, and weigh the truths for which he stood. Mr. Sweeney expeditiously assembles the facts about Peter of Morrone that have survived the centuries, painting a portrait of a man whose goodness was unquestioned but whose talents were unsuited to the hornet's nest of temporal politics into which he was plunged. He was a stoic, a man who rejected the here and now for the otherworldly eternal, a fact which doomed his stint as pope before it even began.

Mr. Sweeney concerns himself, here, with the question of whether or Celestine V was wise or foolish, whether he left his post because he fully understood his unsuitableness or if he was brushed aside by a profane world that had realized his thoughts were far too much of the sacred to be practical. To me, this is not the most pertinent question raised by a consideration of Peter of Morrone. Rather, he ought to ask us to contemplate just how much a man can live in a world of the now when his heart and mind are set on what's next. Can someone who has more care for god than for himself truly ever understand the world into which he's been born? Surely, it holds as many mysteries as god does. And if those mysteries are not studied, grappled with, then how can one ever successfully live with others?

There can be no doubt that, today, Peter of Morrone would be an antisocial misfit, a man whose contemplation of the divine came at the cost of denying to a needful world the light of his goodness. And if that is not an act of supreme selfishness, I cannot imagine what is. It is fine to be selfish in this way; we are all free to act as we choose. But to attempt to festoon it with the trappings of morality seems, at the very least, dubious.

A solid chronicle of an interesting man and an even more interesting time... (3/5 Stars)

An American Insurrection honors a forgotten moment in battle for civil rights

From The Week of January 14, 2013
Historical firsts are never easy and rarely peaceful. For as much as we may wish otherwise, humans resist change, some to such a degree that violence and hatred results from change being forced upon them by an evolving world. And yet nothing can ever stay as it was, and nor should it. For the progress of humanity is a march out of the darkness of ignorance and into the light of respect and understanding for all creeds, all genders, all races and all lifestyles. It is a march towards universal acceptance that rests on but one enduring principle, that the individual is free to decide how he ought to live so long as his choices do not harm others. This is our destiny. And yet arriving at such an obvious truth is, sadly, for some, cause for apocalypse. This lesson is decisively driven home in Mr. Doyle's shattering chronicle of racial integration in 1960s america.

With one of its most landmark decisions, the supreme Court of the United States, in 1954, ordered that all schools in America freely integrate their classes with no eye to racial bias. This ruling, a critical catalyst for the battles for civil rights that would characterize the next twenty years of American life, was accepted, with varying degrees of trepidation, in a majority of this sprawling country except for one notable and predictable exception, the American South where this repugnant decree came as just the latest federal insult in a long line of slights from a national government whose authority they only reluctantly acknowledged. This cynicism, the legacy of the South's defeat in the Civil War, was alive and well a hundred years after that great schism, so much so that the governor of Mississippi felt bold enough to not only resist the Supreme Court's decision but to oppose it with such rhetorical force that violence was inevitable.

For several years, Mississippi, along with other Southern States, refused to integrate, a provocative show of insubordination to the state that culminated in September of 1962 when James Meredith, a veteran of the integrated US military compelled, through the pursuit of the law, the federal government to enforce the Supreme Court decision and allow him to attend the university of Mississippi which, up until then, had cynically and despicably refused to admit Mr. Meredith onto their campus. With support from the governor, the school continued its stubborn resistance despite the Kennedy administrations orders otherwise, compelling Mr. Meredith to be escorted onto campus by US marshals, a provocative show of force that ignited a riot between federalist forces attempting to enforce the law, and a mixture of students, Clansmen and other radical elements who wanted no part of a black man in their white world. Besieged on all sides, the marshals witnessed Mississippi violently resist, over the next 48 hours, the will of the federal government, nearly triggering a second civil war and obligating President Kennedy to deploy, for the first time in a hundred years, combat veterans on American soil.

Though not without flaws, An American Insurrection is a spellbinding recount of a now nearly forgotten flashpoint in American history. Eclipsed by both the Cuban Missile Crisis, which followed it by three weeks, and by the broader struggle for civil rights, which centered on the efforts of Martin Luther King, the riot on the Oxford campus of the University of Mississippi was arguably the most important moment in US race relations since emancipation. For as Mr. Doyle describes in vivid detail, James Meredith orchestrated a campaign against the federal government to compel it to enforce the laws of the land's highest court. And in doing so, he forced the government to commit to racial integration with a rigor and a vigilance that no other prior government had ever exhibited. In this way, Mr. Meredith laid the cornerstones for the march to equality that would eventually culminated in a black president being elected to office 46 years later.

Mr. Doyle divides his chronicle evenly between the lead-up to the riot and to a moment-by-moment deconstruction of the violence which is all the more shocking for it having been neglected by history. The sheer audacity and narrow mindedness of the men and women who resisted Mr. Meredith's admission lends Mr. Doyle's prose an incendiary force that nearly makes the work combustible. An American Insurrection's only drawback is a half-hearted portrait of Mr. Meredith himself who Mr. Doyle clearly did not personally interview. This would have been a welcome addition to a work which is fundamentally about one man's struggle to compel change on the unchanging. That it was omitted here makes James Meredith even more of a mystery than he already is.

First-rate work that inspires as much as it dismays... (4/5 Stars)

Horror and hope in Juarez detailed in in This Love Is Not For Cowards

From The Week of January 14, 2013
For those of us fortunate enough to enjoy the stability and the security of the rule of law, it is difficult to imagine life without it. For though the media gives us a glimpse of the violence and the discord, this understanding barely scratches the surface of the toll chaos takes on societies afflicted by it. Ensconced in our comfort, we cannot conceive of never knowing if the police will protect our bodies, if the state will respect our rights, or if the institutions will allow us to provide for our families. And yet these are merely a handful of the potent fears that characterize life in countries teetering on the brink. This Mr. Powell captures admirably, albeit non-conventionally, through the enduring and universal lens of sport.

One of the most murderous cities in the world, Juarez, Mexico has virtually nothing to write home about. Its churches have been violated, its journalists have been butchered and silenced, its police have been bought. It is a land of broken dreams that, but for a quirk of fate, might have had a very different legacy. For it sits on the unfortunate side of the American border with Texas, a geographical reality that has bestowed upon it a very different political history, one that has shackled it with a legacy of corruption and revolution. But for all that Juarez has had its institutions undermined and its dreams twisted, one constant remains, one group of beleaguered souls in whom this battered place can invest some measure of their remaining hope.

The Juarez Indians, the city's soccer team, has, like its namesake, struggled for success. And yet, it experiences something of a miracle when it wins promotion to the first division of Mexican soccer. Mr. Powell, most recently a resident of Miami, relocates to Mexico to chronicle this development through the lens of the team's players, many of whom are not much better off than the residents they represent. Extortion, gang ties and poverty all stalk their steps, none of which aids their play which, for much of the season, is abysmal. Despite the best efforts of their world-class goalkeeper, the Indians surrender about as many goals as its town does bodies, creating a mid-season rift between team and town that speaks far more to Juarez's social problems than it does to the realities of sport. It's far from fair that a newly promoted soccer team bear the burdens of a broken town's dreams, but it does and they must forge from that burden something of which more than they can be proud.

The result of months of living in Juarez, This Love Is Not For Cowards is a mesmerizing piece of gonzo journalism. Calling to mind Charles Bowden's Murder City, Mr. Powell smoothly interweaves his chronicle of a soccer season with observations of Juarez itself, inadvertently creating a contest to see which can be more bleak. No surprise that the town, with its carbombs and its corpses and its cops who are either crooked or dead, wins the day. And yet, Mr. Powell so wonderfully captures the Indians, a team of earnest athletic young men who've devoted their lives to soccer, that their labors, their almost desperate need to succeed in the face of impossible odds, seems even more tragic. At least the efforts of the Indians comes from a place of honesty. The same cannot be said of the criminal, corporate and governmental elements of Juarez who do little to bring peace, much less healing, to this devastated place.

All the more tragic, then, when the team's shortcomings cause the town to scorn it. For Juarez simply cannot take another disappointment, another broken dream. It needs a win like no other place. And yet such are the limits of sport. For victories through athletics, though inspiring, are like orgasms. They are fleeting explosions of joy that cannot be sustained and that, when gone, leave one feeling exactly the same as they felt hours, days, months before. Sport cannot heal. Sport cannot mend. Sport can uplift for a time, but it is a shot in the arm, not a longterm solution. For that, other, darker, more difficult roads must be braved.

This Love Is Not For Cowards is searing work that does not provide us with a happy ending, with hope for the future. It respects us more than to lie to us. It is, instead, a piece of personal truth, an exemplar of a world it is the duty of humanity to make disappear into our past so that we all can enjoy a brighter, better future. (4/5 Stars)

A sweeping epic brought to a fitting end in A Memory of Light

From The Week of January 7, 2013
While it can, at times, descend into a hell of pompous verbosity, a composition riddled with more splash than substance, few forms of human expression rival the epic. For its numerous volumes, its thousands of pages and its countless words are, for the reader, not a flowery attempt to maximize profits by stretching to its limits a good idea but a singular commitment to the author's literary fantasy, an act of faith that is rewarded with membership to an exclusive club of fans, who like Brahmin, know the secret words and gestures, the symbols and the poetry, of something special, of something unique. The epic creates a world of ideas and textures, heros and villains, made three-dimensional by not only the room to be more fully developed, but by the passage of time outside the epic, years in which the reader matures in both his understanding of the world and of its universal themes. This simply cannot be replicated by a single, passing volume. For nothing that can be consumed in a day can evoke the same intensity of emotion, much less kindle, with its conclusion, the same sense of loss. It is a parallel world and few have been woven with such vividness and flair than The Wheel of Time which is brought to a fittingly apocalyptic end with The Memory of Light.

In a world of magic and sword, of beauty and taint, the Last Battle has come, heralding the end of everything. For what was set in motion thousands of years earlier, with the opening of the Dark One's prison by ambitious men and women made foolish by an unquenchable lust for power, has now culminated in a climactic war between the beleaguered and vulnerable forces of the Light and the ascendent and merciless powers of shadow which clash to determine the future of the world.

The Light, helmed by the Dragon Reborn, the reincarnated general who failed in his attempt to mitigate the damage of his former friends who bored into the Dark One's prison, seeks to preserve what they know, to fight for the queens and customs, the banners and the lands, that comprise their battered world. The shadow, meanwhile, guided by Shai'tan, the manifestation of annihilation, seeks to end it, to unweave the Pattern of life and either replace it with nothingness, as some would have it, or, alternatively, with a world of manifest darkness, a world of fealty and slavery, of suffering and ownership.

The Light cannot win. For they failed in their only other attempt to stanch the shadow, an attempt which broke the world, devolving it from a jewel of technology and freedom into a morass of ignorance and loss. And if the Dark One could not be stopped by the skill and the knowledge of a civilization at its peak, then how can a ragtag collection of medieval farmers and knights, of self-important mystics and magicians, do better? And yet they must. For should they fail, everything that they ever were, centuries of lives and memories, of love and labor, will be lost, leaving beauty to be consumed by the void.

Begun with 1990's The Eye of The World, The Wheel of Time spanned 23 years, 14 volumes and two authors. At times, it was devoured by its own self-importance, descending into an obsessive attention to detail that caused its conceiver, James Rigney, writing under the pseudonym Robert Jordan, to dramatically expand the series from its six initial volumes, a choice which both haunted the epic and necessitated, with Mr. Rigney's death, its conclusion by another, younger hand. It was a series characterized by shrewish women, overwrought mysticism and countless plot digressions. And yet, for all its flaws, it was a work of astonishing imagination, of unbelievable complexity and of unrivaled escapism that encouraged a generation of readers to reconceive of everything from love to war, of heroism to cowardice. In this, it was a remarkable success.

For all its virtues, though, The Wheel of Time would have been little more than an exercise in torment had its concluding volume failed to steer this ponderous ship into a rewarding and safe harbor. Fortunately, then, A Memory of Light is a worthy end to a worthy epic. For after the series spent thirteen volumes promising a war to end all wars, A Memory of Light delivers with 992 pages of cacophonous conflict that, at times, seems to turn the entire world to rubble. The destinies of all of its primary characters are finally fulfilled and in a manner which pleases far more than it frustrates. This is no minor achievement from a series that promised so much for so long.

For all its heros and its battles, its magic and its apocalyptica, The Wheel of Time will be remembered for its mythos which lurches to a surprising conclusion in this final novel. This was an epic about balanced polarities, light and dark, purity and taint, women and men, implying strongly that the world is only balanced through a cosmic game of tug of war executed by two equally potent opponents. This seems like an overly simplistic conception of a world which appears to be much more about spectrums than polarities. Moreover, the series elevated steadfastness of character to the foremost rank of virtue while largely rejecting the notion that wisdom comes through knowledge. It contends, rather, that knowledge leads to power and that power breeds the kind of pride and selfishness that can break the world. This sad tale has surely occurred and yet the inverse is also true. Simple folk have produced just as many narrowminded, ignorant souls as the educated have produced powermongers. It is a matter of temperament not lifestyle, of personality not temptation. Nonetheless, that the series dares to ask these questions, and that it answers them with a fully formed opinion, puts it well above the fray.

This is, for most of those who read it, a memorable series that has, here, been brought to a close with a momentous coda that won't be soon forgotten. A wonderful series that, now that it is over, can proceed to have its annoyances and missteps polished by the fondness of time's passing. (4/5 Stars)

Evils of colonialism and the dawn of modern China in The Opium War

From The Week of January 7, 2013 Though nations are defined by the whole of their histories, their attitudes and dispositions are determined by key events, pivotal moments which shape their views and interactions with the world. A nation with no history of invasion, for instance, might only discover the evils of colonialism through conquest of other peoples while nations with a history of being invaded would know, from prior experience, that nothing good can come of conquest, no matter how pure the motives that initiated it. And so, just as the individual is defined by his experience, so too is a nation. This is enduringly demonstrated in Ms. Lovell's uneven history of one of China's formative events.

One of humanity's most ancient civilizations, China, for much of its history, considered itself superior to the rest of the world. While Chinese scholars were pondering the secrets of the universe and the self, European tribes were still futilely fumbling around for the lightswitch of civilization. But while this superiority held for centuries, the arrogance it bred eventually turned Chinese society insular, closing itself off to the outside world at a time when Europe, ignited by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, was undergoing massive change.

Thus, when the British, beginning in the 18th century, came to trade for Chinese tea, they must have seemed a simple folk from an insignificant island, no more a threat to a hundred-thousand united kingdoms than a fly to an elephant. But in 1839, this illusion was dramatically and irreparably shattered when that tiny island nation, thirsting for tea but lacking the silver the Chinese wanted in exchange, went to war with the great Asian dragon and, in three years, brought an ancient empire to its knees.

Deploying weapons and tactics not studied by its generals, the British bombarded Chinese defenses, violated Chinese sovereignty and disregarded every dictate of international trade in order to achieve one simple goal, to compel upon China a trade agreement that would, in every way, benefit the British. For while they lacked the silver China would take in trade for tea, they had, in abundance, Indian opium, a powerfully addictive substance which, if it could be forced upon China, would not only net them all the tea they could want in turn, but create an enduring market of addicts who would trade the British almost anything in exchange for a fix. Fearing the worst, China revolted, rallying behind one of its national heroes to reject this deplorable exchange, but both their concerns and their resistance were swept aside, creating, in the ashes of Chinese pride, the stirrings of the modern Chinese state.

Meticulously reconstructing the events surrounding this conflict, The Opium War returns the reader to the simpler, crueller time of the 19th century when there was no apparatus in place to prevent the selfish needs of a stronger nation from exercising its power over a weaker brother. Ms. Lovell, a professor of Modern Chinese History, assembles the prime movers on both sides of this now nearly 200-year-old war, reviving the political machinations that ignited it and capturing the necessities of national pride that drove it to its coercive conclusion. But while she does a credible job weaving together both actor and event into a cohesive and comprehensible whole, the work aims higher than a simple re-imagination of a long-dead event. It ambitiously cultivates an understanding of present-day China from an understanding of the lessons and the effects of the First Opium War. By linking this conflict to more modern movements of Chinese pride, Chinese sovereignty and especially Chinese xenophobia, it unspools an engaging throughline from the modern day all the way back to the event that arguably launched the notion of contemporary China.

Unfortunately, while Ms. Lovell has an eye for detail that aids her well in the creation of a big picture, she exhibits here very little ability to hold the reader's attention during her re-telling of the actual war. She fails to animate any of her major players, save perhaps Lin Zexu, the imperial appointee who attempt to rid China of its opium. And given the number of actors involved in this destructive ballet, this is a damningly poor success rate for a history which rests upon its characters to embed us in the now alien ideas and cultures of the time. Moreover, the prose simply fails to hold ones attention, this in spite of a reader actively interested in this period of Chinese history.

There are notable virtues here. Ms. Lovell has winningly connected her chronicle to events that affect the people of today, both within and without of China. But her work's failure to transform the war and its players into a living, breathing moment in time prevents it from reaching the heights to which it aspired. (3/5 Stars)

Lauren Myracle vividly explores small-town culture in mysterious Shine

From The Week of December 31, 2012
While there exists, in most of us, an appreciation for the rhythms and the purity of small-town life, these modest communities are defined by a darkly potent catch 22 that makes actually living there problematic. For the great virtue of small town life is its hospitable culture, a set of values that make neighbors of strangers, that make family of the forlorned, which speaks to a generosity of spirit rarely found elsewhere. However, this ethos, spawned from homogeneity, from shared values and shared customs, creates both a distrust of, and a distaste for, other, those individuals who, through gender or genetics, race or religion, present as different. These outsiders are shunned by these same, generous people, not because the shunners are evil, narrow-minded, or cruel, but because they live in sameness, in normalcy, in a world that is never challenged by chaos or elseness. Their kindness is purchased at the expense of multicultural inclusiveness. And this Ms. Myracle wonderfully demonstrates in her vivid, young-adult novel.

Darkness has come to the small town of Black Creek, North Carolina. For, as much as its country residents may wish to think otherwise, one of their number has committed a crime so violent, a sin so vile, that they can barely bring themselves to believe it's actually happened. Someone they go to church with, someone they have gone to the movies with, someone they've said hi to in the street, someone whose held a shop-door for them, used a baseball bat to beat unto death a sixteen-year-old boy before tying him to the town pump and pouring gasoline down his throat. There is only one thing about Patrick, the victim, that could have inspired such hate, only one characteristic that could have unearthed such rage. Patrick is gay. Not quietly gay, not passing gay. Resplendently gay. And for this he lies in a hospital, fighting for his life.

Tormented by this crime, Cat, herself sixteen and Patrick's dear friend, refuses to accept the sheriff's assertion that the perpetrator must have been a drifter, an evil sort who came and went, stopping only long enough to leave his mark. No, she knows better, that some people in Black Creek aren't talking, that people who once met her eyes will no longer look at her, that secrets are being kept about that fateful night. Unwilling to allow Patrick to go unavenged, she embarks upon an investigation to unearth Patrick's would-be murderer, little knowing the price that must be paid for the exposing of a town's deepest secret.

Though characterized by a simplicity of prose endemic to mainstream youth fiction, Shine is exquisite work. Ms. Myracle, herself a child of small-town life, captures, to a chilling degree, the blessings and the curses of homogeneity, the excruciating awkwardness of adolescence, and the subtle devastation done to the outsider by the society that refuses to love him. For while toleration has become commonplace, while it has become standard practice, toleration is not acceptance. It is not willing. It is reluctant, a begrudging sentiment born of culturally imposed political correctness. This narrow mindedness not only does damage to the individual who does not belong, it discredits the community that shuns him, making a lie of all the values they stand for.

Shine is no glorious mystery. It is not a tale to withstand centuries. But what it lacks in epicness it amply makes up for with pluck and grit. Cat, its heroine, is a fantastically tough hillgirl, a creature formed of indomitable spirit who, nonetheless, manages to be achingly vulnerable and enduringly flawed. Moreover, she has been embedded in a world that is brought into vivid reality by Ms. Myracle's hand. We can feel the heat, see the beauty, taste the dirt of these ancient hills. We can smell the life here, that strain of human stubbornness that refuses to change for anyone. And in this, the author has demonstrated a rare gift, the painting of a portrait in words that can be long-remembered by the mind's eye.

For anyone interested in cultural critiques, gender politics, or even coming-of-age stories, Shine will not steer you wrong. As pleasing as these hills are enduring... (4/5 Stars)

the origins and value of salt explored in Mark Kurlansky's Salt

From The Week of December 31, 2012
As much as we endeavor to give proper credit to the substances and systems that underpin our lives, we all take for granted life's staples. For from the global climate that protects us to the earthly food that nourishes us, these things have always been there, readily available and rarely absent. Their sheer ubiquity leads us to foolishly conclude that it has forever been, and will always be, thus, a truth that has put at risk everything we hold dear. As dire as this may sound, there are ways of mitigating this damage, just as their are ways of not taking the ubiquitous for granted. The most effective of these is knowledge, the means by which all ignorance is banished and reality embraced. Mr. Kurlansky helps us make just such a transition with one of life's most underappreciated commodities in this fact-heavy exploration of salt.

Thought once to be exceedingly rare, salt is one of the most widespread substances on earth. Used in everything from the enlivening of our oceans to the functioning of our minds and bodies, it is a fundamental substance in the propagation and nourishment of life. These truths, however, have only become apparent in the most recent centuries, times in which science has had the freedom to expose salt's secrets. In earlier eras, salt was thought rare enough to be not only a commodity, but one precious enough to be treated like gold, confined to chests and guarded by soldiers. This period of artificial scarcity has left a lasting legacy in our language where salt is the etymology for any number of frequently used words and idioms.

Beyond its role in biochemistry, however, salt performed a key service in the creation of human civilization. For its deployment is one of the most effective means of preserving food, a reality which allowed early, adventurous societies to spread out from their origins, across mountains and over oceans, to explore the unknown and plant there civilization. Without salt, we might have never had empire. And without empire, we might not have today.

From ancient China to medieval Europe, from saltmines to salt chests, Mr. Kurlansky relentlessly exposes the history of this most widely used substance. And so effective is his capturing of salt's prior preciousness that it makes poignant irony out of the fact that we, today, suffer from an doverabundance of salt in our diets. This would have been dismissed as absurd in times past, when salt was considered valuable enough to be the stuff of state monopolies. The notion that it would have been spent so thoughtlessly would have been cause for uproar. But the author is out to achieve more than irony. He has set himself here the goal of capturing the ways in which salt has shaped civilization, revealing, on the journey, a surprising set of enjoyable facts that, while once deadly, have settled comfortably into the arena of intriguingly humorous.

For all its facts and its revelations, however, Salt fails to cohere around a narrative,a throughline with which Mr. Kurlansky can guide his readers. Too often, the author simply trudges from era to era, society to society, reconstructing the traditions of the past for the amusement of the present. He does not engender the work with vision, with a unifying sentiment that would allow us to come away moved instead of simply charmed. And there can be no doubt that such a narrative it exists. For how else would civilization have spread if the preservation of food was unto impossible? How would we have evolved differently if salt was as scarce as once thought? Mr. Kurlansky's work is the poorer for neglecting such speculation.

Salt will entertain those readers who enjoy both trivia and irony, but its failure to be more than this narrows its audience considerably. (3/5 Stars)

Tiger, Tiger, a chronicle of innocence lost

From The Week of December 31, 2012
Our lives pivot on formative moments, tiny slices of time in which chaos collides us with people we do not know and events we cannot predict. Leave the house five minutes early and meet our soulmate on a train we would normally never take; leave five minutes late and get hit by a car that would have been miles away if we'd left on time. And in this, we come to understand that fortune, or fate, or whatever face we bestow upon random chance, is something we can never anticipate. More's the pity. For while some of us are positively impacted by these collisions, others are utterly transformed by them in ways that leave behind very little of what we once were. Few individuals are more familiar with this than Ms. Fragoso. She demonstrates in her vivid and jagged memoir.

An urban child of the 1980s, Ms. Fragoso was born into a fractious family. Her American mother's psychological instability and her Latin father's searing resentments not only deprived her of a supportive homelife upon which she could build her future, their contentiousness drove her out into ther New-Jersey neighborhood to find there a measure of attention and affection not forthcoming at home. Notionally monitored by her mother, Ms. Fragoso, after encountering various characters, tumbles into the orbit of Peter, a Vietnam veteran who, 44 years her senior, is a creature of paternal gentleness. A twice-married man facing a long and difficult decline into agedness, Peter makes Margaux into a shield against decrepitude, giving to her the attention and play she so craves while extracting from her, in turn, a child's innocence.

As the years pass, Margaux and Peter embark upon a journey of mutual devastation. Their relationship, consummated when Margaux is seven years old, lasts until she is 22, but the intervening fifteen years are far from happy. For what began in affection, albeit manipulated, is increasingly marked by jealousy, discord, envy and emotional abuse. Their interactions, stained by what has past between them, become increasingly toxic until selfishness and despair finally sunder their strange and mutually dependent union, leaving Margaux alone in a world she has not been prepared to confront.

As creepy as it is moving, Tiger, Tiger is a 330-page explanation of why we protect our young from sex and relationships. For while peter is undoubtedly a molester of children, he is also someone Ms. Fragoso loves. She is tortured by that love, but it is still love that she feels, love for a man who took her into the basement of his home and changed her young life forever. She was utterly ill-equipped to recognize Peter's self-important excuses, his self-serving justifications, his self-pleasing manipulations. She, like anyone her age, saw only a man who gave her what her parents did not, love without limits or conditions. She could not recognize his martyrdom, his selfishness, his lack of self-control. And so she allowed herself to be grafted onto him. She allowed herself to be sustenance for a vampire who just happened to enjoy innocence more than blood. She allowed herself to be built up into a fantasy frozen in time because she could not imagine her life holding anything else.

There are drawbacks here. Ms. Fragoso reconstructs long and detailed conversations from her childhood without making any attempt to explain how she accomplished this feat. Moreover, she gives us no sense of perspective, no sense of events that followed Peter's departure from her life. Notwithstanding these small flaws, though, Tiger, Tiger is a vehicle for Ms. Fragoso's keen mind, for her lyrical pen and for her wounded heart, all of which combine to lend the work punch and consequence.

This is no savage, overwrought evisceration of child molesters; popular culture has done that for Ms. Fragoso. No, this is a quieter contemplation of the darker side of love: how much we need it, how we can be fooled into it, and how it can keep us enchained despite our best attempts at freedom. In this, Tiger, Tiger is more than worthy of its grave topic. (4/5 Stars)

The race to unearth the secrets of Venus revealed in Chasing Venus

From The Week of December 31, 2012
No matter how far we advance, our search for scientific knowledge and spiritual understanding will never end. For while we can explore the depths of our oceans and search out life among the stars, we can peer into the heart of atoms and measure the heft of galaxies, we will never solve all of the universe's mysteries. To do so, we'd become like gods, so far removed from our human shells, our biological brains, that we would no longer be who we are today, creatures driven by a desire to know, by a need to see, by the thirst to compel the enigmas of our world to surrender their secrets. As much as any other characteristic, this is what defines us, a fact made all the more apparent by Ms. Wulf's engaging micro history.

The brightest planet in our sky, Venus has, for millennia, captivated humanity. Endowed with divinity by various faiths and recognized as an enigma by others, its eccentric orbit has caused it to be identified as both the Morning Star and the Evening Star, positions it occupies at various points in the year. In more recent times, astronomers even bestowed upon it an Earth-like atmosphere, speculation that flowed from a strange, visual effect, seen from Earth, when Venus eclipses the sun. Only Mars has prompted more astronomical and astrological musings, though, even here Venus outstrips its red brother. For its unusual cosmic dance with Earth allows those of us in the present to better understand human cultures of the past which associated Venus with the number eight, the number of years that separate the two ends of Venus' once-in-a-century transit.

For centuries, this was all Venus was, a heavenly object made sacred by a lack of scientific understanding. But when human society rose out of the ashes of Middle-Age ignorance to embrace the Renaissance of science and discovery, Venus became not only a point of study, it was recognized as the key to fathoming the distance of Earth from its sun. By measuring Venus during its stellar transit, astronomers could calculate the stellar parallax, providing a conclusive answer to one of the outstanding questions of the Copernican era. There was just one problem. Venus only eclipses the sun only twice every 105 years. Should weather or circumstance conspire to thwart the efforts of astronomers to take measurements from this transit, they would have to come back eight years later and try again. And should they again be defeated by misfortune, they would be long dead before they would ever again see its like.

In Chasing Venus, Ms. Wulf chronicles the most pivotal of these transit cycles, the 18th-century pairing which, first in 1761 and then in 1769, allowed astronomers to take the stellar parallax. Introducing her readers to the scientific minds of the day, the author describes the extraordinary efforts of various European scientific societies to dispatch their best and most adventurous minds to key points on the globe where the observing of Venus' transit would be most advantageous. But while the harrowing journeys of these mostly brave men provides the backbone to Ms. Wulf's history, her examination of Europe and its politics during this time grants it its punch. For while scientists and astronomers agitated with their royal governments for the funds and the indulgences to execute this rare and intricate endeavor, their needs and desires were utterly eclipsed by the agendas of the monarchs of Russia and Britain, France and Germany, powerful men and women who not only controlled the fates of millions, but used this astronomical oddity to advance the dignity of their kingdoms. This two-tiered perspective allows the novel to operate on scales both individual and imperial, local and global, without losing any of its poignance.

There's no question that Ms. Wulf's work is buoyed by the remarkable efforts of now forgotten men, scientists who braved Siberian winters and equatorial summers to better understand their world. The sheer amount of thought, planning and effort that these individuals invested just in the hope for clear skies and good readings is inspiring. Today, it takes only hours to fly anywhere in the world. We need not brave tempestuous seas and their ruthless pirates, we need not be subject to unknowable diseases and the whims of royal governments. And yet, this achievement meant more to them than it does to us even though it is easily within our grasp. However, for as much as the material sings, Ms. Wulf's contributions are up to the task of reminding us of our past and the giants who characterized it. As excellent as it is expeditious... (4/5 Stars)