Blood, cruelty and a dark future of exploitation in The Bel Dame Apocrypha

From The Week of March 18, 2013

Though it seems, at present, the only effective means of solving international disputes, war exacts a terrible price from its practitioners. Its bombs and bullets, missiles and machine guns, may well be blessings that resolve disagreements through conquest, but with every death, with every cratered building, hatred is inflamed in the hearts of the victims and their families, a hatred that, when properly nourished, prolongs war and ensures that neither side can extract themselves from its embrace without scars that run soul deep. Thus, war's price is more war, war that does not end. For even if the battlefields are cleared and the enemy is in chains, revenge lingers in the minds of the vanquished, making the prospect of peace nothing more than an idealist's fantasy. This Ms. Hurley makes exquisitely and tragically clear in a trilogy that is as difficult as it is engaging.

On a distant world far in humanity's future, civilization has descended into nightmare. After centuries-old attempts to terraform the planet only partially succeeded, the technologists and gene masters who sought to turn this arid planet into a paradise withdrew, leaving their descendents to flounder in the desert sands of a world baked by two vicious suns. Cities on Umayma are isolated havens protected from the worst of the planet's depravities by programmable organic filters which sheathe these ports of civilization, keeping out the grotesquely mutated monstrosities that slither and snake across the rest of its blasted surface. But even though these filters protect the humans from Umayma's natural dangers, they cannot protect them from themselves.

Since the withdrawal of the colony's founders, Umayma's inhabitants have devolved into religious and territorial warfare that has virtually halted technological and societal progress. Umayma's various nation states, each of which zealously practice a form of Islam, have fallen back on the barbarism of biological weaponry to enforce their particular beliefs. This chaos has not only sewn blood feuds into the very fabric of Umaymian life, effectively ensuring conflict for generations to come, it has distorted their faiths and their societies in ways that would be unimaginable to their ancestors. Not only have the traditional gender roles been distorted, but political power has accreted into the hands of the few, while doctrine has cruelly stagnated, offering no solace to those mutated humans who are more creations of Umayma than they are of god.

Through this hellish environment moves Nyxnissa so Dasheem, a rugged, resilient bountyhunter haunted by her past. After a stint on the front lines of her nation's most recent hot war, she was welcomed into the service of the Bel Dames, a government-sanctioned death squad tasked with removing inconvenient and undesirable elements from her country's landscape. The harsh and ruthless Nyx proves herself quite adept at being a Bel Dame, taking pride in her grizzly work, that is, until she is betrayed by her superiors and cashiered from the Bel Dames, abandoned, without friends or income, onto the rough streets of her hometown. Nyx slowly rebuilds her life, hiring on a team of assassins to help her execute the jobs that come her way. Unfortunately for Nyx, no job of significance can take her far enough from the halls of power that she won't be drawn back in to the world of vicious politics and planetary conquest that dismissed her so thoughtlessly. Nyx survived having her title revoked, but can she continue to win and live in a world that seems set upon her death? Only the gods, who have so clearly forsaken Umayma, can say.

As violent as it is bizarre, The Bel Dame Apocrypha is fascinating fiction. A harsh mashup of the science fiction and urban fantasy genres, it is a ruthless and jagged portrayal of lives lived at the very limits of physical and spiritual endurance, on a world too reminiscent of Hell to be coincidental. Sparing neither favorites nor fools, Ms. Hurley is equally savage with her wicked pen, heaping depravities and betrayals upon her beleaguered characters, demanding only that they survive, that they continue, no matter how slowly or painfully, towards their bloody destinies. This cruelty is, at times, wearing, but not since Martin has it been so successfully executed.

Though The Bel Dame Apocrypha reads, superficially, as little more than an exercise in torment, there is something revolutionary here. For Ms. Hurley has used the demands of war as an excuse to completely invert the traditional roles of men and women. In nasheen, the country that doubles as the trilogy's primary setting, the conflict has lasted so long that men are a scarcity, their numbers hurled for so long into distant battlefields that society has re-shaped itself around women who talk and act like men. In fact, were they given male names, their actions and attitudes would be completely indistinguishable from men. Ms. Hurley's is far from the first attempt to envision a society dominated by women. However, it might well be the first attempt to envision a society dominated by women who fill the roles and dispositions commonly held by men. Which begs a fascinating question.

Are the various attitudes and postures adopted by the genders inherent to those genders, or are they, as Ms. Hurley imagines, inherent only to the roles society requires them to fill? In other words, Are female politicians, warriors, assassins and merchants just as likely to be selfish and corrupt as their male counterparts, or do their natural dispositions shield them from the worst excesses of power's abuse? Arguments for both sides are plentiful, but there can be no doubt that Ms. Hurley has clearly and convincingly stated her case, that only circumstance distinguishes the genders from one another, that we only view women more favorably because we've narrowed their opportunities to be corrupted by power. A provocative view that makes for engrossing reading...

There are flaws here. The Bel Dame Apocrypha is ceaselessly violent. There are few chapters not marred by death and dismemberment. Moreover, Ms. Hurley makes virtually no attempt to gently embed the reader in her world. In fact, she seems to go out of her way to be obscure, to gleefully watch as the reader attempts to orient himself in an utterly foreign environment. This will frustrate some, but for those who stay with her trilogy, this bold strategy pays off wen the rhythms and the schemes of Umayma become all-too-painfully familiar. What's more, the trilogy could have benefited from some additional characters, individuals who would have done a better job fleshing out Ms. Hurley's world. As it is, the perspective rarely strays beyond Nyx and her team which can be, at times, tiresome.

In lesser hands, The Bel Dame Apocrypha might well have been little more than an excuse for savagery. But Ms. Hurley has imagined a world as rich and different as it is dark and cruel. From its organic technology to its paternalistic women, it churns out surprises and profundities with equal measure. This is in no way fare for the weak of heart or stomach, but for those looking for an adrenaline-fuelled ride through an outer circle of Hell, look no further. (4/5 Stars)

Words of wisdom and prophecy from a magnificent mind in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

From The Week of March 18, 2013

True genius is a rare and precious thing. For its scarcity stands out like a diamond amongst the rough, allowing its light, in the form of its opinions, its theories, and its understanding, to be taken seriously by a world that largely believes in authority and that holds a deep admiration for exceptional people. Yes, there is certainly great wisdom in the thoughts and beliefs of ordinary folks, but these notions have no platform, no popular basis from which to spread through the culture. This is not a problem for geniuses who, in their celebration, are given a soapbox from which to speak to the world of what they hold dear. Though just such a soapbox was used sparingly and with humility by Mr. Feynman, it was also used powerfully and effectively by one of the 20th century's most extraordinary minds, a truth revealed repeatedly in this collection of his essays.

The son of a uniform salesman who passed on a life-long curiosity for the world and its many, mysterious systems, Richard Feynman was a key physicist in his discipline's formative century. One of the many minds to follow on from the golden generation of Einstein and Bohr, Heisenberg and Wheeler, he left school to work on the Manhattan Project -- holding the distinction of being one of the few scientists to witness the first Trinity test with the unguarded eye -- before going on to win the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965 for his contributions to the advancement of Quantum Electrodynamics. Between these remarkable milestones, he made singular contributions to a dozen aspects of theoretical physics. Today, however, he is remembered best for envisioning and conceptualizing nanotechnology, imagining a world where computers, both quantum and conventional, would facilitate an immeasurable leap forward in human society.

A legendary talker, notable for his unusual deployment of English, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out collects a series of speeches and interviews Mr. Feynman gave over the span of his career. From Japan to Italy, from anecdote to commencement address, he expounds upon not only the moments and insights that brought him renown, but the life experience's that reveal him to be a man of brilliance and humility. From the hilarious absurdities of government censorship during the Manhattan Project to the passionate exhortation for nanotechnology, Mr. Feynman manifests, here, as an exceptional, ordinary man, a profoundly human creature with an otherworldly understanding of the universe.

For all of Mr. Feynman's physics, though, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out is most evocative when it speaks to the great man's philosophy. Holding up doubt as the key virtue of the scientific mind, he laments the thoughtlessness of religious believers who accept as truth something they haven't tested. Nor do they wish to test it. Theirs is literally a senseless belief, one that manifests from a mind unschooled in the scientific method. In this vein, Mr. Feynman exhorts his fellow man to doubt everything. For it is only through testing those doubts that one can find truth. Nothing, no theory, no notion, no matter how farfetched, should be dismissed out of hand. For to dismiss anything without testing its veracity is to be no better than those who believe thoughtlessly in dogma. It is to trust what one feels, not what one knows to be true.

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out is not without its darker moments. Mr. Feynman's anecdotes, playful though they may be, expose the powerful skein of sexism that ran through academia for all but the final few years of the 20th century. He manages, even here, to be charming. Even so, he is representative of the paternalism of his time, a white man in a world that, by and large, only recognized and appreciated the contributions of white men. This is a sin that should not be forgotten, a sense of personal entitlement that not only runs counter to the core philosophies detailed here, but that destructively ignored the talents of millions of women and and individuals from other ethnicities that could have made exceptional contributions to the advancement of science.

This is mesmerizing work, not only for its pleasing voice but for what it teaches us about science, philosophy and the Good Life Outstanding in spite of its occasional missteps. (4/5 Stars)

A mesmerizing look inside the secretive perfume industry in The Perfect Scent

From The Week of March 18, 2013

Where there's wealth there's luxury. From the tribal leaders who collected gold and baubles to the corporate executives who accumulate diamonds and beach houses, this has been true for thousands of years. After all, what better way to signal one's importance, one's power, than to possess worthless trinkets and then ascribe value to them, to their scarcity? It is a means by which to express success and nothing more. And yet, thanks to capitalism's power to create wealth, luxuries are today a booming industry, aspirational brands that together are not only worth billions, but that have the power to announce one's arrival upon society's stage. Fine hats and expensive bags, priceless coats and be jewelled watches... These are today's gold goblets and steel-tipped arrows. These are our trinkets. For all of our enlightenment, our education, this trick still works. This lesson underpins Mr. Burr's excellent and entertaining work.

Of the many expressions of luxury, few are as potent as perfume. Considered a key weapon in the arsenal of the numerous secretive luxury houses that dominate the western world, it has been produced in a dizzying array of packages and compositions, from the innocent to the sexy, from the stayed to the eccentric, all in an attempt to obtain the perfect distillation of power and style that will not only cause humans the world over to surrender their wealth to possess it, but signal to those within range of its wearers that they are something special. Its seductions are predicated upon the evocative clout of the human sense of smell which, when activated, has an unparalleled ability to conjure up memories both new and old and, through this momentary connection, transport wearers to other places, other times.

In 2005 and 2007, first in Paris and then in New York, Mr. Burr was allowed a unique perspective of this secretive industry when, as a writer for the New York times, he was invited to write profiles of two very different perfumes. The first was Nil by Jean-Claude Ellena, a second-generation French perfumer, who was attempting to give Herme, the storied luxury house, a successful perfume to add to their other product lines. The second was Lovely by Sarah Jessica Parker, an industry hit that grew out of the Sex-And-The-City star's desire to realize a dream, to bring to market a perfume that expressed her own sense of sexuality. Through these two experiences, Mr. Burr ventures into the mysterious world of perfume, a 25-billion-dollar industry whose secretiveness is legendary and whose old-world practices seem decidedly out-of-step with modern reality and economics.

Though at times unflinchingly raw, The Perfect Scent is nonetheless a delightful expose of the world of perfume. Mr. Burr, who balances his fondness for his two subjects (Parker and Ellena) with searing critiques of the industry in which they toil, is an engaging guide into a world most of us know nothing about. Step by meticulous step, he details the industry's practices and biases, revealing not only the creative genius poured into dreaming up these exotic scents, but the stodgy management that decides which of them will go to market and which will be condemned to waste away in some forgotten cupboard, never to be savored by the people who invest so much money in these strange but evocative distillations of our world.

Though Mr. Burr's characterizations of Parker and Ellena leave the reader enchanted with their humility and arrogance, confidence and vision, it is the process by which perfume is created that steals the show. The author describes in fascinating detail the degree to which perfumery has been reduced to an alchemical science, leaving vivid in the minds of his readers the image of a lonely master unpacking the various components of a half-remembered scent and committing its ingredients to paper, measuring their weights, shooting this chemical breakdown off to a lab where these scribblings are given form, molecules precisely combined and returned to the perfumer for the examination of his nose. This singular hunt, to actualize an idea and then to perfect it, makes for a mesmerizing read, one that sports few imperfections. For though Mr. Burr may at times evince a certain infatuation with Parker and Ellena, this never strays into the kind of obsequiousness that would have obscure the truths present in his entwined tales.

Enchanting work made all the more powerful for providing the reader with knowledge of an otherwise unknowable world. One of my best reads this year... (5/5 Stars)

Military science fiction done with violence and style in Dread Empire's Fall

From The Week of March 11, 2013
In the hands of tyrants, fear is a fearsome weapon. Not only does it have the power to scourge the courage out of the brave, it institutionalizes a sense of inferiority in those subject to the will of its wielder. It carves into their souls a belief that they must obey or face the prospect of punishments that will send their minds shrieking into madness. Fear compels us to abandon our sense of equality, of personal dignity. And without these virtues to bolster self-identity, without the belief that everyone is subject to the laws of the land, justice atrophies until all that is left is strict, authoritarian order, the likes of which rewards the rich while criminalizing the poor. This truth could ask for no better exemplar than Mr. Williams who demonstrates it to wonderful effect in his engaging trilogy.

For ten-thousand years, the Shaa have ruthlessly ruled the galaxy. Sewing conquest through the liberal use of force, intimidation and nuclear fire, they have subsumed the known races into the fabric of their dread collective, all in the name of their beloved Praxis, a vision of order and enlightenment that only they can truly comprehend. Naturally, most races resisted this shotgun unity, but the anti-matter bombs that the Shaa mercilessly dropped on their cities, their habitats, their worlds, put an emphatic end to that. Perhaps they even attempted to flee, but where could the intelligent species go when the Shaa had already seeded the known universe with stable wormholes through which they could spread their terrible power?

Eventually, unity came to seem natural to the Shaa's client races. As their faiths and traditions fell away, to be replaced by the omnipresence of the Praxis, they became compliant, even content in their bondage until, finally, after millennia of conquest and expansion, the Shaa began to wane. Having conquered every race they could find, having expanded their intelligence through unimaginably complex machines, they had experienced every emotion, explored every thought, sampled every horizon. The universe was no longer a mystery; it was a bore from which to escape. Slowly, through suicide, the Shaa's numbers reduced to one, one last god over the mortal races. And then even he removed himself from the board and exposed an empire of countless billions to a new, chaotic dawn, one far more terrifying than any the Shaa had imposed. This is the story of that dawn, a story of war and resistance, of fire and radiation, that might well burn hot enough to extinguish even the legacy of the Shaa and leave behind nothing but ashes.

Born from the mind of one of science fiction's most eclectic authors, The Dread Empire is a fascinating and engrossing journey through an apocalyptic war. Mr. Williams, who rose to prominence with the Hardwired Series of cyberpunk novels, turns his mind here to military fiction, reconstructing a universe of humans and aliens, of wealth and poverty, of aristocracy and criminality, with winning thoroughness. For the author has rejected the storytelling crutches of Transporters and faster-than-light travel to conjure up a wonderfully detailed reality that, for good and ill, is utterly faithful to its laws and customs. For this alone, the work should be celebrated. Not many possess such vision, much less the willingness to carry it out. And yet, the author has harnessed his talent for three-dimensional characters and deployed it here with vivid results that elevate the series from the mundane to the extraordinary.

Though war dominates the trilogy, The Dread Empire is notable for its politics. Mr. Williams has fused together futuristic technology with an Edwardian society to create a truly horrifying amalgam of privilege and corruption strongly reminiscent of our own colonialist history. In fact, it is an easy matter to regard the Shaa as the British, or the Roman, Empire, using its superior knowledge and tactics to conquer other races and impose upon them a societal structure that is both foreign to their minds and corrosive to their morals. Viewed this way, it is unsurprising that the characters in Mr. Williams' work devote much of their energy to subverting that order in the hopes of overturning it, of converting it into something that better suits ingenuity and personal skill.

Naturally, The Dread Empire has its fair share of flaws. Unlike the adrenaline-soaked pages of Mr. Williams' Cyberpunk work, this trilogy is characterized by long moments of quiet, cruel conniving followed by quick explosions of action and turmoil. Though this technique is not without its merits, the plod is too pronounced, too protracted, to be as engaging as the action sequences which are written with an exactitude that is admirable if somewhat bewildering for those not versed in non-conventional, three-dimensional military tactics. Moreover, Mr. Williams' choice to train the series' focus on only two primary characters leaves much of this universe unexplored. Martinez and Sulah are each wonderful conceptions, creatures of will and ambition who occupy a new space between hero and antihero, but they are both career military and both on one side of the conflict, leaving not only civilian life undeveloped but the enemy perspective as well. The trilogy could have benefited from dropping some of its Edwardian pomp in favor of a third point of view that would have balanced the tale.

Notwithstanding its flaws, The Dread Empire is wonderful work that ties together elements of politics, war, mystery and aristocracy to forge a world that is as familiar as it is foreign. Yes, the author uses thinly veiled conceits to ensure that this future is, in some ways, shockingly like our own, but these can be forgiven when they make possible a constellation of relatable characters and circumstances that keep us invested in the epic. A work of noteworthy imagination... (4/5 Stars)

The virtues of the Internet's open systems championed in Wikinomics

From The Week of March 11, 2013
Though there is a great deal of complexity, in both our world and our universe, nearly every one and every thing can be reduced to polarities. Ones and zeros, yin and yang, white and black... We are consumed by states of Good and bad, left and right, full or empty. Perhaps this is nothing more than an issue of perception, an understanding of the laws of nature shackled by our own ignorance. But it might well be that opposition is a universal necessity, that reality itself demands that its component forces shake down into conflicting camps that eternally vie for dominance. Perhaps conflict itself is a necessary part of life, the engine that drives us to strive for better days. If so, our future is bright. For few of these polarity wars are hotter, and more central to our increasingly technological world, than, open systems versus closed systems, the former of which is exhaustively championed here by Misters Tapscott and Williams.

Defined as a system that relies on altruistic collaboration for its energy and its innovation, open systems are vital to our 21st century infrastructure. From apache and Linux, platforms that provide the Internet its software backbone, to Wikipedia and Reddit, services that shape the information it conveys, the Internet would be marooned without the creative efforts of men and women who eschew profit for cooperation, financial power for social status. Every day, billions of people freely use these and many other services not only with the expectation of never being charged by them, but in the knowledge that they will work, that, even though they are not helmed by CEO masterminds and billionaire companies, they will be reliable and useful in an ever-changing age.

How is this possible? How can relatively unfunded open systems, that seem at times almost adverse to earning profit, deliver products as polished and as useful as the million-dollar alternatives developed by fortune-500 corporations? Pointing out that millions of minds are better than hundreds, or even thousands, Misters Tapscott and Williams argue that open systems triumph thanks to the wisdom of many minds working in concert, training their combined powers upon a singular problem. Moreover, they contend that open systems foster non-hierarchical working groups that empower everyone to voice opinions, provide feedback and, most importantly, make contributions without fear of incurring the censure or the blowback typical of hierarchies. This assemblage of skill, knowledge, goodwill and energy, rather than creating confusion and discord, generate a nearly unstoppable engine of positive change that will, in the decades to come, transform economies and societies as we know them.

Published in 2007, Wikinomics is engaging and energetic work that is, nonetheless, fatally flawed. Adopting an optimistic tone that, at times, borders on cheerleading, Misters Tapscott and Williams investigate the open systems rising to prominence in the modern world and argue that theirs is the model of the future. From Myspace to Wikipedia, from Dig to Linux, they pepper their work with snippets from dozens of interviews with innovators and technologists, all of whom re-affirm the authors' contention that no company is capable of solving a problem faster or better than the will of the educated masses. These are lovely sentiments, ones that most of us will agree with. For it is easy to root for open systems; they are, after all, natural underdogs disrupting the bloated and inefficient ware from gigantic corporations. Moreover, it espouses a heartening vision of humanity that is immune to the corruptions of wealth and power, rejecting them for community acceptance and societal utility.

However, none of this changes the fact that this is a simplistic view that surpasses the naive and approaches the disingenuous. Undoubtedly, it is easy to use the hindsight of these last six years to look back at the heady, Internet world of 2007 and dismiss these conclusions as hopelessly dated. After all, when this book was published, the iPhone, a revolutionary product developed by one of the most closed companies in recent memory, had not yet been made commercially available. Moreover, Twitter and Facebook, the dominant social technologies of the moment, both of which have cynically used the open model to grow before closing it to become profitable, were merely tiny dots on the cyberspace landscape. The fact is, though, that the authors of Wikinomics clearly contend that open will defeat closed, that its native advantages will slay closed, backward-thinking corporate culture. And this simply has not happened. There have been advances, certainly, but open systems are profitless vacuums. Sadly, they cannot generate even a fraction of the revenues that closed systems can. And greed will, at least for some time, win out.

It's a shame that Misters Tapscott and Williams were wrong. For theirs is an optimistic view of humanity that our culture would benefit from embracing. But it turns out, at least as of this moment, the war of open and closed is far more gray than their account would have us believe. A pity... (2/5 Stars)

The principles of rational conservatism detailed in O'Hara's Conservatism

From The Week of March 11, 2013
An unfortunate outgrowth of human intelligence, ideology is a deadly and pernicious force. Capable of unraveling the rationality of even the most discipline mind, it can enslave the wills of millions, chaining them to beliefs that have no truck with reasonableness or compassion, all while convincing these shackled minds that its creeds, its methods, and its objectives are not only perfectly acceptable, but absolutely necessary. Such groupthink has repeatedly, over countless centuries, riven our world, throwing it into darkness and chaos from which generations are needed to recover. But just how do we distinguish ideology from rational argument? How do we avoid having our ideas and our beliefs captured by dogma? Dr. O'Hara demonstrates wonderfully well in his fascinating, if somewhat dense, treatise.

What is conservatism and just what does it stand for? Is it the big-C Conservatism, championed by American Republicans, that advocates for the exportation of democracy, even at the point of a gun; that exemplifies as virtuous the values of big business, no matter the cost in morality; and that uses its patriotic bent to agitate for the strongest possible national defense, regardless of the relative powers of its enemies? Or is it the small-c conservatism that believes in incremental change, that acknowledges that our understanding of ourselves and our world is limited, and that holds with no sacred cows but the openness of ones mind to any fact regardless of how painful or inconvenient?

Strongly contending that conservatism is, in fact, the latter, not the former, Dr. O'Hara argues that two guiding principles should direct small-c conservatism. The first of these is the Knowledge Principle, the belief that society is too complex and too individualistic to allow for anyone, or any computer, to develop a clear understanding of what it wants, what it needs, or even what it should have. The second of these is the Change Principle, the notion that, having established that outcomes cannot always be known, innovation, from government on down, must be adopted cautiously. For wholesale change is invariably disruptive to existing traditions and institutions. And that if we cannot know society, then we cannot know if the change will be to the good. And if we cannot know the change will be to the good, then we must be cautious with its implementation to limit the risk of destroying what is good and functional in the name of nothing more than change.

Conservatism is fascinating work. While Dr. O'Hara, a senior fellow at the University of Southampton, is occasionally laborious with his prose, relying on opaque, philosophic constructs to support some of his contentions, he is, in the main, an engaging guide into the land of small-c conservatism. After clearly stating his two founding principles, he leads the reader on a tour through the ideological minefields of partisan politics and the structure of government to demonstrate that many of the worlds socioeconomic problems can be reasoned through by an adherence to some basic points of logic. Like any good argument, made with reason rather than ideological bias, Dr. O'Hara makes his case convincingly. For he reasonably points out that our existing values and systems are important to us, that, within reason, we know they function, and that to abandon them for uncertainty is, to say the least, risky. Logical points all...

For all its appeal, though, Dr. O'Hara's conservatism leaves a lot to be desired. For we cannot simply accept as fact that society is unknowable. To accept such a premise is to cease working towards making it knowable. And given that understanding society would undoubtedly help us improve it, this seems shortsighted. Should we just disregard oceans of scientific data just because we can't be sure how to weight it, or how definitively to act based upon it? Should we not trawl that ocean for useful conclusions that can then be put to good use? Secondly, though the author argues that small-c conservatives are not opposed to change, it seems to me that slow change is little more than a euphemism for stagnancy. Yes, Dr. O'Hara lays out how small-c conservatives would implement change, beginning with pilot projects that are increasingly scaled up until they have been proven to be valid on a wide enough scale to be legislated. But what if these piloted notions fail for extraneous reasons? What if, like so many things in our world, they are sabotaged by powerful people adverse to what the projects propose?

Dr. O'Hara's conservatism is quite appealing and there can be no doubt that it would be a significant improvement upon the big-c Conservatism so often practiced in our world. But I wonder. While Dr. O'Hara's ideal society is slowly, methodically changing for the better, what if nearby societies are ambitiously changing, transformatively changing, creating a dynamism that always keeps them ahead of the conservative land? An engaging if somewhat monotonous journey... (3/5 Stars)

A beautiful, bleak tragedy slowly unfurled in Hugh Howey's Wool Series

From The Week of march 4, 2013
Our lies are always with us. For as much as we try to extricate ourselves from them, their stains linger so long as the truths sequestered by their telling remain obscured. And even though it is within our power to remove such a stain with a simple, straightforward confession, most of us cannot bring ourselves to do so. For with the passing of every moment, a lie grows in power, accreting in proportion with the damage it would cause when revealed. For most of us, this is a relatively small problem confined to relationships which operate almost entirely on trust, trust that is undermined with every falsehood. But what about the big lies? The lies institutions sell, the lies societies nurture, the lies governments spin? What if a lie is so monstrously large that the confessing of it would break the world? Mr. Howey uses this question to wonderful advantage in his engrossing and creepy series.

Centuries from now, Earth has become a wasteland. Soaring cities and resplendent nature have been rubbled and ruined by human hubris. What form this hubris may have taken has been obscured by time, by the passing of generations absorbed by the rhythms of life. And yet, the evidence of that ancient disaster remains, the images of gray skies, vicious winds and dead earth beamed into the silo that now harbors what is left of humanity. Outside, the world is cold and decayed, but within the Silo it is warm and vibrant, 144 floors of orderly existence shafting deep into the earth where oil and nitrogen, the essentials of life, can be mined and used to empower civilization.

From all outward appearances, the Silo is quite a harmonious place. Modelled on a small American town, it deploys a hierarchical power structure to safeguard the survival of the species. Its many trades, from engineering to portering, are clearly delineated, their talent pools refreshed by a well-organized cast system that, though not completely rigid, ensures that vocational knowledge is largely past down through families instead of being lost in the chaos of self-determination. This eliminates the need for universities. For aside from some basic knowledge, children grow up absorbing what they need to know from their friends, their family and their environment, a perfect incubator for the generation to follow.

This harmony, however, is a facade. For within the Silo, knowledge is tightly controlled, the rebellious sins of the past erased by not just censorship, but the pact each individual makes with the Silo's collective, that he or she will obey the laws and will avoid heretical questions about the past and the outside, the contemplation of which can lead to disaster. The Silo is largely successful in maintaining this pact, but when the wife of its sheriff is broken by the discovery of one of the Silo's most terrible secrets, the Silo's lawman initiates an investigation, the consequences of which will rock the Silo for generations to come.

One of the first major, sustainable successes in self-publishing, The Wool Series is a riveting collection of short stories which re-imagines the post-apocalyptic drama for the 21st century. Harnessing the most terrifying elements of horror, mystery and science fiction, Mr. Howey manages to infest the reader with a powerful sense of creeping wrongness, of gnawing claustrophobia, of crushing bleakness which, though potent, is rarely off-putting. This is a serious alchemical achievement. For activating such emotions can, when overcooked, provoke in the reader an antipathy that, when conjured, is all-but impossible to suppress. That Mr. Howey has found the proper balance here exemplifies his skill.

Though the series adopts a fairly novel approach to an old premise, the notion of a civilization in a bottle, this is not its only virtue. Mr. Howey has imbued his characters with winning personalities that rarely stray into two-dimensional caricatures. What at first appears to be overly simplistic blacks and whites eventually evolve into far more complicated grays whose ambiguities please far more than they irritate. Moreover, the author's sense of cause and effect is delightful. For its clear that the entire plot of the series is kicked off by a single, subtle action, one that creates a subsequent chain that ignites wholesale changes in the author's universe. Instead of fighting this, or even modulating it, Mr. Howey appears only to encourage the eruption, to follow eagerly where the falling dominos lead him. This is a refreshing development for a fairly stale genre.

For all its virtues, though, The Wool Series is not without its flaws. Some of its ex-post justifications for how the world came to be so twisted are decidedly threadbare, revealing gaps in logic that are troublesome. Moreover, after the first five stories, which grapple with the lives of those within the Silo, the series branches out to try to animate the days leading up to the disaster that created this dark world. This fails both theatrically and as a character study. For not only are the near-future characters decidedly less interesting than those who populate the Silo, the premature revelation of how the Silo came to be robs us of one of the series' most successful features, that the reader knew only as much as the Silo's characters knew, a reality which allowed us to unknot the mystery of its secrets and its origins alongside them. Granting us this omnipotent perspective severs this intimate connection with the Silo. It's clear that the author did this with an eye towards converging past and present at the climax of his tale, but the price he has paid for this is, to my mind, too high.

This is excellent, cross-disciplinary science fiction with the power to keep one up at night with dreams of a dark, authoritarian future. It would be worthy of your hard-earned even if each tale wasn't priced at $1, a supreme value that lights the way to the future of publishing, a little coin from a mass audience. One of the most inventive reads in some time... (4/5 Stars)

How Pleasure Works tells us virtually nothing about...wait for it...pleasure

From The Week of march 4, 2013
Of the various fundamental motivations that stir us to action, few are as essential and as wide-ranging as pleasure. For it is this desire to experience joy and reward, happiness and satisfaction, that compels us to achieve our dreams. Without it, life would be a dreary exercise, a plodding monotony that would culminate in nothing more elevating than the completion of ones tasks. It is pleasure that activates our passions and drives our needs. It is pleasure, and its pursuit, that make us more than what we are. And this is a truth championed in Mr. Bloom's brief and troubled exploration.

From food to sex, from competition to gender, pleasure has captured the human mind for thousands of years. It enlivens our days and makes of our nights realms of anticipation and glee into which we all wish to plunge. But what is the essence of pleasure? And how does it manifest? Mr. Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale University, draws upon the theory of Essentialism to answer these basic questions. From the whys that underpin why people will pay more for a celebrity's dirty clothes than for their clean ones to why boys and girls distinguish themselves before the broader culture sorts them out, he argues that human pleasure is derived from our understanding of the world, both in its categorization and in its structure, and that everything from why we drink bottled water to why we believe in spiritualism can be traced back to how we perceive and comprehend our world. Peppered in amongst this philosophical journey are fun facts about how humans relate to the world, tidbits that lend focus to the author's broader arguments.

However much How Pleasure Works may be convincing to scientists and philosophers, there can be no doubt that is a disaster as a piece of literature. Mr. Bloom possesses a lively voice that finds little difficulty in switching between hard science and soft anecdote in order to maintain the attention of his readers. In every other respect, though, he fails miserably in both his attempt to entertain and his attempt to built a case for his argument. Large swaths of this all-too-brief excursion into the roots of human pleasure are unimaginatively surrendered to anecdotal science, singular events that will be familiar to anyone that has consumed the news in the last ten years. To anyone that has cracked a book on popular science in that same timeframe, though, they are not only uninspired and repetitive, but deeply suggestive of cherry-picked circumstances deployed here to support what is, in every other respect, the ephemeral notion that human pleasure is connected to a metaphysical view of our world. In this, the reader is left feeling chilled by the absence of a genuine demonstration of the author's own research which is almost nowhere to be seen.

Mr. Bloom is a deeply accomplished individual, a man whose achievements must be respected. But in the wake of the disgrace of characters like Jonah Lehrer, men who not only read sweeping, societal conclusions from scientific data, but take dicey shortcuts to do so, we must be wary of books that use anecdote to draw conclusions about human nature. We must have higher standards. For How Pleasure Works reads like a cheap attempt to earn a little coin from the credulity of those seeking answers, none of which will be found rooted in what is clearly more of a philosophical text than an empirical one. If we do not demand more, this is what we will get, 150 pages of one man's half-hearted attempt to say something profound.

Thoroughly disappointing... (2/5 Stars)

Ho Chi Min details the enlightened, revolutionary and tyrannical faces of a world leader

From The Week of march 4, 2013
What motivates a man to devote himself to a life of struggle? For the world is full of treasures just waiting to be explored, arcologies of past and present so vast that lifetimes would have to be spent to absorb all their stories. And yet, while some choose to immerse themselves in these worlds of knowledge and discovery, others reject these enriching existences in favor of lives aimed at a single, overarching goal, often thought to be unattainable. Is this hubris, the arrogance of the individual's belief that his is the only will capable of shaping reality? Or is it the mark of greatness, the symbol of a man triumphing over his own needs to give to the world a measure of justice? This fundamental question underpins Mr. Duiker's fascinating if mysterious biography.

Born in 1890 to Confucian parents living in French-controlled Vietnam, Ho Chi Min rose from obscurity to become one of the formative figures of 20th-century Asia. A student and a traveler, a thinker and a toiler, his life's journey took him from the parlors of Boston to the kitchens of Britain, from revolutionary gatherings in Paris to Soviet schools in Russia, until finally depositing him back in Vietnam, at the head of a movement to take back his homeland from the European and Asian colonialists who sought to dominate it. Here, he helped ignite a war that, while it dispatched the French from his native shores, helped make Vietnam the focal point for a Cold-War showdown 20 years in the making. This conflict with the United States devastated his divided country, tipping it into a political despotism from which it would take decades to recover.

Despite the fact that Ho Chi Min was a pivotal figure in both of these wars, and more broadly in the liberation of his country from colonialist rule, his life remains a mystery. Driven to communism by the political perfidy of the west, he was nonetheless a deep admirer of both the United States and France. He immersed himself in their cultures and their values, drawing from their founding documents models of responsible, moral government for his own subjugated nation. Moreover, he was a fighter for freedom, and yet he allowed his administration in Northern Vietnam to be characterized by political executions and one-party totalitarianism, sins that would never be tolerated by the nations he so admired. These appear to be contradictions that will never be resolved. For they might well be present in any man who drives himself to be the father of his nation.

Though at times consumed by an obsessive eye for detail, Ho Chi Min is nonetheless a thorough examination of southeast Asia in the first half of the 20th century. Mr. Duiker, who served during the Vietnam War and who has since become a professor of history at Penn State University, certainly trains all of his formidable powers upon the life of his subject, from his early travels to his Soviet radicalism, from his pleas to the west to his resistance to French, Japanese and Chinese control. However, his work here functions best as a lens through which to examine the broader effects that European colonialism had on Vietnam. For there can be no doubt that France's unwillingness to acknowledge Vietnamese independence, coupled with the deaf ear the liberty-obsessed United States turned to Ho Chi Min's pleas for aid, sapped the west of the moral authority necessary to make anti-communist allies of these ancient nations searching for a 20th-century identity. These tragic missteps not only lead to wars of attrition, they completely re-shaped the political conflicts of the latter half of the century, ensuring that millions more would suffer under the authoritarian yoke of totalitarianism for decades to come.

As a biography of Ho Chi Min, though, Mr. Duiker's work here leaves much to be desired. For though the author manages to capture something of the essence of the man in his youth, this impression fades with time until Ho becomes almost a complete enigma, no more three-dimensional here than he is in the posters and the legal tender that bear his likeness. This is not entirely Mr. Duiker's fault. After all, it is abundantly clear that the details of Ho's later life, particularly the decades in which he actually held political power, have been assiduously guarded by the authorities who have inherited the countries he created. Getting trustworthy and honest information from them must have been virtually impossible. And yet, Mr. Duiker doesn't help his case by abandoning the effort to understand Ho. Indeed, as if snubbed by the man's impenetrable facade, the author succumbs to a lifeless, systematic recitation of historical facts that we would expect from a textbook, not from a biography of a human being. In this, Ho Chi Min leaves much to be desired.

Ho Chi Min is an excellent primer on the political and economic forces at play in southeast Asia leading up to the Cold War. It is thorough and scholarly, virtues that imbue it with gravitas and meaning. But as a biography of the man himself, it suffers at the hands of mythology, the forces of which will make Ho's life all the more opaque in the decades to come. (3/5 Stars)

Entertaining historical mysteries in The Hangman's Daughter series

From The Week of February 25, 2013
As much as the well-heeled would have us think otherwise, society runs thanks to dirty work. From glittering skyscrapers to speeding trains, from internet searches to life-saving medical equipment, countless men and women had to lay those bricks and dig those tunnels, unspool those undersea cables and test those machines, knowing that failure would, at best, cost people their lives and, at worst, undermine society's faith in the virtues of civilization. It is easy for us to forget these truths. For the souls who labor to keep our streets safe, our supermarkets stocked and our houses electrified are largely invisible, their efforts unheralded by a world far more fixated on the feats of the extraordinary than the toils of the masses. The efforts of millions to make the human world go round... This is a truth as relevant now as it has been at any point in the history of agricultural man and it is one explored with delight and darkness in Mr. Potzsch's entertaining series.

Seventeenth-century Germany was a grim and savage place. Riven by the Thirty Years' War, an apocalyptic conflict that claimed the lives of millions while leading to the widespread disintegration of law and order, it was comprised of a series of fiefdoms at the heart of the Holy Roman Empire. It laid claim to philosophers and universities, powerful armies and advancing technologies, and yet it was also consumed by the corrosive fire of religious discord that, having erupted from the rise of Protestantism, had spent the last hundred years washing across much of civilized Europe. But as much as the war's cost was monetarily incalculable, it took an even graver price from the men who were paid or compelled to perpetrate its atrocities and from the families who were forced to bear its deprivations. Such scars are generational, wounds that cannot easily be forgotten.

Jakob Kuisl's entire life was defined by the great war. The son of a town hangman, he disavowed his family's calling for the life of a mercenary. But when, after many years of senseless slaughter, this life proved too dark for his soul, he took up his father's fallen sword and became an executioner. As much healer as killer, Kuisl is as skilled with poisons as curatives, as capable of breaking bones as mending them. And yet, though he and his brothers perform necessary services for the people, they are viewed with suspicion and disrespect by the communities that pay them, communities that impose upon the hangmen a dishonor emanating from their own shame. Despite the obvious injustice, there's nothing Kuisl or his like can do about this disregard except live with honor and do what must be done.

Home from the war, circumstances conspire to keep Kuisl busy. For not only does his hometown require his services, but murder seems to follow him wherever he goes. Devils and ghosts, priests and traitors, stalk his steps and those of his fiery daughter who herself is enchained by the hangman's life. Together, they must endeavor to live free in a world that scorns them, all while meting out some kind of justice in a world that has been without it for so long it might not even recognize its righteous glow.

Though far from masterpieces of fiction, the novels of The Hangman's Daughter are entertaining fair from a promising German author. Translated into English and sold through an amazon imprint, each of the collections stories -- there are four to date -- follow the familiar mystery model, kicked off by a death, often gruesome, that the heroes then proceed to solve over the next several hundred pages. Though this formula is, by now, quite wrote, the deep-seated historical flavor of Potzsch's work elevates the series out of the mundane and into the engagingly foreign as our familiar, modern moralities and customs are thrown aside for a world rooted in gods and superstition.

This is undoubtedly the series' greatest virtue. For though its three core characters -- Kuisl, the bearish and brooding hangman; Magdalena, his stubborn and tempestuous daughter; and Simon, her diminutive but devoted admirer -- are interesting, if somewhat predictable, it is the world that mesmerizes. For though religion is still prevalent in the 21st century, it is a faith confined largely to the church. Science has compelled Christianity to largely withdraw in defeat from the battlefield of society, government, philosophy and especially medicine, leaving our days to be defined by data, by logic, by facts. The opposite is true in Potzsch's conception of 17th-century Germany the society of which is almost entirely subsumed by religion. Every mystery and every murder, every insult and every dispute, is viewed through the lens of faith which, unfortunately, allows many of the men and women raised in this time to seize upon God as an easy answer. Strange markings on the backs of children? It must be witchcraft. Women succumbing to fever and moments of madness? It must be the devil. snap judgements are made because they can be, because there is nothing like science to stand up to these unreasoned conclusions, to refute them with researched truths.

But though the series succeeds in its wish to entertain, it falls short of excellence. For Potzsch is far too captivated by masterminding Kuisl into a 17th-century detective to actually show us the man's occupation. Rarely do we actually see Kuisl perform his duties, let alone with anything other than supreme reluctance which smacks to this reader like an author unwilling to sully his hero with even a whiff of injustice. Strange, really, for Potzsch is quite content to bestow upon Kuisl a savage backstory, but this too is glimpsed only through faded recollection and not the fullness of Potzsch's dark prose. A similar criticism could be leveled at Magdalena, the eponymous hangman's daughter if, that is, she was relevant enough to bother with criticism. The woman may be charmingly self-possessed, but she is rarely anything more than a device for the author to advance the story. We're never truly made to feel the chafing of the constricted life she is forced to lead.

Entertaining work. These are fun mysteries to blow through on a weekend. However, they suffer from the plain fact that others have done better. The inevitable comparisons with Ariana Franklin and the like do not flatter The Hangman's Daughter. (3/5 Stars)

Temple Grandin's exquisite, moving examination of Animals in Translation

From The Week of February 25, 2013
Humans trust most what they can see, touch and taste. For ones senses not only provide a means by which reality can be verified, they grant us the opportunity to distinguish the advantageous from the punitive, the pleasing from the painful. They are the filters by which we come to understand our world. Sadly, though, like any useful tool, relying too much on our senses can be dangerous, welcoming us into a kind of dependence that causes us to discard any piece of information we do not comprehend. We hear birdsong, but do we understand that it conveys information? We see pollution clouding our skies, but do we investigate the damage it causes? We re-shape the earth, but do we consider the domino effect this has on the climate and the species who share it with us? No. We blunder forth, our reliance on our senses having programmed into us an arrogance that all-too-often leads us to our doom. Rarely has this ignorance been so winningly demonstrated than in Ms. Grandin's charming and fascinating examination of animal behavior.

Autistic long before the condition was even notionally understood, Temple Grandin grew up in a world she did not understand. The world that we take for granted, the world that seems so orderly and obvious to us, was, to her abnormal brain, a chaotic mess of stimuli and distraction which not only made little sense, but kept her from maturing alongside her peers. However, what Ms. Grandin lacked in sociability with humans she more than made up for with animals, creatures whose motives and actions seemed comprehensible to her in a way that the rest of us either dismissed or took for granted.

Harnessing this fondness, Ms. Grandin embarked upon a career working with animals of all stripes. From healing to killing, she has spent 30 years watching their behaviors, experiencing their emotions and sussing out the bent of their thoughts. And in this she has made some wonderful discoveries about what triggers their rages, what sooths their spirits, and what defines their desires. These personal experiences, along with her extensive research into the creatures she's devoted her life to, are gathered together to reveal an animal world that is hardly the two-dimensional game of predator and prey that we see, but a universe of emotions, experiences and talents that are not only beyond human ken, but human capacity as well. This is a world of dogs and horses, cows and cats, that seems all-the-more obvious for this journey.

animals in Translation is mesmerizing work. Peppering her chronicle with facts about the creatures most familiar to us, Ms. Grandin needs only 300 pages to convince the reader that the animal kingdom is a rich and diverse world defined as much by motive as genetics. From the subsonic vibrations of elephant communication to the complex emotions of horses, from the sexual violence of roosters to the brutality of dolphins, she captures an environment of routine and mystery, of power and death, that is as far from the fluffy and the cartoonish as it's possible to get. Though she devotes considerable time to numerous other creatures, dogs feature here most prominently. From their bites to their mysterious abilities to sniff out our seizures and our cancers, Ms. Grandin uses their minds and their attitudes to reveal to us a world that has to be studied without biases, without blinders, to be properly understood.

The work is not without its flaws. To someone who has not experienced autism, the validity of Ms. Grandin's theory, that this condition helps the human to think more like an animal, is unclear. The author provides examples of how animal and autistic behaviors overlap, experiments whose results are admittedly quite striking, but these conclusions are largely drawn from anecdotal data. This is a problem also apparent in the parts of the work that concern animal behavior. Here, Ms. Grandin uses personal experiences, along with those of her acquaintances, to exemplify her contentions about the work-ings of the animal mind. It may well be that anecdote is the easiest means by which the author can convey her decades of accumulated knowledge to the reader. If so, it is certainly successful. But it does leave some doubt as to the scientific veracity underpinning her conclusions.

Notwithstanding its personal nature, Animals in Translation is a captivating adventure through the minds of creatures who, for some of us, are not only our friends but our sustenance. In this, it is as revelatory as it is enlightening. The animal mind will never be thought of the same way again. )& # ((4/5 Stars)

Police corruption and "the trial of the century" in Dash's Satan's Circus

From The Week of February 25, 2013
Though the truism "absolute power corrupts absolutely" has been proven far too many times to be doubted, it is perhaps too pithy to capture the full truth. For it is not enough to simply say that power is corruptible. We must understand why it corrupts. We must grasp precisely what forces, temptations and inclinations lead men and women of good character down the road to autocracy and authoritarianism. Is it that self-doubt is an essential and underappreciated aspect to the good life that keeps in check our worst excesses? Are we not built to bear the responsibility for the lives of the many? Or is it that we simply lack the proper understanding of institutions and their capacity to corrupt those who rise through its ranks to helm its tentacled arms? These are but a few theories amongst many that attempt to answer this most important mystery. If Mr. Dash's excellent micro-history is any indication, he too considers this a question of serious note.

Since "the trial of the century," New York City has changed beyond recognition. Today, it is a clean city of power and finance with safe streets, a thriving multiculture and gentrified boroughs that make it an ornament of human urbanism. But a hundred years ago, it was something else entirely, a lawless sprawl of immigrants and hedonists, honest laborers and cunning thieves, all vying for a piece of American prosperity. Prohibition was on the horizon, a foolish law that would only further empower the city's criminal element while institutionalizing the kind of widespread corruption that had been the city's hallmark for decades. From glorious city hall to the most fetid back alley, everything in this American melting pot was purchasable. A price had only to be named for negotiations to begin.

Into this fast-talking, gun-toting maelstrom plunged Charles Becker. The child of German immigrants, he came to new York City looking for a life of opportunity. He joined a notoriously corrupt police service which, in the early decades of the 20th century, not only allowed the criminal element to run unchecked, it encouraged it in exchange for its slice of this most profitable pie. However, rather than simply following in the footsteps of tradition, Becker took NYPD corruption to the next level, helming a special anti-vice unit that oversaw much of the extortionist activities within Satan's Circus, the colloquial name for one of Manhattan's most iniquitous districts. Despite Becker's legendary influence and control, however, his empire quickly fell when he was personally fingered for having orchestrated the murder of a legendary gambler about to blow the whistle on police corruption. What resulted was the Trial of the century, a grandstanding affair that not only cost Becker his life but lead to the dawning of a new era for the NYPD and the city it was meant to protect.

Though it revels in the sensationalism of the period, Satan's Circus is, nonetheless, a breathless and breathtaking examination of a now forgotten time. Mr. Dash, an Welsh writer, deploys becker's life and trial as a lens through which to view turn-of-the-century New York in all of its sinful splendor. From prostitutes to gamblers, from crooked cops to immigrant gangs, the author chronicles the haunts, the practices, the legends and the schemes that characterized this gin-soaked period of American history, doing so with style and veracity. In this, Mr. Dash lucks out. For though Becker himself is something of a predictable creature, a man who could not resist the twin seductions of power and money within a corrupt system, the host of long-since forgotten gangsters and gamblers pulled to the surface by Becker's literary excavation are as delightful as they are utterly ruthless.

While Satan's Circus succeeds on the merits of its aspirations as a cultural micro-history, it is equally adept at highlighting the political corruption of the period. The 21st-century media is obsessed with the downfall of American politics, but one glimpse of the machinations of the 1910s reveals a nation where not just votes but candidates were bought and sold, promoted and discarded, by a relentless and unstoppable machine that had been in place since the mid 19th century. Though this will hardly be a revelation to some, the detail here is nonetheless an excoriation of the notion that politics are today in a bad state. For what today can compare to a sham democracy run by crooked administrators who selected their own candidates for the most powerful offices imaginable.? Truly very little.

Satan's Circus delights in the debauchery of pre-prohibition new York. It gets down with the gutter snipes to tell the tales of some decidedly slimy characters. But though it may, at times, openly root for some of its villains, it is so charming and shocking that these relatively minor sins can easily be forgiven. An excellent romp through a blood-soaked time of injustice and corruption. (4/5 Stars)