Turkey's contrasting cultures explored in Livaneli's moving Bliss

From The Week of April 22, 2013

What is the process by which our bodies, and indeed our lives, are chosen for us? Traditionally, religion has had the most pleasing answer to this existential question, trusting that only god has the power, the wisdom and the desire to assign our souls to the newborns of his choosing. This explanation has held sway for a long time, and why not? It's a satisfying answer, one which gives reason to why some of us are born into fortune while others are delivered into lives of misery. But what if it is nothing more than random chance? What if nothing but a simple quirk of fate stands between the child born of American splendor and the one born of Iraqi war? How different their lives would unfold, how different their experiences and dreams, all on the basis f a flipped coin... O. Z. Livaneli's novel cannot be read without musing over this question and all that it portends.

In present day Turkey, a country of religion and secularism, of modern cities and tribal mountains, of liberalism and honor killings, national identity is a tenuous thing. Forged by the will of a giant of history, and enforced by the overzealous military he bequeathed to his new nation, it is compelled to enshroud not only the westernized urbanites of Istanbul, but the sons and daughters of an ancient east, a place that owes more of its morality to the seventh century than to any other time, or institution. To the West, these are unimaginable stresses pulling at the fabric of society. For they have long since harmonized from helpfully homogeneous roots. But to the east, this is all too common, the chaotic and jumbled legacy of western colonialism and eastern empires that have made borders fluid and non-religious traditions scarce.

Meryem, a fifteen-year-old girl born into this world in flux, is a daughter of the east. Her life is duty and obligation. For she is subject to a skein of Islamic tradition that endows its women with the honor of the tribe. And should that honor be lost, she must be punished, not those who took the honor from her. Thus, when her uncle cruelly assaults her, she, not the uncle, is blamed for her lost virginity. Manipulatively encouraged to commit suicide as a means of restoring family honor, Meryem resists, thus beginning a journey across Turkey in the company of her war-damaged cousin, a journey that will carry her far from home while exposing her to a world of spiritual, intellectual and sexual freedom she could have never imagined.

Penned by one of turkey's most famous, living musicians, Bliss is spellbinding work. No piece of literature can ever truly capture the reality of a place. However, to w to whatever extent it can come close, Mr. Livaneli has succeeded, creating, with Meryem's journey across the physical and spiritual plains, a tapestry of Turkey that won't be easily dismissed. Deploying three main characters to represent the divisive, entrenched tensions that characterize modern Turkey, it exposes the reader to the nearly insurmountable challenge of uniting a place that harbors such disparate values. For the west, as represented by Irfan, the wealthy but aimless professor whose path crosses with Meryem, and who helps her to realize her potential, thinks of the east as backward and depraved, a place where religion claims the mantle of moral authority while doing nothing to discourage, much less halt, the suffering of the disenfranchised.

Meanwhile, the east, as represented by Cemal, Meryem's war-ravaged cousin who is tasked by his family with the obligation of quietly disposing of Meryem to restore the family's honor, views the west as soulless and weak. They have not fought and died for what they believe in. They have not suffered for the freedoms they enjoy. More than that, they are proud of their bloodless secularism, flaunting their sinful ways and exposing good men like Cemal to constant, torturous temptation. How such worlds can be reconcile is beyond the ken of these three souls searching for meaning and truth.

Mr. Livaneli is no master of prose. In fact, this is the novel's major weakness, a simplicity of style that reminds us that he is, here, out of his native element. However, whatever the novel loses in its composition it more than reclaims with its characters who are animated from their archetypal roots to become living, feeling creatures, damaged souls looking for truth and freedom in a world that's never asked them what they wanted.

This is at times a difficult read. It does not shrink from the cruelties of honor-based societies. But rather than languishing in them, rather than bemoaning their existence, it offers hope to the hopeless, believing that life can change for the better by merely offering everyone a chance to make their own choices. Wonderful sentiments for such a grave tale... (4/5 Stars)

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is an intriguing, menacing monologue

From The Week of April 22, 2013

For society, radicalism is a dangerous and pernicious force. Not only is it nearly impossible to eliminate, being that it counterintuitively draws nourishment from every attempted extermination, it neatly divides the world into us and them, righteous and wicked, brave and servile, polarities that are as unhelpful as they are inaccurate. Radicalism is a siren's call to those aimless souls who, in seeking a purpose, fall prey to its song of enslavement, demanding obeisance in exchange for guidance in a manner that saps the victim of his most valuable essence, the will to be free. But while we have a solid grasp of how radicalism impacts our world, our understanding of how people come to be radicalized is far less solid. Enter Mohsin Hamid's brief but engaging novel.

In a comfortable cafe in the heart of Lahore, Pakistan's second city, two men engage in a consequential, lopsided dialogue. The narrator, an intelligent man who was raised in Pakistan and educated in America, carries the conversation, describing how he came to the united States, full of western dreams and western ideals. While his American companion listens, the narrator, reveals how a devastatingly complex relationship with an American woman of privilege and an increasingly soulless job at a financial firm in New York ate away at his idealism, leaving him profoundly unhappy. As the American listens with mounting tension, the narrator reveals how this growing sense of discontentment was sharpened with the onset of 9/11, an event which, or so the narrator believes, presaged Pakistan's political and military crisis with India in the early aughts. The narrator cannot forgive America for this threat to his homeland. And so with increasing malice, the night unfolds with the American's safety in grave doubt.

Published to acclaim in 2007, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a work as poignant as it is swift. Describing in conversational detail the disintegration of one man's life and dreams for his future, it offers up to a West drowning in its own, biased conception of the world, a view from the other side of the tracks. For the narrator embodies the promise of young, intelligent Asians who come to the United States, believing in the very dream sold to them by both Hollywood and the American government. And like all men who invest themselves in dreams that are not based on reality, they find themselves disappointed when the truth of the West, and America in particular, is far more nuanced and complicated than they would have ever anticipated. This leaves them feeling betrayed, tricked into working to perpetuate the designs of an unfathomably large machine that doesn't care about them, much less the safety or the sanctity of the nations from which they've emigrated.

Similarly, The Reluctant Fundamentalist's other character, the American listener, embodies the West with whom the narrator is truly dialoguing. The American is given no right of reply, no bully pulpit with which to refute or drown out the narrator's arguments. He is, instead, forced to listen to a man who has come to hate what he stands for, seeing in its smugness, arrogance and thoughtlessness a toxic stew of sins that must be corrected one way or another. This captivity is mesmerizing, endowing the work with a kind of mesmerizing bondage. One understands the lash is coming, that it is driven by anger and betrayal, but that there is nothing that can be done to avoid it, that the thing must be seen through to its inevitable and perhaps even violent conclusion.

For all its charm, The Reluctant Fundamentalist never quite pays off its promise. Mr. Hamid sheds some light on the mystery of his central premise, why some Muslims come to despise America after being embraced by it, but he never succeeds in answering what might be the unanswerable. For as much as his narrator lays out his reasons for his heart's hardening toward the West, these feel like self-serving excuses designed to justify the failure of an intelligent, educated man to be happy. Perhaps this is Mr. Hamid's point, that radicalism is an outgrowth of dissatisfaction, but this has very little to do with the West. Indeed, the West, in such a scenario, is merely a boogeyman against which one can take out their frustrations. The narrator hasn't catalogued America's many extraordinary crimes, overthrowing governments, supporting dictators, targeted killings. No, he seems taken, instead, by his own internal drama in a manner that suggests he's less than stable.

Regardless, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a fascinating read, all the more potent for its breeziness. Provocative and mysterious... (3/5 Stars)

The history of Sharia detailed in Kadri's Heaven on Earth

From The Week of April 22, 2013

Humanity's relationship with the unknown has had a long and thorny history. For our minds are not predisposed to logic. They have not evolved to bring patience and reason to bear as weapons against the mysteries of the world. Rather, they have evolved from a violent and tribal foundation that perpetuated the species long before we possessed language, let alone a written system with which to express it. With this in mind, it is understandable that science is far more alien to us than god. For, when assessing the beauty of a flower, who among us has the skill and the rigor to tease out the biological and botanical truths that make it so when it is so much easier to credit its glory to god? And yet, we must understand this deficit and overcome it. If we do not strive for better answers than the ones that rely purely on spiritualism, then the thorny, and often tragic, result is what Sadakat Kadri describes in so much detail in his engaging history of Sharia.

Descending from both the Quran, Islam's holy book, and the Sunnah, the deeds and declarations of Islam's prophet Mohammed, Sharia is a collection of codes of conduct that define, for Muslims, the standards and obligations of the good life. From laws to economics, from the duties of prayer to the dictates of divorce, Sharia provides a societal tapestry that, in knitting together the public and private spheres, creates, in theory, a harmony amongst Muslim lands, all of which must adhere to these codes to be considered righteous. It provides for charity and mutual obligation. It implements safeguards against the excesses of aristocracy while protecting the underprivileged. It unites the rights of the individual with his or her obligation to the greater good, remarkable sentiments considering that they emanate from the relative intellectual darkness of the seventh century.

For all its virtues, however, for all that it provides the building blocks of a moral society, Sharia is an ever-moving target, a school of ethics that, in the centuries since the death of its progenitors, have been constantly re-interpreted by a series of powerful Islamic scholars. The views of these men have, over the years, been taken up by their adherents and organized into schools of thought and belief that often stand in opposition to one another. Without a centralized, authoritarian body to act as the final arbiter on the understanding of, and implementation of, these disputes, these schools have been allowed to perpetuate, making impossible the unity of Sharia's promise. Some of these disputes are merely doctrinal, having only a passing effect on the lives of those who live under its sway, but some are not only consequential, but severe, leading to the enshrinement of violent views that have fuelled the clash of civilizations.

Narrating both Sharia's history and its consequences, Heaven on Earth is a fascinating and multi-faceted work that endeavors to educate its readers on the nature of this codified morality and to weigh up what responsibility it bears for modern Islamic fundamentalism. Mr. Kadri, a lawyer and journalist by trade, approaches this sensitive topic systematically, resurrecting the towering figures of Sharia's past and using their views as a means of describing the evolution of Sharia and its application. Consequently, in the work's first part, the reader is exposed to not only well-known figures like Mohammed, but the men, Ahmad ibn Handal and Ibn Taymiyyah to name but two, who endeavored to interpret him and whose writings were in turn deployed by their followers as a means of justifying their view of the world.

In the work's second part, Mr. Kadri leaves behind this dense but edifying history and returns the reader to modern day where Sharia is more often used as a means of exercising power than it is as a code of ethics for an honorable society. Mr. Kadri explores the views of fundamentalists and their organizations, leaving no doubt in the mind of the reader that their vehemence is less an outgrowth of Islam than it is a byproduct of individuals who find, in hate and violence, a comforting sense of power and order that helps them explain the cultural and economic dominance of the west. Galvanized by Islamic scholars reacting to the Western sin of colonialism which has had a profoundly deleterious impact on the Islamic world, they seek justification to punish and castigate outsiders while holding their own adherents to impractically high standards of conduct and belief. This is the work's most potent section. For it deals directly with issues western societies grapple with every day, providing context to what otherwise seems so senseless.

There are flaws here. Mr. Kadri's work assumes that its readers have a pre-existing familiarity with Islam. Moreover, it moves through history at an almost dizzying pace, leaving the reader little time to grow accustomed to changing mores. Both of these problems would have been solved by lengthening the chronicle and providing the reader with a more leisurely swim through the tides of history. But these are minor gripes in what is otherwise a document that has resulted from extraordinary research.

Sharia's clash with western ideas of society and human rights will never entirely end. For these two traditions have taken entirely different evolutionary tracks which have caused them to place different values on commonly held ethics. God and secularism, obligation and individual rights... These are oil and water, leaving the rest of us to try to learn what we can as a means of better understanding our world and our fellows. To that end, Mr. Kadri's work does us all a service. (4/5 Stars)

The Petrovitch Trilogy booms and sizzles like a Hollywood blockbuster

From The Week of April 15, 2013

Beforelong, any discussion of what constitutes a good life inevitably turns to the fundamental question of what we, as individuals, owe to the world into which we are born. We cannot choose the society that birthed us. Nor can we necessarily choose to emigrate to the society that best suits us. And so, given that we lack a full measure of agency in this area, one would expect our answer to be that we owe our world nothing, that one can only feel an obligation to something that they have freely chosen to belong to. Despite this, many of us choose to give back not only our time and money, but, in some cases, our very lives. Such a selfless act of devotion to a society can only mean that, to some of us, society is everything. This most enduring debate underpins Simon Morden's explosive, apocalyptic trilogy.

It is the third decade of the 21st century and the world has been convulsed by terrorism. An event known simply as the Armageddon, a series of nuclear suicide bombings perpetrated by zealots, destroyed much of the new century's promise, reducing many of the world's countries to radioactive wastelands and triggering a refugee crisis throughout what remained. The United States and the European Union appear to be the two remaining powers of significance. However, the former is too beset by its own religious fundamentalism and the latter is too convulsed by seeming indifference to set about restoring order to a planet in political, environmental and economic shambles.

Amidst this ruin endures Samuel Petrovitch. A refugee from radioactive Saint Petersburg, he has come to post-Armageddon London, now known as the Metrozone, to attend school at the Imperial College of London where he has distinguished himself as a brilliant thinker in the field of experimental physics. Cynical beyond his youthful years, he has been deeply scarred by a hellish adolescence that has left him with not only a faulty heart, but a heavily burdened conscience that, despite his every effort, he cannot quash. He wishes only to be left alone, to create something glorious out of the rubble, but fate has conspired to place him at the center of great events over which he has only minimal control, events that have the power to transform the world beyond something even Petrovitch's powerful mind would recognize.

Ambitiously grappling with any number of vital social issues, The Samuel Petrovitch Trilogy is a gripping thrillride through a post-nuclear Hell. Mr. Morden imagines a profoundly scarred world that has finally paid a high price for nuclear proliferation. He's then seeded this world with a fascinating array of characters, all of whom have suffered through not only Armageddon, but the socioeconomic fallout that has virtually ended the notion of local government, transferring the bulk of political power, at least in the Metrozone, into the hands of gangland figures and crime lords who possess the lethal combination of ruthlessness and manpower to make some kind of order from the chaos. We are made witness to the birth of religions, of social classes, even of new traditions, that would have been unimaginable even 20 years earlier.

Though Mr. Morden's trilogy is squarely aimed at readers seeking plots and prose drenched in adrenaline, his work here is elevated by a series of ethical questions that will transfix more thoughtful readers. The author deploys Petrovitch as a cipher for the technologies of tomorrow, a means through which his readers can interpret both the promise and the terror of what's to come. What are the potential costs to human society of widespread computer automation of infrastructure and transportation? What are the spiritual implications of creating artificial intelligences which exhibit every indication of sentience and conscience? What should we be willing to sacrifice, in the form of order, to open our borders to refugees from dying nations? These are merely a few of the numerous 21st-century debates that, yet to be widely argued, will undoubtedly define the decades to come. Mr. Morden executes them with skill and style.

For all its thematic virtues, however, let there be no doubt that this series has its numerous troubles. The Samuel Petrovitch Trilogy is the literary equivalent to a Hollywood summer blockbuster, an explosive spectacle that, in the silence between cacophonies, seeks to say something profound. To Mr. Morden's credit, he pulls off this magic trick far more fluidly than do his siblings in cinema, but this does not alter the reality that these three works are bloated with post-apocalyptic action sequences that are both repetitive and overblown. Moreover, when it comes to metaphor, Mr. Morden has the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Petrovitch's malformed heart is meant to represent the profound selfishness that is the face he puts to the world. His search for a healthy alternative is meant to parallel his search for goodness, both internal and external. And yet, it's clear that Petrovitch already possesses a conscience and a spiritual heart, compelling Mr. Morden to pivot this metaphor to one of man becoming machine that never escapes the hopelessly theatrical.

However much this trilogy is like a fine rock band that plays too loudly just because it can, its merits ultimately overcome its flaws. This is not just a nihilistic journey through a crumbling world. This is a vision of a utopia being born out of the ashes of human error and ignorance. Executing this vision requires not just talent, but a desire to say something meaningful. That is a virtue we can all celebrate. (3/5 Stars)

A beautifully written snapshot of a global city and its history in Istanbul

From The Week of April 15, 2013

Do cities have personalities? They are old and young, big and small, dirty and clean. They come in nearly as many varieties as their human builders and occupiers, but are they alive? Logic would say no, that they are nothing more than an accumulation of glass and concrete anthropomorphized into existence by humans who wish it so. And yet, if they are not alive, how else can we explain their attitudes, their dispositions, their moods? How else can we account for the seemingly obvious reality that generations hand down a city's character like a badge of honor or a cross to bear? Orhan Pamuk, arguably turkey's most famous, living writer, seems to have no doubt that cities have personalities. For he was raised in one of the most glorious of them all.

For nearly 1,600 years, Istanbul has been an ornament of the world. Christened by an emperor of Rome, it has been home to Byzantines and Arabs, ottomans and turks, civilizations which have, over the centuries, bequeathed this great city with gifts of culture and history, some of which stand to this day, defying disasters, both man-made and natural, to sunder them. It is home to great temples and even greater legends. But beyond its bizarres and its attractions, it is a city that straddles Europe and Africa, west and east, Christianity and Islam. It is a city of millions of souls seeking enlightenment and enrichment, culture and advancement, at the nexus of the world.

The son of one of its once-proud families, Mr. Pamuk grew up on these busy streets. He explored Istanbul's neighborhoods and matriculated through its schools. He dated its women and tested its limits, all while attempting, with his artist's heart, to capture Istanbul in all her glory. Imagining himself a painter, he tried countless times to represent the essence of the place on canvas, to distill its essence into something tangible the world could understand. But these talents eventually shifted to pen and paper, a medium in which he is an undeniable master.

Interweaving his personal history with that of his beloved city, Mr. Pamuk has created, in Istanbul, a moving and unflinching portrait of a life at the crux of the world. As critical of his own failings as he is of Istanbul's, he nonetheless manages to convey, over his many, long walks through this city of ten million, a sense of fog and mystery, of western thought and eastern passion, that fills the reader's senses with the sights and sounds of an unforgettable place. But more than simply describing it to us, he reveals the minds it has shaped and who have shaped it, past giants of literature whose melancholia not only captured the imagination of the author, but so clearly permeates the place. This, along with Mr. Pamuk's willingness to share so much of himself, his struggles and his fears, makes this an irresistible read.

For all of the splendor of Mr. Pamuk's prose, Istanbul could have benefited from more history. The author reaches into Istanbul's past only to conjure forth the great minds it has helped to nourish. Otherwise, he makes no attempt to describe, or to elucidate, the civilizations and the societies that have claimed it over the centuries. A pity, really. For the work does so much to reveal the gloominess and quirkiness of the place, to imbue its streets with meaning, that one can only imagine how Istanbul would have come alive if the reader was endowed with the context of its glorious and violent past.

This is mesmerizing work. Even if one has no time for the topic, the pleasure of watching Mr. Pamuk at work is sufficient to make this a memorable and rewarding experience. (4/5 Stars)

the rocky road to Justice in postwar Kosovo in Under The Blue Flag

From The Week of April 15, 2013

When tallying up the cost of war, it's natural for our minds to first turn to the most obvious losses: lives and fortunes. These are measurable deficits, quantifiable burdens that can be inscribed into the hearts and textbooks of a people and used as a crude means by which to compare conflicts. But just because they are obvious doesn't make them foremost in importance. On the contrary, sometimes those things we cannot measure -- the grief of a broken heart, the arrested development of a child without a school, the cynicism of a citizen who knows the rule of law does not hold -- have far more lasting consequences than the readily apparent. Their ephemeral natures trick us into underestimating their collective power to instill in war's victims a gloominess about the future that means far more than a rubbled building. After all, a building can be rebuilt. A broken spirit cannot so easily be mended. This Philip Kearney convincingly contends in his memoir of the most fascinating and challenging adventure of his career.

One of the bloodiest chapters in a most gruesome campaign, the Kosovo War, lasting little over a year, pitted two ethnic communities against one another in a vicious fight for freedom. Unwilling to allow one of its provinces to secede from its collective, Yugoslavia endeavored to crush Kosovo by subjecting it with crimes the likes of which Europe had not seen since the Second World War some five decades earlier. Equally unwilling to be ground out beneath the Serbian bootheel, Kosovo violently resisted, an act which caused it to spawn the powerful and ruthless Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) which sought to win, through terrorism and guerilla warfare, what could not be won in open combat. Though the war lasted over fifteen months, it devastated Kosovo to such a degree that the United Nations stepped in to run the protectorate until it could stand on its own.

At this time, Mr. Kearney was a successful prosecutor in his native San Francisco. Married, and with work to keep him occupied, the prospect of him traveling to Kosovo to help the UN bring cases of war crimes against some of Kosovo's foulest characters must have seemed impossibly remote. And yet, the restlessness of a midlife crisis, combined with an abiding desire to do lasting good while at the height of his powers, found Mr. Kearney applying to the UN for a six-month stint in Kosovo as a UN-appointed prosecutor in a postwar Kosovo coming to grips with its deep and enduring wounds. This first adventure begot a second and, before he was through, Mr. Kearney would have spent eighteen months in war-ravaged Kosovo, helping to restore order to a lawless and broken place.

While problematic as a work of history, Under The Blue Flag is nonetheless an inspiring document that wonderfully captures the rewarding nature of dangerous, but ultimately righteous, work. Mr. Kearney virtually abandoned his comfortable life, trading it in for an existence in Kosovo that was both imperiled and difficult. Threatened by gangsters and terrorists, none of whom were interested in the niceties of civilization, he helped bring to that war-torn place a measure of justice long lost in first the corruption of Communism and then in the depravity of ethnic strife. He did all this all while knowing it would cost him money, friendships and even his marriage. He did it to satisfy the thirsts of his spirit, but also for a sense of rightness, of accomplishment, the potence of which only comes from a job well done under extraordinary circumstances.

However, for all that Mr. Kearney paints vivid portraits of the men he prosecuted, and while his detailing of their crimes sheds light on the awfulness of postwar Kosovo, his prose leaves a great deal to be desired. Under the Blue Flag is devoid of literary flare. Other than a few paragraphs describing the destitute nature of the author's environs, we're almost never presented with a verbal image of Kosovo. Mr. Kearney is fond of describing how much he loves this beleaguered place, and the loyalty he feels to the men and women with whom he worked to put some truly gruesome characters behind bars, but his talents utterly fail him when it comes time to root these criminals in the homeland for which so many died. Moreover, Mr. Kearney makes virtually no attempt to describe the Kosovo War, much less to place it in any historical context. Other than a few scant references to 14th-century battles that live on in the hearts and minds of modern-day Serbians, he makes no attempt to inform his readers about the creation of Yugoslavia, much less the Kosovo war which gave him the opportunity to serve in such a remarkable way. These are bodyblows to a memoir that aspires to be more than self-aggrandizement.

Under the Blue Flag is moving work that inspires us to take chances and be true to our selves and our desires. However, its failure to educate its readers on any issue but the personal history of Mr. Kearney, and the suffering of the peoples of the Balkans endeavoring to find justice in a broken world, prevents it from achieving greatness. (3/5 Stars)

Scams, corruption and the new Africa in Ferguson's 419

From The Week of April 8, 2013

What do we owe one another? More than seven billion people inhabit our planet, seven billion souls who dream as we do, work as we do, fail as we do. They possess different personalities, different goals, different cultural ethics, but they are fundamentally beings built from the same blueprint, individuals who descend from a common place and a common time. And yet, with this being true, we still fight one another, steal from one another, denigrate one another, all in the hopes of reserving for ourselves the largest portion of available resources and privileges possible. Some might argue this is right and proper. After all, of those seven billion, we will only ever meet a vanishingly small fraction. And we don't owe anything to people we'll never meet. Or do we? What are the costs of acting against those we'll never know? Will Ferguson ruminates in his intriguing novel of modern reality.

Known colloquially as a 419 scheme, drawing its name from the section of the Nigerian criminal code that prohibits it, this infamous practice attempts to defraud an individual of their savings by making the victim an offer temptation won't allow them to refuse. Having risen to prominence with the popularization of email, the Nigerian Scam is the most famous strain of this disease. Though it has various derivations, the scam generally offers the victim a lucrative payout if they will wire the scammer a substantial sum of money, ostensibly used by the scammer to unlock an even greater sum of money such as an inheritance. In reality, however, the scammer has no intention of paying back the victim. For the entire enterprise is a fiction used merely to capture the victim's initial investment. Though the odds of success are low for the scammer, the rewards are high enough for them to persist until they find someone credulous enough to fall for their lies.

Laura Curtis, a copy-editor living in Canada, is made painfully aware of the price of this scam when, after her father's death in a car accident, his bank accounts and email history reveal a devastating truth, that he is only of 419's victims. Preying on his chivalry, the scammer has defrauded the elder Curtis out of not only his savings but the money from a loan Curtis took out to aid a fictional girl. Though Laura's brother is enraged, haplessly threatening to sue everyone involved, Laura is the only one determined to act. Driven by grief, she attempts to track down the specific scammer, traveling to Nigeria where she is immersed in a world utterly foreign to her, a world of vicious criminal gangs, ruthless government troops, cold-hearted oil companies and beleaguered natives of the Nigeria delta trying to survive in a hellish, ever-changing environment.

A slow and steady build towards a darkly moving crescendo, 419 is at times laborious and mesmerizing. Mr. Ferguson deploys three primary protagonists, a Nigerian scammer, a native of the Nigerian delta and a beleaguered, pregnant girl from inner Africa, to draw the reader into a noisy world as utterly foreign to the West as it is harsh on its inhabitants. As the narrative switches between Lagos, the delta and the dubious roads and polluting oil derricks that connect them, we can feel modern Africa in all of its post-colonial splendor and corruption. Through the eyes of these partially empowered actors, we come to understand not only the heavy burden of colonialism's legacy left on the souls and the societies of this continent, but the razor-sharp keenness of the Resource Curse that afflicts Nigeria, miring it in so much corruption that it's nearly impossible for the country to lift itself out of economic chaos.

For all of the emotive power of 419's African characters, Laura Curtis is the novel's driving force. Sharing with the reader both culture and ethics, Curtis channels the reader's empathy and outrage which she shapes into a cold sword of justice. She is a bright spot of familiarity and vengeance amidst a sea of foreign ways and means. And yet, for all that she is the reader's port in the storm, she is also the novel's downfall. For Mr. Ferguson is never able to bring Laura to life in the same way he does the Nigerian cast. He tries to inject her with grief and rage, but these powerful emotions seem to slide off of her impenetrable exterior, leaving behind an austere shell. We sympathize with her plight and cheer on her desire for action, but this never coalesces into anything like a human being we'd recognize.

With an engaging cast of characters, cinematic prose and an expanse of quality research into both Nigeria and 419, Mr. Ferguson has produced an interesting read that pays off those who persist with it. However, periods of inactivity and the occasional slide into spiritualism prevent it from truly standing out. (3/5 Stars

the West's intellectual debt to the Arab world in The House of Wisdom

From The Week of April 8, 2013

Human history is defined by instability, a tumultuous sea of clashing cultures the waves of which bear aloft the victorious while its depths claim the defeated. And yet, such fortunes, or misfortunes, do not linger long. For like with the brief, violent life cycle of a wave, the victorious can be easily drowned. For in order for a culture to climb to the peak of civilization, it must innovate and create; it must streamline and strategize; but mostly it must supplant its foes, foes who, in the darkness of their subordination, nurse their battered pride and make of their wounds an enduring enmity that, someday, will contribute to a change at the top. Supremacy can never last forever. This much, if little else, Jonathan Lyons elucidates in his troubled history.

In the centuries following the death of the Roman Empire, while Europe was enshrouded in the gloom of cultural stagnancy and religious zealotry, the Middle East was experiencing a new dawn. The inheritors of the wisdom of the ancient Greeks, thanks to the alexandrian scholars who preserved such knowledge, the formerly disparate and warring tribes of Arabia had, under Mohammed, forged themselves into a new kind of empire, one built on the principles of a single book designed to provide a moral and political framework for their civilization. Eventually based in Baghdad, this Arab society flourished under a succession of rulers who encouraged scholarly learning, fashioning their subsequent insights into innovations that could transform their cities into palaces that would forever leave behind the plains of the dusty deserts from which they'd come.

From astronomy to philosophy, from the measuring of the earth to the understanding of the human body, this Arab awakening endured for more than three centuries, hundreds of years in which their doctors and metaphysicists would have been the envy of the world if the rest of the world, at least to the West, had not descended into superstition and ignorance. Thoughtful souls from far and wide came to learn at the court of these Arab masters until the rise of the Mongols ended all that they had built, smashing it beneath the hooves of their mountainous horses. Fragments remained. These same Arab tribes remained powerful enough to overthrow Byzantium and to make of Constantinople the seat of a new, Ottoman empire, but the dream of wisdom was over, leaving it to the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution to catalyze the advancement of civilization and transform the world into one empowered by western commerce and western technology.

For all its research, for all that it illuminates centuries of world history spitefully ignored by a self-referential West consumed by its own manifest destiny, The House of Wisdom is deeply flawed work. Mr. Lyons' intentions are good, to right a historical wrong by elevating to their proper place of prominence those Arab kings and thinkers who preserved and then improved upon the knowledge of the ancients and, in doing so, created an advanced civilization. However, instead of immersing the reader in the lives of these men and women, largely unknown to western minds, instead of bringing them to life with their histories, their struggles, their crowning achievements, the author chooses to castigate the dimness of western thought during the Middle Ages, devoting swaths of his history to describing Western barbarism and the many wars and tribulations that resulted from it. He must have intended for this to provide some kind of contrast to Arab learning. And yet, his tone is unavoidably reproachful of a culture that is now centuries dead and, thus, unable to hear his howls.

There are some exceptional Arab minds represented here. al-Haytham and al-Khwarizmi, amongst others, have numerous pages devoted to their deeds. And so the tome is not without moments of clarity that educate the reader. Moreover, Mr. Lyons is certainly right to argue that the Western mind receives an inexplicably skewed education in history, with the West forever marching towards enlightenment and freedom while the rest of the world is mired in chaos and darkness. And to whatever extend the author's work here corrects that gross misapprehension makes the enterprise worthwhile. But Mr. Lyons does not celebrate Arab learning. He uses it to sneer at a medieval West lost to doctrine. For proof of this, one needs only look to the work's protagonist,Adelard of Bath, who, despite being a fascinating character in his own right, is a westerner who realizes his culture is hopelessly behind Arab society. Yes, Adelard brings some Arab learning to the West, satisfying one of Mr. Lyons' themes here, but what he gains in this he more than loses in not truly embracing his subject, the prominence and power of post-roman Arabia.

This could have been wonderful work. But its twisted perspective ties it in knots from which it never untangles itself. A shame. For Its cause is just. The torch will have to fall to another to be carried forth. (2/5 Stars)

The filth and the power of hydrocarbons explored in Freese's Coal

From The Week of April 8, 2013

Everything runs on energy. From the lightest atom to the heaviest black hole, every organism, every system, cannot exist without some means of excitation, some motive force that allows it to act, that allows it to survive. Without energy, our universe would be a cold, dark, empty space, a lifeless cavern of scattered debris that once was something. And if this truth applies to galaxies, then it certainly applies to human civilizations which are just as voracious, just as greedy, merely on an considerably smaller scale. It follows, then, that few things are as vital to civilization's continuity than energy, the harnessing of which can be complicated both conceptually and morally. This much Barbara Freese captures well in her engaging biography of one of humanity's oldest and most powerful sources of energy.

For centuries now, coal has quite literally lit the world. The condensed remains of organic life millions of years dead and buried, it was once considered nothing more than an ornamentation, indistinguishable from jet by past civilizations that never made insight into coal's enormous potential. For when burned, coal releases its dense storage of hydrocarbons in the form of heat, energy that not only ignited stoves and empowered steamships, but lend its might to the Industrial Revolution. Over the subsequent generations, coal became a ubiquitous, and seemingly endless, source of energy which eventually culminated in a move out of the homes of everyday citizens and into the mighty fire chambers of powerplants which converted this energy into electricity for advancing societies.

Initially, coal was used without compunction by people who saw only its potential, not its price. Gradually, though, with our improving understanding of science and the environment, as our many, historical delusions fell before objective truth, we came to understand that coal was not only limited in supply but terrible in nature. For along with energy, the burning of coal releases immense amounts of CO2, a greenhouse gas that, traditionally, has been kept in careful check by a climate accustomed to balancing Oxygen and CO2 levels across geologic timescales. However, with the wholesale use of the planet's store of coal, that climate check is being threatened with an unmanageable amount of CO2 that might well have the power to forever transform our world.

From its earliest moments on the human stage to its most recent threats to destabilize the climate, Coal is a fascinating chronicle of humanity's relationship with this most advantageous and dangerous resource. Ms. Freese engagingly narrates centuries of human history as it pertains to coal, culminating in a fascinating and sobering description of the powerplants which, today, devour it at a frighteningly unsustainable rate. She highlights how coal once darkened every industrialized sky and hardened every industrialized lung, an inescapable scourge that occupied the thoughts and fears of millions. This sets up a potent punchline, that the centralization of coal burning -- its movement from homes to powerplants -- allowed the people to forget its costs while enjoying its benefits, a Faustian bargain that may well be fatal for our civilization.

Coal is inarguably at its best, however, when detailing the social price of coal's extraction. Ms. Freese devotes entire chapters to the conditions under which coal was literally unearthed by countless miners who risked life and limb to excavate it, not to mention the children who were tasked to keep such mines operational at a time before technology saved us from our lack of conscience. None of the facts presented here are entirely unknown to us, but their presentation wonderfully illustrates just how much of our ethics humans are willing to sacrifice in the name of comfort, convenience and power.

Coal is not without its flaws. Ms. Freese devotes entirely too much time to coal's evolution in the west, in particular, Britain and the united States. Other than an all-too-brief chapter on the Chinese relationship with coal, her account makes it seem as though only these two nations have had any influence on coal, its excavation and its use. This seems awfully narrow for a tome that purports to contain the human history of coal. What's more, the geological roots of coal, while explained, are skimmed over, especially relative to the environmentalism which, while welcomed and well-argued, is less interesting than evolution and hydrocarbons.

Notwithstanding these drawbacks, Coal is a brief and edifying look at a material absolutely essential to the production of electricity that our civilization uses in such abundance. In this, Ms. Freese's work succeeds on its merits. Engaging if somewhat limited... (3/5 Stars)

Humor, tragedy and social injustice in the excellent The Observations

From The Week of April 1, 2013

We are what we make of ourselves, not what others make of us. This is a fundamental truth of human existence that seems, today, inarguable. And yet, for centuries, it was rejected for a more convenient truth, chiefly, that we are born into the fates and the circumstances that suit our personalities. If a man was born into a life of slavery, then that was what he was best suited for. Similarly, if a woman was born to a life of prostitution, then her character was capable of nothing else.

The appeal of this view is obvious, for it re-affirms to the holder that their world is exactly as it should be. To view the slave or the prostitute as we would, that they were forced into those circumstances by ill fortune and socioeconomic pressures beyond their control, would shatter the holder's conception of the world, would reveal to them the fundamental unfairness of their society and would call upon them to change a system that would have seemed to them monolithic. So they wrapped themselves in their biases and condemned untold millions to proscribed lives. This unbearable narrowness of life is beautifully, and humorously, captured in Jane Harris' outstanding novel.

The year is 1863 and life for a poor Irish girl, trying to make her way in Scotland, is far from easy. And yet, this is the lot of Bessy buckley, the Catholic daughter of a woman of ill repute and dark disposition who, alone and sixteen, is attempting to find a place that will allow her to get ahead in the protestant world. Made aware of a job opening in what she imagines to be a castle, young Bessy stumbles, starving, into an estate outside of Glasgow where she encounters the intellectual wife of a lawyer who offers Bessy everything she could want: a wage, a roof and all the food she could desire. Only, as with everything in life, there are certain...strings.

At first, Bessy imagines she can cope with the lady's odd requests. Beginning a daily diary and handing it over to the lady isn't terribly onerous. Nor is acceding to the lady's desire to take every conceivable measurement of her head and body. But when Bessy learns the truth, that she is little more than a pawn in a demeaning game, she's had enough. And her response will set into motion a chain of events that not even she can imagine.

A finalist for the Orange prize, The Observations is first rate historical fiction. Narrated in Bessy's mesmerizing brogue, it exquisitely animates 19th-century Britain in all its narrowminded, classist claptrap, revealing, through Bessy's sharpness of mind and wit, the depths of her society's idiocy. This, naturally, is thanks to the skillful and steady hand of its author, Ms. Harris, who possesses not only a keen eye for the entwined polarities of humor and tragedy, but the the often-times devastating consequences of cause and effect. She deserves, here, every bit of acclaim that has and will come to her.

Of the work's many virtues, though, none shine more brightly than the degree to which it demonstrates the travesty of a society, and a culture, that invests importance in classes and casts. The notion that we somehow deserve, or are tailored for, our lots in life is laughable now that we understand that we are born to a particular life, but that we are shaped by the circumstances into which we are born. Thus, if we are born of tailors, and our society makes it difficult or even impossible to rise above our station, then of course we too will be tailors. We have no other option. But rather than comprehending this obvious truth, Victorian Britain goes the other way, believing that people wind up in the occupations they are made for, awfully convenient for a society trying to justify its unimaginable disparities in income, privilege and opportunity. And yet, though society is inarguably damaged by this reality, the people are moreso. For the women who wish to be scientists are barred from that life. And the poor men with keen minds for finance and politics are cordoned off from the halls of power. The misery of people forced to endure lives unsuited to their natural talents is unimaginable.

The Observations has its shaky moments. Its plot is, at times, too tidy, with every piece fitting neatly into place, holding little of the messiness of real life. Moreover, its resolution strikes this reader has too hopeful for the time and place. And yet, even these flaws seem like small sacrifices in the name of irony and poetic justice, virtues that Ms. Harris puts to good purpose throughout.

A deeply enjoyable romp through a tragically narrow world. It won't soon be forgotten... (4/5 Stars)

Human folly and the power of Malaria clash in Shah's The Fever

From The Week of April 1, 2013

From trees to tigers, from eagles to kelp, evolution has shaped our world for billions of years. Without it, Earth would be little more than a volcanically active water world with a few single-celled organisms listlessly occupying various oceanic vents and superficial pools. There would be no other life, nothing to revel and no one to do the revelling. It is, then, a necessary driver of permanent change. But for all that humanity would not exist without evolution's many gifts, it also presents some problems. For what worked to create us can just as easily work to create things to kill us. Evolution was not a means to our end. It is a means to the development of life. And for all that we may have outpaced our fellow species on the race to intellect, we have not, and never will, corner the market on the right to exist. This is made chillingly clear in Sonia Shah's sweeping biography of a most pernicious and persistent disease.

For nearly half the lifespan of the human species, Malaria has infected our world. Generated from pools of stagnant water in which mosquito larvae happily grow, this crippling illness spreads from these humid nurseries in the saliva of female mosquitos who, with every successful attack upon a living target, inject Malaria's devastating payload into the bloodstreams of their unwitting victims. From there, the disease spreads to the liver, a base from which it can, over the next few weeks, cause havoc to its host, lashing it with debilitating fevers and headaches which, if sufficiently severe, can be fatal. Even if malaria was self-aware, though, it would not care about these consequences of its existence. For its only purpose is to exist. And this it achieves by infecting the blood of the host, blood which is then slurped up by other mosquitos eager for a meal.

So what can be done about this? Ever since humanity has had the tools to battle disease, it has been fighting Malaria. But though there have been soem successes in creating medicines that armor uninfected hosts against Malaria's impact, there is, as yet, no vaccine. Worse yet, some of the agents developed to fight Malaria have strengthened the disease, bestowing it with teeth it once did not require. Failures in the medicinal front have turned inquisitive minds to the prospect of chemically eradicating Malaria's delivery system, the mosquito, efforts that famously culminated in the widespread application of DDT, a wonder insecticide that soon proved to be a poison chalice. Hopes remain for a vaccine, but until then malaria persists, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives a year.

Depicting the pathological, sociological, medical and evolutionary histories of Malaria and its impact on the world, The Fever is a stark account of ingenuity and failure. Ms. Shah weaves a terrifying tapestry of Malaria's causes and effects, a dismaying portrait matched only by her tragic, and at times shocking, account of humanity's calamitous attempts to eliminate this most effective infectious disease. Tales of failed drugs, boastful promises and arrogant assumptions culminate in a truly disturbing portrait of the degree to which humanity leaps before it looks. For so eager are we for cures to the afflictions that trouble our days that we are willing to apply them before we fully understand their consequences, a hastiness that has lead to unimaginable ecological damage.

As much as Ms. Shah's account reserves its most effective blows for these failures, it is equally free with praise for the low-tech methods we've developed to fight Malaria. From mosquito nets to the draining of the stagnant pools that are malaria's breeding ground, the disease has been forced to retreat from many parts of the world. Unfortunately for the impoverished, however, most of these retreats have occurred in the developed world, causing Malaria to be, much like AIDS, a problem experienced by others, elsewhere.

The Fever might well have done with some first-hand accounts of Malaria's impact, the better to exemplify Ms. Shah's arguments. Nonetheless, it is a riveting demonstration of how little we actually control our world and how much we rely upon systems like evolution, that are far older than us, for defenses against the threats that live and grow across Earth's ecology. Wonderfully edifying... (4/5 Stars)

Charlemagne brings the giant of European history lyrically to life

From The Week of April 1, 2013

For as long as humanity has been capable of passing down its history, it has revered legends, figures of time-shrouded myth whose deeds are as grand as their appetites. All of our hearts swell at the prospect of conquest, whatever shape it takes, but these singular men and women seized that desire and stamped it with such force into the metal of our history that their immortality is virtually assured. Perhaps we would do well to forget them. Perhaps, if we were unaware of how brightly their stars burned, some among us would not be driven by the need to eclipse them, regardless of the destruction such would sew. But we'd have as much luck wishing away the sun as erasing our giants. For even in death, they have but to extend their hands and we find ourselves being welcomed into their destinies. This truth is exquisitely explored in Richard Winston's engaging biography.

The son of kings and the forger of an empire, Charlemagne is one of the foremost figures of our age. An illiterate man with a passion for knowledge, he was a creature of contradictions, of enlightenment and devastation, who rallied the men of his far flung province of the fallen Roman Empire and, over 47 years of rule, created a new imperium upon the ashes of the old. The conquerer of Europe, he caused popes to bow to his will and to craft crowns so that he might place them on his brow, acts motivated by glory, surely, but also from a desire to restore the order of what had been centuries lost in the death of old Rome. That he was successful where others had failed speaks to luck, but also to a once-in-a-generation will to leave behind a world better than the one he had found.

Charlemagne fought the Saxons and the Lombards, the Saracens and the Bavarians, but war was not his legacy. That was rooted in the idea of a united Europe, a continent that could set aside its disagreements and work in concert towards a common goal. Moreover, it was invested into the scriptoria he created, places of learning that could restore at least some of the wisdom of the fallen ancients and bestow upon the subsequent generations the capacity to build towards a world not consumed by war, but progress. These were mighty goals Charlemagne worked towards during his long reign, but fate prevented them from coming to fruition as he'd hoped. For with the passing of his eldest sons, men in whom he'd rested his hopes for a continuation of his dreams, his empire fall to Louis, King of the Franks, a pious but unwise man whose squandering of Charlemagne's efforts plunged the continent into centuries of intellectual darkness.

This is the tale Mr. Winston tells in Charlemagne, a lyrical account of the life and times of the most powerful European figure to emerge from the ruins of Rome. Drawing from Einhard's contemporary account of the emperor's life, as well as what other sources remain from the eighth century, the author paints an irresistible portrait of a singular mind, one as shaped by conquest as it was by metaphysics. Though little remains of Charlemagne's youth, and though it is difficult to corroborate the exact nature of his various deeds, a pattern of behavior emerges across the whole of the man's life, one that speaks to a complex nature that would be as well-suited to the cut and thrust of our century as it was to the tribalism of his own. From the manner in which he treated his wives to the esteem with which he held knowledge, we are made witnesses to the man more than we are the warrior, the spirit more than the deeds, a reality which is sure to frustrate those interested in military history but that pleases those others who find themselves fascinated by the minds of giants.

Charlemagne, for all its delightful prose, is a largely sympathetic account of the founder of the Holy Roman Empire. Mr. Winston is far harsher on the emperor's contemporaries than he is on Charlemagne himself. Perhaps Charles the Great was a man above all others, an unyielding spire of morality lashed by a seething sea of corrupted souls, but this seems far too simplistic given what we know of humanity which is much more liable to produce individuals of gray morality than of purely white and black. The only spot of criticism Mr. Winston levels at Charlemagne is the mercilessness with which he treats the Saxons who, time and time again, rise in rebellion against him, but even this seems muted compared to his paeans to Charlemagne's successes.

Notwithstanding its vagaries and its sympathies, Charlemagne is a vivid and lively document that teaches us as much about the man as it does about fate. For the readers of this chronicle will not be able to walk away unaffected by Mr. Winston's conclusion that, had Charlemagne's eldest sons lived, the subsequent 13 centuries of history would have unfolded quite differently. In peace, the schools Charlemagne founded would have had time to build on their learning, to spur on the intellectual flowering that only occurred centuries later. Instead, Louis' unsuitableness caused many of Charlemagne's reforms to wither on the vine, a tragic fact that caused Europe to devolve back into the post-Roman gloom that had already consumed it for 400 years.

Imagine a world without the Middle Ages, without irreason and theocracy. Imagine a Renaissance that began five centuries earlier in Charlemagne's Europe rather than Italy's city states. Imagine if industrialism came to Europe in the 13th century, not the 18th. We would today be among the stars.

Well worth the read, as much for the dream as for the man... (4/5 Stars)

a fascinating if cold glimpse of a possible near-future in The Dervish House

From The Week of March 25, 2013

In the 21st century, technology is the driver of societal change. And though it is tempting to think it has always been thus, this instinct would be in error. For while innovations, from the bow to the printing press, have invited periods of positive disruption, change, historically, has been caused by a complex stew of changing climates, population pressures, natural disasters and geological good fortune, all of which have kept humanity on the path of progress. No longer... Where our species was once subject to fate's whimsy, we now create the tools of our own destiny. With every line of code we write, we program the look, the feel and the morality of our future. Technology has bestowed us with the responsibility for our own success or failure. And while that burden may be heavy, it is one we must shoulder if we are to advance to the next stage of civilization. This is a truth well-explored in Mr. MacDonald's intriguing novel of the near future.

The year is 2027 and Turkey has acceded to the European Union. The dream of a free and secular nation that began with Ataturk has finally, after a century of military coupes and Islamic politicians, been realized in a safe, prosperous country in which men and women, old and young, can succeed. Turkey, once nothing more than the sick man of Europe, once little more than the desiccated heart of a decaying empire, now embodies the American Dream 2.0, the hope for a stable and prosperous Asia.

For all this, Turkey is still subject to profound and disparate forces that threaten to crater its ascendency. A radioactive Iran, demolished by Israeli bombs, is a seething, ecological disaster to its east while Russia, floating on a sea of oil profits, looms to the north, having the power, with a flick of a switch, to end the flow of precious hydrocarbons into Turkey and the West. And these are just the external threats that do not account for the Kurds and the Islamists the disruptive technologies and the thieving capitalists, who trouble it from within.

In this sprawling place, caught between east and west, religion and science, the Deep State and the Islamic state, the interconnected lives of men and women, living in an apartment building in Istanbul, unfold. The economist mourning his past while facing his end of days, the deaf boy who dreams of adventure, the young female professional who yearns for her talents to be recognized, and the young Islamist who is troubled by divine visions all, in their own ways, hold small pieces of a plot to use nanotechnology in an act of terrorism. Their conflicting agendas, and those of the Turks and Greeks, scientists and zealots, they encounter promise to make this hot week in Istanbul, the queen of cities, one to remember.

A thoughtful contemplation of what the world might look like in twenty years, The Dervish House is engaging, if cold, science fiction. Deploying the literary conceit of nesting his host of disparate characters in a single apartment building, Mr. Macdonald is able to craft a varied cast of characters and entangle them in two overlapping mysteries which he then slowly and skillfully unknots during the course of the work. This, along with the liberal use of nanotechnology and terrorism, financial chicanery and geopolitics, allows the novel to be as erudite as it is fictional, a snapshot of a possible, largely optimistic future for a nation that has, for thousands of years, been the cultural hinge of the northern hemisphere. To glimpse it in such detail is pleasing.

For all its imagination, however, The Dervish House is flawed work. For though Mr. MacDonald succeeds in animating his characters with drive and purpose, he fails to invest them with much, if any emotion. Gleefulness and melancholy, ambition and despair, certainly make cameos here, allowing for moments of exultant triumph and crushing defeat, but these explosions are all the more notable for the affectless postures his characters otherwise adopt. We are interested in their machinations, and even occasionally root for their momentary victories, but we rarely love, admire, or even root for them, the notable exception being the young, deaf boy who is easily the novel's strongest character.

Moreover, Mr. MacDonald fails to properly balance the knowledge, about Turkey and the world, he wishes to convey with the plot, about perfidy and nanotechnology, he wishes to execute. Swaths of the novel are consumed by culture, economics, Islam and Turkish history, all of which are interesting in their own rights, but too often we're left to feel as though Mr. MacDonald is showing off his erudition rather than building a better, more engaging story for his readers to consume. His references to the Deep State and financial scams, terrorism and history, ought to add color. Instead, they largely succeed in making the novel seem shallow and flashy.

The Dervish House is high-minded fiction that should be lauded for its attempts to come to grips with the future in all its promise and its politics. It boasts some interesting characters and some complex plots, but the pieces never gestalt into a product that must be devoured. (3/5 Stars)

The cultural and medical histories of Rabies engagingly explored in Rabid

From The Week of March 25, 2013

Viruses reek havoc upon the human mind. For not only do they have the power to starve it of resources, reducing it to an unintelligent sludge, they can attack it through fear, divesting it of all rationality and making of its host an exceedingly soft target. Despite the innate difficulties of battling a scourge one cannot see, however, many of these viruses have been brought to heel, their effectiveness muted by science. And yet, some remain to haunt us, some that refuse to have their claws so easily clipped. Mr. Wasik and Ms. Murphy marvellously documents the most infamous of these vehement holdouts in his excellent chronicle of Rabies.

For all but the last few centuries of its existence, humanity has been blind to the threat of viruses. Its conceptions were limited to what it could taste, touch and feel. So while the species had soem understanding of what was harmful to its health, it could not even imagine the ecologies that lingered beyond the vistas of human vision. And yet, something had to be there. For tribal man could see quite well the consequences of contracting deadly viruses, chiefly, the loss of their companions felled by nothing more than the sudden onset of ill health.

First with the ancient Greeks and then with the Arabs, this understanding began to evolve, but not before superstition had taken hold. Before we knew why, we knew how. And in the case of Rabies, this was particularly apparent. For one had to but wait a few days after being bitten by an enraged subset of mostly friendly animals to feel the deadly consequences: the nightmares, the fear of water, the sleepless nights, the creeping death.

Devils and demons were conjured up to explain such violent and terrifying punishments. And yet, few of these could imagine the truth, that Rabies was a most insidious virus, a chain of genetic information with the singleminded goal to propagate, to spread, to consume. Eschewing the most conventional routes of pathogen's (the blood stream), it attacked the nervous system, inching its way up to the brain which, defenseless against its ravages, succumbed to that most straightforward kind of madness, the bite, a most expeditious method of passing copies of itself on to the next, inviting target.

From the characteristics that made it legend to the scientists who reduced it to mere mortality, Rabid is an entertaining journey through the history of Rabies. Penned by a veterinarian (Murphy) and a journalist (Wasik), it competently mixes humor with fact to create a most edifying illumination of a genetic sequence that, though relatively rare, particularly within civilization, has nonetheless had a profound impact on our conception of horror. The authors contend that the myths that gave birth to vampires, werewolves and zombies were all heavily influenced by our fear of the bite which does not merely emanate from our distaste for pain, but from something far more elemental, an aversion born of memories written into our heritage.

Rabid has its stumbles. It makes almost no attempt to advance our understanding of Rabies' genetic properties. Moreover, it seems, at times, much more concerned with its cultural impact than its medical one. But these are minor gripes in what is otherwise a thoroughly engrossing read that winningly captures the full might of science, particularly its capacity to isolate a problem, reduce it to its component parts and to deduce, through trial and error, a method of rectifying it. Here, this is particularly exemplified in the time the history devotes to Louis Pasteur, the famous French scientist who, in addition to discovering germs, took a largely successful swing at Rabies as well, reducing it from a fearful unknown to a problem that could be vaccinated if not cured. This, along with an intriguing comparison of how the East and West conceive of Rabies' primary carriers, allows Rabid to easily overcome its drawbacks.

This is eminently consumable work. And yet, for all its lightness, Rabid possesses sufficient depth to leave the reader's knowledge of the world of viruses significantly advanced. Most satisfying... *4/5 Stars)

A ringing condemnation of prisons in Abramsky's American Furies

From The Week of March 25, 2013

Of the many pillars of progress that have marked humanity's existence none have had more of an impact than civilization. For it is this gestalt of societal evolution that creates beautiful structure from tribal chaos, that sews together peaceful communities from antagonistic cultures, and that carves out harbors of innovation to elevate us above stagnancy. Our thoughts and our dreams, our extraordinary brothers and our earth-shaking sisters are all remembered by civilization which allows each successive generation of the species to stand on the shoulders of those who came before. And yet, not all of us contribute positively to civilization. In fact, there are a substantial number who, for various reasons, threaten civilization with strains of destructive violence that range from the nihilistic to the greedy. Are we not entitled to seal these criminals away? Is it not right that we remove from them the freedoms the rest of us enjoy? Perhaps, but to think that we do so without consequences would be deeply unwise. This point Mr. Abramsky drives home in his uneven work.

In much of the world, prisons are stressful and dangerous places, institutions that contain the worst humanity has to offer. For years on end, men and women who have broken society's laws endure in these hard places, suffering a kind of purgatory in hopes that, some day, they will be released back into the world and have restored to them the privileges they once enjoyed. This is the hope. But so scarring are these penitenturies, so fraught with animalistic violence and cognitive decay, that this is nothing more than wishful thinking, dreams one holds to when nothing else remains.

It was not meant to be this way. In the breathy reforms of the post-Renaissance West, where it was no longer sufficient simply to execute troublemakers, prisons were conceived of as places of rehabilitation, idealistic schools of reform that would capture destructive non-conformists and shape them into healthy, stable influences. But while some penal systems still notionally cling to this hopeful ethos, the United States does not. Despite drastic reductions in crime over the last 40 years, more and more Americans, every year, are forced into these violent pens, compelled to sleep, eat and endure alongside society's worst. Many of these offenders haven't even committed violent crimes. And yet, here they languish, either worked for pennies or neglected to count down their days, with rapists and murderers, pimps and traffickers, until they can rejoin a society that will only ever half-heartedly welcome them back.

From Jeremy Bentham's optimistic conceptions to the cold, present-day realities, from the harshness of Joe Arpaio's Arizona to the ruthlessness of Miriam Shehane's Alabama, American Furies seeks to chronicle, through statistics and anecdotal accounts, the price, both fiscally and societally, the United States has paid for its punitive approach to crime. Mr. Abramsky, who leaves no doubt that his sympathies lean heavily towards the imprisoned, lays before the reader a series of movements and societal attitudes that go some way to explaining the heartlessness with which Americans approach incarceration. His conclusion, that a toxic combination of the depravity of sensationalist crime and the ongoing privatization of the prison system has lead the US to its current state -- a higher percentage of its people behind bars than Stalinist Russia -- is passionately argued. And yet, there are profound flaws here.

As strong a case as Mr. Abramsky makes, his account tries to be all things and succeeds at none of them. He attempts to make two cases, one based in dry statistics and the other ground in hard reporting. And yet, when he combines his academic research with his face-to-face gum-shoeing, the result does not become a pleasing souffle of passion and erudition. It does not become, as the author so clearly wishes it to be, a declarative statement against the evils of American-style incarceration. It is, instead, a scattered jog through an ever-changing landscape of shifty characters and inferred agendas that imply a great deal but conclusively prove little.

This is not to imply that I disagree with Mr. Abramsky. His argument rests on firm ground. There's been a great deal of sociological research that has attempted to explain the rise of the prison population and why that rise has suspiciously corresponded with the building of new prisons. However, Mr. Abramsky's goal here was to distill that research into a work of narrative non-fiction, capped off with a passionate appeal for understanding and sympathy for prisoners, many of whom are non-violent offenders. And, sadly, that task he failed to accomplish.

Valuable, but ultimately uninspired. The American prisoner will have to rest their hopes for a brighter future on other shoulders. (2/5 Stars)