A bloody rumination on faith and sacrifice in Abaddon's Gate

From The Week of June 17th, 2013

Concerted, collective action towards a single, unified goal is, for humans, a challenge without peer. For though most of us possess the requisite generosity to selflessly offer our aid in times of stress and confusion, we are still creatures of ego, individuals who believe that our ideas, our beliefs, our plans, represent the right way and that everyone else's ideas, beliefs and plans are inherently less for being other, for being not of us. This self-centered mentality is not without its merits. After all, often, there is a right way. And if someone who possesses the requisite strength of personality leads his fellows in the direction of the truth, then the whole benefit. But how do we know what is right? How can be we be sure? And are confidence and ego our only guides? Abaddon's Gate ruminates.

In a future solar system dominated by political rivalries, ideological disputes and commercial realities, life is difficult and dangerous. Population pressures on Earth have not only forced society to adopt radically different ideas of the family unit, they've compelled the bold and the ambitious up the gravity well and into the solar system where opportunities are as wild as the various space stations, orbital habitats and domed moonbases are liberal. Though this offworld expansion has both developed beneficial technologies and brought back useful resources to the humans who need them, it has only deepened the balkanization of humanity into several distinct and contentious groups which are as selfish as they are bellicose.

Perhaps these rivalries would have resolved themselves in time, allowing humanity to enjoy a more united future, but even this optimistic outcome is short-circuited by a terrifying, alien threat that escaped from a research station in the solar system's outer reaches and migrated to Venus where it has systematically transformed the planet into a great, energetic ring inside which the understood laws of physics seem to give way to the secrets of an ancient, advanced civilization that, though it has past into darkness, has left behind its powerful and unknowable technologies. Fear of the unknown initially precludes the various factions from exploring the ring, but soon a desire for revenge overwhelms their common sense and they chase an apparent saboteur into the ring and humanity's future.

The probable, bloody conclusion to the riveting Expanse series, Abaddon's Gate is a long and savage last stand against both ignorance and justice. James S.A. Corey, the pen name for the writing team of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, largely relinquishes the tropes of horror and science fiction, deployed to such heart-pounding effect in The Expanse's first two volumes, and takes up in their stead the more complex themes of sacrifice, faith and collective action, each of which prove to have nearly as many interpreters as human beings. For there is no clean sacrifice, just like there is no true god. There is only what we as individuals want to think is true and right, realities which often clash with the conceptions of other humans with devastating and debilitating effect. We can no more find accurate confirmation for our beliefs than we can touch god. We have to rely, instead, on clear minds and good intentions and hope that these lead us into the light.

There is no doubt that Abaddon's Gate suffers from this switch in scope. Where the prior two entries mined such profitable material from the genres of horror and survivalism, this most recent effort has much more in common with the modern conception of the Western, a play in which sociopolitical realities thoroughly give way to the relative simplicity of two opposing forces fighting over control, over how things ought to be done, over who gets to do them and why. This ambitious switch in theme mirrors the switch in perspective. For most of the towering figures introduced in the prior works, excluding a handful of necessary principals, are discarded in favor of a new cast of largely female actors who, though refreshing, fail to capture the reader's interest to the degree of prior casts.

Moreover, the new cast keeps the perspective trapped on the various ships jockeying over the Ring and all that it contains, robbing us of the opportunity to experience, to some degree, what life inside the ring is like. Perhaps future volumes will dispel some of the mysteries left here, but this is cold comfort to this reader who felt as though Abaddon's Gate lacked the balance of the previous works and failed to deliver all that the series had promised.

Notwithstanding its flaws, The Expanse, overall, is wonderful, dark, imaginative science fiction that challenges our conceptions and insists that we view our optimism for the future through the lens of today's political realities. For this, it has earned a place amongst the great SciFi series of the 21st century. We can only hope that future additions to this series will help make Abaddon's Gate feel less vestigial. (3/5 Stars),

Faith, justice and innocence all go missing in Redrum The Innocent

From The Week of June 17th, 2013

As much as we plan and dream, organize and hope, our lives are beyond our control. We live in a world of billions, a world in which, every day, countless people make decisions that have an impact on both our present and our future. We can't resist that. We lack the knowledge and the power to turn back that flood. And so we ignore it, concentrating on what we can change, on what we can see affecting us in the moment. This is a much more palatable existence, one that gives us the illusion of command. But what happens when that illusion is shattered? What happens when our lives are turned upside down by events we could no more predict than we could accept? What are we then? And how do we survive? Kirk Makin ruminates in his sprawling work of non-fiction.

On October 3rd, 1984, Christine Jessop, a playful, adventurous, nine-year-old girl living in Queensville, Ontario, vanished without a trace from her quiet, suburban home, shocking a community unfamiliar with such terrible events. Over the next three months, fuelled by her mother's hope for the girl's safe return, the police and the public would undertake a regional search for little Christine, one that would end in tears when her broken body was found some 50 miles from her home, in woods frozen by winter. With only a few suspects and even less evidence, investigators soon locked in on Guy Paul Morin, the Jessops' eccentric, 24-year-old neighbor who, though lacking any sort of motive, much less a criminal history, was extensively questioned by cops increasingly eager to find their man. Their suspicions were only strengthened when they learned that Morin declined to join the extensive, public search for Christine, in the desperate days just after her disappearance.

Using hair and fiber samples taken from Morin and his car, police would eventually arrest Morin, charging him with Christine's murder. Fixated by his social awkwardness, they would spend the next year largely ignoring other suspects, SHAPING what few pieces of evidence they had into a case against Morin that would lead to two controversial and contentious trials, the second of which would finally convict him of a crime he did not commit. This truth, however, would only come to light in 1995, 14 months after his conviction, when newly developed DNA techniques would rule out his involvement with Christine. This shameful miscarriage of justice would conclude with a 1997 inquiry which excoriated the police and the judiciary, accusing the former of leaping to unsupported conclusions and recommending that the latter change its prejudicial procedures. But none of this would help Guy Paul Morin regain his life. Nor would it return Christine to a Jessop family shattered by her disappearance.

As shattering as it is revelatory, Redrum The Innocent is Mr. Makin's extensive chronicle of both the murder of Christine Jessop and the judicial farce that would attempt to identify and punish her killer. Drawing on dozens of interviews with the principals and countless hours spent observing Morin's two trials, the author masterfully weaves together the personal and the professional, painting intimate portraits of the prime movers while methodically laying out the dubious evidence used to first hound and then to imprison an innocent man. Between, Mr. Makin systematically savages the case against Morin, not only revealing its shoddy construction, but detailing the unforgivable extent to which police fixated on Morin, contorting the facts to better fit their assumptions of his guilt. His efforts here are so thorough, so overwhelming, that they leave the reader's faith in the judicial system deeply shaken.

There is no doubt that Redrum The Innocent is at its most potent when describing the ways in which the police bungled the investigation of Christine Jessop's murder. In fairness, the cops in question were neither trained nor prepared to handle such a complex and difficult case. None of their rural charm, or good ol' boy instincts would help them find their man. For the degree to which they were overwhelmed by what unfolded, we can have sympathy. However, what we cannot tolerate, much less accept, is the degree to which the police refused to acknowledge their own inadequacy. Instead of welcoming outside assistance, they fell back on interdivisional rivalries out of the selfish desire to claim the glory of finding Christine's killer. This hunger would lead them to not only manipulate evidence and coach witnesses as a means of firming up the case against Morin, it would cause them to unforgivably dismiss the leads that might have lead to Christine's killer. As a consequence of hurling all their energies at an innocent man, the killer was never found, a fact which has left the Jessop family in ruins.

If this is the work's travesty, its tragedy is saved for the Morins and the Jessops, two families smashed by this ordeal. As a result of the harsh light of the investigation, secrets and lies are forced out of the shadows, truths nearly as cruel as the murder itself. This endless, grinding process of lurching towards something like justice leaves the reader hollowed out, hoping for some measure of peace, of justice, that never comes. We should be better than this. It should be easier than this. Alas...

Redrum The Innocent could have used an edit trim some of its 750 pages. Nonetheless, it is, in every other respect, a mesmerizing read that withstands the test of time. For though its subject is primarily the murder of a young girl, the ways in which it branches out to speak about the law, society and human nature is timeless. A must-read... (4/5 Stars)

Honor killings, multiculturalism and a horrific murder in Honour on Trial

From The Week of June 17th, 2013

Multiculturalism has, and will likely always be, problematic. For though many of the world's countries pride themselves on open borders and hospitable populations founded on notions of generosity and the will to be free, humanity has spent the bulk of its history as a species in homogeneous environments, ensconced in tribes and lands where everyone walked and talked like everyone else. Certainly, there were exceptions, particularly in the most recent millennia in which technologies that allowed for large empires were deployed to conquer other lands, but these centuries are but the tip of the iceberg poking out of the waters of our evolutionary past.

As a consequence, human beings living in multicultural environments experience a quiet tension, one that pits the wisdom of their cultural enlightenment against the suspicion of their genetic makeup. While times are good, with crime low and jobs plentiful, wisdom wins out. But when times are difficult and money scarce, like for like takes the day, causing suspicion of the unknown to override judgement and for cynicism to replace kindness, a matter made all the worse when this multiculture is forced to grapple with crimes it cannot imagine, emanating from backgrounds with which it has only a passing knowledge. This is a truth chillingly rendered in Paul Schliesmann's brisk work of true crime.

For Canada, a country that has never experienced a high rate of crime, relative to much of the world, the Shafia Family murders came as a severe shock. An honor killing that claimed the lives of three teenaged daughters of a successful, immigrant family from Afghanistan, then living in Montreal, it would launch a three year odyssey beginning with a lengthy police investigation and concluding with a high-profile trial in which Mohammad Shafia, the family patriarch, Hamed, his son, and Tooba, his second wife, would stand accused of executing a cruel plot to drown the three young women, along with Rona, Mohammad's first wife, in a Kingston Mills Lock. It would take time for a motive to emerge for such a terrible and senseless crime, but eventually an chilling image of the family would take shape, one colored by tribal customs transported to the new world, customs that endow females with family honor to such a degree that any significant act of disobedience brings a stain upon the family that can only be cleansed with blood. This would prove to be true of the three Shafia daughters who, having once agreed not to date boys, broke with their eastern customs to embrace the western culture in which they were immersed. For this, they died in the cold and the darkness.

A thorough primer of the Shafia murders and the complex trial that would follow on from them, Honour on Trial is a read as swift as it is informative. Mr. Schliesmann, a Canadian journalist, possesses a newsman's prose, pages stripped of any sense of excess or flair. In its place, cold, hard facts which paint a portrait of events that are as clear as they are difficult to stomach. In this vein, the author makes no judgement calls about the Shafia family, leaving such editorializing to others. Instead, he uses established truths to depict the tragic, senseless course of events with heart-sinking deliberation, leaving little room for doubt.

For those looking for a simple chronicle of events, Honour on Trial serves admirably, but the Shafia case demand more than this. This was not only a murder. This was the premeditated killing of four women for reasons that are inescapably barbaric. Yes, we must be sensitive to the customs of other cultures, to embrace them and weave them into the fabric of who we are. But we must test those customs against not only our ethics, but the widely acknowledged human rights that should exist for all individuals. Any customs that fail that test, that violate the rights to be free for which countless people have fought, then those are customs we can all rightfully reject, leaving them in the dust of history along with every other unenlightened, self-serving notion that we've evolved out of. But for a brief section describing honor killings and the causes that give rise to them, Mr. Schliesmann fails to articulate this important point.

Every day, innocence is lost because of ignorance, because of customs that are not knocked down by exposure to other cultures. This is multiculturalism's value, a test of who we are against the values of others, a crucible from which reasoned truth can emerge. If only such enlightenment did not have to come at such a terrible cost... (3/5 Stars)

The lives that trap us brought exquisitely to life in Revolutionary Road

From the Week of June 10, 2013

To some degree, all of our lives are defined by constrictions, limitations both moral and circumstantial that inhibit our actions and hobble our desires. Some of these restrictions, like marriage, are voluntary, agreements of conduct entered into willingly, even happily, in hopes of acquiring a partner's love and trust in exchange for our freedom. But others, like class, are beyond our control, ceilings cemented above us that block, or make difficult, our social advancement. Nonetheless, they are present, small confinements that, over time, accumulate until one is confronted with a choice: resign oneself to these bonds as a means of making due or rebel against them in hopes of a better, freer future. The former is easier than the latter for it requires from us nothing more than our blissful ignorance, but the latter is painful indeed, demanding that we reject our society and all its tentacles. This conflict could ask for no better illustrator than Richard Yates.

The year is 1955 and the United States is outwardly enjoying an epic, post-war economic boom unrivaled in modern history. Technologies, from televisions to power stations, from affordable cars to handy home appliances, are sweeping across the country, creating the first generation of connected citizens in a network of entertainment and industry. It is the slow, sleepy dawn of the information age.

Inwardly, however, a different story is unfolding. Women, freed during the war years to experience the liberation of work and income, are largely forced back into the home by the millions of American men returning from Europe. Minorities, welcomed into the military to fight for their country, come home to find their nation full of racism and prejudice that selfishly refuses to recognize, much less honor, their service and sacrifice. Worst of all, religion, and the social mores of the time combine in an unholy union to dictate what they consider to be the good life from which deviation is cause for concern and reproof.

Into this narrow life come the Wheelers. Frank and April were ambitious spirits, freed by the Second World War to think and act for themselves. But with the resumption of peacetime, they find their dreams of intellectual and economic freedom besieged by social expectations which demand that Frank take a stable, bread-winning job in industry while April remain at home to raise their children. This is not the lives they wanted, and yet, at each turn, they are confronted by forces beyond their control, forces powerful enough to plunge them into darkness.

Marked by innocent dreams and exquisite tragedy, Revolutionary Road is an engaging meditation on the nature of modern existence. Mr. Yates, whose talented pen effortlessly spills forth mesmerizingly cinematic prose, captures here the way in which even the best laid plans can wither away, killed by not just peer pressure from the outside, but doubts from the inside. Questions of inadequacy plague both Wheelers, prompting them to second guess their decisions, then to loath their second guessing, and then finally to act rashly, results which often lead to recrimination and discord. This pattern, though only repeated here a few times, has clearly characterized the scope of Frank and April's time together, locking them into a history from which they cannot escape.

Though much of the narrative is productively consumed by the dream, championed by April, of escaping the empty, suburban existence into which the wheelers have trapped themselves, the novel's rhetorical and thematic highs are reserved for the dominant narrator, Frank, who is realized here with breathtaking clarity. Mr. Yates in no way spares Frank by allowing his ugly thoughts to remain hidden in the shadows of his mind. No, the author dredges up every selfish urge, every vain posture, every insecure act, presenting Frank to us in a way that few will ever understand him. For though his wife has clues of his deceits and his delusions, she would never wish to imagine the ways in which his private doubts drive him to redirect his energies from helping himself and April realize their dream of being liberated people to realizing his own goal of getting his own way, whatever that entails in the moment. It is almost impossible to imagine how this demonstration of man's public and private faces could be better rendered than it is here.

Revolutionary Road has its stumbles. After establishing its eloquence and its patterns of doubt and recrimination, failure and futility, its narrative stalls, choked up by Frank's internal life which grows tiresome after awhile. Moreover, there are secondary characters here who serve little purpose but to be backdrops against which the Wheelers' flaws can be writ large. These serve little purpose but to firm up the novel's structure and fill in for the passage of time. The novel, however, largely overwhelms these off-notes with its sharpness of vision which carries the work to an appropriate conclusion.

A powerful, poignant representation of how lives are eventually, inevitably defined more by the decisions we make than by who we actually are. In this, it is an exceptional, rare read that is well worth consuming. (4/5 Stars)

The long, complicated life of a remarkable individual in Nelson Mandela

From the Week of June 10, 2013

For all of civilization's advantages, for all that it creates capital, organizes industry, encourages socialization and allows for institutions that aid us all, it is not without risks. Beyond the libraries and the schools, the theatres and the shopping malls, the courts and the law-enforcers, made possible by it, civilization is fundamentally a system for concentrating power from the disparate and disordered masses and into the hands of the few who in turn put it to useful purpose. Most often, this power is applied reasonably, even constructively, but it can also be twisted, shaped into a weapon for controlling the people instead of aiding them. Sadly, we Mont' have to look very far into our history to find horrific examples of just such abuse.

When civilization goes bad, when those we trusted most turn against us and use the powers we have given them against us, what do we do? We can fight, but in a time of increasing, technological advancement, are our overwhelming numbers sufficient against a well-armed, well-drilled force of professional killers? We can disobey, speaking out and winding up in jail for our pains, but will anyone listen to us over the din of the government's demonization of our characters? We can leave, but what message does that send to those we leave behind? Worse, what does it say to those brave souls who chose to stay and fight? What is the right thing to do when faced with such a massive threat? We turn to Anthony Sampson's biography for answers.

Only eight years younger than the state of South Africa, Nelson Mandela is undoubtedly one of the most famous freedom fighters in modern history. The son of a proud, tribal lineage, he was born into a land that had been conquered and colonized by the British Empire which, along with other western European powers, had spent the preceding century laying claim to an entire continent of people and their resources. However heartless this imperialism, having itself only come in the wake of centuries of enslavement and forced relocation, it was, to some degree, a world with standards of education and faith, morals and dignity, all of which a young Mandela soaked up as a citizen of this civilizing system which promised opportunities to those willing to seize them.

Nelson Mandela's customary, colonial existence, however, came to an end in 1948 when, freed from British rule, the newly elected National Party institutionalized racism. The seeds of western superiority sewn into the fabric of South African society flowered with apartheid which not only outlawed interacial marriage, but called for the uprooting of Africans out of white neighborhoods, crowding them into ghettos in which they could safely be ignored. Forbidden from owning businesses by white colonials, the black Africans were confined to narrow lives of unemployment and servitude, a situation the young Mandela found intolerable. Rejecting his life as a lawyer, he spoke out against apartheid's cruel policies, fighting them in court and in public until his vociferousness, and his community organizing against Apartheid, finally earned him a long stint in the infamous robben Island prison where he and his fellow political prisoners would linger for decades, chained by a government that could no more understand them than recognize its own ignorance.

From jail, Nelson Mandela became an agent of change. For 27 years, he read, learned and spoke out against the government that had jailed his friends and taken him away from his family. This constant, dignified agitation bore little fruit until the 1980s when a combination of international political pressure and the rising power of Mandela's political party at home compelled the ruling party to negotiate with Mandela and the ANC, talks that would eventually lead to Mandela's freedom and the freedom of his country from decades of appalling oppression.

The biography of a most remarkable man, Nelson Mandela is an eminently readable chronicle of an extraordinary life. Mr. Sampson, a journalist present at some of the key moments in his subject's life, guides the reader through the many fazes of Mandela's existence, beginning with the young and relatively innocent lawyer and concluding with the powerful symbol of freedom in the face of tyranny. Between, he examines, at length, Mandela's long career as a political agitator, from the incidents that lead to Apartheid's banning of the ANC to the the negotiations that would end his long exile in prison. All of this is accomplished with clarity and without becoming bogged down in any one part of Mandela's long and complicated story which is itself an accomplishment.

Though the work contains numerous revelatory moments for those unversed in Nelson Mandela's story, none are more potent, or moving, than his intellectual and spiritual resistance to the many forces that sought to reduce him from a man of character to an animal of savagery. Provocations from the apartheid regime and pressures from his fellow freedom fighters sought to encourage Mandela into greater acts of violence that would discredit not only his leadership, but the legitimacy of his movement and the message it sought to convey to South Africa and the world. Above all else, it is this that makes Mandela special. For he did not fall back on spiritualism to resist the temptation to fight fire with fire. He used his mind. He read, he thought, and he formed arguments that stripped away the veneer of apartheid and exposed it for what it was, a selfish, foolish disgrace that stained the world for far too long. Mandela's capacity to rise above those who sought to break him will be an inspiration for generations of freedom fighters to come. He is one of humanity's best and most noble children.

For all of its subject's glory, Nelson Mandela is a flawed work. Mr. Sampson succeeds in bringing Mandela to life, but he fails at virtually every other turn to flesh out the world around him. The key events in the struggle against Apartheid are never described in any detail. Moreover, the actors who both aided and opposed Mandela are cruelly underrepresented here. With but one or two exceptions, they are simply names who appear here only as a means of furthering Mandela's story. This is a biography of Nelson Mandela, but he was but the most important spoke in a large wheel. To have the other spokes be so marginalized does them, and the reader, a disservice.

Nonetheless, this is a most thorough document of a legend of humanity. We will all be diminished when he leaves us. For in him, we see the potential for greatness in our species: kindness and fierceness, compassion and determination, cooperativeness and leadership. That he was able to master these virtues in the face of endless provocation and temptation is a lesson to us all. He will never be forgotten. (3/5 Stars)

The wonderful, eerie and ultimately dated The Handmaid's Tale

From The Week of June 3, 2013

Of all the freedoms that human civilization has conceived, popularized and distributed throughout most of the world, those of the individual are of paramount importance. For though the powerful have always held largely unassailable positions, Olympian heights from which to judge and manipulate those less fortunate than they, the powerless have not. In times past, this uneven application of laws and privileges was justified by any number of self-serving notions such as Divine Right and Might makes Right. But thanks to both the Rule of Law and to those numerous champions of democratic freedoms, some of us now enjoy societies in which the homeless are sheltered by the same laws as the elites.

For some of us, these societies have nurtured us for the totality of our lives and the lives of everyone we know. But for others, these societies are but a dream, a fanciful theory of equality that may or may not ever come. For them, the present is defined by the rulers, for the rulers leaving the many to be merely pawns for their pleasure. This world Margaret Atwood vividly animates in her chilling, award-winning novel.

In the near future, the celebrated nation once known as the United States has given way to revolution. A dominionist organization calling themselves the Sons of Jacob, guided and inspired by the Old Testament, has orchestrated a devastating terrorist attack upon the seat of national government, wiping out most of the executive and legislative branches. Blaming the attack on Islamic terrorists, the Sons erect a military junta in the power vacuum created by the Republic's fall, a junta that proceeds to implement the Sons' particularly stringent form of Christian fundamentalism throughout what will henceforth be called the Republic of Gilead.

In the wake of these shocking developments, the rights of women and minorities begin to rapidly disappear. Jews are given a choice between conversion to Christianity or forced relocation to Israel. African Americans are reclassified as the Children of Hamm and deployed as plantation-style labor. Gay people are ordered to reconsider their sexual orientation or face lethal consequences. But for all of these dark developments, perhaps the worst plight is reserved for women who are forbidden to work, to read, and virtually to think for themselves. They are reduced to incubators for the next generation of Gileadians, with the most fortunate of them placed as wives to defenders of the state and the least exiled to work the vast, radioactive zones that occupy the outskirts of the republic.

Within this narrow, colorless world, Offred endures. A handmaid, or concubine, within the house of one of the regime's elites, she barely remembers her previous life as an American who worked, played, had friends, went out to parties. Her husband is gone and her daughter seized by the state for indoctrination. But worst is perhaps Offred's own re-education at the hands of a special segment of Gilead women who have been privileged to re-train society's women to obey, to please and, most importantly, to be fertile for their masters. Despite her many sorrows, Offred persists until her owner picks her out of the crowd of handmaid's, starting a series of events that will thrust her into an uncertain future.

As grim as it is introspective, The Handmaid's Tale is imaginative, dystopian fiction. The award-winning product of one of Canada's most famous authors, it posits a future America in the grips of a perverse fundamentalism that has seized upon America's ills as an excuse to carry out mass-slaughter and the mass-reorganization of society along patriarchal lines. In this, the work, originally published in 1985, is very much of its time. For these are concerns specific to the 1980s in which a succession of American presidents, both Republican and Democrat, had encouraged, rather than choked off, the meteoric rise of those potent strains of American teleevangelism that would, in response to the liberalization of society in the 1960s and early 1970s, eventually coalesce into the Religious Right. This, combined with the dissipation of Women's Lib, which had already begun to devolve into various and somewhat competitive waves of feminism, created fertile ground for the imagination of an author and a possible, if not probable, future.

Consequently, though The Handmaid's Tale is chilling, its anachronism robs it of some of its power. We live, now, in an age in which threats emanate from the abuse of technology, not the distortion of faith. We live in a time in which the surveillance state is the dystopian boogeyman, not dominionism which is given about as much heed as Neo-Nazism. The idea that generals and scientists, market researchers and corporate executives would get together to create a new society in which they restricted their own behavior, in the misguided belief that they were executing God's will, seems silly from the hindsight of 2013 in which the heat has gone out of the culture wars and in which the freedoms of the individual are, if not expanding, then certainly static.

That said, The Handmaid's Tale is nonetheless a forceful illustration of the immense power of totalitarianism. Re-education has managed not only to turn women upon one another, distracting them from the greater goal of overthrowing their oppressors, it has succeeded in changing their norms, in convincing them that what they enjoyed before was wrong, sinful. This kind of behavioral conditioning is not only possible -- see North Korea --, it is terrifying. Ms. Atwood most convincingly demonstrates this power in the form of Moira, Offred's coarse, boisterous and combative best friend who, instead of being hardened into an opponent of the regime, is shattered by its oppressive practices. In this, Ms. Atwood leaves no doubt of totalitarianism's power, nor its willingness to use it, a demonstration that provides the novel with its best moments.

Moreover, Ms. Atwood's decision to make Offred her heroine is brilliant. For Offred is not a hero. She is not a survivor. She's not even especially interesting, or smart, or earnest. She does not stand on rooftops, calling out for change. She is gray, a plain, colorless canvas upon which the Republic of Gilead can scrawl out their beliefs. She is painfully and tragically average, just like most of us who will read her story. She is us in less fortunate circumstances.

For readers even passingly familiar with technological and societal trends, dated and even at times humorous. But for those even mildly interested in societies that care nothing for the rights of the individual, quietly gripping. (3/5 Stars)

The history and science of that most desired part of the female anatomy in Breasts

From The Week of June 3, 2013

As much as we'd like to think that humans are creatures of the mind, empowered by intellect, shaped by morals and fired by curiosity, we are still driven by the base desires for what we can see, touch and taste. We can create the most complex technologies and philosophize at length over the finest points of Aristotelian logic, we can implement free-market economies and devote our days to the beauty of the printed word, and still we are consumed by food and sex, by shelter and family, by kisses and caresses. Perhaps this is well. There is, after all, a great deal of joy and comfort to be found in the treasures of fleshy, epicurean delights. And yet, these same excitations have the power to consume us, to reduce our grand intellects to the pursuit of pleasure at the expense of all else. Of these temptations, few hold the power and the objectification of the female breast, a truth expanded upon in Florence William's eminently engaging exploration.

Throughout recorded history, in carvings and sculptures, in song and story, we have celebrated the breast. It has been a source of nourishment and obsession, of critiques and signalling, of pleasure and frustration. It comes in a dizzying array of forms and sizes, a symbol of sufficient power as to warrant the creation of taboos in its name. But what is the breast made of and why has it become such a potent symbol of womanhood?

From the academic controversies that have swirled around its origins to the medical research that has revealed its vital role in the nourishment of newborns, Ms. Williams attempts to not only answer these questions, but to provide this most fetishized part of the female anatomy with some entertaining context. Beginning with its uniquely omnipresent manifestation in human women and ending with a sobering analysis of the ways in which it acts as a dumping ground for toxic chemicals that have accumulated over the lifetime of its host, she investigates, in Breast, its form and function, its social impact and its medical mysteries, all in an attempt to better understand this object of so much cultural attention.

Alternately humorous and chilling, Breasts is no fluffpiece masquerading as literature. There is no titillation here, nor is there any moral posturing. It is a serious and sincere attempt to determine the value and the purpose of the breast, to record its history, to measure its trends and to predict, in some limited way, its future. Drawing upon dozens of interviews and almost as many personal experiments with diet and environment, Ms. Williams sifts years of data and research into an eminently readable chronicle that leaves the reader as informed about the breast's physiology as he is about its augmentation. To have reduced such a mountain of information into such a digestible and engrossing product is, to say the least, a triumph.

While readers will be no doubt entertained by the vicarious glimpse of the breast-augmentation industry, Breasts is strongest when it stands firmly on scientific ground. Ms. Williams familiarizes us with fat and milk glands, with estrogen and other hormones. But most importantly, she enthusiastically joins with those researchers who have sounded the alarm about the way in which our modern world has disturbingly played with and reprogrammed the female body, tricking it into maturing earlier and earlier. These trends suggest devastating consequences for women in the future, exposing them to a host of savage cancers that have the power to rob them of good health and good fortune. Her call to arms, for increased regulation of these damaging chemicals, is heartfelt and level-headed. There's no wailing here, no rampaging feminism masquerading as popular science. Ms. Williams is calm, clear and thorough in a manner that should inspire plaudits.

Women's health is a fraught field in which to wade, one that contains as many opinions as it does curatives, as many clarion calls as it does conflicts. Breasts won't avoid drawing criticism. But that its purpose is clear, its motives pure and its conclusions eye-opening ought to earn it a place of prominence, even amongst this challenging crowd. (4/5 Stars)

the legendary errors of some of our greatest minds in Brilliant Blunders

From The Week of June 3, 2013

Insight is a fascinating and complicated power. For while it enables us to make incredible leaps of understanding in everything from science to faith, from the domestic to the metaphysical, it also communicates the false impression that we are somehow special, that such leaps are, for those who experience them, an inevitable outgrowth of intelligence. Insight, in reality, is a moment as rare as it is precious, a brief glimpse of an endgame that may or may not be true. It is not a gift from god. It is an extrapolation of our understanding and experience of the world and, as such, potentially contains within it all our biases. Some scientists and thinkers have seized upon these moments to advance human understanding. Others have seized upon them to confirm their prejudices. Distinguishing one from the other is an almost impossible task, a truth laid bear in mario Livio's inventive piece of non-fiction.

From genetics to physics, from the fundamentals of our world to the underpinnings of reality, fields of human knowledge and endeavor have been advanced by geniuses, men and women who, in training their powerful minds upon difficult problems, have moved them from the unknown and uncertain to the understood and the accepted. But while these individuals have made immeasurable contributions to their fields, success also breeds arrogance, a sense of self-belief that shoulders aside modesty and humility to alter the genius' personality to such that the truth more often gives way to the truth that makes sense to the genius in question. No one has the market cornered on the right way, or the right idea. Rather, these notions come to us slowly, painstakingly and even sometimes accidentally, and, in doing so, confirm our own sense of self-image, a reality that distorts the scientific method.

Harnessing examples from Darwin to Einstein, Brilliant Blunders demonstrates this premise clearly by setting forth six scientific figures, each of whom laid claim to a revolutionary idea and whom, later, laid claim to an equally serious blunder. From the notion of blended inheritance to the triple helix, from the denial of radioactivity to the agitation over the Cosmological Constant, Mr. Livio not only deepens the reader's familiarity with the most famous ideas of our famous thinkers, he sets forth how they arrived at their most infamous errors. Arrogance certainly plays a role. For once one is celebrated for one idea, why not be celebrated for another? But Mr. Livio makes clear that most errors arise from the desire of brilliant minds to compel the world and the universe to make sense, to be reducible to mathematical equations that are as beautiful as they are fundamental. Not only is this often not the case -- the world appears to resort to klugy solutions as often as it does to elegant ones --, this also presumes that the thinker is operating from a correct premise which is rarely the case.

Though Brilliant Blunders is at its best illustrating flawed ideas that have fallen before the power of truth, it's perhaps most effective in demonstrating just how errors arise. The line between self-belief and pompousness is thin at the best of times. For geniuses, that line is microscopic, owning to the fact that they don't expect to have their intelligences fail them or their instincts mislead them. Naturally, this leads to brilliant minds holding onto their flawed notions far more stubbornly and pugnaciously than anyone else would. For they've invested too much of their sense of self and pride in being right, in being the one who comprehends before all others. Even Darwin and Einstein, who come off here as quite humble, fall prey to this nasty trick of the mind.

Brilliant Blunders is not without its own flaws. Everyone errs. Everyone has false conceptions of the world. Cherrypicking the misconceptions of giants of science and collecting them for all to see and remember seems, at times, almost cruel. But these men are dead now, their legacies enshrined in textbooks and museums. Whatever damage done to them here is inconsequential, especially considering that it allows Mr. Livio to exemplify the price of arrogance and confirmation bias.

An engaging, entertaining read... (3/5 Stars)

Racism and the harmfulness of social mores in A World Unseen

From The Week of May 27, 2013 As much as we benefit from society, that wonderful collective of traditions and mores that define localized cultures, it throws up its fair share of challenges. For while society organizes people of different faiths and ethnicities, classes and colors, into a powerful hive-mind capable of defending itself against all manner of external threats, it also imposes codes of conduct upon its participants that can benefit some at the expense of others. After all, society doesn't care about the niceties of personal liberty. It doesn't gaze hopefully into the future in order to bring to the present visionary standards of equality and deportment. Society unifies people on the back of traditions that the majority find acceptable, a reality which is far from inherently liberal. This sad truth is animated to chilling effect in Shamim Sarif's quiet, historical novel. The year is 1952 and South Africa has slid into the worst form of institutionalized racism. Its ruling political party, an all-white assemblage of British Colonials and their descendents, have not only forbidden the races to intermarry, but robbed native Africans of their land by forceably removing them to semi-autonomous districts beyond the urban havens enjoyed by whites. Though some of these restrictions have existed since western colonization, laws codifying this racism have only recently been past, empowering police and the military to execute the will of the European elites. At the same time, however, South Africa is undergoing industrialization for which it has opened its borders to Asians to come and fill its factories and run its shops as it accelerates into the First World.? Into this patchwork country are dropped two young, Indian women seized by exceedingly different circumstances. Miriam is the quiet wife of a Muslim shopkeeper who has relocated his family to South Africa in the promise of new opportunities. Confined largely to the home, unless her stern husband requires her assistance cleaning or taking inventory in the shop, Miriam is rapidly aging under familial burdens made toxic by a nearly complete absence of warmth from her husband. Her children are her only refuge, that is, until she encounters amina, an ambitious cafe-owner who not only flouts the traditional dress and deportment proscribed to women, but defies this racist state by secretly allowing Jacob, her friend and co-founder, to silently own half of their shared business. Though society and circumstance makes it almost impossible for the two women to connect, Amina persists in drawing Miriam out of her shell, offering her a future the beleaguered wife couldn't have otherwise imagined. A novel as quiet as it is moving, A World Unseen, later made into a film of the same name, is a disturbing snapshot of life in a time that has thankfully lapsed into history. With but two brief and emotional scenes, Ms. Sarif vividly captures the senselessness and hopelessness of apartheid, reviving its depravities for a 21st century audience that will largely find its practice abhorrent and shameful. This political backdrop, for all its ugliness however, provides a spectacular setting in which to root our two protagonists, Miriam and amina, both of whom represent the slow, incremental way in which change is brought to societies. They do not march in the streets. They do not organize protests and set fire to government buildings. They do not even lock arms with their fellows to force the state into revealing the hellish depths to which it is willing to sink. No, they simply resist in the most effective way, and in the only way they know how, by living their lives as they wish to, deferring to no one but themselves and to nothing but their own desires. Though superficially a love story, A World Unseen is, at root, a story about the right to choose: one's fate, one's loved ones, one's friends, and even one's mistakes. It harnesses the quintessential elements of liberty in the face of violent opposition and, through that liberty, seeks to capture the preciousness of life and the degree to which we are all lessened when that most universal gift is crushed beneath the boots of an unfeeling state operating on the principles of ignorance and selfishness. In this, it succeeds beautifully. A World Unseen has its troubled moments. It fails to give the uninitiated reader any any real sense of Apartheid's power,, much less where it came from or why it persists. Moreover, the choice to make both of the protagonists outsiders sets the reader at too far of a remove from the bone-deep wrongness of this country at this time. However, neither of these complaints are fatal to the effort and, indeed, perhaps aid some readers in experiencing what Miriam and Amina feel, visitors to an exceedingly strange land in which they've chosen to stay and live. Quietly excellent... (4/5 Stars)

A thoughtful, quiet journey To a Mountain in Tibet

From The Week of May 27, 2013 Grief is a complex and exquisite emotion. For though it wracks our minds and torments our hearts with its dark and vicious throbbing, constantly and acutely reminding us of what we've lost, it also provides an avenue through which we can explore not only our place in the world, but the very meaning of existence and the good life. It takes us out of our day-to-day existence and compels us to contemplate our lives, our virtues and our sins, our merits and our flaws. And finally, it serves as a kind of memorium for the fallen, a means of acknowledging to them, and to ourselves, the depth of our emotions. Without it, introspection would be a meager force, a tool rarely brought to hand. This Colin Thubron captures well in his cinematic exploration of the Himalayas. After losing his sister to a mountain accident and his parents to old age, Mr. Thubron was a man adrift. But for an Italian girlfriend living in his native England, he possessed no ties to the world, nothing with which to link him to life. And so, as a means of revisiting his father's past, his sister's death and his own belief system, he conceived of a journey to Tibet where he would make himself intimately familiar with Mount Kailash, a 27,000-foot colossus of beautiful lakes and pitiless stone that is sacred to four of the world's prominent faiths. Here, he encounters a people eking out a hard existence at the heart of the world, a people who, despite being rich of faith, have been reduced to life's essentials. Despite their poverty and their scarce resources, these natives persist in this hard land, making pilgrimages to Mount Kailash's most holy sites, many of which are not easily accessed by the young and the fit let alone the aging and the undernourished. Determined to find something here to sooth his soul, Mr. Thubron pushes past the pain and the deprivation to absorb this sacred place and all that it has to offer. Though it has all the hallmarks of another chronicle of an ambitious mountaineer and his adventures conquering the world's peaks, To a Mountain in Tibet is an introspective work of nonfiction that equally captures the beauty and the desolation of the Himalayas. Largely setting aside the tangled politics of the region, Mr. Thubron bears his wounded soul to the reader, inviting him on a journey of self-discovery into a formidable place that most of us will never see. On the way, we learn about the author's father's military service in the area, his childhood in a war-torn Britain and his desire to find some measure of solace for a savaged spirit. But while these emotions are never far from the surface, they are overshadowed by the sheer grandeur of Mount Kailash, a sacred and unsummited mountain that is brought brilliantly to life by Mr. Thubron's descriptions of its walks and its lakes, its rocks and its shrines, all of which convey a profound sense of timeless majesty unimaginable to those of us who live in blander climes. Consequently, Kailash becomes the work's central character, the hub around which the work rotates, its secrets as profound as its claws are sharp. This is not a flawless work. Though Mr. Thubron wields an eloquent pen, his account seems to float largely out of time, existing in a place beyond culture and politics. This may well have been deliberate, an attempt to make the work enduring to the generations who might find solace in it, but it seems as likely to be a simple unwillingness to grapple with such difficult subjects. Moreover, Mr. Thubron teases us with details of his family that he never quite reveals with any specificity. Naturally, it is his prerogative to keep private his own history, but it seems strange to raise the specter of such figures and then to not fill them in. Nonetheless, this is an excellent and emotional trek through icy desolation to find beauty at the heart of the world. It is executed with quiet grace and enduring sensitivity. (3/5 Stars)

An excellent, playful takedown of the DSM5 in The Book of Woe

From The Week of May 27, 2013 Compared to the talents and the weapons claimed by the great diversity of life on Earth, humans are an unremarkable species. We cannot hide ourselves in plain sight nor poison our enemies with venom. We cannot glide through the skies nor survive at the bottom of the oceans. But what we lack in tusks and gills, wings and exoskeletons we make up for with the power to think, an ability that has given rise not just to dreams and language, science and culture, but the only advanced civilization to have ever graced our planet. Our minds are remarkable machines that evolution has shaped into tools that we will use to rise beyond our base genetics, our root circumstances, and take to the stars. But for all its glory and its plasticity, the human mind is not without its flaws. For while it has enabled some to make discoveries that have re-imagined our world and our universe, it has also steered some into the pits of hell, condemning them to lives of madness and confusion, obsession and disassociation from which it is difficult to recover. And it has encouraged yet others to study these malformed minds to both glean knowledge of their illnesses and to aid in their healing. But just how successful has that effort been to catalogue and heal the array of human mental afflictions? Gary Greenberg explains in his fascinating polemic. The diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) is the psychiatrist's handbook. An oft-revised classification of mental illnesses, it is an encyclopedia of disorders that range from the disassociative to the obsessive. Though largely confined to the psychiatric community, the alphabet soup of its terminology, BP, OCD, BPD, has spilled over into mainstream culture, causing some to prematurely diagnose themselves with its theatre of mental horrors while motivating others to rebel against its labels, rejecting them as nonsense. Between, it has given rise to an eruption of proscriptive drug use unimaginable fifty years ago, a result that none of its authors could have predicted. The DSM has undoubtedly been beneficial to some. Its classifications, assembled from thousands of studies, have helped clinicians accurately recognize and properly treat mental illness in their patients. However, the DSM is simultaneously, and unavoidably, the work of men and women who cannot escape the biases of their culture. Thus, over the years, "afflictions" such as homosexuality have been included in its pages, proscriptions offered for its curation. These incidents damage the Manual's credibility. For if illnesses can so easily slip in and out of its pages, then what truly is mental illness? Can we ever know? The result of both a career as a clinician and the most recent and controversial revision of the DSM, The Book of Woe is an excellent and utterly unforgiving examination of the DSM: its history, its implementation and its architects. Though Mr. Greenberg pays particular interest to the pointed criticisms of the DSM5 by Allen Frances, the author of the previous version, this exercise in mud-slinging is merely an entertaining and clarifying lens through which to view the ways in which the DSM has impacted psychiatrists, their patients and the wider culture. In this, Mr. Greenberg is clinical in his ruthlessness, raising awareness of the numerous ways in which the DSM's various revisions have been exploited by doctors and pharmaceutical firms to create highly profitable drugs of dubious effectiveness at the expense of patients and their concerned families. This work is hardly the first to raise such concerns, but they are handled here with both care and passion. Though much of The Book of Woe's critiques of the DSM5 will be of little interest to non-psychiatrists, Mr. Greenberg is effective in taking the reader into the anatomy of a diagnosis, not only revealing how thin the line is between mental health and mental illness, as defined by the DSM, but the ways in which such diagnoses offer hope to bewildered families seeking answers. The author poignantly captures just how desperate some people are to get help, help that, at times, the DSM actually hinders instead of aids. The Book of Woe only re-enforces the critical importance of being one's own best advocate, of questioning everything as a means to getting the proper diagnosis, a task made all the more difficult when one's mind is clouded by illness. The Book of Woe is certainly not without its flaws. Mr. Greenberg barely even attempts to be objective about the DSM5, featuring here its critics far more than its promoters. Moreover, he has chosen to prominently focus on the bumps in the road to the DSM5's publication, making it seem as though the book is a nonsensical result of bureaucratic bumbling. His desire to emphasize these flaws gives what would appear to be a distorted view of the DSM5's quality. However, even in this, Mr. Greenberg's work serves a purpose, chiefly, to reveal the degree to which the APA has deployed all the typical and despicable tools of a bureaucracy on the defensive to fend off criticisms and discredit its criticizers, a reality that leaves the APA looking both disorganized and greedy. For those interested in the history of the DSM, The Book of Woe is a wonderful read, full of colorful characters and powerful minds. But for those looking for a good catfight between deeply interested parties, looking to preserve both fame and fortune, look no further. (4/5 Stars)