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

From The Week of October 20th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From The Week of October 20th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the fascinating and disturbing Economy of Prestige

From The Week of October 15th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

A relatively tame but entertaining jaunt in The Exorcist

From The Week of October 8th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

The danger of nuclear weapons chillingly captured in Command and Control

From The Week of October 8th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From The Week of October 8th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An innovative if monotonous The Book Thief

From The Week of October 1st, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A tumultuous and revolutionary season recounted in Freedom Summer

From The Week of October 1st, 2013

As much as the religious would have us believe in the holiness of an ideal standard of conduct, an unchanging set of views and values from which one may never need to deviate, we know this is absurd. After all, such standards are informed by the times and the cultures in which they were enshrined. And the merest glance at human history, both recent and ancient, tells us that social mores change over time. What is inexcusably taboo in one culture might not even be worthy of a whisper of controversy in another. Which leads us to an inescapable conclusion. As our physical forms evolve, so too do our morals and mores, taking us on a long and winding journey to freedoms both of the flesh and the mind. This should not be feared. On the contrary, it should be embraced. For to do so is to accept that we can always be better.

But there's a deeper question here, one that cannot be so easily dispensed with. How do mores evolve? What motivates social change? Is it the introduction of foreign elements that must be grappled with, incorporated into our cultural worldviews? Or are mores changed by insurgency, an upheaval from within the culture that has woken to an injustice that must be corrected? Both may be applicable, but I cannot think of a better argument for the latter than the remarkable story of hardship and endurance laid out here by Bruce Watson.

Fully a hundred years after the Americans fought a great, transformative war to expunge their nation's original sin, slavery, life in parts of the racially divided American South had changed amazingly little. African Americans were still segregated, forced to use different washrooms and schools, restaurants and churches, distinctions imposed upon them by their white masters, men and women who had refused, since the end of the Civil War, to admit defeat. Their rage and humiliation coalesced into a movement to deny the rights of their black neighbors, not only disenfranchising them, but igniting the creation of a culture that caused the law to look the other way while the descendents of their slaves were beaten and murdered, raped and marginalized.

Tired of the indifference and the status quo, and chafing at the soulless, forced conformity of the homogeneous, 1950s white culture, a group of young, rebellious, earnest and devoted students, from schools all over the country, descended on the South, in 1964, armed with a mission to compel change upon the ignorant and the backward. With songs and leaflets, energy and passion, they helped to shield the African American community from the slings and arrows of their white peers while they organized to do what most of them hadn't done in their lifetimes, register to vote. The riots and killings that flowed from this hellish summer would change forever the way the world viewed the American South, inspiring lasting legal and social change worthy of Lincoln's memory.

From the policy arguments to the tactical disputes, from the mobilization to the execution, Freedom Summer collects the stories of these legendary rebels that helped to finally abolish this most enduring stain on the American fabric. Shaping his narrative around a number of the Summer's key figures, revealing them in all their admirable passion and headstrong determination, Mr. Watson allows his chronicle, of those few, memorable months in Mississippi, to telescope back and forth between the heatedness of the view on the ground and the more calculated coldness of the view at 20,000 feet, where politics and necessity trump individuality. In this, the reader is afforded an excellent overview of this reckoning with the old South that is as comfortable sitting in the White House, with a conflicted and annoyed Linden Johnson, as it is roaring along at 100 MPH through the Mississippi heat, with the bringers of change and those who sought to snuff them out before they could work their will.

As of this writing, we're less than a year away from the 50th anniversary of this revolutionary summer, a fact which will surely author thousands of recollections, white and black, liberal and conservative, of what happened in 1964. There will be analyses of what it meant, some arguing for everything, others countering with nothing. Freedom Summer may not have all the definitive answers to these inevitable disputes. What it does possess, though, is far more important, a knowledge of the means by which positive change can be wrought. These rebels didn't have to have a coherent message -- on the contrary, the author is quite clear about the many, ruinous disputes that convulsed the SNCC. No, all they needed was the will, and the courage, to enable, and to motivate, the criminally disenfranchised to vote. The poisonous snakes obstructing them, envenomed by their irrational hatreds and burdened by their cultural conservatism, would happily expose themselves at this provocation, slithering out into the bright lights of the national spotlight where they could be judged and found wanting.

Freedom Summer is not a perfect work. It could have spent more time on the lead up to, and the aftermath of, this critical conflagration. Moreover, Mr. Watson virtually ignores the terrible optics of white people, however good-intentioned, riding bravely to the rescue of the beleaguered and uneducated blacks. This must have created fallout, both at the time and thereafter, but these are small quibbles with what is otherwise a wonderful work that exposes, and largely celebrates, the lives of heroes of all stripes who recognized an injustice and, instead of whining about it, chose to attack it directly. Would that they were better remembered by the culture at large.

Inspiring work... (4/5 Stars)