The Last Lost World by Lydia & Stephen Pyne

From The Week of October 22, 2012 As much as the occasional upheavals in our lives may suggest otherwise, most of our days are lived in a stable,predictable environment. Variables like the weather do their best to roil this consistent brew, but these represent only a handful of chaotic forces agitating within an assembly of normality. Everything from the composition of the atmosphere we breathe to the menagerie of the organisms we come across are indistinguishable from conditions 50 years ago, 500 years ago, perhaps even 5,000 years ago. What we know of the world has been the world since humans discovered agriculture ten millennia ago. But has the Earth forever been this way? In the thousands of millennia prior to the rise of humanity, was the planet then as we think of it now? And if not,just how different was it from what we know so well? Ms. Pyne and Mr. Pyne attempt to explain this muddled text.

Beginning more than two million years ago, the Pleistocene is the most recent of Earth's periodic ice ages, each of which have profoundly transformed the planet's climate and the creatures that live within it. While Warm temperatures accelerate the propagation of most species, cold temperatures, especially temperatures which leave large chunks of the planet covered in ice, are deadly to them, making food far too scarce for most species to survive. This affect is particularly hard on larger species which, in dying off, open the door to smaller mammals who are free to flourish in this, at least for them, new and less dangerous environment. Though humans have adapted remarkably well to these new conditions, they are not alone. Animals from bears to elephants have weathered these same interglacial storms, putting their paws, hooves and muzzles into the ring to be the new apex predators. However, unfortunately for them, tooth and claw, feather and fir have lost out to the hairless ape who has used his mind to conquer and control all that lays before him.

Of course, looking back millions of years to divine the truths of the planet's past is not easy. It relies largely on the finding and the proper studying of fossils which can tell us much about not only the kinds of creatures that once walked the Earth but the climate they walked in and the enemies they fought in order to survive. The Last Lost World takes the reader on a journey through some of these fossils and the caves that have sheltered them for millennia. Through this process, interesting facts about the Pleistocene and our role within it are revealed and carefully examined, inspected for bias and finally judged based on their validity in hopes of making clearer our lamentably opaque picture of Earth's many and varied pasts.

Though their intentions are good and their studiousness admirable, The Last Lost World is in every way a pedantic nightmare. Ms. Pyne and Mr. Pyne might well be excellent academics and admirable analysts of fossil records, but they have assembled a disastrous study of the Pleistocene that concerns itself infinitely more with the study of the era rather than the era itself. Yes, some species, like the cave bear, are touched on. And certainly, they pause in their navel-gazing long enough to elaborate on the missing links in humanity's evolutionary chain. But these are merely rest stops on a journey into self-flagellation. For our authors here are consumed by the human biases inherent in defining the Pleistocene and in how these biases reflect more broadly on humanity itself, topics which, I'm sure, hold academic interest for some, but surely not for the layity.

The Last Lost World casts wretchedly little light upon the mysteries and the accepted truths of Earth's ice ages, their characteristics, their durations, even their mechanics. There is certainly room enough here for a discussion of scientific methodologies, especially in the age of climate deniers. Good science is thoroughly tested science. But instead of being treated to a wise and warning-filled coda, the reader is bombarded with a rambling dissertation on the nature of scientific classification, the ruminations on which are torturously extended out into a discussion about human nature that only an academic could love. I left the work knowing very little about the actual Pleistocene which was ostensibly the subject of this ponderous work.

Profoundly flawed. Wikipedia was far more informative. (1/5 Stars)

The Copper Sign by Katia Fox

From The Week of January 09, 2011

Though it is a genre of wide-ranging tastes and styles, historical fiction has two fundamental purposes: to open windows upon the past and to invite us to imagine how we might have fit into these times so different from our own. These are powerful enticements, seductions that speak to us of eras come and gone: their glory, their nobility, and their difficulty. They are stories capable of inspiring us, igniting passions for worlds lost to us by the shrouds of centuries. It is unfortunate, then, that this laborious effort from Ms. Fox mostly fails to deliver on either promise.

In the century following the fall of Anglo-Saxon England, a civilization largely buried by William the Conquerer and his Norman knights at the Battle of Hastings, life is hard for those who call themselves English. Not only are their customs overturned, their laws changed, their lords slain, they also find themselves bowing to a line of foreign kings who ended their way of life and imposed upon them continental conventions of tangled feuds and dubious morality. This is the thorny and troubled Plantagenet England through which Eleanor, our heroine, must navigate.

The product of a youthful and indiscreet dalliance between a French lord and an ambitious Englishwoman, Ellen is doubly cursed. Not only is she the object of her mother's spite -- the woman blames her pregnancy, and by extension Ellen, for ruining her chances at a comfortable, upperclass life --, she is a commoner with a boy's ambitions trapped in a woman's body. She does not want to succumb to a life of marriage and childbearing -- the destiny of all women of her era. She wants to throw off her meager, limited life, become a smith and make armor and swords for the great lords that rule her land.

Until she catches her mother cheating on her adoptive father with a local knight, hers is nothing more than a childish dream. But when her discovery forces her to flee her village, pursued by the knight's lethal threats, she inadvertently stumbles into a lie that will transform all her fanciful notions into reality. If she masquerades as a boy, she can not only earn an apprenticeship with a smith, she can have the life she dreamed of, traveling the known lands, her talented hands laboring for the highest kings. This is Ellen's adventure, its highs and its lows, its triumphs and its betrayals, its loves and its discord.

Though its heroine is, for the most part, a subversive pleasure, The Copper Sign is, in virtually every other respect, a disaster. Its bloated plot consumes 640-odd pages, showing no signs of having ever graced an editor's desk. For not only is the tale twice as long as necessary, Ms. Fox's characters are a confused, inconsistent muddle, their attitudes and ethics changing as the story's plot and her whimsey require. Not only is Ellen's desire to be a boy abandoned less than a quarter of the way through this dense morass, nonsensical feuds, irrational master smiths and conveniently timed illnesses are all summoned by the author and hurled at her heroine in the vain hope that something sticks. Some of this would be forgivable if the novel wasn't held together by Ms. Fox's stupefying lordly antagonist, an accretion of villainous cliches that serve no other purpose than to make Ellen's life miserable and to shove the tale towards its quiet conclusion.

It brings me no pleasure to condemn this work. Clearly, Ms. Fox went to great pains to learn and pass on to her readers the lessons of the forge and the realities of 12th century England, but she appears to have spent much more time researching than she did crafting a plot in which to embed this knowledge. Startling work in desperate need of another draft. (1/5 Stars)

Haiti After The Earthquake by Paul Farmer

From The Week of November 14, 2011

As much as rational analysis argues otherwise, some regions of the world appear to be cursed. Whether they find themselves at a nexus of tectonic instability, or blessed by natural resources that other societies want very much to steal, turmoil and conflict stain their histories, causing prosperity to be as elusive, for them, as tranquility. But even on a list of Earth's most cursed locales, Haiti stands apart. For the Atlantic hurricanes that sweep in to buffet this Caribbean island are as tempestuous as this impoverished nation's self-destructive politics. In Haiti After The Earthquake, Dr. Farmer and his associates attempt to give us a window into this nation and its history as seen through the recent, tragic events there. Unfortunately, they fail miserably.

On January 12, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake rocked Port au-Prince, the densely populated capital of Haiti. Destroying buildings and roads, hospitals and power grids, the devastating temblor, considered as of this writing to be the third deadliest in recorded history, lead to the deaths of 316,000 people, wounded nearly as many, and rendered a million more destitute. Overwhelmed by such widespread destruction, the Haitian government long-plagued by corruption and instability, was unable to respond adequately to the severity of the disaster, a reality which quickly triggered a humanitarian response from the UN and neighboring nations which rushed life-saving assets to the crippled country. Though many lives were saved as a result of the swift, international reaction to Haiti's crisis, it also complicated matters. For without strong intra-agency coordination, the logistics of trying to help so many, in a nation suddenly without functioning infrastructure, created a bureaucratic nightmare the likes of which the western world has rarely seen.

A book entitled Haiti After The Earthquake should have two, straightforward tasks: to describe the earthquake and its aftermath and to use the earthquake as a vehicle to inform the reader about Haiti and its troubled history. Dr. Farmer and friends fail on both counts. Though some effort is made to elucidate the magnitude of the earthquake, the authors blur their descriptions of the 12th of January, and the fearful days thereafter, with their own preoccupied and emotional reactions to the devastation. If these accounts actually conveyed some solid information about the destruction of Port au-Prince, the self-obsession of the narrative would be tolerable. Unfortunately, these 400-odd pages are consumed, in the main, by the authors expressing their shock, their dismay, their worry for family, and their admirable desire to help the afflicted. This tells us far more about the authors than it does about the actual earthquake and its victims.

The effort to inform the reader about Haiti's history is equally as feeble. Dr. Farmer makes a token effort, reserving a couple dozen pages in the middle of his piece to give us a crash course in 200 years of Haitian history. Not only is this section hopelessly pro-Haiti -- it discusses at length the many international injustices Haiti has suffered while making very little attempt to locate any blame for the decay of its modern-day civil society --, it is misplaced in the narrative. It ought to have been expanded and positioned near the beginning of the piece where the reader, having had his sympathies activated by the enormity of the disaster, is educated on Haiti's difficult past and how these struggles inform its present. Poorly done...

There can be no doubt that the contributers to Haiti After The Earthquake made heroic efforts, in the days after the earthquake, to give succor to an impoverished people. Their successes should be championed; their morality should be applauded; and their tenacity should be used as an example to the rest of the world of the great achievements that emanate from the application of human compassion. However, the extent to which Dr. Farmer and his associates are consumed by their own existential drama prevents the reader from fully appreciating these admirable accomplishments, much less extracting valuable lessons from Haiti and its history.

Uninformative and poorly assembled... The self-absorption of an author should never supersede fidelity to the subject at hand. One of the worst reads this year... (1/5 Stars)

Quartered Safe Out Here by George Macdonald Fraser

From The Week of October 31, 2011

War is so costly a weapon, in lives and coin, that it must only be used when all else has failed. For war is an insidious crime that runs longer and cuts deeper than its instigators ever imagine, scarring the world with its pain and ugliness. But even though we all, to some extent, understand these truths, war persists because acuteness of its cruelty fades with time, allowing populations to forget its harsh lessons. This is why we read war memoirs, to remind us of what has come and gone and of those who suffered in the embrace of that most destructive of human inventions. Unfortunately, in every way, Quartered Safe Out Here is incapable of teaching us anything.

Mr. Fraser, a British author and screenwriter, here, reflects upon his time in the British infantry during the second world war. Stationed in Burma, he vividly details the unromantic side of war: the suffocating conditions, the endless marches, the chaotic battles and the blessings of fortune which distinguish the living from the dead. Contesting the British forces in this inhospitable land are the soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army who, in their dogged determination and their suicidal bravery, earn both Fraser's grudging respect and his burning enmity. For many of their deadly traps and their bullets have found the flesh of his friends, striking them down far away from home, in a theatre of battle halfway forgotten by a world seemingly exclusively focused on the dramatic collapse of the third Reich. Even while Germany is surrendering and Paris is being liberated, the war grinds on in the east until, with some relish, Fraser observes the capitulation of the Japanese after their homeland becomes the first in the history of humanity to be devastated by nuclear weapons.

Though Quartered Safe Out Here harbors some wisdom regarding the everyday deprivations confronted by soldiers fighting far from home, it is, in every other respect, a contemptible memoir. Published some 50 years after the events it describes, it is full of long and detailed conversations between the author and his fellow infantrymen. Everything from politics to the age-old complaints of soldiering are covered in discussions which the author appears to remember with exquisite clarity even though he had no way of recording them for posterity. His unwillingness to so much as caution the reader on the authenticity of these conversations drains his account of credibility.

Worse, though, is Mr. Fraser's unwillingness to bestow even a gram of validity upon any viewpoint but his own. Not only is he dismissive of those who were critical of the United States' use of nuclear weapons -- would they have rather hundreds of thousands of western soldiers die taking Japan? --, he exposes himself as a hopeless fossil by decrying the extent to which the modern culture is in touch with its feelings. Soldiers of Mr. Fraser's day complained, sure, but they didn't need to see psychiatrists. They did not suffer from PTSD. They did their jobs because these were the tasks before them, the routines assigned to them. They did not blubber like babies; they accomplished their goals. They were real men, living in a better time. Such boastful blather not only ignores the heavier, psychological burden placed upon the modern soldier who, more often than not, is fighting an unconventional war, it assumes that 50 years of advancements in the understanding of the human mind is nothing more than an attempt to weaken man's indomitable spirit. This is backward-thinking nonsense from someone clearly incapable of adapting with changing times.

Some engaging moments centering on the poignancy of war, but has very little else to recommend it. A thorough disappointment from a narrow mind... (1/5 Stars)

South With The Sun by Lynne Cox

From The Week of September 26, 2011

In a world crowded by authoritarianism and tribalism, exploitative globalization and financial meltdown, there is little room for the celebration of human achievement. After all, of what relevance to the war-torn and the oppressed, the distracted and the bored, are the accomplishments of explorers who have long-since been pulled under by the tide of history? Of what use to the beleaguered are the teachings of the nearly forgotten?

Great achievement may mean little to those among us just trying to survive; it may mean even less to those preoccupied by the distractions of a Facebook world, but they should mean something. For without great achievement, without the men and women of the past who bent their wills to the singleminded dream of something better, we would still be running with the monkeys, sleeping under trees for cover and hunting our food which sticks. Civilization itself is the gestalt of generations of human achievement. And if we allow that to be neglected, to lapse into the past unremarked, then civilization will rot and all that we have made will stagnate.

This is why we read books about men like Roald Amundsen, adventurers who possess indomitable wills and resilient spirits, men who shame our petty fears by looking into the unknown and seeing only an ignorance waiting to be conquered. And so, it is a great pity that, here, Ms. Cox does her worthy subject such a grave disservice.

South With The Sun is ostensibly the author's reconstruction of the life of Roald Amundsen, the first human being to not only reach the South Pole, but to reach both poles in separate expeditions. Born in modern-day Norway in 1879, he abandoned the settled life of a doctor and, at the age of 21, fixed himself upon a life of naval adventure. At great cost in physical suffering, and for very little financial gain, he successfully navigated the Northwest Passage (1903-1906), reached the South Pole (1911), and flew over the North Pole (1925). All of these feats, firsts in human history, may have had to share the limelight with yet more achievements by Amundsen had his life not come to a tragic end in 1928 when, taking part in a rescue mission, his plane crashed in the Barents Sea. A keen planner, Amundsen was renowned for a willingness to learn from the native peoples he encountered on his journeys, lessons which bestowed upon him a substantial competitive advantage over his fellow and less successful explorers.

While Ms. Cox, here, pays tribute to Mr. Amundsen's unique achievements, in reserving more than half of South With The Sun's 320 pages for herself, she dooms her tribute to the great Norwegian explorer. An American swimmer, Ms. Cox sparingly describes Amundsen's background and his achievements while lavishing self-reverential attention upon her own efforts to swim Earth's oceans under the most challenging of conditions. And make no mistake, From Greenland to the Arctic, from the English channel to the Ohio River, Ms. Cox has faced some formidable challenges and conquered many of them. But the extent to which she eagerly fetes herself destroys the reader's ability to hail her accomplishments and put them next to Amundsen's which, in assembling this chronicle as she has, is clearly her goal here.

South With The Sun is a travesty of adventure non-fiction. Had Ms. Cox lengthened her chronicle and done Roald Amundsen's life justice, her self-aggrandizement could have been easily forgiven. After all, in this, she would at least be providing the reader with a book that appropriately honored its subject. Instead, in what swiftly becomes a trumpet for Ms. Cox's own life, South With The Sun is rife with self-importance, name-dropped celebrities, and simplistic prose. One of the most complete disappointments of the year thus far. Roald Amundsen deserves so much more than this, non-fiction less informative than Mr. Amundsen's Wikipedia entry. (1/5 Stars)

Napoleon's Wars by Charles Esdaile

From The Week of July 10, 2011

Histories which concern themselves with events prior to the 20th century invariably collide with a problem endemic to the genre. The farther back in time they attempt to reach, the more opaque events become. Not only do the ravages of time rub out valuable sources of information necessary for the corroboration of events, the context in which the events took place is lost, leaving us to only wonder at the myriad motivations which impelled the past's prime movers. The Napoleonic Wars are a classic example of this problem. For while they transpired at the dawn of the 19th century, in a time of printing presses and parliaments which disseminated information that survives to this day, the shifting alliances, internecine conflicts and political firestorms are 200 years removed from us, mired in a barely post-feudalist world mostly ruled by absolute monarchs and the ambitious men who sought to eclipse them. In other words, this is very much not our world. Though Mr. Esdaile goes a long way to illuminating the wars themselves, he fails to connect us to the thought processes of the men who instigated them, an inadequacy which dooms his history.

The Napoleonic Wars were a series of ruinous campaigns which, for the first time in history, coupled technological advancements birthed by the Industrial Revolution with new military ideas of mass-conscription and standardized training to create huge armies the likes of which the world had never seen. These titanic forces smashed into one another all across Europe, soaking lands, from Russia in the east to Spain in the west, in the lifeblood of millions of dead soldiers. Sparked in 1793 by the First Coalition of European kingdoms which, in the wake of the French Revolution, banded together to use military force to restore the Bourbon monarchy to the vacated French throne, they did not end until the Seventh Coalition defeated Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, casting him from Europe and condemning him to a death in exile. In the intervening 22 years, Napoleon rose from the ranks of a disorganized French army, hurriedly raised to defend the new republic from coalition invasion, to become the most powerful man in Europe. Originally cloaked in republican idealism, he soon became a tyrant, sweeping aside the violence and the confusion that followed in the wake of the French Revolution and replacing it with a military-backed empire with Napoleon at its head. He lead campaigns to conquer territory in Spain, Germany, Italy, Austria, Portugal, Russia and Egypt. In doing so, he very nearly succeeded in creating a single block of European kingdoms bent on locking his greatest enemy, England, out in the economic cold. But a guerrilla war in Spain, followed by a notoriously calamitous invasion of Russia sapped his great French army of strength and legitimacy, leading to his overthrow and abdication.

Mr. Esdaile bites off far more than he can chew in this self-styled international history of the period between 1803 and 1815, when Napoleon was emperor of France and very nearly ruler of Europe. Though the author is mostly successful in his attempt to escort us through the ever-shifting sands of the various alliances that sought to oppose Napoleon, he fails to provide anywhere near enough background on the various players involved, leading to confusion and dismay for a reader drowning in a sea of unfamiliar names and labyrinthine political compacts. As a result, Mr. Esdaile hits most of the major notes, the rise of Napoleon, the consolidation of the powers against him, the wars the two sides waged, and the consequences of those wars, while failing to animate the why behind these conflicts: the ambition that drove them, the politics that shaped them, the recriminations and retaliations that perpetuated them.

To be fair, Mr. Esdaile set himself a difficult task. How does one write a history about multiple wars, on multiple fronts, all while providing enough background to tie it all together? His unfortunate answer was to middle it, a single volume history which is too brief to tell the whole story and too long to provide a synopsis. Damningly, I learned more about the Napoleonic Wars from two hours spent with Wikipedia than I learned from blurrily staring at these 650 pages of half-explained alliances and dizzying conflicts. This may be well-researched, but it fails to do what a history must always do best, make explicable events and times now removed from us. (1/5 Stars)

Patriots by James Wesley Rawles

From The Week of October 24, 2010

This is, to date, and without question, the worst novel I've reviewed. It is also likely the worst novel I've ever read. Fans of Mr. Rawles may reflexively assume that I'm just another liberal weenie going after an easy target and that may be true; Mr. Rawles and I have very little in common politically or philosophically. But such differences have never before stopped me from enjoying literature. This leads me to conclude that Patriots is what it is, an enormous, steaming pile of confused, jingoist nonsense which cannot decide if it is a political pamphlet, a survival guide for the end times, or a hymn to the greatness that is Christianity.

In a near-future America in the grip of hyperinflation and economic collapse, a group of friends in the Midwest, who originally met online and devoted time and money to establishing a hideout for the apocalypse in rural Idaho, each journey to this safe location, braving roving bands of the desperate in order to make it to their new home. Once safely ensconced, the friends establish a hierarchy, take an accounting of their seemingly endless supplies, and then brace themselves for the fallout from society's collapse. The band of righteous Americans are, initially, content to defend their territory, but when what's left of the American government sells out to Europe and the United Nations, they rise up to defend their homestead and, more broadly, Idaho from the violent and merciless UN Peacekeepers.

If Patriots is successful in any of its aims, it is surely its survivalism. Long passages are preoccupied with the kind of food, guns and fuel necessary for self-sufficiency when the world falls apart. Though these are tedious, it's clear that a great deal of thought and expertise has gone into their formulation. But the virtue here, to the extent survivalism has a virtue, is wiped out by the narrative which is unspeakably provincial. The objective with any piece of drama, no matter its medium, is to establish an emotional connection with the reader. This is done through the plight of the protagonists who, generally, endure hardship in the achievement of some goal. Mr. Rawles' patriots hardly ever come to any harm. Why? Because they never make mistakes. They are perfect, Christian warriors for the 21st century, men shrouded in the sanctity of Christ and the righteousness of their cause. Their enemies are fodder for their guns. Every non-patriot who does not immediately see the wisdom of the cause? A sellout or a foreigner. But if the structure here is bad, the religious moralizing is even worse. Mr. Rawles is a shill for Christianity which, as the most dominant faith on the planet, certainly doesn't need anyone else justifying its self-righteousness.

I'm always up for a piece of fiction on the end times. I find fiction of this kind both fascinating and scary, akin to a good horror movie. It gives me a thrill and makes me think about the extent to which our modern lives are dependent upon technologies and systems we completely take for granted. But this piece of work just gives the genre a bad name and deflates my hopes of finding a book to match the glory of, say, Lucifer's Hammer. (1/5 Stars)

The Story Of Stuff by Annie Leonard

From The Week of August 22, 2010

This irredeemably pompous commentary on all matters environmental drove me as close as I've ever come to doing physical violence to a piece of literature. Ms. Leonard seems to have no sense of her own conceit as she proceeds to spend 350 pages castigating humanity for its wastefulness. According to Ms. Leonard, when it comes to commercialism, both in the buying and the selling, we are constant polluters, destroying our natural habitat by manufacturing chemicals and materials that, when they are no longer useful, get dumped into the environment. Everything from the toxicity of our shampoo to the guts of our computers are targets for Ms. Leonard's guilty rage. Oh, but there's someone arriving to save the day, with a new plan for how we can live in perfect harmony with the world. I'll give you one guess at the identity of this green caped crusader. Yes, got it in one, Ms. Leonard herself.

I am socially liberal. I believe in recycling, in reusing, in saving water, in solar power. On most points, Ms. Leonard and I philosophically agree. And yet the outrage, the guilt and the complete self-absorption pouring forth from these pages is difficult to swallow. As Ms. Leonard recounts the ways in which she's bravely fought entire state governments to bring justice to the voiceless, as she describes how her short film about the trashing of the environment has brought elementary school kids to tears, her pride towers over her work like a storm cloud ginned up by Global Warming. I read to educate myself on my world, my species, my universe. But how can I trust the opinions and the facts of someone so clearly taken by their own self-importance?

The Story Of Stuff is about the ways in which we waste and pollute. It tries to educate us on some of the toxins, some of the chemicals, some of the processes, and some of the solutions. These are worthy goals. But the good is drowned out by the parade Ms. Leonard throws for herself. This is a bitter disappointment and perhaps the most egregious example of self-aggrandizement I've read in years. (1/5 Stars)

Vampires by John Steakley

From The Week of August 08, 2010

Armor may not be the best piece of science fiction around, but at least that effort from Mr. Steakley is worth the paper its printed on. Vampires, the other of Steakley's famous works, is a repugnant accumulation of violence and despair that, for me, has no redeeming value.

The inspiration for the John Carpenter film of the same name, this tour de ugliness plunges the reader into a world darkened by vicious vampires which have swept across the world. Standing against the supernatural tide is Vampire INC., an Catholic-funded organization of mercenary cells which can be hired by local communities to exterminate the dangerous leeches. It's a decent premise for a vampire novel, perhaps even for a film, but Mr. Steakley's utter inability to infuse a shred of redeeming virtue in any of his characters dooms the tale. Which is well enough given that Vampires barely has a plot, unless one defines plot as overwrought dialogue squeezed between episodes of slaughter and nihilism.

The vampire as a concept, as a creature, is a wonderful way to explore the dark side of human nature. It is the manifestation of a truth that often rides just beneath the surface of human interaction, that humans feed off of one another on a daily basis, that some of use and exploit our fellows, while others give and heal. Mr. Steakley decides to ignore any notion of nuance, instead creating a paean to blood and death which gives the genre a bad name. (1/5 Stars)

Cromwell: Our Chief Of Men by Antonia Fraser

From The Week of April 11, 2010

This is a breathtakingly boring account of what ought to be one of the most fascinating figures in the whole of British history. Unfortunately, Ms. Fraser does her level best to choke the life out of Oliver Cromwell's life story, failing to animate a man who might have done as much to change the eventual trajectory of his country as Alfred I, the first king of England. Clocking in at 1,040 pages, this stuffy chronicle could have had 700 pages easily cut without shirking any worthwhile details.

There is room within historical literature for works that are scholarly and popular. I understand that the former tend to run long in an effort to exhaustively research the subject in hopes of authoring a conclusive work, while the latter favor a more narrative portrayal which inevitably falls short on a few details. I understand the former must be authoritative works of our history, works that take no license with the truth whatsoever, but do they have to be so bloody dry?! Works like this from Ms. Fraser will inevitably give rise to popular, entertaining histories out of sheer frustration with the boredom. Surely some things can be cut so that those of us genuinely interested in the past don't come away yawning from the sheer pointlessness of it all.

Maybe I am spoiled by narrative history. Nonetheless, there must be a better way. Oliver Cromwell defied a king, executed him, and then created a constitutional republic in a 17th century Europe dominated by monarchies. He birthed this republic 120 years before American colonists would do the same. And Ms. Fraser's exactitude has reduced that achievement to mere words on the page. I would've been better served reading Oliver Cromwell's Wikipedia entry than this exercise in Chinese Water Torture. (1/5 Stars)

Titan by Stephen Baxter

From The Week of February 14, 2010

There is but one group of readers who will be satisfied with Mr. Baxter's Titan, those readers who think, as he does, that science fiction is nothing more than orgiastic expressions of geekdom. Titan is an idea and nothing more. It doesn't have a purpose. Its characters barely grow. Hell, its villains, such as they are, have utterly incomprehensible motives until the reader realizes that the story has to be advanced forward somehow and that this monumental lifting has to fall to someone. This is geekdom, plain and simple, a quality idea dredged up from the mind of a scientist and put to paper with little thought of what to wrap around it; a hotdog with no bun. For those of you still interested in such plain fare...

In a near future America on the march towards religious zealotry -- because that's original! --, funding is being cut from the space program. In a last ditch effort to explore the solar system, a collection of astronauts and scientists hatch a plan to cannibalize the remaining extraorbital craft to build a single ship that will travel a select group of them to Saturn's moon, Titan, where they will live out their days, exploring and researching, knowing they cannot return home. Though there's an admirable kind of scientific existentialism about this one-way mission, and though some may find the human relations among the crew of some note, the story runs out of legs once the mission reaches Titan. Mr. Baxter's tale concludes with a coda so ridiculous, so disconnected from the main thrust of his story, that it's not worth detailing here.

A story must be animated by something more than an idea. It has to be inflated by characters and their personalities. It has to be alive. And unfortunately, Mr. Baxter has only simulated life in Titan. There is no true genesis. (1/5 Stars)

Citizens: A Chronicle Of The French Revolution by Simon Schama

From The Week of December 27, 2009, 2010

Though widely held to be the authoritative history of the French Revolution, I found Mr. Schama's recounting of that terrible time painfully long and oppressively weighed down by trivia. Perhaps this is a work more suited for scholars willing to wade through 976 interminable pages of dry but accurate history. Clearly, I will have to return my membership to the society of history buffs because I was skipping whole pages from about page 100 on. Perhaps it is meant to be a reference guide for those teaching a course on a revolution which, in some sense, lasted nearly 20 years as it chewed through multiple constitutions, parliaments, heads of state, currencies and ethics. In that, there is much for Mr. Schama to cover, but doing it with writing as dry as the Gobi? It could not claim my attention.

For anyone looking for a more digestible version of the French Revolution, I suggest Donald S. Sutherland's Liberty and Its Price, a lecture in the Modern Scholar series. However, if you have some suggestions for me, please feel free to write and pass them along. The violence of the French Revolution, especially when contrasted with the comparatively bloodless American Revolution of a scant ten years earlier, has always fascinated me. I found very little enlightenment here. (1/5 Stars)

First Lord's Fury: Codex Alera 06 by Jim Butcher

The week of December 20, 2009

First Lord's Fury is undoubtedly the concluding chapter in the Codex Alera, an epic fantasy series from Jim Butcher which has spanned six books, following a young man's rise to prominence in a world torn apart by war. Though the Codex Alera has offered many enjoyable moments and even more enjoyable characters, not even the combined charms of both can save this ultimate effort. This series climaxed at the end of book four. Book five was tolerable as an addendum, but this sixth effort, while offering an end to the saga, gives us little by way of unanticipated closure. And what closure there is could have been easily predicted by the attentive reader a few books ago.

As some of you may be reading this prior to reading the summaries of the first five novels, I recommend a journey back to my review of Furies of Calderon for a more detailed description of this Rome-inspired the series. Quality work when taken as a whole, but a marked dropoff in these last two novels leaves a sour taste, a shame given that Alera is a lovely world animated by a quality author. For series as a whole, 4/5 stars. But for First Lord's Fury? (1/5 Stars)

Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds

From The Week of October 25, 2009

This is an entirely forgettable effort by Alastair Reynolds, the justifiably acclaimed author of science fiction. Here, however, he stumbles, transforming a promising premise into a nightmarish novel that essentially boils down to two women fighting over nothing more than stupid pride. Scientifically thoughtful as always, but completely uncompelling in any human sense. However, if you're still interested, Pushing Ice is a near future tale in which an Earth ship harvesting comets notices one of Saturn's moons inexplicably leaving planetary orbit. The Rockhopper pursues at Earth's behest and is drawn into a long, strange conflict involving aliens, mutinies and life lived on the extremes. A solid notion, but not much else here. (1/5 Stars)

A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman

From The Week of August 16, 2009

there is almost nothing about this interminable book that I found redeeming. It is a chronicle of the 14th century, in all its calamities, both wars and plagues. Perhaps there is an interesting pattern here, but it's drowned out by the author's obsessive research which dries out the tale to the point of complete desiccation. Still, if you enjoy ridiculously long novels as dry as the Gobe, go for it. (1/5 Stars)