The problem of income inequality in Capital in The 21st Century

From The Week of May 1st, 2014 Wealth has become one of society's most enduring obsessions. Its acquisition preoccupies our musicians, its distribution fascinates our economists, and its possession enables our powerbrokers. Perhaps, this is unhealthy. After all, to ascribe so much value to something is to virtually guarantee that it will become a point of serious societal contention. But while some may successfully convince themselves to deny its seductions, wealth, and the money it represents, is much too deeply embedded in human civilization to simply shrug off. For it not just conveys prestige, its pursuit has endowed our greatest minds with the will and the drive to strive against all risk, a truth that has revolutionized our world and brought us wonders our agrarian ancestors couldn't have imagined. But for all of its unimaginable influence, wealth still starts more arguments than it ends. How much is too much? How much should be freely given away? How much should be taxed? How much should be invested? Wealth is hardly a new invention, and yet, even after all these centuries, it remains controversial, a state not at all alleviated when it is examined by the inquisitive regard of Thomas Piketty who attempts to explain wealth, in all its forms, in his dense and sprawling work. For centuries, economists have understood that economic growth comes in two basic varieties: income and capital. The former is any wage that one might receive for services returned, money that one can then spend on wants and needs. The latter, meanwhile, is the equity that one has invested in what one owns, anything from shares in companies to the roof over one's head. Over time, both of these forms of wealth can accumulate value; technological advances can make products cheaper and thus cause one's money to possess more buying power than it once did while land can become more scarce, as the human population expands, increasing its value sometimes overnight. These forms of growth have allowed human civilization to rise beyond subsistence farming and into the rarified air of industry and technological innovation. Traditionally, economists have equally connected the value of capital and the value of income to the health of national economies. After all, it seemed safe to assume that, in the event a national economy fell into recession, the value of a factory would suffer as much as the value of one's wage. Conversely, should a national economy grow at an auspicious rate, the values of both capital and income would grow equally. But on this vital point, Mr. Piketty begs to differ. Drawing upon 300 years of economic data from numerous western nations, he has reached the conclusion that the growth of capital, thanks to its greater durability, its capacity to weather purely financial shocks, and its concentration in the hands of the wealthy, is considerably more than the growth of income which is not only far more destructible, its value is much more subject to the fluctuations of national fortune. Charged with this insight, Capital In The 21st Century becomes more than a 700-page slog through a veritable forest of charts and research. It becomes a work of disturbing intensity that coalesces around a single, compelling argument, that capitalism is fundamentally flawed. Drawing on centuries of data, Mr. Piketty, a decorated French economist, argues that because the value of capital is more stable than the value of income, and because most of the available capital is owned by the rich and not by the many, the wealth of the few is accelerating away from the wealth of everyone else and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. In this way, the author has set himself in opposition to prevailing opinion, that the fortunes of capital and income are linked, rising and falling together. This bold stance is no doubt part of the reason for such a lengthy laying out of his case. There's no doubt that Mr. Piketty's argument is intriguing. He contends that economists have been tricked into believing growth of capital and income are linked because of the peculiarities of the 20th century which experienced two colossal world wars which destroyed much of the capital of Western Europe. Additionally, this blood-soaked century also labored through decades of Left-leaning governments whose socialist tendencies caused them to implement steeply progressive income taxes which harnessed the profits of the wealthy, thereby precluding their wealth from racing away from the pack. After Europe recovered from WWII, and once the policies of these governments were rolled back in the 1970s and 1980s, the growth of capital returned to its more typical state, of outstripping income growth two to one. If Mr. Piketty is right, and assuming the 21st century avoids capital-destroying calamities like those experienced by the 20th, then the chasm between the haves and the have nots will only continue to dangerously widen. But however much we may be exercised by his assertions here, there is far less excitement for his proscription, a global tax on wealth, between one and two percent, aimed at redressing the imbalance between capital and income, thereby narrowing income inequality. Only a fool would declare this an impossibility, but neither would anyone but a fool think it probable. The United Nations doesn't even harbor a full complement of the world's nations. And if a body designed to unite the world in a single, diplomatic congress can't even agree on membership, how are we to implement a truly global tax on wealth that would undoubtedly prove even more controversial than a global tax on carbon emissions which are arguably just as consequential to civilization? The hope for such movement seems dim unto darkness. In some respects, it is foolish of me to have penned this review; I am by no means a trained economist. And it is clear, to anyone who reads even a dozen of the pages herein, that no less a figure is required to properly assess Mr. Piketty's case on economic grounds. But as a work of literature, it is profound. Yes, it is difficult, yes, it is stifling, but when one comes to understand the man's contention, the implications elevate the text into something well worth exploring. A fascinating and disturbing slog... (3/5 Stars)

Comprehending the self and its states of being in Being And Nothingness

From The Week of April 20th, 2014

Who we are, and defining how we fit into the world in which we find ourselves, has been a problem preoccupying philosophers for thousands of years. In millennia past, where human understanding of science - particularly biology and physics -, was poor, it was an unanswerable question. After all, how can the self be understood without any conception of neurology? But even as the steady march of progress endows us with knowledge the ancient Greeks could've only dreamed of, the debate continues. Can we truly be reduced to component parts? Can all of our memories and emotions, our actions and our insights, be summed up in neurological code? Or do the desires and the motivations of a conscious being extend beyond science and into realms both theological and psychoanalytical? It may be many more centuries before proof removes these questions from the argumentation of philosophy, but in the meantime some of our greatest minds will continue the discussion in hopes of answers. Being And Nothingness is Jean-Paul Sartre's contribution.

Being and Nothingness is a defining work of Existentialism, a philosophical movement that seeks to characterize the human experience as a subjective amalgam of consciousness, emotions and actions. Existentialism contends that humans are, as far as we know, unique in that we have both existence, defined as awareness of self, and essence, defined as existence as an object - a human is a human in the same way as a table is a table. Because we are endowed with self-awareness, we can make choices in ways objects cannot. And if we can make choices, then it follows that we are profoundly free in ways objects cannot be. We are individuals, enslaved to no will but our own. We can fulfil our desires, obtain knowledge, achieve our goals, all without subjecting ourselves to anyone else's definition or mastery.

Being and Nothingness further refines this idea by laying out Sartre's key components of Existential existence: Being For Itself - awareness of self and of the world around us -, Being In Itself - the object that we are, the physical human form -, and Being For Others - the subjective and objective selves that we put forward for public consumption. He argues that to be conscious is to be free, to act, to choose, but that this freedom is refined and reduced by not only our own actions but the regard of others. For when other conscious beings look at us, they objectify us. We become a thing in their reality just as they become a thing in ours. These tensions are deepened by what Sartre calls Bad Faith, the tendency of conscious beings to objectify themselves, to squander their freedom by reducing themselves to form and function. This struggle, the subjective with the objective, the Being For Itself with the Being In Itself, he argues, damages us, defeats us, in ways profound and disturbing.

A dense, 630-page treatise on the nature of consciousness and social interaction, Being And Nothingness is, despite its length and its complexity, a statement about the nature of personal responsibility. Mired in the midst of an ugly war in which Mr. Sartre not only witnessed many of his countrymen willingly surrender to the Nazis, but found himself imprisoned by the Third Reich, the famous philosopher had a great deal of experience with the complexities and difficulties of personal choice. These experiences lie heavily on this work, charging it with a kind of pessimism about human nature that seems both understandable and tragic.

And yet, the Second World War acts as a kind of proof for Sartre's key insight here, that humans continuously squander their freedom by suborning themselves to either their own weaknesses or to the power of others. How else to explain not only the millions who senselessly died in the absurdity of WWII, but the equally numerous excuses that poured out from the survivors, excuses that either sought to justify their inaction in the face of Hitler's society of hate or sought to play down their role in it.

Excuses have no place in a life lived well. Consciousness either endows us with freedom or it doesn't. If it doesn't, then we are slaves to our genes and none of this matters. But if we are free, then we are completely responsible for our choices. We may choose well; we may choose badly, but we can choose. Even a prisoner, stripped of all dignity, all physical freedom, can choose how to endure his or her deprivation. To excuse away our choices is to reduce ourselves to objects. It is to claim that we are not free, that something or someone else rules us, defines us. And to do that is to become nothing more than a table.

This is an insight as fascinating as it is powerful. It endows the individual with total responsibility while giving him or her nowhere to escape to when matters go against them. It compels the individual to live a life of honesty, both with the world and with the self, that must foster both consistency of action and authenticity of being that would be both welcome and rewarding.

And yet, this is harsh. For it leaves little room for what seems to me an understandable, and justifiable, distinction between reasons and excuses. The success and failure of our actions are often determined by circumstances beyond our control. Uncovering those circumstances and incorporating them into the justifications for our choices seems reasonable. And yet, it is almost impossible to define when these justifications descend into the realm of excusemaking. This is not just a slippery slope. It's a slippery slope in the midst of a darkness so complete we don't know we're even on the slippery slope. Making some accommodation for this weakness in our cognitive character seems warranted.

Which is why Being And Nothingness feels incomplete. Yes, once one gets past the stuffiness and the headache-inducing defining of terms and conditions, is inarguably potent manifesto for human responsibility which, many would argue, is the perfect tonic for our age. But it is also too much of its time. It is drenched in a kind of grim certainty that must, at least in part, stem from one of the darkest, most violent periods in human history. It argues for a doom that does not seem appropriate for a more peaceful age, one in which the self is not under constant siege. It feels as though Mr. Sartre was looking for an analytical cure for the helplessness that anyone would feel in the midst of colossal warfare and that states of being in conflict with one another was the result.

As difficult as it is insightful... (3/5 Stars)

an entertaining, if overly explosive, near, nanotech future in Nexus

From The Week of April 6th, 2014

Although progress has been a constant throughout human history, successive generations building on the discoveries of those who came before, it has often come so slowly, so gradually, that humans have rarely had to confront the notion that progress might change their entire world. Certainly, there have been inventions that instilled such fears, particularly those produced by societies beginning to industrialize, but even these advancements only affected certain walks of life. Only in the last 50 years has technological progress reached a sufficiently high velocity to challenge our deeply instilled sense of stability, of sameness. And the result? Nearly universal anxiety about where our civilization is headed, whether or not we are enslaving ourselves to the utility of technology, and the degree to which we are raising children zombified by being forever plugged in. We want the world to be predictable. We want to be what we know. It's precisely this hunger that Mr. Naam exploits so well in these first two volumes of an engaging future of the synthesis of man and machine.

The year is 2040 and, quietly, humanity is on the brink of a revolution as consequential as it is irreversible. Nexus, a drug based on neurological nanotechnology, allows for the voluntary linking of human minds. Not only can experiences and emotions be shared, but thoughts can be exchanged effortlessly, individuals entwined until they can become united far more than they were apart. Moreover, Nexus allows humans trained in its use to hack their own brains, unlocking doors to potential previously only dreamed of. Homeostasis can be monitored and tweaked. Bodies of knowledge, of skill, can be compiled into apps that Nexus users can run, empowering them with instant abilities. Even memories can be blocked, manipulated and selectively forgotten. The brain has not be cracked. It has been reduced to a coding platform that is the playground of geeks everywhere.

But this is also precisely why Nexus is banned throughout the West. The potential for Nexus to create transhumans, to create species distinct from baseline humanity, terrifies western governments. Coming on the heels of any number of disastrous encounters with cloning and mind-control, it is seen as an existential threat to an entire way of life. Which is why it must be controlled at any cost. In America, this responsibility falls to the ERD, the emerging Risks Directorate, a branch of Homeland Security which arms its agents with the newest bio-enhancements and unleashes them upon the producers and peddlers of Nexus. Arrests are made, careers threatened, lives ruined, but for one promising scientist, kaden Lane, their threats are provoking, not quelling. For they have evoked in him a desire for revenge and freedom that might just accelerate humanity's date with destiny, permanently upending the world order.

An entertaining if formulaic jaunt through an exciting, potential future, the first two volumes of the Nexus series are worthwhile science fiction. Ramez Naam establishes an engaging world of bright parties, experimental drugs and unshackled ambition that feels pleasingly and authentically global. Nexus may have been dreamed up in Silicon Valley, but it's adopted, played with and accelerated to its potential in an increasingly powerful Asia which has had little, if any, history with, much less time for, the tricky balance of state power versus individual freedom. It is a playground of experimentation that proves deeply fertile for nexus, a playground that the West, through means both covert and otherwise, tries to manipulate and pollute. In this way, Nexus becomes a future analogy for today's oil politics, with the US acting as it sees fit, with little to no care for the consequences, let alone for international law.

At the series' heart lies a fascinating question. Should knowledge, that could potentially be put to ill use, but that also has immense utility for those who will not abuse it, be regulated by governments? Nexus will change the world. It will break down the traditional notion of the individual and create a new kind of permanently connected person, one incubated in the ideas and philosophies of we rather than I. But however revelatory, howevermuch it may expand the horizons of the human experience, this is potentially powerful for certain abusive personalities who could use this technology to enslave their followers, or their dependents. But should such potentialities be a death knell for any technology? By positioning his heroes as non-conformists, and by giving near omnipresent surveillance technologies into the hands of his government villains, Mr. Naam convincingly argues that knowledge should be free and that we ought to trust in the goodness of people to ensure that it is not put to wicked ends.

Superficially, however, Nexus and Crux are techno thrillers. The author may ask interesting, philosophical questions about the nature and responsibilities of knowledge, but these queries are far-too-often sandwiched by adrenalized action scenes aimed straight at Hollywood. While there's nothing inherently wrong with this approach, it does cause the characterizations here to suffer. Mr. Naam never manages to create anything close to a functioning, rational actor. His characters are puppets being jerked around to his masterful end. Often, the action and the technologies hide these flaws, but they inevitably re-surface to remind the reader that the author cares far more about saturating his pages with set pieces of total mayhem than he is in developing real people we can relate to.

This is a fascinating journey, one that won't soon be forgotten. Mr. Naam is right to point out that, with the advent of certain technologies, our world could radically change in months, maybe even weeks. But one doubts that such change, however exciting and chaotic, would be quite so bloody, or labyrinthine. (3/5 Stars)

A thoughtful glimpse of civilization's fall in The Last Policeman

From The Week of March 31st, 2014

Civilization is so pervasive, so consequential, that it's all-but impossible to imagine our lives without it. It has sparked ideas and ignited industrialization, enshrined the rule of law and elevated the power of the people, but it has also virtually blinded us to the truth, that it has bound us up in its conformist chains. This is a good bargain. After all, whatever we lose by way of personal freedom we more than gain back in enlightenment and wealth. This is indisputable. But just what have we surrendered? Is the absence of civilization truly so destructive? Would a world predicated on personal freedom necessarily be anarchic? Philosophers and anthropologists have been asking themselves these questions for generations, but Mr. Winter's has run the experiment. And though the destination may not be revelatory, the journey certainly is entertaining.

It is virtually certain that, in six months, everyone on Earth will be dead. This is the truth that confronts Harry Palace one unforgettable morning when he wakes to the news that a planet-killing asteroid is on a collision course with Earth. A policeman in a quiet, new-England town, one would expect that he, like every other living human, would be tempted to throw off the boring mundanity of daily existence, either by revelling in the freedom of these final days, or by ending it all on their own terms. But Harry Palace is not like the thieves and the opportunists, the professors and the pilots, who have forsaken their lives and their posts for a final, explosive experience. Harry palace holds the thin blue line against the darkness, righteously holding up the law in a world going to pieces.

The only problem is that it's almost impossible to be a policeman in the endtimes. Cell service is spotty, hospitals are barely staffed and the police force's investigative powers are being shut down. After all, what's the point in solving any sort of crime when there's so little time left? But to harry palace, truth is truth, right is right, and an oath is an oath. And even if it kills him, he's going to hold that line until the bitter end, as best he knows how.

An engaging journey through a tragicomic landscape, The Last Policeman and its successor Countdown City are pieces of imaginative near-future fiction. Ben Winters, though far from the first to attempt to conceive of a world careening through its last days, nonetheless manages to lay it out with style, with passion and with originality. His post-Announcement New England is vividly and organically drawn, a place where, though law and order is practically maintained, the soul has been ripped out of the community. There remains a societal superstructure within which to operate, but families are deteriorating, services are decaying and people are wandering off to please themselves before the end. Consequently, the author's world is not one of instant and gratuitous violence, but one in which the social, economic and civil webs that bind us all together are being sundered thread by thread, widening existing holes through which yet more vulnerable people slip into oblivion.

More than its rich environment, though, The Last Policeman's protagonist is also relatively rare. In a world slowly fraying at its seams, harry Palace is a humble, even geeky, rock of stability. He's a square, a man who does good because he has never thought to do anything else. While many of his fellows escape their obligations, he stays to do the job he's always wanted to do, an unthanked, unwanted, and unacknowledged pillar of civilization that someone will eventually break. In this, Palace does the series wonderful service as both an object of amusement and admiration. The former comes as the reader snickers at his naivety and his earnest doggedness; the later arrives when we come to understand just how much he must sacrifice in order to stand up in the face of a tide that even he seems to know will wash him away.

The first two volumes of the Last Policeman are by no means perfect. The author's mysteries are as threadbare as they are insignificant. Thus, as Harry labors to solve them, we are left to snicker and scorn him for either his thick-headedness or his gullibility. And given that Harry was already a square, having these attributes emphasized in this way is less than flattering. Moreover, we're often left with the impression that Harry's humanity only exists as a means by which to highlight its absence in everyone else around him. Which draws scrutiny to Harry's spotless character that it cannot withstand. Howevermuch the works may be flawed, the extent to which Mr. Winter's has avoided the cliches of apocalyptic fiction, and attempted instead to ask intriguing questions about what the world would realistically look like if all our deaths were as certain as sunrise, grants his work imagination and depth that easily overcomes its shortcomings.

An interesting idea that is neither boring or derivative... (3/5 Stars)

An extraordinary mind, a tragic life in Tesla

From The Week of March 17, 2014

There's an element of madness in innovation, a capacity to seize the unknown that is foreign to the rest of us. We are born in established worlds, baked into environments that have been shaped by centuries of tradition and generations of experience. And so it is no surprise that our tastes, even our thoughts, are influenced by customs we cannot ignore. Not so for the visionaries in our midst who are, in some fundamental way, immune to the transmission of cultural DNA, who reject the known for the alien shores of undiscovered frontiers of science and philosophy. This is what makes them special, not their products or their plaudits, not their lives and the hagriographies written in their honor, this altered sight that allows them, for just a moment, to glimpse the beautiful chaos of the unformed. The glories and the costs of such perspectives are detailed thoroughly and methodically in Bernard Carlson's engaging biography of an exceedingly strange legend of history.

Born in a 19th-century Europe obsessed by the dying days of empire, Nicola Tesla would become one of the most transformative, American inventors of the industrial age. Widely credited with the creation of systems to harness the powers of Alternating Current, and having made powerful contributions to the understanding and usage of wireless transmission of both information and electricity, he was celebrated, in his day, as a wizard of science, a man who used his expansive imagination to dream up fanciful technologies and demonstrate them to crowds in awe of his discoveries. His insights and designs, even today, underpin technologies in everything from cars to smartphones. Many have won greater fame and awards for achieving far less. After all, were it not for Tesla Motors, named in homage to the great inventor, would anyone in mainstream culture even remember the man?

Why such a genius has had his star burn so dimly for so long has a complex answer rooted in Tesla's eccentricities and his society's biases. A likely bisexual who never married, Tesla did not conform to the social customs of his turn-of-the-century day. But as much as we would like to blame his lack of fame on something as simple as societal ignorance, we cannot. For it's equally clear that Tesla possessed a fondness for making boastful claims that he often failed to back up. Repeatedly, his more fantastic projects encountered unforeseen problems that set him back years, eventually earning him a reputation as someone whose bark was louder than his bite. These factors combined to banish him into relative obscurity, until a recent spate of biographies has re-established him as one of the great minds of our age.

At times revelatory and opinionated, Tesla is a thoughtful biography of a complex genius. Mr. Carlson, who does not shy away from attempting to explain both the man and his insights into electricity, its properties and the manner in which it interacts with our world, does an excellent job describing Tesla's successes, his failures and his methodologies. The reader is not only furnished with an understanding of the importance of 19-century patents, but with the science contained within those patents and how it has outlived Tesla himself, growing to become a fundamental technology upon which a large swath of our world operates.

But these explainations, however educational, are secondary to Tesla himself, a man with a remarkable life story that Mr. Carlson largely handles with respect and fascination. The author details his tragic family history, his personal drive to succeed, and the numerous ways in which the meritocratic United States aided him in turning his drawing-board scribblings into products and standards that could quite literally light the world. It's here that Mr. Carlson shines. For he is perfectly willing to speculate on Tesla's mentality, his drivers and his demons, doing so with an openness that is as refreshing as his insights are compelling. We'll never know for certain what Tesla the man was like, but Tesla does a wonderful job conveying a consistent impression of a man buoyed by a profound belief in himself and his capacity to overcome every obstacle. That this was both the great gift and central tragedy of Tesla's life will surprise no one who reads this book.

Where Tesla wanes is in the less interesting chapters of the inventor's later life. Mr. Carlson spends ample time on the disputes and the grudges, the insights and the patents, during the heady days of the 1890s. But Tesla is allowed, with only minimal comment, to lapse into his long twilight. Perhaps this reflects what little we know of Tesla's last 38 years, but one senses that the author was far more interested in the feverish years than he was in how a genius lives when the world stops paying attention to him. This, along with the absence of any effort to connect Tesla the man to Tesla Motors, much less the AC age that he gave birth to, seems a notable oversight.

Notwithstanding its shortcomings, Tesla is a mind-altering examination of the powers of imagination. For it is in no way a simple matter to conceive of an unmade world. Tesla is a blind man who managed to draw the blueprints to a city without having ever seen one, by simply willing himself to imagine it, to know it, to possess the whole of it. That act of purely mental discovery is remarkable. And that Mr. Carlson chose to position it at center stage of his biography is as laudatory as it is thought provoking. A good glimpse into a unique mind... (4/5 Stars)

A delightfully creepy journey through a twisted world in Annihilation

From The Week of March 10, 2014

In life, there are few certainties. Seven-billion humans stuck on an unpredictable world that is largely governed by chance ensures that much. But one thing we can be certain of is the sanctity of our own minds. These sublimely tuned systems of pattern recognition sort reality from fiction, friend from foe, even wisdom from foolishness, so effortlessly, so reliably, that we're often barely even aware these assessments are taking place. Our minds are the gatekeepers of sanity, providing boundaries without which the world would not make sense. Remove the mind's capacity to make these distinctions, damage its ability to see clearly, and the world becomes a foggy morass of which nothing can be certain, not even the fidelity of our own thoughts. This is a truth chillingly explored in this first entry in a new trilogy from Jeff Vandermeer.

Located just off a stretch of unpopulated coast in one of Earth's more tropical climes, Area X is a deadly and torturous enigma. A place of undefined borders, it appears to be populated by some kind of organizing intelligence made manifest in the behavior of the animals residing there. And yet, but for a handful of chilling encounters, few have ever seen physical agents of this most hidden and pervasive power. Which is not to say that humans haven't felt its presence. Repeatedly, governments have dispatched expeditions to Area X, in hopes of learning its secrets, only to have these highly trained professionals returned to them in extraordinary disarray. For some, their memories are gone, others, their health. But one constant remains. None come back unscarred.

The twelfth and most recent expedition is no exception. Comprised of four women, a biologist, a surveyor, a psychologist and an anthropologist, they are given training, equipment and a mission, to investigate Area X, in particular, a tower that seems to shaft deep into the earth. At first, they seem to be making progress in understanding this twisted place, but then soon events begin to proceed out of their control and, beforelong, nothing will be familiar, not even their own minds. There will be no comfort in this place without rules.

As creepy as it is swift, Annihilation is an entertaining piece of weird fiction. Mr. Vandermeer, who rose to prominence with a series of stories set in the strange city of Ambergris, has channeled his talent for creepy fantasy and carved out a foothold for it on our own world. This proximity, this sense that the rot now exists in a place we hold dear, invests the work with anxiety and urgency, neither of which the author wastes as he marches the reader down into his dark, infested imagination.

Of its many accomplishments, Annihilation's most important achievement is the degree to which it teases the reader into accepting that the line between sanity and madness is whisper thin. The governor of this line, the mind, can be tricked and influenced in so many ways that it's rather surprising that madness isn't a more pervasive problem for society. After all, how could anyone function if they could not trust their senses? Their memories? Their actions? How does anyone distinguish what must be fought from what must be loved when there is no cognitive anchor to hold onto? When there is only Area X, its lies and its mysteries laid bare in the warped light.

Mr. Vandermeer has always excelled at presenting his characters with an environment capable of driving them mad, of tormenting them with things they cannot understand until they have no safe ground left upon which to tread. Annihilation is no exception. But where this volume joins those in its power to entrance, it fails to back that up with compelling characters. In some sense, this is intentional. For Area X leaves no more room for personal identity than it does for personal freedom, devouring all before its strange, expansive threats. However, the reader is left to quietly rue these omissions, as none of the human wills present here amount to much more than their archetypical foundations. Certainly, the creeping sense of otherness makes up for this absence, but only just.

More delicious than disappointing... Weird promises to be an exciting genre for some time to come, particularly with minds like Mr. Vandermeer to guide it. (3/5 Stars)

the heartbreaking legacy of corruption and ideology in The Oligarchs

From The Week of March 10, 2014

However much we may debate its merits and pick at its flaws, there can be no doubt that capitalism is the engine that empowers the progress of civilization. In providing markets for products and rewards for risk, it has banished agrarian economies to the dustbin of history, rejecting its centuries of stagnation in favor of the decades of swift progress generated by industrialism. In doing so, it has been the mechanism by which positive change has built our world and given us hope for better futures.

But for all of capitalism's power, it is not a self-guiding system. It requires men and women to refine its rules and establish its aims. No surprise then that capitalism comes in many flavors ranging from the relatively free markets of the United States to the authoritarian ones in China. These strains are shaped by history and culture, experiences and values, from the tragic to the revolutionary, that characterize economies. Nowhere is this cultural influence more apparent than in Russia's 25-year relationship with capitalism, a journey chronicled here by Mr. Hoffman.

In 1991, with the arrest of Mikhail Gorbachev and the ascension of Boris Yeltsin, Russia's 70-year experiment with Communism came to an earthshaking end. After decades of speeches and marches, of command economies and five-year plans, the Soviet Union could no longer hide, from an ever more sophisticated world, that it had fallen into the past. Where the West was rising high on profitable markets demanding fancy cars and ever-more-powerful planes, the USSR, despite its countless bureaucrats and endless training, could not even manage to fill its stores with fresh vegetables, let alone entice anyone to choose its brands. Its promise, that the organized power of the people would ignite a worldwide revolution and a new age of enlightenment, had collapsed under the weight of its inefficiencies, its corruption and its politics, none of which encouraged innovation.

Over the next five years, Russia would embark upon one of the most ambitious and fraught economic experiments in human history. Through shady auctions and even shadier schemes, it would sell off its nationalized banks and oil companies, airlines and car dealerships, hoping to create an entrepreneurial class that would fill new markets with new products that the people would be proud to purchase. Instead, in its haste, it created opportunities for a handful of ambitious individuals to control Russia's most powerful and profitable assets. Practically overnight, oil barons and media titans, kings of construction and lords of finance, became Russia's board of directors, using their outsized influence to shape government policy and shape a better future for themselves and those who'd invested with them.

A chronicle of the lives of Russia's new class of industrial titans, The oligarchs is a thorough examination of a pivotal period in Russian history. David Hoffman, an author and journalist for the Washington Post, so thoroughly reconstructs the sociopolitical climate that characterized Russian life during the fall of the Soviet Union that the outcome -- the accretion of power into the hands of an extraordinarily exulted few -- seems inevitable. From the voucher schemes to the influence peddling, from the banker War to an actual war, we watch as men of unbridled ambition steal, cheat and grind their way to power, largely at the expense of the Russian people who, thanks to life under Communism, are ill-prepared to be worked and swindled for the benefit of others.

Though the work is primarily an introduction to the first generation of Oligarchs who rose to power in the early 1990s, vividly describing their lives both before and after the fall of the Soviet Union, The Oligarchs reaches for something grander than a dry recitation of past events. In diving deeply into the mechanisms that were meant to transition Russia to capitalism, Mr. Hoffman paints a portrait of the perniciousness of influence peddling and how it has disfigured the Russian economy. In allowing favoritism to play a key role in the minting of fortunes, in the merger of corporations, even in the selling off of national assets, a handful of officials have managed to create a version of capitalism in which the winners have already been chosen. The people, whose decisions ought to shape the markets, have no choice but to use untrustworthy banks and consolidated oil. After all, the very government that should be regulating these industries is simply encouraging them so long as they follow a few proscribed rules that suit the men who happen to be in power at the time.

Every system, be it economic or political, has some level of corruption. And yet, The Oligarchs does such a good job describing how its pervasiveness, its institutionalization, has lead to the present moment in Russian history that it is hard to care about the Boris Berezovskys and the Mikhail Khodorkovskys of the world. Their stories may be individually different, but the result is the same. They were winners who either demanded to be chosen by the system, or were chosen by it anyway. Yes, their ascendance required skill and cleverness, but it was also completely inevitable given the manner in which Russia was privatized. Someone would have won. And in doing so, they would have reaped absurd riches that were bound to create class resentment for generations to come. The flaw is in the system, not the men who simply fail, here, to be interesting.

An interesting primer on one of the sketchiest and most formative moments in recent Russian history... (3/5 Stars)

A weird, re-imagined American West in the universe of The Half Made World

From the Week of February 17th, 2014

We all have our masters, powers into which our service has either been captured or sold. They take many forms, of course, from the internal demons that drive our actions to the external forces that seek to puppeteer our strings, but the influence remains, a constant, guiding pressure that redirects us onto paths of another's choosing. Occasionally, these influences are positive -- the mentoring we receive from parents on our lives and luminaries on our careers --, but often they are negative, coercive pleas, from within and without, that entice us to surrender our money, our will, even our freedom. What we can do about this is unclear. After all, it is not as though these influences always make themselves known to us. But we must try to resist. For to do otherwise is to sell ourselves into slavery, to ourselves and to others, of a kind vividly illustrated in Felix Gilman's weird world of spirits and steam.

In an alternate 19th-century West, where the land is as unforgiving as the people are ruthless, the Great War is a constant, undulating vice that squeezes the hope from the humans caught between its two, thrashing sides. To the east is the Line, the relentless march of mechanized civilization captained by the ruthless Engines, a collective of conscious machines who have tasked themselves with bringing their relentless order to the world. The Engines are so oppressive, so pitilessly efficient, that they have largely rubbed out the spark of individuality that flickered in the hearts of their subjects, assembling them into a mass of amoral tools with which to act out their will. To the west, meanwhile, are the anarchic agents of the Gun, guerilla fighters endowed with extraordinary powers who regularly infiltrate the lands claimed by the Line, seeking to disrupt the schemes of the great engines who want them exterminated. Both are nearly immortal, causing the fallout of their unfathomable conflict to land on the very mortal humans attempting to live in the cracks between forces.

But after many years and countless skirmishes which have ground to dust several attempts at democracy and a more human order, the war might be at an end. For the last great general of a conquered republic may well have, within his shattered mind, a weapon capable of defeating both the Engines and the spirits of the Gun who have risen up to fight for control of the human world. The race to find the broken general and pull from him this terrible secret is fierce, as the victor will surely hold in their hands ultimate victory. But it may well be that the general is too far gone to surrender what he knows, leaving it to the will of others to find their way out of darkness.

Two fascinating entrants into an already crowded genre, The Half Made World and its successor, the Rise of Ransom City, are sweaty, gritty exemplars of the power of Weird. Hailing from the strange shoals of Steampunk, they are a playground in which Mr. Gilman can re-imagine our past, casting it in a far more archetypal light. The author dispenses with the restrictions of our grounded reality and, in their place, animates the cultural and economic forces that shaped the West, investing them with power and agency. The result is the creation of tangible gods who walk the earth, who guide human affairs, who fight and bleed and scream and plot, but who remain as alien to us as any god we can imagine. We do not know why they do what they do, only that they do it, only that they will continue, only that it is within their nature. These truths are so prevalent in Mr. Gilman's world that his people accept them without thought and, largely, without struggle.

Of the two works, The Half Made World is by far the more successful. The author gently introduces us into his brave new world by giving his first work the familiar-unto-trope structure of a small band of heroes racing to find the key to everything before the pernicious forces chasing them can seize it for their own wicked will. This customary plot is then fleshed out with powerful and beleaguered personalities who, in their own ways, are haunted by the demons that this world has bestowed upon them. Their hunger for absolution, for escape, for understanding, for purpose, is as mesmerizing as this world of living, breathing concepts is darkly vivid.

But where The Half Made World succeeds, its successor fails. Structured as an autobiography from a highly unreliable narrator, it is little more than a series of explosive bloviations that, though they advance the plot, do very little to capture the reader's interest. Rather than explore the strangeness of his weird world, Mr. Gilman, here, finds himself with little more than a paean to the literature of 19th-century America, a time in which the P. T. Barnum's of the world could largely get away with penning extravagant tales of their dubious exploits. Harry Ransom, the work's narrator, is a garish bore about whom it is exceedingly difficult to care, a reality that naturally drains the work of its impact and significance.

Notwithstanding the struggles of The Rise of Ransom City, Mr. Gilman has made a substantial contribution to the new and energetic world of the Weird. Superficially, the genre seems like little more than a lazy attempt to attenuate the familiar until its distorted form can produce some kind of entertainment. But this reading misses the way in which breathing actual life into otherwise inanimate concepts compels the reader to acknowledge both their power, in shaping our existence, and their excesses which, when unchecked, have the capacity to plunge us into a world of grit and smoke. In its fevered dreams, it asks us to reckon with what we are making of our world, questions that will linger long after the last page has been turned.

An engaging journey... (3/5 Stars)

Corruption and the new France in the dark The Marseilles Trilogy

From The Week of December 16th, 2013

Corruption is a cancer that, when unchecked by the will to do good, spreads malignantly through the body of society, devouring virtue at every turn until civilization is simply a wasteland of broken dreams. Other crimes, other sins, lack this power to spread and infect. They are either regulated by the good around them, or quarantined into small ghettos where such behavior is, if not normative, then certainly expected. But corruption cannot be confined in this way because of its most potent weapon, the communication to the minds of the good that they are fools for playing by society's rules, that only dupes refuse to partake of the sweet fruit of all of corruption's temptations. No other form of wickedness can so swiftly convince the good to do bad, a truth made abundantly clear in Jean-Claude Izzo's engaging trilogy.

In the late 1990s, at the dawn of modern Europe, life in the French port city of Marseilles, the first city of the third world, is difficult and divisive. Not only are jobs relatively scarce, making rife the exploitation of the vulnerable, poverty and the influx of immigrants have created fertile soil for the racist National Front to bed down and nurture their cruel plots against all those who do not look like them. But underneath the drumbeat of the Front's marches, beyond the screeds of their pamphlets, is an even deeper threat from Italy, a Mafia culture that threatens to reach out and worm its corrosive tentacles into every aspect of European life.

Fighting a one-man war against these threats, which are as foul as they are pervasive, is Fabio Montale, a cop come reluctant crusader who has lived all his life in this dirty city of discontent. A hoodlum in his youth, he found his way onto the side of justice when he could no longer stomach the nihilism of criminality. And yet, while Fabio finds purpose with the police, he does not find peace. For they, in their own way, are just as corrupt as the world they seek to marginalize. Isolated in his quiet quest to keep the Mafia and the national Front from ruining Marseilles, Fabio is ill-prepared for the lengths they are willing to go to win, against him and against the world they want to own. Killing his friends, or even just people seen with him is nothing. What will Fabio have to surrender to continue on the path of righteousness? And does he have the right to endanger those closest to him to fight a war he cannot win?

Adventures through the racist and corrupt underbelly of this French city, The Marseilles Trilogy is as riveting as it is sloppy. Mr. Izzo, whose work helped create the genre of Mediterranean Noir, of which this trilogy is a stalwart, has created a gritty and wine-soaked world that more-or-less operates at the behest of organized crime. These syndicates, in penetrating governments and the police, have largely sheltered themselves from mainstream prosecution, allowing them to conduct their consequential business well outside of the light of day. This cunning investment has short-circuited resistance against them, leaving it to individual journalists, policeman and social crusaders to fight against a monolithic machine they have no hope of destroying.

Which leads us to Mr. Izzo's most singular and effective creation, the battered and beleaguered Fabio Montale, a man who staggers from crisis to crisis without plans, without hope, and certainly without any reasonable expectation of victory. Fabio is aware of all of these truths. And yet, miraculously, despite the pain this world has caused him, he persists in pursuing it precisely because of what said world has cost him. This may be insane; it's most certainly foolhardy; and it will someday, undoubtedly, get him killed. But whatever flaws of character Fabio may possess -- a closed-off heart, an inability to relate to the women he loves --, he is not a coward. He introspects. He reminds himself of what others deserve and he uses this motivation to deal small defeats to a darkness that will endure until long after he is gone.

the Marseilles Trilogy is rich with detail, with chaotic streets and crowded bars, with cynical racism and elicit drugs, with new music and old loves, all of which provide a rich tapestry around its reluctant hero, Fabio. But for all its sensory hedonism, for all that its leading man is worthy of the silver screen, its plots leave a great deal to be desired. At practically every turn, Mr. Izzo falls back on the old chestnut of the murdered woman Fabio could have loved to galvanize him into action. This an effective trope, one that has withstood the test of time, but when overused so blatantly, it gestalts into a writer's crutch that, when kicked away, leaves no other foundation upon which the tale can rest. Moreover, the resolution of these stories are so dizzyingly swift that they are in no way clear or coherent. The author's reluctance to grant Fabio any major victories is understandable in light of his overall message, but his manipulations, to keep Fabio from anything like triumph, is too readily apparent. The reader is never allowed to feel as though his conclusions are organic outcomes of real scenarios.

Nonetheless, The Marseilles Trilogy and the genre in which it has found such a profitable home, is a valuable work that not only speaks to the challenges faced by lone crusaders and large institutions trying to resist the infestations of crime, but to the kind of society that results from allowing the wielders of corruption to operate with relative impunity. These lessons grant these works their potence and their passion. (3/5 Stars)

The neurological mechanics of reading revealed in Proust and The Squid

From The Week of November 10th, 2013

Of the many gifts with which evolution has blessed us, none are as consequential as humanity's ability to adapt. Our physiological capacity to endure the cold and the heat, the dry and the damp, the grim and the barren, have ensured the continuance of our species, but even these achievements pale in power next to the might of neuroplasticity, the ability of the human brain to literally re-program itself in response to the necessities of the individual. In the event that areas of the brain are damaged, malformed, or even underutilized, neuroplasticity allows the brain to re-task its other regions in order to regain necessary skills. It is a wonder that has saved and empowered humanity countless times, and yet, little did we know the critical role it has played in our capacity to read. Maryanne Wolf explains in her engaging work.

Without the written word, we would not have civilization. It's a grand claim, and yet, there can be little arguing it. After all, the written word has been, throughout our history, the most stable means by which to transmit information from generation to generation. Oral traditions served admirably well in the many millennia prior to the advent of alphabets, but such a means for knowledge transfer is highly unstable, subject to misremembering and misinterpretation, not to mention genocide. More than the accumulation of knowledge, though, the written word has given us complex mathematics with which we've built up a world capable of delivering us to the stars. A substantial achievement for something that does not come naturally to the human brain.

From signs to messages, from magazines to novels, we read every day, largely without conscious effort. And yet, in Proust and The Squid, Ms. Wolf argues that this fundamental element of our daily existence is, to us, an unnatural process, one that we have trained ourselves to perform. Drawing on her own research, as well as work from neuroscientists and linguists, she describes how reading is an outgrowth of the brain's capacity to recognize patterns and to extract meaning from them. This evolutionary talent, no doubt the result of the necessities of survival, is, in the reader, cultivated, over some 2,000 hours of intense training, into a system by which the individual can associate shapes with letters, letters with sounds, and sounds with language, creating a closed, linguistic circuit that allows us to not only communicate with our fellows but to imbibe knowledge from the troves of information left to us by the countless members of humanity who have come and gone.

Proust and The Squid is more than a rumination on the mechanics of reading, however. It is an examination of the many manifestations of this talent, how languages based on alphabets and hieroglyphs make different neurological connections, and how these connections can sometimes go astray. The most famous of these maladaptations is dyslexia, a disability Ms. Wolf has clearly studied at length. For these disabilities, and the social and emotional price they exact upon their sufferers, inject passion into the author's work here, transforming it from a thing of pure science to something of a call to arms, to understand and to eliminate such challenges.

While Proust and The Squid is, at times, fascinating and inspiring, it is plagued by a troubling narrowness of perspective. Ms. Wolf uses several admittedly potent statistics correlating reading with personal success to argue that it is a talent that must be cultivated for a full and informed life. But this advocacy seems to run completely counter to her fundamental premise, that reading is an unnatural cultivation of a neurological system that isn't designed to actualize it. Is it truly possible for reading to be so profoundly important when it is clearly not intrinsic to our natures? Is it not possible that reading is, rather, the most obvious means of knowledge transfer for the present? Ms. Wolf is alarmed by the propensity of our newest generation to immerse themselves in a world of touchscreens rather than books. And yet, touchscreens seem to be far more in line with the brain's natural visual systems than reading is. Perhaps, in the future, we will discover other means of knowledge transfer that are more efficient than the laborious programming of alphabets.

In this vein, that Ms. Wolf completely ignores those who read through listening is deeply disturbing. Entire industries have been created to service the many communities that either prefer or depend upon audiobooks for learning. In fact, I read Proust and The Squid as an audiobook because I lack a visual means to consume it. By Ms. Wolf's logic here, I too am cause for concern because I've chosen another way to learn. The author's alarmism over new technologies is a rejection of the very glory that gave us reading in the first place, our ability to adapt. Trust seems in order here, not dismay.

An interesting read, but one that is far more interested in providing encouragement to the dyslexic than it is in recognizing and mitigating its author's own lack of foresight... (3/5 Stars)

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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)

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)

Abraham's The Tyrant's Law fails to bring the heat

From The Week of September 9th, 2013

Belief, no matter its form, is a powerful thing. It nourishes us when we are alone, it motivates us when we have no drive, and it sustains us when all hope is gone. It is the kindling that keeps lit the flame of life which burns in defiance of a hostile universe. And yet, belief has its drawbacks. For while it can push us to be more than we are, belief is not inherently wise. It offers strength, not guidance; will, not insight, a truth that helps to explain why the most ardent believers have often, in the history of our species, also doubled as our most violent and destructive members. Both sides of this coin of faith, the good and the pernicious, play substantial roles in the third entry of Daniel Abraham's engaging Dagger And The Coin series.

The day that no one thought would ever come has arrived and the empire of antea, forged in the ashes of a war now more myth than reality, has fallen. Its ruling sons, once so powerful and pompous, have either been swept into early graves, or corrupted by the priests of a newly ascendent faith that only a meager few understand well enough to fear. For this religious order has the sanction of antea's Lord Regent, Jeter, a man of middling talent who has been plucked from obscurity to be the most powerful man in the known worlds. And given that they have placed at his disposal their singular talents, of sniffing out lies and convincing the weak-minded of their own twisted truths, he is not likely to relinquish his dependence upon them anytime soon.

Cognizant of the crimes of these mysterious priests, a small group of scattered dissidents, who are barely aware of each other's existences, agitate against them. Some choose to do so from within the empire, in hopes of undermining their power. Others, meanwhile, seek out answers in the form of relics and riddles that might well shed more light on how to defeat them. At times, their individual missions appear hopeless. And yet, answers live on in the history of the world, answers that might open a window to a future none of them can imagine.

Lacking the tightness and the drama of The Dagger and The Coin's first two splendid entries, The Tyrant's Law is, nonetheless, an entertaining bridge to what is to come. Mr. Abraham has created a host of characters, from the loyal to the traitorous, from the humorous to the mad, that are as well-drawn as they are tragic, overmatched souls who must somehow find a way to persist in the face of horrors that would make gods take note. They are the work's virtue, establishing an emotional tether between reader and work that won't easily be broken.

Mr. Abraham occupies a fascinating place within the genre of fantasy fiction. For while he is understandably counted among the first ranks of the wave of gritty scribes who have helped boldly navigate Fantasy into new and exciting waters, he does not exhibit the same cynicism as his fellows. The labors encapsulated here are as overwhelmingly atlasian as they are in works by Abercrombie, Morgan, Martin and so on, but they harbor a certain measure of good humor and even hope in lieu of world weariness, a promise of warmth that may not lead to softness but that is nonetheless present throughout. That seductive suggestion, that hint of something more, is here in spades.

And yet, though Mr. Abraham brings his able pen and his cast of engrossing misfits to bear here, the necessities of the plot fail him and us. The Tyrant's Law is almost entirely consumed by the moving about of chess pieces which may well pay off down the road, but that here leave the reader feeling as though he's slogging through mud. There is plenty of movement and machinations, even of blood and manipulations, but these seem like mere dress rehearsals for what's to come, the breath taken before the fall. Required, yes, but no more tolerable for knowing it...

The Dagger and The Coin is just the right amount of inventive and familiar, violent and thoughtful. And for this, it should be celebrated, but this will never be remembered as one of its better entries. Here's hoping for better to come. (3/5 Stars)

The genius and the curse of Walmart winningly captured in The Walmart Effect

From The Week of August 12th, 2013

Of all the traits humans share with their fellow organisms, a desire for a efficiency must be considered the most pervasive and consequential. For though it does not rise to the surface of our everyday thoughts, in governing everything from the way we walk to the manner in which we approach daily tasks, it shapes our every action. This is not altruism, nor is it a conscious effort to leave as little a footprint in our wake as possible. It is an outgrowth of the harsh discipline evolution has stamped upon our genes. For when energy is scarce, as it has been for most of our genetic history, what little is available must be preserved at all costs in order to improve the odds of survival. Unlike every other creature on Earth, however, humans have freed themselves of the chains of that limited energy environment and exploded into a world where the desire for efficiency can have a global impact. And it is difficult to imagine their being any organization to better represent both the glories and the tragedies of this truth than Walmart. Charles Fishman explains.

Launched with humility and little fanfare in 1962, Walmart has become, in the decades since, a retail phenomenon that has swept the globe. Sporting a workforce of 1.6 million associates, enough to populate a small country, and amassing sales that make it larger than much of its competition combined, it has deployed the singular vision of its founder to create a retail empire unrivaled in human history. Eschewing flashy sales and headline-grabbing headquarters that so often tempt its competitors into profligacy, its philosophy is shockingly simple; sell for the lowest price possible. Then, next year, find a way to sell for even less. And continue until every possible inefficiency has been wrung out of the retail system. This not only fosters trust in customers who don't have to worry about waiting for half-off sales to purchase their goods, it drives their suppliers to streamline their practices until every non-essential element has been eliminated from their business.

This thirst for the lowest price has had a transformative impact upon the retail chain, allowing customers to purchase goods at prices that, adjusted for inflation, are a fraction of what they once were. However, it has also placed many of Walmart's suppliers in an impossible position. For there are only so many inefficiencies to eliminate. Once they are gone, Walmart's relentless drive presents them with one of two unpleasant options: lower the quality of their goods in order to save money, or lowering their prices and eliminating their profit margins which exposes them to the risk of being hurled into bankruptcy at the next bump in the economic road. Their only other choice is to remove their goods from Walmart's stores which, given Walmart's reach, would be tantamount to business suicide. This is the new reality and one entirely created by a company that did not exist fifty years ago.

The Walmart Effect is a revelatory examination of a remarkable company. Mr. Fishman, adopting a frank and conversational tone, walks the reader through not only Walmart's history, but the philosophy that has made it one of the first organizations to master the commercial opportunities of the global economy. From the humble wisdom of its founder to the everyday realities of its suppliers, the author discusses in glowing terms the delightful ways in which Walmart's single-minded devotion to the lowest price has improved the practices of countless companies, passing these savings onto the customer. We're invited to revel in the simple brilliance of a company that understands the basic human desire to get the best deal and not to be made to feel the fool, desires that Walmart has woven into the very fabric of their business.

However complimentary, The Walmart Effect in no way shrinks away from the company's dark side. Walmart's zealous pursuit of the lowest price has not only driven many of its suppliers out of business, it has forced many others to eliminate their unaffordable American workers and export their manufacturing needs to Asia where a toxic mixture of poverty and unenforced labor laws have created a fouls stew in which millions of desperate people are forced to toil for pennies. Walmart, like many other American retailers, makes all the appropriate noises about ensuring that it sources goods only from reputable suppliers, but these lame assurances ring utterly hollow, especially when one considers that Walmart would have to violate the core tenet of its belief system to avoid using virtually indentured workers. It would have to raise prices.

For all its virtues, The Walmart Effect, feels terribly dated. The degree to which it exposes Walmart's unforgivable insensitivity to the plight of those affected by its drive for efficiency is still relevant, but Mr. Fishman published his work in late 2005, before the rise of Amazon.com which, though still not as massive as Walmart, threatens the Arkansas giant's entire business model by offering the customer an opportunity to get the lowest price without even leaving his couch. Walmart's inability to combat amazon.com with a comparable online presence suggests that amazon will eventually consume Walmart once it can guarantee same-day delivery of its innumerable products. This is a consequential chapter of this story that Mr. Fishman did not foresee in 2005.

Nonetheless, this is a fascinating read. Walmart has undoubtedly done the customer a great service in making all manner of products more affordable, but in doing so it has helped to create a monstrous system of exploitation that cannot be ignored. Engaging work... (3/5 Stars)

The fusion of marketing, the Internet and SciFi in Pattern Recognition

From The Week of July 29th, 2013

As much as we would like to claim that capitalism rests on high-minded ideals of freedom and free markets, it is, inescapably, a system designed to encourage people to buy stuff. For it is only through this base consumerism that businesses can be profitable. Profitable businesses hire more employees which results in more people with employment. And what do employed people have? Money that they can spend on more products. This, capitalists argue, is a virtuous cycle, a means by which to iterate and innovate humanity towards a better, brighter future, but how can we know that it is not just a single, enormous pyramid scheme designed to line the pockets of the privileged few while everyone else is sold, through advertising, a vision of progress that most of them will never actually benefit from? Perhaps we can't know this for certain, but this first in William Gibson's contemporary works of science fiction will surely offer some cause to be cynical.

It is the summer of 2002 and the world is still recovering from the aftershocks of 9/11, an event which particularly haunts Cayce Pollard, a 32-year-old advertising consultant who lost her father on the same day, and in the same city, as the World Trade Center attack. Possessing both an affinity for the cultural effectiveness of trademarks and a peculiarly allergic aversion to brand logos potent enough to drive her to completely eliminate branding from her wardrobe, she is an invaluable asset to corporations looking to capture the zeitgeist of consumers and ride that wave to unimaginable riches.

This insight into the nature and value of semiotics, however, is a double-edged sword for Cayce. For while it has provided her with a skill that is as rare as it is prized, it has also driven her to seek patterns in everyday life in a manner similar to paranoid schizophrenics. This obsession comes to a head when Cayce finds herself mesmerized by snippets of mysterious footage leaked onto the Internet, the origins of which she must find. With the encouragement and aid from her friends in an online forum, she journeys to Tokyo, London and Moscow in an attempt to untangle a knot she cannot resist. For it in it lies truths about herself and her father that she must know.

A departure from the cyberpunk dystopia that made Mr. Gibson famous, Pattern Recognition is a headlong plunge into the vagaries of modern marketing that represents the culmination of the author's peculiar ideas about the zeitgeist begun in The Bridge Trilogy. Mr. Gibson's unusual insights into the manner in which some people process information were best represented by that trilogy's protagonist, Colin Laney, a man modified by a cocktail of drugs to find patterns in oceans of data. Cayce is, in a literary sense, the origin of that story, a creature who manifests an earlier, and considerably less potent, strain of that particular talent and uses it to locate and unknot significant events of the moment. Few people have explored this avenue of thought. Even so, it is difficult to imagine anyone doing it more justice than the author has here with his unique blend of weirdness, grace and cool.

More broadly, Pattern Recognition is, in spite of its protagonist's aversions, transfixed by brands. Scarcely a paragraph goes by in which a product name is not referenced. Moreover, Mr. Gibson drives home the degree to which brand names have become synonymous with their products by only referring to them as brands, iBooks, not computers. This creates a delightful reading experience, but more than that it invites the reader to contemplate marketing's power which only promises to grow as people and algorithms get better at understanding our eccentric tastes.

Amusingly, this fixation conjures up Pattern Recognition's most charming feature, the degree to which it is rooted in the now quaint technologies and rhythms of the early aughts. Cayce uses Netscape instead of Chrome, newsgroups instead of social media, laptops instead of smartphones. Indeed, written five years before the first iPhone, the mobile economy and the extent to which it has completely altered the information-sharing landscape is not present here in any way. Had this book been written merely three years later, we can well imagine Cayce having found her mysterious footage on youtube which almost seems designed for the express purpose of feeding Mr. Gibson's information obsessives.

This is by no means a perfect work. The plot is weak unto non-existent. The author makes some attempt to connect Cayce's journey to something that resembles action and drama, but this has mixed results at best. No, this is a novel almost entirely about the merits and flaws of men and women who, for reasons both internal and external, are compelled to live outside the box. In this, it engages our every sense. But if such speculative musings fail to capture the reader's interest, there's almost nothing else here.

Charming, fascinating, and sobering work... (3/5 Stars)

The many faces of man and India in the long and winding Shantaram

From The Week of July 22nd, 2013

Though we can try to broaden our experiences with travel and literature, exposing ourselves to classes and customs of which we know little or nothing, we will never know others the way we know ourselves. From the thoughts that define our darkest moments to the rhythms of our lives indelibly shaped by the cultures that nurtured us, this is what we know. Everywhere else, we are strangers, floating through societies, defined by languages and landscapes, that would require years to understand. But what if we don't even belong to the places that nurtured us? What if, even there, we are misfits, our energies and temperaments mismatched with what we know? Then escape is our only option, a commitment to life as a stranger in a strange land, the price of which is exquisitely captured in Gregory David Roberts' sprawling work of autobiographical fiction.

The product of a working-class upbringing and a life-defining stint in a harsh, Australian prison, Lindsay Ford is a stranger to himself. A bank robber of some repute, he has fled his native land, and the jail that sought to cage him, and traveled, on a fake passport, to India which, initially anyway, serves as merely a stop on his way to freedom in Europe. However, before Ford can move on, events and new friends conspire to keep him in this unknowable, tumultuous country that he is forced to embrace and understand when, in an act of karmic revenge, he is himself robbed and deprived of all but the shirt on his back.

This defining event sends Lindsay on a remarkable journey of criminality and philanthropy that begins in a Mumbai slum and concludes in the violence of war-torn Afghanistan. Between, he will learn Indian languages, Indian customs and even Indian prisons, each of which serve to deepen his understanding of not only himself, but the suffering of the world. Enlightenment, however, may just come at the cost of his soul which may well be the only thing that one cannot sell in this land of noise and opportunity.

Shantaram is a monumental work of fiction that asks far more questions than it answers. Built on the back of Mr. Roberts' remarkable life, it is a thousand-page odyssey into the India of the 1980s, a place of corruption and sorrow, kindness and justice, that is undoubtedly the star of the tale. For the author forsakes a desire to constantly entertain the reader with plot and action and devotes large swaths of the work to simply describing this nation of a billion souls scrambling to get ahead in a world that makes that an all-but-impossible achievement. Villages and slums, cities and jails, are revealed in all their structure and their limitations, exposing India, at the least the India of this novel, as a place where the failure of organized, fair civic institutions have been replaced by ad hoc operations that attempt to provide some sort of framework for the lives of the lower classes. The patchwork nature of this tapestry is both beautiful and tragic.

Though Shantaram speaks at length to issues that range from morality to corruption, suffering is its profoundest and most consistent theme. Lindsay, Mr. Robert's fictional alter ego, endures a remarkable amount of degradation, all of which eats away at his spirit. In this, he becomes our entry point into the Indians who live with the same treatment, or worse, on a daily basis and do so with, what is to the western mind, a stunning degree of fortitude. The scars of unfathomable poverty linger on them, certainly, but it's the novel's caucasian characters who seem far more burdened by their experiences here. It is they who lack the armor that comes from properly understanding a place, of having their expectations for life calibrated from the moment of their births. The Indians know how to take life's slings and arrows without having them damage their spirit. The westerners, meanwhile, have no such protection which causes them, in the face of all of India's thunder, to break down and lose their way, to become trapped by its schemes, radicalized by its violence, and numbed by its capacity to test the depths of the human spirit.

Shantaram has some revolutionary moments, perspectives and phrases that leave the reader alternately breathless and enlightened, but it does this at the expense of the plot which is picked up and set down at the convenience of its author. Fully half of the work is made up of one rumination or another on the nature of existence which, after awhile, becomes both burdensome and far too apparent. The reader begins to sense the digressions into moral philosophy, to feel them coming, to resist the urge to skip it in order to stay within the story's arc, a frustration that weighs down this truly tome-like work. Had the author made more of an effort to intertwine these spiritual musings with the story's significant episodes, one senses that the read would have been legendary.

Fascinating and enlightening... (3/5 Stars)

An engaging study of the lifecycle of civilizations in Revenge of Geography

From The Week of July 22nd, 2013

Though it is an exercise fraught with failure and misapprehension, there are few tasks more worthwhile than the effort to improve our understanding of the cultures from which we come. For, despite the challenges, despite having to constantly check for ones biases and preconceptions, there is no better way to advance one's culture than to grasp the influences, the logistics and the the history that informs it and to separate these truths from the stereotypes that so often characterize national cultures. There are reasons for why our countries are the way they are, why some are rude and others prickly. And the sooner we understand this, the sooner we can begin to predict the future with some modest accuracy. This Robert Kaplan studiously demonstrates in his examination of the world viewed through the lens of geography.

For ten-thousand years, civilizations both grand and small, both coastal and landlocked, have risen and fallen. Some crumbled into dust with barely a lasting mark to remember them by. Others immortalized their legacies through engineering and enduring monuments that have left no doubt of the links they forged in the unbroken chain of humanity's march towards a more knowledgeable future. However, despite having different languages and assets, populations and ethics, lifespans and legacies, they did, all possess one common trait. They all eventually collapsed, their prowess and their vigor consumed by younger, energetic states. This inescapable fate has prompted both historians and interested parties to analyze this perfect mortality rate and divine from it lasting clues that might help stave off the inevitable deaths of current cultures.

Though this has given rise to nearly as many universal theories as their are studiers of this question, few are as simple as Mr. Kaplan's. Setting aside the monumental fields of economics and law, politics and multiculturalism, he contends that the ultimate fates of nations are written into their geographies. From the vital rivers that organized and then gave rise to cohesive cultures in China and Egypt to the sweeps of coastal-rich territory in Europe and North America, he argues that these invaluable resources concentrate populations which in turn innovate and inflate until they've become regional powers capable of spanning entire continents.

This would seem to be a wise, and even pleasingly unbiased, assessment of why some nations stabilize and succeed while others disintegrate and fail, but is it applicable in a 21st-century world where bombers and drones, have overcome the once-formidable natural barriers that have historically held nations back? Mr. Kaplan believes so. In fact, he is convinced that these technologies which have so effectively reduced mountains to molehills have created a whole host of new existential problems for humanity's various national tribes. After all, prior to the age of flight, India never had to worry about China. The Himalayas took care of any fear of invasion on both sides of that question. The same for nations separated by substantial waterways that would've taken weeks to traverse in centuries past that now take hours. The globalization of the world may have revolutionized trade, but it has opened up theatres of conflict that would have been unthinkable in times past.

The Revenge of Geography is an engaging analysis of 21st-century geopolitics informed by a first-rate mind. Mr. Kaplan has an admirable grasp of the present that is informed by both an intriguing read of geography and an educational grasp of the past civilizations that comprise known history. It explains south Asia, the Middle East, Europe and North America in a manner that is no less explicable for it being erudite. And yet, there's a blitheness here that haunts his study no less than it does all those that purport to boil the world down to a single, defining trait. There can be no doubting that geography has played vital role in the shaping of our nations and our cultures, but can the success of he United States really be put down simply to the fact that it had manageable neighbors to north and south, plentiful coast to east and west, and abundant heartland in which to spread out and thrive? Factors all, surely, but far from the only ones to be heard in the formation of the defining nation of the last 200 years...

But though Revenge of Geography may state its case too definitively, it does so in an unforgettable manner. For Mr. Kaplan introduces us here to intellectuals who conceive of the world, and even history, as a series of existential conflicts for dominance. Art and science, philosophies and customs, are discarded by the minds of these men and replaced with a heartless pragmatism that is predicated on the idea that governments seek always to expand not only their powers but their borders as well. There's plenty of evidence to support this cynical view, but there's just as much evidence to counter it as well. For while states may act in the interests of the people they contain, willing to go to war for gains both economic and territorial, people are often far more emotional and far less strategic than this. They would rather live in a world that is not zero-sum, a world where everyone has a fair shot of progress and comfort, rather than one in which their interests are mercilessly advanced at the expense of everyone else. The utterly pragmatic approach here is as striking as it is narrow.

There's much of value here, but for all Mr. Kaplan's skill, he fails to convince us that geography trumps ideology or cultural ethos. Nonetheless, well worth the read... (3/5 Stars)