China's flailing birth into modernity in Age of Ambition

From the week of June 9th, 2014

China has forever been a mystery to the West. With a vast cultural history whose longevity is rivaled only by the Egyptians, its philosophers, its artists and even its rulers have enriched the world with their teachings, their creations and their approaches to public works. And yet, for all of this cultural wealth, China has remained an enigma to outsiders, a gem that cannot be valued. For not only have the countless generations endowed its people with a sense of superiority over younger, more ignorant nations, its leaders have often indulged in noteworthy strains of xenophobia that have frequently kept out foreigners.

Western economic advancements in the 20th century, however, have put an end to that isolation. For they, coupled with the disastrous Great Leap Forward, threatened to leave China sprawling amidst history's dust, an impoverished and forgotten nation. No longer. Internal reforms have not only opened China up to the world, they have lifted millions out of abject poverty and started China on the march towards a starring role in the 21st century. And it is of this emerging nation that Mr. Osnos takes his enduring snapshot.

China is at a crossroads. Having emerged from the self-imposed annihilation of the Maoist era, it has undergone a political and economic revolution to become something new in our world, an authoritarian capitalist state that, nonetheless, pretends to hold to its communist beginnings. From the Free Economic Zones in the 1990s to the factory cities of the aughts, it has managed to adopt many western values, consumption, brand identification, and affordable exports, all without relinquishing the one-party system that has governed the country since the 1940s. It has tried, with some success, to incentivize and empower a prosperous business class, to help it compete with the west, without allowing its increasingly wealthy and educated citizens to mire the nation in the democracy's bureaucratic quagmire.

But as much as this streamlined form of capitalism has elevated China into the class of advanced nations, it has lead to widespread sociopolitical problems that will plague it for years to come. For while, to some degree, the tide of the Chinese Miracle has lifted all boats, its blessings have been selfishly accrued by a small class of political and economic elites who have used their wealth to not only isolate themselves from China proper, but also from any repercussions from the Chinese state. This ruling class, combined with a strong sense of pervasive corruption within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), has lead many to think that they are but exploited cogs in an unfathomably large machine, unheeded and unheard.

The voice of these voiceless, Age of Ambition is a fascinating glimpse of a society undergoing tumultuous change. Evan Osnos, an American journalist who has recently returned to the west after eight years living and working in China, lays before the reader a cast of individuals, the everyday and the extraordinary, in an attempt to convey not only the existential struggles, but the daily rhythms of Chinese life. In this, his entertaining and eminently readable chronicle oscillates between fixating on political corruption, its ubiquitousness and its exposure, and the lives of the Chinese people who must negotiate two distinct and equally challenging obstacle courses: the trials and tribulations of life in the 21st century and the ever-changing collection of human rights they may or may not be afforded depending upon the whimsy of the all-power state.

Individually, none of Mr. Osnos' idiosyncratic case studies are particularly interesting. Some, like the man who yearns to teach English, activate our empathy while others, like the author turned race-car driver and sometimes political dissident, are engagingly amusing. But none rise above the threshold of simply holding our attention. However, their power, here, comes in the aggregate. The gestalt of all these lives, troubled by the state's fickleness and fears, by a pervasive willingness to exploit their fellows, and by a makeshift, unevenly applied system of justice that evokes memories of the Wild West, leads us to the realization that the CCP has only adopted the convenient aspects of capitalism and not the ethical framework required to sustain it. They have appropriated the engine of economic progress without bothering to assemble the car around it. And given that capitalism is, at the best of times, heartless, adopting only its underpinnings, and not the two centuries of moral customs that developed around it, is bound to start a fire of outrage in the hearts of the Chinese people that will eventually burn away the cynical system that seeks to run their lives.

But while Age of Ambition is both valuable and often powerful, its focus leaves much to be desired. Mr. Osnos, atimes, appears to be writing a polemic against the Chinese state, detailing the various scandals in which it has been captured during his time there. At other times, he chooses, instead, to focus on the struggles of everyday Chinese who have no connection to the government at all. Which leaves this reader with the sense that the author was sufficiently moved by the plights of the men and women he met to include their trials in his chronicle, but he could not find a common thread that would connect them to the broader, political narrative. This is hardly a grievous blow to the work, but one is left wondering if the work would have been improved by deciding to focus on one or the other.

On the whole, an excellent and enlightening journey through a fascinating country that it would take lifetimes to understand. (4/5 Stars)

A century uplifted, a century crushed in The Third Horseman

From the week of June 9th, 2014

Finding truth in history is a difficult and often treacherous pursuit. Empowered by our hunger to understand our ancestors, and to learn from the mistakes they made, we read into the bits and pieces we are able to unearth about them narratives which are invariably distorted by our own values, our own biases. We savage the Catholic church for its backwards treatment of Galileo; we cringe at the murderous zeal of Henry VIII; we sadly shake our heads over the unimaginable loss of life during its wars and famines. And for most of us, this is done without context, without comprehending the deeply entrenched customs that motivated actions that, to us, range from abhorrent to bewildering.

This is why history cannot be reduced to narratives. It is the gestalt of countless lives, across countless generations, making contributions to countless cultural constructs. History is like the weather. It is not moved or shaken by any one disturbance. It is a complex system whose constant shifts require constant re-evaluation. And it is an acknowledgement of this underlying reality that makes this micro-history from William Rosen so captivating.

Popularized by opponents of Climate Change, who deploy it as ammunition against acknowledgement of the Anthropocene, the Medieval Warming Period was a roughly 400-year warming of the European climate that began in the tenth century and ended dramatically in the early years of the 14th. Between, Europe and the British Isles, experienced a significant increase in temperatures which not only expanded the total acreage of cultivatable land, but allowed for the existence of crops in areas that formerly could not support them. Northern England, for instance, possessed fruitful vineyards during this uptick. And as has been true since the dawn of civilization, more available food allows the population to expand, in this case, by tens of millions.

This expanse in the Carrying Capacity of Europe would come to have dire consequences in the 1300s when, with the end of the Medieval Warming Period, widespread flooding in the 1320s destroyed much of the continental harvests. The shrinking of the food supply led to starvation, famine and death. With scientific thought in its infancy, and the ruling powers too preoccupied with their own disputes to engineer solutions, these crippling conditions killed many, in peace and in war and authored more than a century of anguish highlighted by plague and darkness.

A history of both the climate and the people who endured it, The Third Horseman is a gripping examination of the Medieval Warming Period, the systemic forces that likely caused it and the human events that characterized it. From the Norman Invasion of England to the Scottish wars of Independence, from the floods in western Europe to the barley crops in Norway, Mr. Rosen gathers together the disparate, dangling threads of this consequential time and weaves them into an entertaining tapestry that is as enlightening as it is terrifying.

From the perch of modernity, where we possess technologies to literally remake the face of our planet, we rarely think about fundamental elements like food that are necessary for not only human survival but the continuance of human civilization. Today, food is not only bountiful, it is ubiquitous, so much so that some have fetishized its consumption while the rest take its presence for granted. Not so in Medieval Europe where food's cultivation was a difficult and arduous process, requiring a significant percentage of the available human capital to actualize, leaving margins for error razor thin.

But while, thanks to advancements in farming technology in specific and science in general, we have more margin for error, it is swiftly shrinking. Seven-billion humans now walk our planet, a many-fold increase over Medieval Europe. Should harvests fail thanks to our reckless distortion of the climate system, untold millions will die and plunge our civilization into the greatest famine we've ever known. And given that the failure of past civilizations is often caused by the social upheavals that result from the scarcity of basic necessities like food and water, it is not difficult to imagine that such a disruption would be the end of us too.

Mr. Rosen, however, is neither a nag nor a pessimist. The Third Horseman is not a polemic against human wastefulness, nor climate skeptics. It is, rather, the study of the disruption of life during consequential changes in those fundamental things we take for granted. It does not prod us to change our ways, nor does it seek to blame us for our faults. It merely invites us to remember how, despite our science and our liberation, despite our triumphs and our beliefs, we are still, in totality, reliant upon Earth and its climate to sustain us, systems of which our knowledge is laughably incomplete. Whatever step we take as a result of this key insight is ours to execute on our own.

A review of this fine work would be incomplete if it glossed over the author's treatment of the Scottish wars which have a ringing relevance for 2014, the year in which Scotland again faces the prospect of becoming sovereign. Famous historical figures like Robert the Bruce, William Wallace and the Englishmen they faced to gain their freedom are given fine, if unspectacular biographies. The passion, and indeed the enlightenment, comes in how these men were affected by the broader, global systems that they gave not even a passing thought.

An excellent micro-history that leaves no doubt of just how perilous our perch is on our little blue dot... (4/5 Stars)

The war for the ownership of the smartphone in Dogfight

From the week of June 9th, 2014

For humans, competition is a wickedly sharp double-edged sword. It has driven us to rise up out of the muck of subsistence to build a diverse, technological, multifaceted civilization that is forever improving upon itself. And yet, it has also fostered, and empowered, individuals who possessively lay claim to their little contribution to that societal progress, jealously guarding it as though it alone was the key to all else. Wanting credit for one's work is nothing new. After all, in a world where rewards often only flow to those who receive credit, it's hard not to want to promote one's contribution to the whole. But when guarding that contribution grows into wanting to deny it to others unless they pay for the privilege, then we have all, in some sense, lost. This is the difficulty that lies at the hard of Mr. Vogelstein's excellent document of one of Silicon Valley's most recent and consequential wars.

Though modern computing has existed as an industry for the better part of a century, it wasn't until the introduction of the iPhone that computing became a global phenomenon. After decades of clunky desktop towers, underpowered netbooks, battery-sucking laptops and chunky cellphones, the iPhone crammed everything one could reasonably expect from a personal device into a sleek package that apple, its creator, was able to market to brilliant effect. No more expensive infrastructure, no more cluttered desks, no more tangled nest of cables... Just a simple versatile, wireless device that could exist happily in one's pocket.

For this triumph, Apple understandably wanted credit, not only in the social arena but in the technological as well. It filed numerous patents to protect what it considered to be their crowning glory. And yet, there was no individual aspect, or component, of the iPhone that was innovative or new. Rather, Apple's genius was in assembling those various components into an attractive, functional package that put Apple on the road to being the most powerful brand in the world.

Understandably, Apple would disagree with this view. They would argue that, over years of toil, secrecy and countless man-hours, they invented the modern smartphone. And that, for this singular achievement, they should be rewarded. This position has not only set Apple on a path to litigation, against other smartphone makers, it has permanently damaged its relationship with Google, a once-close ally in the creation of a new, post-Microsoft world. Amongst billion-dollar lawsuits and hyperbolic threats of corporate warfare, the world's largest companies busted up over who gets the credit.

This and more Fred Vogelstein argues in his engrossing Dogfight From the Sidekick to the iPhone, from the early days of Apple and Google against the world to the bitter falling out that has seen the companies abandon friendship for rivalry, the author blends opinion with fact to create an entertaining micro-history of the smartphone that takes few prisoners. Though he clearly admires the innovative spirit and entrepreneurial cultures of both companies, Mr. Vogelstein also properly upbraids them for the arrogant attitudes that cause both to believe that the world would be immeasurably worse without them in it. And yet, it's the extent to which these jealousies and insecurities have dictated their actions that the true damage can be found.

For most of the world, the smartphone is synonymous with iPhone. This isn't true because Apple is litigious. Nor is it true because Apple holds patents for various components within the iPhone. It's true because the iPhone was new, innovative and powerful. It's true because people loved it to such a degree that it transformed a luxury item into a household toy. This didn't happen because Apple got its proper credit. It happened because Apple created a good product. And yet, when faced with competition from companies like Sam-sung and Google, Apple, rather than trust in their own success, rather than capitalize on their clear advantage over everyone else to stay ahead, talked about betrayal, of copycatting, of "thermonuclear war," as though theirs was the only touch-enabled hand-held device with wireless radios allowed to exist. But of course, if that were true, then the iPhone would have never existed at all.

And this is Dogfight's central revelation. There is nothing in the technological world that is truly new. Everything that we have now, and will have in the near future, is a refinement of an older, less successful idea. Attempting to take credit for that idea is not only disingenuous, it is a betrayal of the very spirit of competition that these companies claim to treasure. Worst of all, though, it exposes the truth that these companies don't genuinely believe that a better product will win the day. They believe that hobbling their rivals' ability to compete is the path to victory. That is not only cynical, it's depressing.

A delightful and sobering look at the pitfalls of competition and at the extent to which the powerful fool themselves into thinking they are indispensable... (4/5 Stars)

A tortured man in a tormented land in Lawrence In Arabia

From the week of June 9th, 2014

Mythology plays a strange and complex role in the legacies of history's legendary figures. Heroes and villains both find themselves subjected to its whimsical powers, the former elevated out of the mists of obscurity to shine like the essence of virtue, an example to all those who follow, and the latter shrouded in the darkness of devilry, their cruel deeds used to assure present-day citizens that they aren't so barbaric. Without mythology to generationally resurrect the stories of the past, we might never have heard of such figures, let alone learned their lessons. And yet, this historical airbrushing is so deeply rooted in the cultural prejudices that have shaped and carried them that, often, very little of the actual person is left for us to study. Fortunately, for Mr. Anderson, his subject has only suffered a century of such treatment. The rest of the mythological sediment the author himself expertly scrapes away to reveal a character of endless fascination.

Born into less than reputable circumstances, at least by the measure of his Victorian era, T. E. Lawrence rose from the obscurity of a difficult childhood to become arguably the most famous figure of World War I. An archaeologist with a particular fondness for the Arab world, he was initially tapped by the British Government to survey the Middle East which became a battleground in the Great War when the Ottoman Empire refused to side with the Entente powers. Keen to protect its colonial interests in the region, not to mention the vital oil reserves necessary to fuel their ships, Britain needed to understand not only the strategic situation in the region but the cultural one as well.

Lawrence might have remained a historical footnote, nothing more than a consultant on Arabic affairs, were it not for Britain's shambolic defeat at Gallipoli, a foolish engagement that not only swept into the sea the lives of thousands of young men from both Commonwealth and Turkey, but robbed Britain of any territorial advantage. Forced to rely on key figures in the Arab world, Britain turned to Lawrence to liaison with the region's tribal leaders. Not only would Lawrence come to cherish these relationships, they would serve to highlight the faithlessness of his own imperialistic government, truths that would permanently change his view of the western world. Lawrence would persist in his task, however. For he believed in an Arab world for the Arabs. And to achieve that, the ottomans would have to be defeated, the doing of which would make him a legend of history.

A superlative work of non-fiction, Lawrence in Arabia is a thorough, spellbinding account of the man, the myth and the world that spawned him. Scott Anderson, an author and journalist, exhibits, here, prose of the first order that not only drills down into Lawrence and the lives of the regional figures who encountered him, but also more-than-capably withdraws to a more global remove to discuss the political and militaristic maneuverings of the involved powers. His descriptions of Lawrence's labors are so wonderfully enmeshed into the overarching narrative of imperialistic exploitation and notions of smug, European superiority that the reader, made breathless by western perfidy, looks on in wonder at an unfolding tragedy of the first order, horrific events that, though they occurred a hundred years ago, nonetheless maintain sad echoes of the present. That the author so ably and effortlessly evokes such comparisons is a credit to his grasp of the subject.

There are actors here, other than Lawrence himself, that garner attention. William Yale, the prospector for Standard oil; Faisal Ibn Hussein, a warlord and Lawrence's primary ally; and Mark Sykes, an infamous British noble and diplomat whose corrosive whimsy wound up destroying Arab faith in the west. Each man, in his own right, is a creature of fascination and complexity. And yet, none hold a candle to Lawrence whose problematic-unto-abusive childhood drove him to lengths of ascetic self-denial that verged on the fanatical. His capacity to endure suffering is as breathtaking as his transformation from creature of self-contained interests and passions into an individual possessed of both the arrogance and the will to believe that his view of what was just could be imposed upon the western world. That he failed is not surprising. But that he thought he might succeed says more about the man than all his trials combined.

It is impossible to read such books without being enriched by them, not only in the events themselves but in how they characterize the broader tides of history. There's a palpable sense of tragedy that hangs over this work, a perpetual sense that human civilization, for all its brilliant advancements, is heart-breakingly prone to collective acts of senseless violence. From the indescribable idiocy of the Great War itself, down through all the self-interested decisions spawned by it, we come to understand some measure of the cultural disdain and suspicion the Middle East has for the West. It is there, for all to see, in the actions of our fathers and our forefathers, what we are capable of doing so long as our interests appear to demand it. Until we break that habit, until we establish, for all time, the notion that there are simply actions too manipulative, too duplicitous, too heinous, to carry out for the sake of necessity, we will just repeat these mistakes over and over. This is the lesson of the Great War, or it ought to be.

Splendid work. First-rate biographical history... (5/5 Stars)

The long, rich and despotic history of Iran in Empire of The Mind

From The Week of May 1st, 2014 Though pride insists that we have the right to act as we choose, our wills unfettered by the shackles of anyone else's desire, we are, inescapably, beings shaped by history. History is the gestalt of our experiences, the joys and traumas, the victories and the defeats, that, by individually imprinting themselves upon us, collectively influence our futures. We can try to recognize these influences in hopes of minimizing them, or perhaps even with an eye towards completely weeding them out, but how can we mitigate something we can't even measure? How can we extricate the fallout from something that has already happened to us? As much as individuals struggle with answering these questions, nations are equally subject to them. For what is a nation if not the collective will of human beings who share geography, culture, history? What scars the people scars the nation as well and leaves behind marks that take centuries to fade. The experiences of many nations provide evidence of this truth, but few more vividly, or tragically, than Iran. Michael Axworthy elaborates in his piece of narrative history of this consequential country. Home to one of the world's oldest human civilizations, Iran is a nation as fascinating as it is troubled. For millennia, it has produced poets and scholars, theologians and mathematicians, whose insights and revelations have both enriched the world and advance the scope of human knowledge. It has hosted dynasties and religions, groundbreaking universities and defined entire disciplines of science. Without it, the world, and the peoples that populate it, would be exceedingly different. And yet, for all of this glorious history, for all that its culture makes the Ancient Greeks look like Johnny-come-latelies, its recent past has been ravaged by the plagues of corruption, colonialism and conflict, all of which have taken its toll on this proud nation. Made a pawn in the Great Game of the 19th century, in which the British and Russian empires vied for regional dominance, and made a slave to oil interests in the 20th century, during which its politics and its institutions were ruthlessly manipulated by foreign governments and foreign corporations, it has become a suspicious theocracy, one that seeks, through the favor of god, to wrestle back its rightful place, as one of the world's premier nations, the first amongst younger equals. But the world is not what it was when Iran was a center of culture and knowledge. And it may well be that Iran cannot return to the prominence it claimed for so long. An exploration of the long history of a singular nation, Empire of The Mind is a riveting portrait of a country transformed by the insights of science and by the vicissitudes of geography. Mr. Axworthy, a professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Exeter, transports us back millennia, before the Romans, before even the Greeks, and gradually marches us into the present, introducing, along the way, religions, scientists and kings that have characterized this place of mountains and faith. The reader witnesses the fall of Zoroastrianism and the rise of Islam, the decline of tribalism and the assembly of the nation state, the destruction of pluralism and the elevation of theology. But for all these potent forces, none prove as consequential as colonialism. The world is not short of examples of colonialism's cruelties. It seems, at times, that half the world has suffered beneath its ruinous shadow. And yet, Iran has escaped most of the obvious consequences, instead, bearing up under more subtle and insidious damage. Perhaps, this is owing to the fact that Iran was more of a client state than a colony, its interests, and therefore its policies, torn between the various western powers fighting for dominance in the 19th century. This subservience certainly engendered a sense of humiliation within such a proud culture. And yet, this anger would be but a rehearsal for the outpouring of betrayal and rage that would come later, during the 20th-century's thirst for oil, when Wilsonian promises of self-determination gave way to the ruthless politics of necessity that undermined their governments, manipulated their intellectuals and empowered their dictators. For those of us fortunate enough to have been reared in countries spared the indignity of being subjected to the merciless will and the selfish whimsy of other nations, this shame is difficult to relate to. The West looks at Iran today and sneers at its theocracy and expresses incredulity over the insanity of its nuclear weapons program. But while the convergence of these forces is certainly cause for dismay, they should be properly understood as the consequences of meddling, of manipulation, of exploitation. For in the minds of a people, whose culture has been forgotten and whose sovereignty has been toyed with, what could possibly germinate but distrust? Put in this situation, we would all want the security of knowing that we would never again be someone else's tool. While maintaining an admirable neutrality, Empire of The Mind conveys not just the history of Iran but the powerful ways in which that history has informed the problematic present. This is no mean feat, particularly for a work that strives to be much more than an ideological weapon with which to chastise one's enemies. It is far easier to descend into the language of victimization and or excusemaking. That Mr. Axworthy avoids this while delivering an engaging read on a consequential country makes this one of my more thoughtful reads this year, only marred by the fact that its publishing, coming in 2007, denies the author the opportunity to read Iran's history into the failed Green Revolution and the events of the Arab Spring. Quality work... (4/5 Stars)

A pleasing romp through a realm of Asian gods in The Eternal Sky

From The Week of April 20th, 2014

Living, as we do, in a world shaped by science and empowered by technology, it is difficult to imagine how society would function without them. Religion would certainly step out from its forced confinement backstage to reclaim its civil authority, but religion is only the dogmatized distillation of a power that runs far deeper, that may well have been with us longer than any other human concept. Mythology... For in a world without systems of logic and procedure, when truthseeking is reduced to hunches and hubris, mythology must be the genesis of both society and its customs, forged by the will of visionaries into a sword of belief that everyone can carry. What would it be like to live in such a world, where such concepts, such gods, are real, their powers shaping the lives of millions? Elizabeth Bear imagines in this engaging and bloody trilogy.

In a world of empires and Jin, warriors of the step and wizards of the tower, a ruthless conspiracy is afoot to bring chaos and war to the known realms. Having worked its corrupting will into the tribalism of the Plains and the politics of the imperial court, it has cleverly warped the existing bonds of family and law that have kept the realms relatively stable, manipulating them until brother besets brother and clan besets clan in a bid for discord and despair that it is uniquely positioned to capitalize on.

Standing in the way of this ruthless powergrab are two unlikely allies. Temur is a warrior of the step, grandson of the great khan who was left for dead on a battlefield that has robbed him of clan and future. Samarkar is a princess, sister to the reigning Emperor who has made a singular sacrifice to attain the powers of a wizard. He is powerless and alone. She is exiled and friendless, but as the conspiracy unfolds, and the land is riven by plague and infighting, they are thrust together by circumstance to try to right a wrong and discover just what is tearing their worlds apart. Joined by friends with their own pasts, their destinies will be written in blood across a changing sky, reconfiguring a world that has tried, and failed, to kill them many times over.

Imaginative fantasy fiction from an author of many literary disciplines, the Eternal Sky is an entertaining romp through a world drenched in myths and consequences. Eschewing the typical proto-European backdrop that characterizes so much of the genre, Ms. Bear has drawn from a more eastern inspiration, chiefly, the customs and politics of Mongolian Asia, when the Khans were at the height of their power. But the author does not simply flirt with this fascinating time in Asian history when the Mongol nations violently clashed with dynastic China and caliphate Islam, briefly creating a vast united empire that was ruled from horseback, she delves deeply into the stories and the traditions of these great powers and conjures from them monsters and mayhem, magic and malignancies that not only buffet her heroes, but drape the world of The Eternal Sky in the cloak of familiarity and authenticity.

Despite its pleasingly atypical setting, The Eternal Sky could have been just another trilogy, the churning out of familiar tropes for the entertainment of audiences wishing to gorge themselves on such familiar fare. But Ms. Bear, who has frequently exhibited a fondness for cutting against the usual grain, has generated a series of winning characters that further set her chronicle apart. Temur is a fearsome warrior who, despite the cruelties he's endures, maintains a core of decency that makes him eminently relatable despite his tribal upbringing. Samarkar is a newly minted mage who, despite her noble blood and her physical charms, rejects the narrowness of a life proscribed to her class and her gender and, instead, becomes a person not afraid to get her hands dirty in a world that desperately needs her. Even Hrahima, the half-woman half-tigress who accompanies them, is animated beyond the typical nonsense of such fantasy breeds to become a fearsome creature with whom the reader can sympathize.

These are not easy accomplishments. That they are so effortlessly achieved is both a credit to the author and a boon to the reader.

However, while the setting and the characters are winners here, the plots leave something to be desired. Ms. Bear has opted for the standard approach of the quest that binds together the brave band of heroes which, without twists, feels tired unto exhaustion. This feeling is not at all abated by repetitive surprise attacks upon the band which, in both style and substance, are tiresomely reminiscent of adventure games spanning the decades. But while these are flaws that hobble the work to some degree, they are in no way fatal blows upon what is otherwise delightful work.

A pleasing creation that gives us a taste of worlds we rarely see and demons we rarely fight... Well worth the time and money... (4/5 Stars)

http://www.amazon.com/Steles-Sky-Eternal-Elizabeth-Bear-ebook/dp/B00FO77KRA/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=&qid=

Serendipity, chance and the anatomy of discovery in Happy Accidents

From The Week of April 6th, 2014

Serendipity is a constant throughout our lives. Whether it is the tragedy narrowly avoided or the good news received at just the right moment, its unexpected gifts and arrows have the power to delight, to terrify and to change our world. For who hasn't had the course of their existence altered by a moment unlooked for, a circumstance not considered? But for all of serendipity's capacity to change our moods and our lives, is it not, on some level, merely a means by which to explain the strange oddities that chance sometimes throws up? Is it not an evocation of some external force to explain a lack of vision? The absence of the mental clarity to consider all that lies before us? Whatever its implications, it lies at the heart of this fascinating history of medicine from Mr. Mayers.

Of all the industries that have been redefined over the last two centuries, few have experienced more change, and more advancement, than medicine. As late as the 19th century, doctors were little more than priests when it came to their capacity to heal. They had a handful of steadfast remedies with which they could attempt to mend the broken, but their knowledge of the human body was about as poor as their comprehension of the world around them. Germs and diseases had yet to be discovered, let alone studied. And curatives were often as poisonous to the patient as the affliction. Comprehension of the world and all its forces was so poor that, even when radiation was discovered at the turn of the 20th century, it was thought to be beneficial, even therapeutic. It wasn't until cancers began to erupt from these applications that the true cost of playing with such fundamental forces was revealed. Ignorance, creating assumptions, creating dogmas, until those dogmas were shattered in the face of hard truths.

But as dark as the 19th century may have been for medicine, the 20th was a revolution. Where prior centuries had been a wasteland of discovery and understanding, treatments for cancer, Tuberculosis, bacterial infection, heart attacks and high blood pressure all became widespread. Even the mysteries of the brain were, to some degree, conquered with drugs that successfully fought numerous strains of mental illness. In les than a hundred years, the doctor's toolbox expanded from prayer and good fortune to hundreds of possible remedies for any of a host of formerly lethal conditions. But just how did these magnificent discoveries eventuate? Were humans suddenly smarter, more intuitive, more understanding of the human form and its connection to the broader world, or were there other forces at play?

A persuasive argument for the virtues of screwing up, Happy Accidents is an engaging adventure through the slap-dash, serendipitous world of medicine and the discoveries that have shaped its last hundred years. Morton Mayers, himself a medical doctor, divides his chronicle up into sections, each of which sheds light upon the fundamental workings of the heart, the cell,the circulatory system, the blood and even the brain. His intent is not so much to give his readers a refresher on high-school biology, though he does this admirably, as to illuminate the anatomy of the breakthroughs, the circumstances that surrounded the key insights that not only pulled back the curtain on the innerworkings of these systems, but that lead to revolutionary cures that have restored life to the terminal and sanity to the doomed. In each case, from antibiotics to antipsychotics, from Lipitor to Lithium, he exposes a startlingly clear pattern of ignorance that was dispelled by happenstance, leading to awareness and, finally, to solutions.

Underpinning Mr. Mayers' work here is the understanding that humans invariably operate based on a collection of assumptions that become, in their certainty, unhelpfully dogmatic. X should not work on Y because of Z. But of course, truths are only true until they are proven false. The sun revolved around the Earth until it didn't. The Earth was 6,000 years old until it wasn't. Emotions stemmed from the heart until they didn't. Certainty; giving way to puzzlement in the face of contradictions; forcing the forging of newer, better certainties; starting the process all over again until perhaps something like knowledge is possessed. However, given the discomfort of living in constant doubt, we like certainty. We cling to it and we are damned by it. For it blinds us to the discoveries, the connections, that would be obvious to us if we were willing to try everything rather than being dismissive out of hand and waiting for random chance to drop fortunate outcomes into our laps.

But as wonderfully as the author constructs this argument, and as much knowledge as he drops on the reader during its repeated demonstration, his proscriptions for its rectification seem inadequate. Mr. Mayers levels an accusatory finger at everyone, from big pharma to big government, to explain why this age of rapid discovery has slowed, why fewer treatments than ever are being discovered. And perhaps he is right to blame these forces interfering with good research. However, Happy Accidents is nothing if not a book about the narrow mindedness of humanity, of how we have to practically be smashed over the head with a gong before we see what's before us. And so crediting serendipity for the golden age of medicine and then blaming institutions for its end seems, at best, inconsistent and, at worst, blind to the possibility that we have plucked all the low-hanging fruit. We have made most, if not all, of the simple discoveries that it's possible for chance to gift to us, that what remains are more systemic discoveries that will require open minds and collaborative efforts to achieve.

Happy Accidents is a dense and deeply rewarding adventure through the human body and the men and women who reduced it from mysterious phenomenon to a highly complex machine that we've gone a long way to explaining. For this knowledge alone, a must read. For those intrigued by happenstance and randomness, no disappointment will be found within these pages. But for those looking for solutions to the intriguing problems posed here, the answers will have to be sought out elsewhere. (4/5 Stars)

The criminality of the death of the Celtic Tiger in Ship of Fools

From The Week of April 6th, 2014

For society to function properly, for it to have hope for more than chaos and discord, the people must have trust in the State. There is no other way to maintain the rule of law. The State collects taxes in exchange for providing services. If those services are corrupted or dysfunctional, then taxation becomes, in the minds of the citizenry, just a nice word for extortion. And the moment the individual realizes this, then resistance against this unfair system is the only ethical course of action.

As clear cut as this may seem, however, there are complications. After all, only the most cynical citizens want to believe the State is broken. Thus, we grant it chance after chance to convince us otherwise. It is far easier to give the government a second chance than it is to overthrow it. But one can only give so many second chances. Once those are exhausted, there are only two options, rebellion or surrender. Sadly, the latter seems to be the path in Ireland, a tragic reality stingingly illustrated in Mr. O'Toole's engaging polemic.

From 1995 to 2007, the Republic of Ireland experienced a 12-year economic boom that, for a brief time, made this moribund country the envy of the world. After centuries of oppression, misrule and sectarian discord, the Celtic Tiger, as these boom times were christened, finally seemed to be lifting the near-permanent shadow from the heart of this benighted place and giving it a glimmer of hope for a brighter future. For once, jobs were plentiful, allowing the Republic to claim one of the world's best unemployment rates. For once, real-estate developments were inviting the famed and the fortunate to Irish shores, making the emerald isles a place to see and be seen. For once, foreign investment, particularly in the IT field, appeared to be offering a higher quality of life for the average citizen. There was just one problem. It was built on a lie.

Through reckless lending policies and criminally lax procedures, private Irish banks fuelled the Celtic Tiger by extending astronomical sums to already wealthy Irish developers who in turn used that money to develop a country that did not need it. This form of trickle-down economics may have happily continued on for years to come. But when the credit crisis detonated Wall Street in 2008, quickly sweeping the globe, those German and French banks that happily lent those Irish banks money to pass on to Irish developers suddenly wanted their money back. Unable to cover their debts, these Irish banks instantly collapsed under the strain of absurdly skewed ledgers and would have drifted into oblivion but for the Irish government who, in stepping in and nationalizing the debts of these banks, instantly burdened every Irish taxpayer with additional debts of more than 50,000 Euros. How this calamity came to be, both the systems that permitted it and the government that refused to stop it, illuminates these pages and sets fire to the notion that there ever existed a reasonable, moral Irish state.

Ship of Fools is is a blistering, convincing broadside to the Celtic Tiger and the government that manufactured it. Fintan O'Toole, a journalist and public intellectual, walks the reader through the last 50 years of Irish economic policy, an adventure that ought to put his every reader to sleep. But how could a single eyelid even threaten to droop when every turned page reveals another scam, another dropped ball, another scandal by which the Irish government revealed itself to be nothing more than a public-facing shell corporation for the Republic's obscenely wealthy elites, a small cadre of men who, over decades, established an Irish gentry that not only held the reins of business, but collared the government and the regulatory bodies designed to contain them. In this, the author lays down a painfully obvious pattern of corrupt and selfish behavior that made the death of the Celtic tiger both obvious and inevitable.

Though Mr. O'Toole largely keeps his critical focus on the government dysfunction that allowed the Celtic Tiger to all-but destroy the Irish state, he does not spare neoliberalism its fair share of the blame. It may well be that this business-first system of low taxes and small government has merit. Perhaps, in a vacuum, it could be executed admirably and allow every citizen a chance to succeed on their own, without aid or succor from governments. Certainly, there's appeal to economists in this scheme. After all, governments act in the interests of their constituents and from the necessities of politics, not caring what the consequences of these half-informed decisions might be. Removing this power from government removes the temptation to act which will allow a well-engineered system to operate smoothly.

However, a free market invariably evolves into one dominated by massive, conglomerated firms that use their outsized power to not only crush their competition, but to silence their opposition. The moment they've succeeded in ensuring that no one can say no to them, they act as only they see fit regardless of the consequences. It is the very definition of a doomed state.

The State cannot exist to service business interests. It cannot exist to facilitate the wealthy. It must exist for everyone, to give everyone a fair chance at life. And as Ship of Fools makes painfully clear, this has never been the case in the Republic of Ireland where self-serving economic policies and a hollowed-out government have created the worst of all worlds. A sad but powerful indictment... (4/5 Stars)

The horror of ethnic war and the cost of human difference in The Cage

From The Week of March 31st, 2014

Much of the conflict in our modern world is powered by our differences. Yes, economics and natural resources are also wellsprings of human violence, but these battles pale in comparison to the societal discord spawned by the desire of minority cultures to be distinct and free. From Ireland to the Middle East, from the Jews to the Tutsis, we've witnessed cultures deploy their languages and their customs to distinguish themselves from their neighbors, to define themselves as else. Which may be well enough until some form of hardship comes to the region, driving desperate people to find someone to blame for their stumbles. Who better than the other,? Who better than those we do not understand?

Bloodshed of minorities, causing their traditionalists to entrench and hold the ground their fellows have died for, causing them to make virtuous the ultimate sacrifice for their way of life... Leading to radicalization, the hardening of their hearts to those who've stolen from them, beaten them, killed them. Cycles within cycles until all that is left is death and victory... This grim lesson underpins Mr. Weiss' powerful and disturbing work.

Sri Lanka has existed, in some form or another, for 2,500 years. Settled ed by visitors from nearby India, it was, for centuries, a Buddhist kingdom in the heart of one of the world's most beautiful and idyllic regions. One would have expected the centuries to smooth out any significant differences that might have existed between the various social groupings on such a picturesque island. But a series of divisive internal conflicts in the 13th and 14th centuries, profoundly worsened by western colonization in the 18th and 19th centuries, hardened these differences into distinctions worth dying for.

Consequently, Sri Lanka has been, for generations, two island, with the south ruled by the more populous and culturally dominant Sinhalese and the north governed by the minority Tamilese made fearful by colonialist reforms that they believed would deeply favor the Sinhalese. It would be the Sinhalese who would comprise the government, who would receive the important jobs, who would wield all the influence, not the Tamilese who were merely the remnant of a long-dead kingdom. Ignited by political riots in the 1950s, and fanned by widespread killings in the 1980s, the political discord between these two groups would escalate into a civil war that would not only take the lives of tens of thousands, it would introduce into this idyllic place the corrosiveness of modern terrorism which the Sinhalese government would use as a pretext for a vicious crackdown that would finally end the war, but not before the strife had left a permanent scar on a wounded nation staggering into the 21st century.

A detailed history of the last days of this cruel conflict, The Cage is chilling non-fiction. Gordon Weiss, a journalist and a former official with the United Nations, establishes a rough history of Sri Lanka before plunging head-first into its civil war, documenting many of the unfathomable deprivations that characterized it. A firm believer that both sides perpetrated war crimes, the author equally condemns government and Tiger. The former he accuses of concealing the degree to which it allowed its armed forces to butcher, rape and starve-out Tamilese civilians while blaming these attacks on the enemy. The latter, meanwhile, he rightfully criticizes for taking up the virulent and destructive weapons of modern terrorism: forced conscription of civilians, the use of child soldiers, and the deployment of suicide bombings. Worst, however, was the cult of personality created by the charismatic leader of the Tamil tigers who ritualized and elevated martyrdom into a virtuous end, a worthy achievement for a noble cause.

The Cage, though, is far more than a polemic against the various sins of both the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers. It cares about their schemes, their despotism, their pieces of propaganda, but only as a means of illustrating the suffering of innocents, some of whom are given voice here. Frequently, Mr. Weiss removes himself from the narrative, surrendering it to those who've lost families, partners, and their own health and vitality to a self-destructive war perpetrated by individuals who exercised no restraint and certainly no decency. Their words are alternately terrifying and plaintive, recitations of crimes that no one should have to endure, crimes for which there is no recovery, crimes that leave marks on those who do them as well as those who suffer them. In this, we come to witness the utter madness of war, particularly, war perpetrated by children and conducted like children.

While The Cage does not directly ask the question, the reader cannot help but wonder what any of this suffering is for. Wars do have purposes. They can be means by which wrongs are rectified and newer,b better balances established. Without the chaos of the two World Wars, the European Union would not have existed. Without the deprivations of the American Civil War, the united Union would not have economically accelerated the 20th century. Some good can come of violence. But as inevitable as the Sri Lankan civil war was, its purpose is utterly absent. To what end, all of this torment? So that ethnic groups can preserve their linguistic codes? To protect their religious dogmas? To husband their ethnic foods? Are these differences worth dying for? Are they worth plunging an entire country into madness and agony? The answer, for anyone even moderately steeped in history, must be an emphatic no. And yet, these conflicts continuously crop up, the result of minorities being radicalized, or radicalizing themselves, on the basis of perceived differences. It is a tragedy without peer or end.

Yes, The Cage could have been more thorough with its history of Sri Lanka. It could've included the testimonies of more innocents. It could have been a rallying cry for the betterment of humanity. But these absences are minor flaws in what is otherwise a moving example of a modern nation, of the value of destiny, and the dangers of despotism. Mesmerizing work... (4/5 Stars)

The thorny history of a famous cemetery in On Hallowed Ground

From The Week of March 24th, 2014

Our relationship with the dead, and the bodies they've left behind, is as revealing as it is complex. For while some dismiss the body as nothing more than empty vessel that can be discarded now that the soul no longer abides within it, many others hold such a deep connection with human remains that anything less than respectful reverence is cavalier and insensitive. For these individuals, the only way they can honor those who have past beyond this life is to ensure that they lie peacefully in undisturbed ground, that their graves, like them, are not forgotten. However, such reverence implies that, on some level, the spirits of the dead still care what happens to their bodies, that it means something to them to have been returned, with grace, to the earth in which they began.

Is there a connection? And should it matter? These are two unavoidable questions in a book about a cemetery. Mr. Poole may not have any immediate answers, but the clarity of the snapshot he has taken here of death, of ritual, of grief, and of ceremony is of such quality that answers seem unimportant.

Arlington National Cemetery is one of the worlds most famous landmarks. The exclusive preserve of those who have died in the defense of the United States, it is home to tens of thousands of veterans, from at least nine significant wars, whose graves are visited by more than seven-million people each year. Popularized by the televised burial of President Kennedy, Arlington is a shrine to ritual and respect. For its very ground holds what remains of those who died for their country, making it, outwardly, a monument to duty and patriotism.

Arlington's history, however, is far more troublesome. Originally the primary residence of Robert E. Lee, the legendary civil-War general, it was appropriated by the Union government after the Lees decamped to Virginia at the beginning of the American Civil War. Initially, it was to be used as a military camp, but once the war came to the doorstep of the capital, it was deployed as as a burial ground, for the bluecoats who died during that great American schism. Despite Mary lee's vigorous efforts to reclaim it, the government refused to surrender the sprawling farm, eventually, over the decades that followed, expelling everyone who lived on the property and converting it into a full-fledged cemetery that would be subjected to all manner of cultural winds that would force many of the graves to be dug up and reburied in order to satisfy the whims of the day.

A fascinating history of a lodestone of grief and remembrance, On Hallowed Ground is a surprisingly engaging journey through a famous monument. Robert Poole has produced a thorough chronicle of this sacred place, walking the reader through the many storms it has endured. His portraits of the stewards of Arlington are fond without fawning, showing respect for the work they have done without neglecting the ways in which their egos have shaped it. But perhaps most instructive are his careful descriptions of the key moments in the Cemetery's long existence, capped off with a detailed paean to the televised funeral of JFK that is both moving and vivid. Lush descriptions of the place not only evoke its grandeur, but remind us of the conflicts, both political and actual, that have defined it.

All literature makes some form of contribution to the culture. And yet, there are occasions when one is surprised by the size of such a contribution. On Hallowed Ground fits that bill. For what looks to be an ordinary history of an extraordinary cemetery becomes, in the author's hands, a revealing chronicle of an institution that, if it avoids scandal, does so just barely. From Arlington's controversial origins, to its mistreatment of black soldiers, to its preferential treatment of officers, it reminds us that even the bodies of the dead are subject to the politics of the day, however revolting we may find them now, and that, for all the reverence and ritual we may grant the dead, the institution that cares for them is, like all institutions, beleaguered by biases. One wouldn't expect a cemetery, no matter its fame, to attract such strong opinions, and yet, they reveal just how much meaning we invest in a place that is only, truly made significant by the value we the living give to it.

A work as revealing of human nature as it is of Arlington itself... Its beauty and its ironies won't soon be forgotten. (4/5 Stars)

Elephants, their majesty and their power in The Elephant Whisperer

From The Week of March 3, 2014

The world is a playground for humanity. This is the inevitable conclusion drawn by a species that, for thousands of years, has flourished as Earth's apex predator. No other creature can match our intelligence, our self-awareness, our emotional depth. No other species has produced poets and playwrights, gods and scientists. These findings, these thought experiments, distinguish us from the great dumb herd that comprises the world we are free to exploit.

But naturally, this is nonsense, the destructive conclusion of biased thinking. For humans typically only respect as intelligent things they understand. Present to us music and math problems, politics and prose, that we, on some level, comprehend and we are more than willing to acknowledge your personhood, your worthiness. But communicate to us in a language we're not geared to understand -- the skitterings of the monkey, the song of the whale, the bone-deep vibrations of the elephant -- and you are a beast of burden, a thing whose power is to be harnessed and used to our benefit. This inexcusable intellectual arrogance has not only allowed us to ravage our planet, it has permitted us to do it guilt free. The costs are immeasurable, a truth vividly illustrated in Mr. Anthony's touching life story.

Compared to much of the rest of the world, Africa is a wonderland of biodiversity. Swamps and forests, deserts and jungles together contain a breathtaking spectrum of life, from tiny spiders to gigantic elephants, from venomous snakes to harmless dogs, a balance ecosystem in which the ruthless, millennia-long dance of nature and evolution has unfolded. But now, after countless centuries of natural ebb and flow, this treasure trove of life is under threat, not only from encroaching humans but their externalities as well. Urbanization, climate change and trophy hunting have reduced this once vibrant place to a shadow of what it was. Every year, the deserts grow at the expanse of the forests and once populous creatures are hunted for their meat and their horns, as the glories of evolution are reduced to cliched mementos of man's undeserved prowess.

Recently, however, movements have ignited to push back against this butchery of the wild. Conservationists have succeeded in having huge swaths of African territory designated as nature preserves where the ecosystem is allowed to flourish unmolested by all but a handful of poachers who are dealt with violently and mercilessly. Staffed by naturalists whose life's work is the understanding of and treatment of animals, and funded both by governments and tourism, these reserves hold a mirror up to the world, of how it once was and how it will someday never be, the essence of natural, if cruel, harmony.

The story of Lawrence Anthony, the head of the Thula Thula Game Reserve, The Elephant Whisperer is a charming adventure through the life of a world-class conservationist. Organized around Anthony's reception of a herd of elephants abused and hunted by man and the means by which he restores their health and their trust, the work expands to include lush descriptions of the Reserve: its incredible wildlife, its caring staff, its venomous dangers and its thorny politics which are uneasy at the best of times. Throughout, we are afforded glimpses of lives lived with purpose, not to gain advantage, not to hoard wealth, not even to accrue power; simply to hold on to the glories of what came before, beauty we are all-too-eager to bulldoze in favor of another town, another residential complex, another hotel and casino. In this, it is hard not to think of Anthony and those like him as the guardians of nature, as stewards of life the rest of us dismiss as unworthy.

There can be no doubt that Mr. Anthony's charm and passion rides high throughout The Elephant Whisperer, but it is to the credit of Anthony and his biographer that the elephant herd is the work's beating heart. Over and over, the authors demonstrate the grace and intelligence of these majestic creatures who appear as emotionally connected to their allies and their environment as they are willing to fiercely protect it. Described in vivid detail, their five-ton bodies seem as massive as their awareness of the external world is keen, communicating complex notions of friendship and suspicion with devastatingly simple gestures that leave the reader yearning to witness even one of these life-altering moments of cross-species connection. For they leave no doubt that we are not alone on this world we've claimed, that we share it with others who too-often go unheard in the congress of Earth's affairs.

There are flaws here. For a conservationist, Mr. Anthony is a little too fond of recounting his own successes. The Elephant Whisperer's first half is almost entirely about the compassion that Anthony and his friends have for the animals they steward. One cannot help but imagine an alternate text in which the animals feature more prominently than the humans. However, beginning in the work's second half, a series of devastating failures on Anthony's part allows the reader to forge an emotional connection with him and his cause. We are made to understand just how much this means to him and how much of a difference it makes to the creatures in the reserve. This sweeps aside concerns of egotism, leaving in its wake a heart warmed by the world he is fortunate enough to know so well.

A read with the power to re-shape the way one thinks about both Earth and our role in its concrete future... (4/5 Stars)

An unparalleled view of a darkly divided Israel in My Promised Land

From The Week of February 24, 2014

As much as we are individuals, endowed with our own wills, our own freedoms and our own futures, our lives are profoundly shaped by our ancestors and the lands into which they delivered us. We may rebel against them as a means of establishing our own identities, but the traditions, the habits, the pursuits that they considered important bed down in us until, eventually, we recognize their value and incorporate them into our own worldview. For the fortunate, these inherited values are confined to trivialities like what sporting teams we favor and what kind of manners we hold dear, but for those cultures who have suffered grievously at the hands of others, these values are fundamental to who they are, a series of unbroken vows made to those who died so that others may live. Rarely has this life-defining notion been so exquisitely captured than in Ari Shavit's sociopolitical history of Israel.

A meager strip of coastal and desert land hugging the Mediterranean sea, Israel has been for 60 years, a beacon of democracy and innovation in the Middle East. A fraction of the size of most of its neighboring nations, with whom it is on uneasy terms, it has, since its creation in 1948, consistently and stubbornly fended off annexation, defeating militaristic threats to its sovereignty with superior technology and tactics. Throughout, it has provided a proud and flourishing homeland for the Jewish people who, after the fall of Judea to the Romans in the 1st century, had been forced to nomadically roam through Asia and Europe, spending 1,900 years persisting in lands peopled by those who welcomed them and abhorred them. This disenfranchised journey came to an end in the Second World War when the Nazis' genocidal hatred made it clear that the Jewish people would never be safe living under foreign suns.

However, as much as Israel is an astonishing success, as much as its economic and industrial revolutions have shaped it into a land to be envied and a power to be feared, this triumph has come at a terrible cost to the Palestinian people who occupied this land prior to 1948. Muted and marginalized, their lands stolen and their region transformed, the Palestinians have been forced to watch while their homeland has been developed into a paean to the West: its institutions, its culture and its excesses. This transformation has fuelled resentments, grudges that have hardened with time and ill deeds, into malignancy that eats away at the heart of the Israeli miracle, burdening this new nation with the curse of its problematic founding.

A remarkable, first-hand journey through the 60 years of Israeli history, My Promised Land is a frank, confrontational and profoundly personal accounting of life in the world's first Jewish country in nearly 2,000 years. Mr. Shavit, a journalist for one of Israel's most prominent newspapers, collects the family histories of several of Israel's key luminaries, including that of his own father, and uses them to characterize the political and cultural forces that shape Israeli existence. In this, his work calls to mind George Packer's The Unwinding, an outstanding work of non-fiction with which My Promised Land is more than capable of keeping up. For it is an aggressive, unflinching and honest examination of the actions and the trends that have brought Israel to its present-day crisis with the Arab world.

Of its many virtues, My Promised Land provides the reader with a profound understanding of Zionism, that potent skein of Jewish belief that both founded their nation and seeded its future troubles. The author personalizes the crimes against the Jewish people, elevating them from textbook abstractions into living and breathing atrocities for which there had to be some kind of permanent solution. That became Israel, a land come refuge from tyranny and genocide, a land raised up by Jewish ingenuity and determination into modernity. Here, the indefatigable Jewish spirit is represented with such potence, as the reader watches deserts turned into orange groves, turned into industry, turned into commercial and residential developments, that one is left aglow with a wealth of respect and amazement for these dogged people who, armed with nothing, made a paradise out of sand.

Mr. Shavit could have left it at admiration. He could have penned his paean to Israel's founders and left well enough alone. Instead, in his harsh criticisms of Israel's handling of the displaced Palestinians, he exposes an intellectual honesty that lends his work moral heft. It is not an easy matter to lionize and criticize the same people, but the author manages this with a mixture of fire and class that captures the spirit of heated debate without descending into cynicism and ideology. This caustic fire he reserves for the subsequent generations which he clearly feels have betrayed the spirit of the Founders by squandering their gifts, their efforts, their sacrifices, in a land of hedonistic play and political backbiting. In this, he sounds like all social and political commentators of a certain age, men and women who so celebrate the past that the present seems a pale shadow.

From the Founders to the Ultra-orthodox fundamentalists, from Labor to the hard Right, from the orange groves to Startup Nation, My Promised Land is a sweeping, lively depiction of Israeli life that marvels at its successes and mourns its moral failings. It does not have answers. It does not even have proscriptions. It has only hope, hope that the divisive figures in power today do not ruin the glory of what great men and women devoted themselves to create. He sees a country deeply divided, a country that is increasingly religious and increasingly blind to its own turpitude, but he also remembers that all of this was once, not so long ago, hills and dust. Some measure of that spirit surely lives on today.

A dark and beautiful journey... (4/5 Stars)

Corporate greed and a righteous cause in Tom's River

From the Week of February 17th, 2014

Capitalism has built and furnished our world with the stuff of our dreams. In providing a tangible, monetary reward for the risks inherent in the creation of products, it has given us a society in which we travel on airplanes, entertain ourselves with televisions and and accumulate knowledge with networked computers, all of this in the span of little more than 200 years. The innovation it has spurred has literally transformed our planet, making it and the humans who live on it, unrecognizable to the generations who came before.

And yet, for all of capitalism's incalculable benefits, it sometimes extracts a terrible cost. For in incentivizing humans with the promises of wealth, and in valorizing the pursuit of that wealth, it has created conditions in which the societal costs of mass-production are, at best, minimized and, at worst, utterly ignored, its toxic consequences sloughed off for later generations to deal with, a point powerfully made in Dan Fagin's thorough account of one of the United States' most shameful episodes in its corporate history.

Tom's River, New Jersey has been, for much of its 300-year existance, an idyllic town. Nestled on the mid-Atlantic coast, it is part of the famed Jersey Shore, a stretch of American beach front popular amongst vacationers and tourists. In recent decades, its population has grown, elevating property values and turning tidy profits for those who bought when it was still a sleepy community.

However, for 30 years, a toxic secret lay beneath Tom's River's charm and beauty, one that oozed out of the ground and into the public consciousness in the late 1980s when parents and hospital workers began to notice an unusual preponderence of sick children within the town. Investigations of these clustering cancers would eventually lead to the doorstep of Tom's river chemical, a subsidiary of a Swiss dye manufacturer that had, at least since the 1960s, been dumping its carcinogenic waste products into the town's ground and the nearby ocean. This waste eventually seeped into Tom's River's wellwater, likely causing the statistically significant uptick in cancers from the 1970s onward.

An account of the dumping and the long, torturous battle on behalf of the concerned citizens to have tom's River Chemical held to account, Tom's River is a powerful and moving work of non-fiction. Mr. Fagin's history of the idyllic town, and the chemical plant that poisoned it, unfolds like a car crash in slow motion. Its linear narrative ruthlessly explores Tom's River Chemical's greed and negligence, the agonizing grief of the parents who paid the price for its malfeasance, and the many government inquests and scientific investigations that tried to sound out the when, where and why of what it had done. The gestalt is nothing short of a gut-wrenching tale of soulless capitalism butting up hard against the love of parents for their children who play in an increasingly polluted planet.

Peculiarly, Tom's River is made all the more potent for the messy and controversial resolution of its subject. Fearing the years of life-destroying litigation that would almost certainly result from trying to take on Tom's River Chemical in the courts, and lacking any sort of scientifically grounded smoking gun tying the cancer cluster with the chemical dumping, the parents of the affected children negotiated a controversial truce with the company, robbing this multi-decade odyssey of anything like a satisfactory conclusion. And yet, this is precisely why the work is so extraordinary. For it leaves the reader with no doubt that the concerned were forced by circumstances into such a peace. The limitations of science and the perfidy of politicians left them bereft of any muscle to bring to bear against the company , reducing them to two bad options, a foul-tasting peace or a Pyrrhic war in the courts.

This conclusion, however, in no way diminishes the heros who devoted nearly 20 years of their lives to bringing Tom's River Chemical to heel. From the concerned nurses to the EPA officials, from the determined parents to the stoic scientists, Mr. Fagin introduces us to a swath of honest and earnest Americans trying to right a wrong that no one else wanted to acknowledge. In doing so, we come to understand not only the frustration of the unheard but the pain of the healer who can only look on and watch as cancer, in all its varieties, eats away at the innocents in their care. If there's any flaw with the work, it is the absence of interviews from Tom's River Chemical and its Swiss masters who are utterly silent throughout. Whether this is due to bias on the part of the reporter, or heartless lawyering on the part of Novartis, is not at all clear.

Environmentalism, bureaucracy and science all have their moments here, but Tom's River leaves no doubt that, if we are to change our world for the better, it will have to come at the expense of unbridled capitalism. Regulation is a wretched tangle of thorns into which only the foolish wish to plunge, but we must also acknowledge that it is the nature of publicly traded companies to maximize profits at the expense of everyone and everything around them. Their soul drive is to earn. And over two centuries, that drive has given us an amazing world. But the price we pay for that world is too high, for us and for the people who come after us. Incentives must be put in place, penalties so cripplingly severe that they leave no doubt, in any boardroom, that it is more economical to do the right thing than to do the irresponsible thing. To ignore this truth, for reasons of politics or ideology, will devastate our planet which is, after all, the cradle of the generations to come. (4/5 Stars)

An extraordinary person, an unjust fate in The Spy Who Loved

From the Week of February 17th, 2014

Joy comes in many forms. Be it ushering a new life into the world or watching a young mind expand with the possibilities of the life to come, be it performing a perfect piece of music or experiencing the power of a sublimely toned body, we are all uplifted by the exhilaration of life's rare moments, those cherished slivers of time in which we, or those we know, are at our best. But while, for most of us, it is enough to simply have these precious memories, others are not so easily satiated by the past. For these souls, joy only erupts from the extremity of emotion and circumstance, from moments in which one's life or one's wellbeing has been wagered on the outcome. Which is precisely why the past wont' suffice. For it is already a known quantity, a settled question from which victory has already flowed. The next battle is the only cure. But as Clare Mulley explains in her riveting work, for some, there can be no more battles.

Born in 1905 to a wealthy, landed family in Poland, Krystyna Skarbec of a daughter of the aristocracy, an educated beauty of class and repute whose life was overturned and shaped by the two great wars that transfixed Europe in the first few decades of the 20th century. Without the Nazis and Communism, without politics and ideology, she might have been someone's wife, a creature living a life of proscribed comfort in which the sorrows and frustrations of being a pretty woman in a man's world would have remained her own. But when the freedom of her beloved country was crushed beneath the jackboots of continental regimes hungering to impose their notion of unity upon the world, the cage of her social confinement was breached, allowing her to crawl out into a broken world and fight for her own freedom.

Beginning in 1939 and only concluding with the end of the Second World War, Krystyna Skarbec, naturalized by Britain as Christine Granville, was an agent in both the Polish Resistance and the Special Operations Executive, a British organization whose remit was to spy on the Axis powers and to commit acts of sabotage where possible. Trained in everything from parachute drops to the transmission of secret codes, Skarbec operated behind enemy lines in much of occupied western Europe, curriering messages to the Allies, helping to take fortified Nazi positions and even intervening to bribe Nazi officers to spare allied prisoners. But despite her extraordinary efforts and the Allied victory over the Axis, she was never able to free her beloved Poland which would remain in the rough hands of soviet Russia long after she had succumbed to the miseries of postwar life.

The spellbinding account of a remarkable woman, The Spy Who Loved is nothing short of extraordinary. Ms. Mulley, an author and journalist, has helped to resurrect the life and times of a woman who should have never been lost to the rough tides of history, whose fearlessness and determination remain inspirational even some sixty years after her death. Swiftly dispensing with Granville's early years, the author concentrates on Granvile's wartime service, painting a lush portrait of a woman of charm and hunger, of grand habits and even grander drive who surmounted the prejudices of her age to leave her mark, to make a difference, to be someone. That sorrow was her primary reward for such strength of will is a pity that no amount of acclaim can sooth.

Cultures then and now might call Krystyna Skarbec a slut. They might look at her sexual appetites and her many lovers and dismiss her as a woman who slept her way to success. Indeed, this opinion, or fear of, is partially responsible for her present anonymity. For the men with whom she was close were so eager to guard her reputation that they were reluctant for her story to be told at all. This is idiocy. For while it is inappropriate to so blithely condemn any woman, it is even more foolish to do so with a woman who behaved no differently than any of her many male comrades. And even were it appropriate to label any woman such, such a label would not fit. For far from a degenerate, skarbec seized life, sucking from it every drop of nourishment it could offer her. In wartime, she comes alive, relishing her own agency, her own power, her own capacity to be a hero. This is the designation she has earned, not one rooted in dated sexist notions of foolish propriety.

As much as this is a winning biography of a rare woman in a brutal period of history, The Spy Who Loved is also a kind of office drama set in wartime. As the first woman to join the SOE, Skarbec was beset by all manner of prejudices that, with sixty years of reformist hindsight, appear even more absurd now than they must have seemed to her then. Despite her willingness to risk her life for her country, despite her obvious competence in the arenas of espionage and sabotage, she was distrusted, denied the legal use of a gun and often marginalized to the sidelines of a war she was eager to fight. Worst of all these nonsensical sins, however, is Skarbec's treatment after the war where upon England, the nation so fond of thinking of itself as the great civilizer, entangled her in sexist legalities which not only denied her the combat medals she so clearly deserved, but obligated her to pretend to be married in order to receive the citizenship she'd so clearly earned. It is shameful enough that these foolish codes troubled such a courageous veteran. That they also indirectly contributed to her death is an intolerable irony.

The Spy Who Loved could have devoted more time to Skarbec's early years. And indeed, it is slightly troubling that so much of the work has to be told through the eyes of others, an unfortunate necessity thanks to the dearth of skarbec's own correspondence. But these are small imperfections in what is otherwise the biography of a brave, liberated hero who should be celebrated for achievements on the battlefield and pitied for the peace she could never find off of it. Unforgettable... (4/5 Stars)

The next Walmart and the life of its genius creator in The Everything Store

From The Week of January 13th, 2014

Genius is a fascinating and complex virtue. From physics to literature, from mathematics to philosophy, it has allowed the gifted among us to make quantum leaps of understanding that have changed our world and benefited us all. But while such gifts are to be admired, and perhaps even envied, by us mere mortals, they do not come without a price. For to be so far beyond one's peers in a particular area is to understand what it means to be alone, to see the world the way few others do. It's only natural for this to encourage arrogance at the expense of empathy, to foster autocracy at the expense of collaboration. Many geniuses will be socially connected enough to avoid this fate, but others, particularly those who find themselves at the pinnacle of powerful organizations shaped by their particular talents? Perhaps not. The ups and downs of just such an adventure are chronicled by Brad Stone's engrossing history of Amazon.com.

One of the earliest successes of the internet age, Amazon.com, known now as simply amazon, began in 1995 as a small bookstore operated out of a Seattle garage and has, in the years since, grown into one of the world's largest retailers. Shaped by an unwavering devotion to the customer, it is the Walmart of the Internet, luring in many of the world's best and most ubiquitous brands with the promise of its 200-million users and deploying that market power to relentlessly drive down costs for the benefit of the consumer. From books to toys, from music to jewellery, it has extended its tentacles into virtually every aspect of modern commercialism while investing its profits into 21st-century industries like cloud computing and digital streaming, ventures that promise to position amazon as one of the most vital companies of the next 20 years.

But how did a tiny internet startup grow to rival Walmart? The dreamchild of Jeff Bezos, amazon's gifted founder, it was conceived in the halls of a new-York-City hedge fund as an "everything store," a a customer-first retailer that would leverage the advantages of the internet to put products in the hands of customers swiftly and smartly. Without much backing from external sources, however, Mr. Bezos began more modestly with a bookstore that would use its vast warehouses to collect every book in print, giving consumers access to literature that rarely, if ever, made it onto shelves of brick-and-mortar booksellers. Early success with this model made the company one of the internet's dot com success stories, opening a geyser of investment that Mr. Bezos would use to make his dream of an efficient, universal marketplace a startling reality.

The controversial history of this legendary company, The Everything Store is an arresting work of non-fiction. Mr. Stone, a journalist for Bloomberg Business Week, takes the life of Jeff Bezos and the rise of amazon and interweaves their narrative histories into a united tale that is much about the complexities of business as it is the personal characteristics of amazon's brilliant and driven founder and CEO. Despite having little access to Mr. Bezos himself, or his immediate family, the author constructs a detailed portrait of amazon's ascendance on the back of dozens of interviews with men and women who played key roles in its rise. Though many of these accounts are critical of Mr. Bezos and his managerial style which seems, at times, abrasive and obsessive, their admiration for his gifts and respect for his devotion is nearly universal. Their anecdotes coalesce into a portrait of a man who is both brilliant and uncompromising, insightful and reckless, but who is nonetheless seized by an entrepreneurial will so potent that it suffuses this work with its passion.

The Everything Store is more than an assemblage of legendary meetings and dramatic near-misses, celebrated acquisitions and quiet grudges. It is, at its core, a work about the unique strain of corporate philosophy imposed upon amazon by its fixated founder. Since launching the company in the 1990s, he has refused to let himself, or his company, slow down to catch a breath. Believing that consumerism on the Internet is a landgrab that the old stalwarts of commerce are ill-equipped to capitalize on, he has relentlessly pushed for amazon to grow, often, far beyond its capacity to handle the demands placed upon it by customers who expect satisfaction, who have no sympathy for its eccentricities, and who have no idea of the mad scramble to both keep the website running and their orders fulfilled. On the surface, this strategy seems insane. Shouldn't one consolidate one's gains before thrusting one's pride and joy into new frontiers? And yet, Mr. Bezos' frenetic pace, though costly in terms of personnel and failed ventures, has not destroyed amazon. It has, instead, shaped it into a rival to Walmart which was already the world's largest retailer before Amazon was even being conceived. Reckless, perhaps, but successful? No question...

A review of this work would be incomplete if it failed to address the controversies that have swirled around it. Many of amazon's luminaries, both those who granted Mr. Stone interviews and those who did not, have gone public with their complaints which have ranged from accusing the author of mishandling their quotes to making profound factual errors that might undermine the confidence of some in its authenticity. As there's no way to verify these claims, it is pointless to even contemplate siding with either party. However, some of the accusations do have some corroborating evidence. Mr. Stone does take liberty with his characterization of Mr. Bezos, occasionally straying into his mind during certain key moments to guess at his feelings, his thoughts. Mr. Stone also meddles in the personal history of Mr. Bezos in a manner that is, at best, presumptuous and, at worst, ethically questionable. However, the former is but a relatively small crime in the world of narrative fiction and the latter is a matter between the principals and not us. For the rest, one will have to decide for oneself who is more believable, the journalist attempting to thoroughly tell the story of a tech titan, or those inside trying to protect their friends and the brand they've all worked so determinedly to build. Given the balanced tone of the work which, to my mind, has few if any hints of a deeper agenda, I side with the journalist.

An inspirational and transformative work about an exceptional company and the even more exceptional minds and spirits that shaped it... A must-read for 2014... (4/5 Stars)

A thrilling demolition of tropes and expectations in The Demon Cycle

From The Week of December 30th, 2013

There are many ways to measure a man. We can judge him on how he treats his fellows, on how he acts when there's no one around to watch him, even on how he represents himself to those who know no better. But these observations can only tell us so much, and mostly about the public and private faces of someone shaped by a million different experiences and interactions. Hence, it's popular to suggest putting him to the most extreme test, of stripping away every advantage to see what he is like when the crucible is upon him. But even cowards can find courage when there's nothing left to lose. No, the best way to measure a man is to give him the world, to grant him godlike powers to change the destinies of himself and everyone he knows. Only then, when there are no societal checks left to confine him, can you truly know him. And this truth is vividly rendered in Peter V. Brett's fascinating and often exhilarating series.

In a devastated world, ground to dust by an unstoppable threat, life is as difficult as it is short. Civilization has been reduced to isolated hollows, semi-autonomous hamlets notionally under the control of various neighboring duchies. But while these regional authorities provide a threadbare framework of centralized control, this is, at best, lip service to a humanity traumatized into servitude by immortal demons which, every night, rise up from the earth's core, yearning for destruction and sustenance. Manifesting from stone and wood, from wind and fire, these seemingly unvanquishable foes reek havoc upon society, preventing it from advancing upon the medieval creeds and conditions that define it.

However, despite the insurmountable obstacles these demons represent, not all hope is lost. For these creatures are susceptible to sunlight, which dispatches them back to the hell they came from, and to the Wards, a hieroglyphic language that, when properly composed, has the power to not only repel the demons with magic, but to harm them as well. Only, the secrets of this language have been long lost, forcing the surviving humans to huddle in their houses, behind the few wards they remember, and pray for a dawn that never comes swiftly enough.

This gruesome stalemate, however, is shattered some 300 years after the rising of the demons when an ancient city is re-discovered by a wandering youth, searching, earnestly and hopelessly, for answers to the demon threat. At great peril, the young man liberates not only warded weapons from this sacred place, but also knowledge of long-lost wards that may well allow humanity to hold its own against the demons. However, this city is not of his heritage and the fight that ensues, over possession of its relics, and the mantle of its stewardship, may well shatter humanity forever and see a permanent night ascend from the Core to claim the world.

A thrilling ride through a broken world yearning for any sign of hope, the first three volumes of the Demon Cycle is, on balance, excellent fantasy fiction. Drawing on the venerable traditions of the epics that have shaped the genre, Mr. Brett begins with a premise that that has underpinned thousands of tales like it, the young man rising out of obscurity to defeat the indefatigable dark power. And yet, instead of relying upon the tropes typical of such tales, he exploits them, establishing the reader's expectations only to shatter them with creative developments of character and plot that charge what should be a stale adventure with energy and vigor. This is no mean feat; it is far easier to travel the well-worn path than it is to strike out on one's own. Thus, Mr. Brett should be celebrated for the exhilarating surprises his subversiveness generates.

While The Demon Cycle, thus far, has a cast of engaging, if overexposed characters, and a familiar world so reminiscent of more epics than I can name, it is pleasingly original in its willingness to draw in the symbols and the tropes of different genres to forge something new. Elements of horror, romance and dystopianism are all present here, lending the work the doom of a post-apocalyptic novel. And yet, these various threads are united by the work's protagonists, all of whom stubbornly put a shoulder into the plot until it is flying along, the work of potent, if opposing, wills. What's more, the author has drawn on the tropes of the video-game world to provide an even more familiar structure to the plot which sees heroes and villains alike methodically ascending from powerless obscurity to triumph and wonder.

The Demon Cycle ought to be a Frankenstein, a monster built from the stolen parts of unconnected creatures and, certainly, it has its bad moments. The genre-bending sees Mr. Brett discordantly inject episodes of extreme violence and physical and sexual abuse into a tale that, at times, feels as emotionally harmless as the Lord of The Rings. What's more, it's borrowing of things familiar to us leads it down a road to cultural insensitivity. For Mr. Brett has uncritically appropriated swaths of Bedouin and Arabic society to stand in for his world's desert people, exposing his readers to a thoroughly westernized view of cultures more complex than he often gives them credit for. These are flaws that drag on the three published novels, burdening them with unnecessary baggage. And yet, given that the series' strength is its capacity to subvert, perhaps these too are simply expectations being set up to be knocked down. We can hope.

This is a superb and unexpected delight that resists being set down. An adventure of the most darkly engaging kind... (4/5 Stars)