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)

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)

A forgotten stain on the American character in The Blood Telegram

From The Week of November 18th, 2013

Government, in all its forms, has forever been a double-edge sword. For all its advantages -- the organization of power and resources into the hands of the able few ostensibly for the benefit of the less able many --, it is predicated on the ancient, animalistic notion that might makes right, that the having of power is also a license to use it as the holder sees fit. This conception has been handed down for generations, from the tribes and the monarchies from which our governments evolved, a time in which all manner of ideas and mythologies were dreamed up to justify the actions of the most high. And though we have mollified such harsh views, varnished them with the veneer of electoral mandates and senatorial debates, that underlying idea of I know best still transfixes our leaders, reducing them from creatures of reason into beings of pure authority. The terrible cost of power's corrosiveness could ask for no better exemplar than Gary Bass' mesmerizing portrait of the intersection of American leadership and Bangladeshi freedom.

Separated by as much as 1,000 kilometers, the two halves of Pakistan were always fated to secede from one another. A geographic oddity born out of the great partition, which saw India declare its independence from the British Empire and Pakistan declare its independence from India, this distance irrevocably strained the natural bonds of community that evolve from humans in close proximity, causing views in both territories to become distinct from one another. And so, when Yahya Khan, then the leader of Pakistan's ruling junta, held free elections in 1970, and found the result going dramatically against him, particularly in East Pakistan, he authorized military action to bring the foolish East back into line.

Supported by the Nixon Administration and all the American materiel it could reasonably supply, the Pakistani Army's ruthless attack on East Pakistan was brutally efficient, leading to the slaughter of nearly half a million people and the conversion of millions more Bangladeshi into displaced refugees who fled to India for safety. This crisis appalled the American diplomats stationed in Bangladesh, prompting them to speak out against its depravities. At first, these warnings were private communications up the chain of command. But when this yielded only inaction, many of the diplomats went public, accusing the Nixon Administration of standing by while genocide was perpetrated by an American ally. The subsequent political fallout not only drove India closer to the Soviet Union, it ignited war between India and Pakistan in 1971 which effectively ended the crisis, the scars of which would linger for decades.

A captivating examination of the conflict, viewed through the eyes of the Nixon Administration, The Blood Telegram is powerful, emotive work that will leave few readers unmoved. Drawing upon White-House recordings, and the first-hand accounts of American diplomats in Bangladesh, Mr. Bass describes in stomach-churning detail the lengths to which Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger ignored the mass-slaughter of Hindus in East Pakistan out of loyalty and expediency to dictators and communists. Working hard to thaw relations with Maoist China, and cognizant that Yahya Khan was the best conduit through which they could work with and access China, the President of the United States armed a junta, ignored the entreaties of India, then and still the world's largest democracy, and stood by while their own weapons were used to perpetrate what their own diplomats termed as genocide. Those who objected to this strategy were dismissed as having "gone native" or as being a political enemy of the Nixon administration, neatly allowing the champion of world freedom to plow forward with its plans regardless of the terrible cost.

Were The Blood Telegram's narrative not so consumed by quotes from Nixon and Kissinger, one would be hesitant to take this chronicle at face value. After all, Mr. Bass seems, at times, eager to fit the American diplomats, particularly Archer Blood, for white hats while conversely vilifying the Nixon Administration. And yet, the filth that pours forth, first hand, from the mouthes of Nixon and Kissinger is inescapably wicked, leaving little doubt in all but their staunchest advocates, that their roles in this affair were pernicious and destructive. They are so anxious to win with China that they sneer at anyone who stands in their way, degrading them racially, ideologically and profanely in an effort to justify their actions to themselves. Sadly, despite breaking the law to support Yahya Khan, neither man was charged, much less censured, for their behavior in this matter.

The Blood Telegram is not without its own issues. Though the work is ostensibly about the brutal suppression of East Pakistan, it is far more concerned with the American role in that ugly incident than it is in actually documenting it. We are exposed to one or two refugees and the odd Indian commander, but all else is reduced to the cold statistics of those who were killed, maimed, or forced to flee. We're afforded no real sense of how Bangladesh tried to recover from its bloody,breached birth, much less what was done for the refugees after the Indo-Pakistan war. This despite the fact that Mr. Bass himself states that this is an underreported, little known bloodbath in the 20th century. It is well that we understand the heroic and the villainous roles American officials played in this affair, but not at the expense of understanding and educating ourselves on the reasons why American duplicitousness here was so damaging.

Chilling work that leaves no doubt that representative government is no better at choosing leaders of principle than randomly pulling names from a hat... The crimes of Nixon and Kissinger should not be forgotten... (4/5 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)

A thoughtful, quiet journey To a Mountain in Tibet

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

a fascinating if cold glimpse of a possible near-future in The Dervish House

From The Week of March 25, 2013

In the 21st century, technology is the driver of societal change. And though it is tempting to think it has always been thus, this instinct would be in error. For while innovations, from the bow to the printing press, have invited periods of positive disruption, change, historically, has been caused by a complex stew of changing climates, population pressures, natural disasters and geological good fortune, all of which have kept humanity on the path of progress. No longer... Where our species was once subject to fate's whimsy, we now create the tools of our own destiny. With every line of code we write, we program the look, the feel and the morality of our future. Technology has bestowed us with the responsibility for our own success or failure. And while that burden may be heavy, it is one we must shoulder if we are to advance to the next stage of civilization. This is a truth well-explored in Mr. MacDonald's intriguing novel of the near future.

The year is 2027 and Turkey has acceded to the European Union. The dream of a free and secular nation that began with Ataturk has finally, after a century of military coupes and Islamic politicians, been realized in a safe, prosperous country in which men and women, old and young, can succeed. Turkey, once nothing more than the sick man of Europe, once little more than the desiccated heart of a decaying empire, now embodies the American Dream 2.0, the hope for a stable and prosperous Asia.

For all this, Turkey is still subject to profound and disparate forces that threaten to crater its ascendency. A radioactive Iran, demolished by Israeli bombs, is a seething, ecological disaster to its east while Russia, floating on a sea of oil profits, looms to the north, having the power, with a flick of a switch, to end the flow of precious hydrocarbons into Turkey and the West. And these are just the external threats that do not account for the Kurds and the Islamists the disruptive technologies and the thieving capitalists, who trouble it from within.

In this sprawling place, caught between east and west, religion and science, the Deep State and the Islamic state, the interconnected lives of men and women, living in an apartment building in Istanbul, unfold. The economist mourning his past while facing his end of days, the deaf boy who dreams of adventure, the young female professional who yearns for her talents to be recognized, and the young Islamist who is troubled by divine visions all, in their own ways, hold small pieces of a plot to use nanotechnology in an act of terrorism. Their conflicting agendas, and those of the Turks and Greeks, scientists and zealots, they encounter promise to make this hot week in Istanbul, the queen of cities, one to remember.

A thoughtful contemplation of what the world might look like in twenty years, The Dervish House is engaging, if cold, science fiction. Deploying the literary conceit of nesting his host of disparate characters in a single apartment building, Mr. Macdonald is able to craft a varied cast of characters and entangle them in two overlapping mysteries which he then slowly and skillfully unknots during the course of the work. This, along with the liberal use of nanotechnology and terrorism, financial chicanery and geopolitics, allows the novel to be as erudite as it is fictional, a snapshot of a possible, largely optimistic future for a nation that has, for thousands of years, been the cultural hinge of the northern hemisphere. To glimpse it in such detail is pleasing.

For all its imagination, however, The Dervish House is flawed work. For though Mr. MacDonald succeeds in animating his characters with drive and purpose, he fails to invest them with much, if any emotion. Gleefulness and melancholy, ambition and despair, certainly make cameos here, allowing for moments of exultant triumph and crushing defeat, but these explosions are all the more notable for the affectless postures his characters otherwise adopt. We are interested in their machinations, and even occasionally root for their momentary victories, but we rarely love, admire, or even root for them, the notable exception being the young, deaf boy who is easily the novel's strongest character.

Moreover, Mr. MacDonald fails to properly balance the knowledge, about Turkey and the world, he wishes to convey with the plot, about perfidy and nanotechnology, he wishes to execute. Swaths of the novel are consumed by culture, economics, Islam and Turkish history, all of which are interesting in their own rights, but too often we're left to feel as though Mr. MacDonald is showing off his erudition rather than building a better, more engaging story for his readers to consume. His references to the Deep State and financial scams, terrorism and history, ought to add color. Instead, they largely succeed in making the novel seem shallow and flashy.

The Dervish House is high-minded fiction that should be lauded for its attempts to come to grips with the future in all its promise and its politics. It boasts some interesting characters and some complex plots, but the pieces never gestalt into a product that must be devoured. (3/5 Stars)

Ho Chi Min details the enlightened, revolutionary and tyrannical faces of a world leader

From The Week of march 4, 2013
What motivates a man to devote himself to a life of struggle? For the world is full of treasures just waiting to be explored, arcologies of past and present so vast that lifetimes would have to be spent to absorb all their stories. And yet, while some choose to immerse themselves in these worlds of knowledge and discovery, others reject these enriching existences in favor of lives aimed at a single, overarching goal, often thought to be unattainable. Is this hubris, the arrogance of the individual's belief that his is the only will capable of shaping reality? Or is it the mark of greatness, the symbol of a man triumphing over his own needs to give to the world a measure of justice? This fundamental question underpins Mr. Duiker's fascinating if mysterious biography.

Born in 1890 to Confucian parents living in French-controlled Vietnam, Ho Chi Min rose from obscurity to become one of the formative figures of 20th-century Asia. A student and a traveler, a thinker and a toiler, his life's journey took him from the parlors of Boston to the kitchens of Britain, from revolutionary gatherings in Paris to Soviet schools in Russia, until finally depositing him back in Vietnam, at the head of a movement to take back his homeland from the European and Asian colonialists who sought to dominate it. Here, he helped ignite a war that, while it dispatched the French from his native shores, helped make Vietnam the focal point for a Cold-War showdown 20 years in the making. This conflict with the United States devastated his divided country, tipping it into a political despotism from which it would take decades to recover.

Despite the fact that Ho Chi Min was a pivotal figure in both of these wars, and more broadly in the liberation of his country from colonialist rule, his life remains a mystery. Driven to communism by the political perfidy of the west, he was nonetheless a deep admirer of both the United States and France. He immersed himself in their cultures and their values, drawing from their founding documents models of responsible, moral government for his own subjugated nation. Moreover, he was a fighter for freedom, and yet he allowed his administration in Northern Vietnam to be characterized by political executions and one-party totalitarianism, sins that would never be tolerated by the nations he so admired. These appear to be contradictions that will never be resolved. For they might well be present in any man who drives himself to be the father of his nation.

Though at times consumed by an obsessive eye for detail, Ho Chi Min is nonetheless a thorough examination of southeast Asia in the first half of the 20th century. Mr. Duiker, who served during the Vietnam War and who has since become a professor of history at Penn State University, certainly trains all of his formidable powers upon the life of his subject, from his early travels to his Soviet radicalism, from his pleas to the west to his resistance to French, Japanese and Chinese control. However, his work here functions best as a lens through which to examine the broader effects that European colonialism had on Vietnam. For there can be no doubt that France's unwillingness to acknowledge Vietnamese independence, coupled with the deaf ear the liberty-obsessed United States turned to Ho Chi Min's pleas for aid, sapped the west of the moral authority necessary to make anti-communist allies of these ancient nations searching for a 20th-century identity. These tragic missteps not only lead to wars of attrition, they completely re-shaped the political conflicts of the latter half of the century, ensuring that millions more would suffer under the authoritarian yoke of totalitarianism for decades to come.

As a biography of Ho Chi Min, though, Mr. Duiker's work here leaves much to be desired. For though the author manages to capture something of the essence of the man in his youth, this impression fades with time until Ho becomes almost a complete enigma, no more three-dimensional here than he is in the posters and the legal tender that bear his likeness. This is not entirely Mr. Duiker's fault. After all, it is abundantly clear that the details of Ho's later life, particularly the decades in which he actually held political power, have been assiduously guarded by the authorities who have inherited the countries he created. Getting trustworthy and honest information from them must have been virtually impossible. And yet, Mr. Duiker doesn't help his case by abandoning the effort to understand Ho. Indeed, as if snubbed by the man's impenetrable facade, the author succumbs to a lifeless, systematic recitation of historical facts that we would expect from a textbook, not from a biography of a human being. In this, Ho Chi Min leaves much to be desired.

Ho Chi Min is an excellent primer on the political and economic forces at play in southeast Asia leading up to the Cold War. It is thorough and scholarly, virtues that imbue it with gravitas and meaning. But as a biography of the man himself, it suffers at the hands of mythology, the forces of which will make Ho's life all the more opaque in the decades to come. (3/5 Stars)

Evils of colonialism and the dawn of modern China in The Opium War

From The Week of January 7, 2013 Though nations are defined by the whole of their histories, their attitudes and dispositions are determined by key events, pivotal moments which shape their views and interactions with the world. A nation with no history of invasion, for instance, might only discover the evils of colonialism through conquest of other peoples while nations with a history of being invaded would know, from prior experience, that nothing good can come of conquest, no matter how pure the motives that initiated it. And so, just as the individual is defined by his experience, so too is a nation. This is enduringly demonstrated in Ms. Lovell's uneven history of one of China's formative events.

One of humanity's most ancient civilizations, China, for much of its history, considered itself superior to the rest of the world. While Chinese scholars were pondering the secrets of the universe and the self, European tribes were still futilely fumbling around for the lightswitch of civilization. But while this superiority held for centuries, the arrogance it bred eventually turned Chinese society insular, closing itself off to the outside world at a time when Europe, ignited by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, was undergoing massive change.

Thus, when the British, beginning in the 18th century, came to trade for Chinese tea, they must have seemed a simple folk from an insignificant island, no more a threat to a hundred-thousand united kingdoms than a fly to an elephant. But in 1839, this illusion was dramatically and irreparably shattered when that tiny island nation, thirsting for tea but lacking the silver the Chinese wanted in exchange, went to war with the great Asian dragon and, in three years, brought an ancient empire to its knees.

Deploying weapons and tactics not studied by its generals, the British bombarded Chinese defenses, violated Chinese sovereignty and disregarded every dictate of international trade in order to achieve one simple goal, to compel upon China a trade agreement that would, in every way, benefit the British. For while they lacked the silver China would take in trade for tea, they had, in abundance, Indian opium, a powerfully addictive substance which, if it could be forced upon China, would not only net them all the tea they could want in turn, but create an enduring market of addicts who would trade the British almost anything in exchange for a fix. Fearing the worst, China revolted, rallying behind one of its national heroes to reject this deplorable exchange, but both their concerns and their resistance were swept aside, creating, in the ashes of Chinese pride, the stirrings of the modern Chinese state.

Meticulously reconstructing the events surrounding this conflict, The Opium War returns the reader to the simpler, crueller time of the 19th century when there was no apparatus in place to prevent the selfish needs of a stronger nation from exercising its power over a weaker brother. Ms. Lovell, a professor of Modern Chinese History, assembles the prime movers on both sides of this now nearly 200-year-old war, reviving the political machinations that ignited it and capturing the necessities of national pride that drove it to its coercive conclusion. But while she does a credible job weaving together both actor and event into a cohesive and comprehensible whole, the work aims higher than a simple re-imagination of a long-dead event. It ambitiously cultivates an understanding of present-day China from an understanding of the lessons and the effects of the First Opium War. By linking this conflict to more modern movements of Chinese pride, Chinese sovereignty and especially Chinese xenophobia, it unspools an engaging throughline from the modern day all the way back to the event that arguably launched the notion of contemporary China.

Unfortunately, while Ms. Lovell has an eye for detail that aids her well in the creation of a big picture, she exhibits here very little ability to hold the reader's attention during her re-telling of the actual war. She fails to animate any of her major players, save perhaps Lin Zexu, the imperial appointee who attempt to rid China of its opium. And given the number of actors involved in this destructive ballet, this is a damningly poor success rate for a history which rests upon its characters to embed us in the now alien ideas and cultures of the time. Moreover, the prose simply fails to hold ones attention, this in spite of a reader actively interested in this period of Chinese history.

There are notable virtues here. Ms. Lovell has winningly connected her chronicle to events that affect the people of today, both within and without of China. But her work's failure to transform the war and its players into a living, breathing moment in time prevents it from reaching the heights to which it aspired. (3/5 Stars)

the origins and value of salt explored in Mark Kurlansky's Salt

From The Week of December 31, 2012
As much as we endeavor to give proper credit to the substances and systems that underpin our lives, we all take for granted life's staples. For from the global climate that protects us to the earthly food that nourishes us, these things have always been there, readily available and rarely absent. Their sheer ubiquity leads us to foolishly conclude that it has forever been, and will always be, thus, a truth that has put at risk everything we hold dear. As dire as this may sound, there are ways of mitigating this damage, just as their are ways of not taking the ubiquitous for granted. The most effective of these is knowledge, the means by which all ignorance is banished and reality embraced. Mr. Kurlansky helps us make just such a transition with one of life's most underappreciated commodities in this fact-heavy exploration of salt.

Thought once to be exceedingly rare, salt is one of the most widespread substances on earth. Used in everything from the enlivening of our oceans to the functioning of our minds and bodies, it is a fundamental substance in the propagation and nourishment of life. These truths, however, have only become apparent in the most recent centuries, times in which science has had the freedom to expose salt's secrets. In earlier eras, salt was thought rare enough to be not only a commodity, but one precious enough to be treated like gold, confined to chests and guarded by soldiers. This period of artificial scarcity has left a lasting legacy in our language where salt is the etymology for any number of frequently used words and idioms.

Beyond its role in biochemistry, however, salt performed a key service in the creation of human civilization. For its deployment is one of the most effective means of preserving food, a reality which allowed early, adventurous societies to spread out from their origins, across mountains and over oceans, to explore the unknown and plant there civilization. Without salt, we might have never had empire. And without empire, we might not have today.

From ancient China to medieval Europe, from saltmines to salt chests, Mr. Kurlansky relentlessly exposes the history of this most widely used substance. And so effective is his capturing of salt's prior preciousness that it makes poignant irony out of the fact that we, today, suffer from an doverabundance of salt in our diets. This would have been dismissed as absurd in times past, when salt was considered valuable enough to be the stuff of state monopolies. The notion that it would have been spent so thoughtlessly would have been cause for uproar. But the author is out to achieve more than irony. He has set himself here the goal of capturing the ways in which salt has shaped civilization, revealing, on the journey, a surprising set of enjoyable facts that, while once deadly, have settled comfortably into the arena of intriguingly humorous.

For all its facts and its revelations, however, Salt fails to cohere around a narrative,a throughline with which Mr. Kurlansky can guide his readers. Too often, the author simply trudges from era to era, society to society, reconstructing the traditions of the past for the amusement of the present. He does not engender the work with vision, with a unifying sentiment that would allow us to come away moved instead of simply charmed. And there can be no doubt that such a narrative it exists. For how else would civilization have spread if the preservation of food was unto impossible? How would we have evolved differently if salt was as scarce as once thought? Mr. Kurlansky's work is the poorer for neglecting such speculation.

Salt will entertain those readers who enjoy both trivia and irony, but its failure to be more than this narrows its audience considerably. (3/5 Stars)

From The Ruins Of Empire by Pankaj Mishra

From The Week of October 30, 2012 Though we, particularly in the West, have come to understand the crimes and the pains of colonialism, this enlightenment has come at a terrible cost. After all, to learn these lessons, we were compelled to plunge the better part of three continents, Africa, Asia and South America, into chaos and brutality, perfidy and corruption. We created entire ruling bureaucracies which, though their names and their masters have crumbled into dust, have born lasting legacies that have lived on decades, even centuries, after they were forced on the nations subjected to the will of industrialized powers. We cannot avoid the truth of this. We cannot look away from the costs of what those men did. We all bear a measure of responsibility for righting that epic wrong. But there is a deeper truth exposed by colonialism's practice, a truth about power's universal destructiveness that Mr. Mishra does well to expose in his intellectual history of colonial and post-colonial Asia.

For the better part of 250 years, western Europe did its level best to subjugate the world. Casting themselves in the role of light-bringers, men of skill and knowledge who would bring wisdom to the wild, mysterious east, they addicted these monarchies and fiefdoms, empires and tribes, to trade and narcotics, money and wealth. In the name of free trade, that most celebrated of freedom fighters, these nations conquered half the world, not so much with their navies and their cannons, though, these weapons were deployed when necessary. No, victory came through infestation and strong-arming, economic trickery and smart politicking, which saw the unstable eastern powers succumb to the western spell.

There were, undoubtedly, western men who endeavored to do well by their eastern brothers, but whatever blessings such rare gems provided to the newly acquired peoples of the east were more than offset by the darkness of economic depravity and the humiliation of cultural inferiority. This was at least the view of the Chinese, Indian and Arabic intellectuals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who rose to prominence within their lands. From Tagore to Al-Afghani, from Gandhi to Sun Yatsen, Mr. Mishra reconstructs the thoughts of these bright but tragic Asian stars and their hopes for a new, united Asia, one that acknowledged its own cultural weaknesses by accepting and benefiting from western strengths without sacrificing those spiritual virtues that helped create civilizations millennia older than the one subjecting them. Their dreams are expansive and glorious, their struggles noble and inspirational, but were their messages for pan-Asian unity listened to? Were their visions implemented in an Asia free of colonialism?

From The Ruins of Empire is a staggering and revelatory read. Energized by the thoughts of Asian scholars envisioning a better, brighter future for their continent, it perfectly encapsulates the fundamental tragedy that emanates from revolutionary thought and the revolutions they ignite. Subjugated people naturally blame their conquerers for ill-treatment that occurs in any inequitable relationship. But in levying this blame, the defeated imagine that if they were themselves but better, purer, smarter, if they but adopted the best of what made their enemies great while preserving the core of their own identities, they could throw off their imperial shackles and be born as free peoples, bound together in common and glorious unity. They see themselves capable of creating lasting peace and stable, centralized governments if given the chance. For are their cultures not older and wiser? Are their motives not purer and higher?

But of course, this is only half of the truth. We are all weak. We are all corruptible. For it is power that corrupts us. Colonialism is merely a symptom of the lust for power. Asia is the proof. For once the great wickedness that was colonialism was banished from its shores, there was no utopia realized, no stable government implemented. Asia went on as it has always been, as most of humanity has always been, dominated by powerful men who answer to no one but themselves and the armies and the structures that prop-up their dictatorships. These nations may well be democracies in name, but they are not so in reality. These are merely pretty fictions that conceal two darker truths: that power is the ultimate corrupter and that we are all equally unwise.

From The Ruins of Empire is a wonderful demonstration of power's corrosiveness, of how dreams of cultural superiority are bound to succumb to their own gravity and be sucked down into the black hole of arrogance. Mr. Mishra has captured the lives of tragic men and their tragic dreams and used them to reveal these truths. And he's done it with force and flair. Colonialism's legacy must not be forgotten, but it is merely the surface of what plagues this most populous, diverse and fascinating continent. Perhaps, in the future, greatness will blossom from the seeds planted by the intellectuals who threw themselves at colonialism's battlements, but it will not come until these deeper truths are understood. (4/5 Stars)

Hirohito by Herbert P. Bix

From The Week of August 06, 2012

Self-delusion is a remarkable and underrepresented aspect of human nature. For it has the capacity to convince us that we are right when we are wrong, righteous when we are sinning, strong when we are weak. In an effort to ease the pain of the cognitive dissonance we experience every time we compare our actions to our morals, self-delusion sands down the rough edges until our two worldviews, the internal and the external, are once again in harmony. But of course, this way lies disaster. For eventually, after the internal has had its way with the external, our conception of the world is so far out of step with how things actually are that calamitous mistakes are inevitable. We have lost all perspective. And with that goes any hope of relating to anyone of consequence, much less anyone we care about. For the powerless, this is simply pitiable, but for the powerful, for those in whom society invests authority, the consequences can be disastrous. Mr. Bix demonstrates in this lengthy, scholarly biography.

The child of centuries old Japanese nobility, emperor Hirohito stood at a vital crossroads in 20th century history. Born in 1902, he was trained from the cradle to not only be the imperial ruler of an emerging world power, but to be a man of the military, to be disciplined, to be regimented, to be efficient. But more than a leader, more than a man invested by his people and their government with an authority second only to fascist dictators like Hitler and Mussolini, Hirohito was thought by many to be divine, to be a force through whom the will and the superiority of imperial Japan could be made manifest on the world stage. A warrior became the focus of a war machine that had but few rivals in the century's early decades.

With no checks in place to mitigate this unimaginable power, Hirohito used it. He shaped his government to suit his desires; He authorized territorial conquests in Manchuria and China, looking the other way when his soldiers committed abominable war crimes; he even bid that war be declared on world powers like the United States, heedless of his military's own assessments that Japan would be overmatched in such a conflict. He did all this while endorsing the very culture that kept him in power, believing in the conceit that he understood both his place in history and his family's position in his country's destiny. Such hubris drove his empire into ruin, causing the deaths of millions of soldiers in war and hundreds of thousands of citizens in the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It destroyed the Japanese economy, ended imperial rule and directly lead to the American occupation of Japan. It lead to the end of the world that his family had so carefully imagined and that his supporters had so imprudently endorsed. It created a new Japan.

However, as Mr. Bix argues in this, his exhaustive biography of the last true emperor of japan, Hirohito himself escaped the consequences of his actions with only a few moderate wounds. He had to surrender his power and take up a largely ceremonial role in Japanese culture. He had to sit by and watch his country be transformed into a democracy. And he had to swallow the humiliating concessions made to japan's reformer, the United States. There would be no war crimes trial for Hirohito. For he was useful to japan's masters in Washington, Americans who, ignorant of Japanese culture, would invariably blunder in the country's westernization. He could glue the nation together while it was reborn into a new form, a new state.

This usefulness, contends Mr. Bix, lead to the suppression of Hirohito's role in WWII and the events that preceded it. Instead of the mastermind, Hirohito had been the victim of a militarized state. He was held captive by the influence of bellicose forces within Japan's government which foolishly sought out a war with the west. He was helpless to prevent the inevitable and destructive outcome. Perhaps, as the decades accumulated, he even believed this notion. But Mr. Bix does not. Arguing against the tide of popular opinion, he calls upon government records and the accounts of Hirohito's contemporaries to paint a different portrait of the man, one consistent with what we know of human nature, that power is corrupting, that to use it is destructive, and that to relinquish it is impossible. The idea that a man invested with ultimate authority refused to deploy that authority goes against everything we know about man and of Hirohito.

This is fascinating work. There can be no doubt that Mr. Bix has strongly held views on the role Hirohito played during WWII. But his scholarship and his willingness to declare his position on the matter, openly and honestly, lends his work here credibility. There's perhaps too much attention paid to the machinations of Japanese politics in the 1920s and 30s which must have been bewildering even then. But he nonetheless leaves us with a captivating portrait of a fascinating man who deserves both our pity, for the extent to which he was born into a life he could never change, and our scorn, for not rising above the world around him to be a visionary for his country. An intriguing study of a powerful man in a turbulent time... (3/5 Stars)

Inside The Pakistan Army by Carey Schofield

From The Week of July 23, 2012
Though at times prone to bureaucratic gridlock and systematic corruption, political influence and misguided decision making, institutions remain powerful beacons of truth and stability to countless humans. For however problematic they can be, they remain the closest tangible manifestation of order we have, symbols of unity that promise us a place to belong and a mission to adopt. There is something deeply nourishing about belonging to a whole greater than oneself, a superstructure of which one can be proud. And yet, these virtues are, to some degree, illusions, myths enshrined by the extent to which the institution's members want to believe them and the institution's leaders find them useful. And though myths can be sometimes made reality, they do, at other times, paper over cracks in the foundation that will eventually bring the institution down. Ms. Schofield's work is a vivid demonstration of this truth.

Hampered by the vicissitudes of history and troubled by an unstable democracy, Pakistan is a nation laboring to tread water in the 21st century. Religious extremism, volatile borders and entrenched corruption eat away at the country's potential, grievous sins made worse by a legendarily tempestuous climate capable, from time to time, of producing widespread disasters that claim thousands of lives. Add into the mix a handful of humiliating territorial defeats which remain thorns in the paws of the people and there is little room left for precious prosperity.

But however much the country is burdened by its history and its circumstances, the Pakistan army is immune to such shortcomings. A rare, beneficial legacy of the British Empire, its regimented world offers hope to all Pakistanis. For regardless of religious affiliation or class background, one can find companionship and advancement in this most honorable body. For here, a man advances on his own merits, on the back of his conduct and his talent, his loyalty and his bravery. Given that such avenues to success are, to say the least, exceedingly broken in every other aspect of Pakistani society, it's no wonder that the army has come to be invested with the honor of the country, a symbol of a better tomorrow that the people can only imagine.

From its structures to its campaigns, from its politics to its position in society, Ms. Schofield, a British journalist, having embedded herself with one of the most vital forces in the War on Terror, narrates the often troubled history of the Pakistan Army. This 200-plus page expose describes her time with the army's grunts and its leadership, revealing her admiration for it's many honorable men while expressing her concerns over its capacity to bear the great burden it's been forced to shoulder. For few institutions have the necessary vision and capacity to hold together a country threatening to split apart at the seams, least of all one that has been riddled with accusations, from both the West and from within Pakistan, that its intelligence arm (ISI) has been cooperating with those same terrorists so eagerly sought after by the United States.

Ms. Schofield makes few bones of her positivity towards the army. She respects its traditions and admires the degree to which it inspires men to lead good lives. However, her account fails to infect her readers with her enthusiasm. For while every institution is filled out with men and women who believe in the mission, who adopt wholeheartedly the honorable code of conduct it espouses, this promise is misleading. For citizens should not have to adopt an institution's values in order to feel as though they are leading productive lives. These values should be pervasive at every level of society. After all, this is the only signal we have to determine the social health of the nation. That Pakistan's young men feel such a powerful need to take on the honorable shroud of the army is a condemnation of Pakistani society. Rather than reassure us of the army's capacity, it compels us to understand the truth, that it is the only properly functioning institution of consequence in that country. And for that institution to be the military, a machine designed to kill and destroy, is both sobering and depressing.

Inside The Pakistan Army is as thorough as it is engaging, giving readers an inside glimpse of the challenges of fighting terrorism and maintaining a semblance of cohesion in a wounded nation, but it is difficult to imagine a happy ending here. For all the honor in the world can't erase the purpose of an army, and that is not to be honorable. It is to kill. Challenging work... (3/5 Stars)

Tamerlane by Harold Lamb

From The Week of July 09, 2012

Human history has produced some bloody chapters, periods of profound violence and upheaval that have not only altered the fortunes of those millions who lived through them, but that, in reverberating down through subsequent generations, have changed the very course of human civilization. Empires have been smashed and raised up, peoples celebrated and exterminated as a consequence of such chapters which have unleashed every imaginable plague, from the human to the fecal, upon the unsuspecting world. How are we to interpret the deeds of those who drenched these periods in blood? Should they be venerated for the order they formed, or reviled for the destruction they sowed? Should they be remembered as they clearly wished to be, or forgotten as a reminder to those who might take inspiration from them and attempt to improve upon their deathly designs? These are some of the questions we are forced to consider while consuming Mr. Lamb's biography of arguably the world's greatest conquerer.

In 1336, in what is now Uzbekistan, Tamerlane, known contemporarily as Timur, was born without fanfare to a family of inconsequential landowners in an Asia still reverberating from the conquests of Genghis Khan. Sixty-eight years later, he would die, in the heart of an empire that he himself had forged, having outlived his enemies, his wives, and, tragically, many of his own children. In the nearly seven decades between, in which he rode across half the world, he created a people, conquered much of Asia, terrified Europe, and waged wars of unimaginable cost in human lives to civilizations still recovering from the aftereffects of plague and ignorance. He built cities, made roads, appointed judges and laid down laws. But he did so on the still smoking ashes of his own conquests, not so much bringing order as re-shaping it into an image that pleased and properly honored the grace, the power and the dignity of the great Tamerlane, conquerer of the world that mattered.

Forced to draw from but a few contemporaneous sources, Mr. Lamb, a noted narrative historian, is at his imaginative best in Tamerlane. Capturing the richness of the palaces and the lushness of the gardens, the horror of the battlefields and the terror of the vanquished, he pulls from the clutches of legend and infamy a man of contradictions. For Timur was both of his time and ahead of it; a man of faith and a man of mass-murder; a man of principle and a man who allowed his men to drink deeply of the rapacious cup of pillage. He was a force for both widespread creation and mass destruction, making him one of history's most chaotic forces.

Mr. Lamb makes no apologies for the conquerer. While he asks his readers to consider Timur of his own time, he acknowledges that the man was ruthless when crossed and merciless when acted against, detailing the voluminous incidents in which Timur practiced his bloody form of justice. And yet, the author is careful to catalogue the glimpses of the man's humanity in his civilization-building: the art, the order, the scholars, the books. Most intriguingly, he chronicles the life and death of the young Timur's first wife, the only creature who seemed capable of restraining him, leaving the reader to imagine a future in which she had lived to temper Timur's iron with the softness of society.

While such biographies are entertaining, they fall short of edifying. Too many vital sources have been lost, leaving even the scholars among us to speculate over the fragmented truths that have descended to us from the intervening centuries. Nonetheless, considering that Timur succeeded where Napoleon failed, and capitalized where Alexander did not, an examination of his deeds and his time are an instructive chapter in the history of our bloody development. (3/5 Stars)

The Man Without A Face by Masha Gessen

From The Week of April 30, 2012

Of all the many maladies that can afflict society, corruption must be considered among the most destructive. By allowing power to be channeled into the hands of a handful of elites, it hampers economic growth and institutionalizes complacency and inequality, grim realities which not only discourage innovation and progress, but sap the will of those laboring to make positive change in a stagnant system. While some societies can recall better and fairer pasts to help fight darker presents, others lack this encouraging history to draw upon. These nations have struggled with corruption for the entirety of their existences. Their citizens are only aware of a better way through witnessing it in other nations, countries where the history is not so stark and the present not so hopeless.

How does this corruption arise? More over, how is it extracted once it has taken root? Who are the men and women who nurture it and who are those best positioned to attack it? In this biography of Vladimir Putin and the Russia he's made, Ms. Gessen asks these questions and more. Her answers are not always so clear.

Born into modest circumstances, far from the halls of power, no one could have imagined, much less predicted, the rise to prominence of Vladimir Putin, the now three-term president of a new, authoritarian Russia. Diminutive and pugnacious, he was, admittedly, a thug, a self-interested adolescent searching for somewhere to belong in the troubled USSR of the 1970s and 1980s. After a handful of false starts, he would eventually enter into a mutually beneficial marriage with the KGB, the infamous Russian spy service, a relationship that would endure for decades and see him trained and embedded into various governmental posts while the Soviet Union died and gave birth to a new, oligarchical Russia.

Invested with the hopes of desperate Yeltsin loyalists, Putin completed his rise to power in 1999 when he was tapped to succeed the unpopular president. It would take him only a matter of months to betray that faith, engineering convenient crises which he then used to roll back the political reforms of the 1990s. This centralization of power into the hands of the Russian president, completed by 2003, shifted the balance of power in the world's largest country, jeopardizing the interests of powerful oligarchs who were instructed to either get in line or suffer the wrath of Russia's newest Czar. For while this new Russia was definitely not the Soviet Union of distant memory, its tactics were no less deadly, leaving no room for dissidents unwilling to play by the rules of Vladimir Putin.

Penned by a Russian journalist, The Man Without A Face leaves the reader in no doubt of its position on Vladimir Putin and the new Russia. An outspoken critic of Putin's heavy-handed presidency, Ms. Gessen does her best to piece together the admittedly sketchy histories of the rise of Putin and the fall of the Soviet Union, contemporaneous events which fuelled the birth of the new, corrupted Russian state. Though the absence of corroborative accounts hinders her effort to create a definitive biography of the man or the dying regime, she nonetheless lays down a logical narrative deeply informed by the thoroughly documented terrorist incidents that plagued Russia in the early aughts. Putin's abominable responses to these attacks, attacks he likely had a hand in creating in the first place, are rendered, here, in chilling detail, dispelling any questions the reader might have about Putin's willingness to act, at any cost, in the advancement of himself and his strongman agenda.

There's no doubt that The Man Without A Face suffers from the deceptions and the confusion that surround Putin's rise. Ms. Gessen is forced to rely on accepted history and the personal recollections of a handful of compromised witnesses to key events. This is far from ideal for it leaves the author too much room to guess and pontificate, to reaffirm her own biases. However, for all these drawbacks, the author has nonetheless built upon the work of others to make a devastating case against Vladimir Putin, a case there's no doubt he will ignore. For while the faces and the ideologies are different, this is the same Russia in one respect. Corruption is still rampant, corruption which gives the elites a great deal to protect. And when they stand to lose so much, there is very little they are not willing to do in the name of power and self-preservation.

quality work troubled by its suppositions. (3/5 Stars)

The Secret Army by Richard Michael Gibson & Wen-hua Chen

From The Week of April 09, 2012

Though we may, with apologies and reparations for past discretions, endeavor to wipe clean the slate of history as a means of creating a better future, we can never begin anew. For the past is always with us. It may well be that those who shaped it have died, thus relinquishing their destructive hold on power, but they inevitably leave behind destabilizing legacies that corrode subsequent generations. It is difficult for stable nations to combat such patterns -- the United States is still suffering the effects of the organized crime networks created during Prohibition. It is infinitely harder for poor nations to subdue these forces. After all, here, state power is invariably fragmented among disparate interests, the chaos of which permits criminal elements to operate largely without constraint in semi-autonomous regions far from the halls of power. Few parts of the world are more painfully aware of these truths than southeast Asia. Mr. Gibson and Mr. Chen explain why.

Thanks to its decades-long status as the world's preeminent opiate producer, the Golden Triangle, that troubled intersection of Burma, Laos and Thailand, was, for much of the 20th century, a zone of concern for many of the world's governments. Dominated by private armies in the pay of drug traffickers, this region has been plagued by well-funded armies who have worked to corrupt and or repel the armies of the neighborhood's sovereign nations in order to maintain a stranglehold over one of the world's most lucrative elicit trades. Time after time, these forces either co-opt or kill their opponents, preventing area governments from asserting control over their own territories. But how did this come about? Was it inevitable, thanks to the curse of geography, that the Golden Triangle would be a zone of conflict, or is the region's turmoil rooted in its history?

In The Secret Army, misters Gibson and Chen contend that the roots of the region's problems lies in the Chinese civil war, a bloody and consequential conflict between nationalists and communists that eventually saw Mao elevated to supreme power, Chiang Kai-shek expelled to Taiwan and collectivism implemented across the world's most populous nation. Kai-shek, backed by American fear of Communism's spread, continued to resist Communist China, resorting to insurgencies and private armies in hopes of destabilizing the regime and opening up an avenue to victory. When these efforts at agitation failed, however, the armies, here-to-for funded by the US via Kai-shek, rather than disband as ostensibly ordered, took up a new banner, profit. This launched 30 years of conflict in the Golden Triangle, 30 years in which the struggling, post-colonial regimes in nearby nations failed to uproot this scourge, allowing it to embed itself so deeply within the region's tapestry that its corrosive effects are felt today.

While The Secret Army is a compelling and provocative history of one of the world's most troubled regions, the authors assume a familiarity with the region and its players that is absent in all but a handful of their readers. Names, dates, and battles blur past in a hazy and confusing march of history that feels as though it was curtailed here for the sake of time and space. Yes, the authors manage to convey the overall picture of the destructive forces that shaped the region, but these details, the nuances, the players, are barely more than pieces on a chessboard. Little illumination is given to the motivations and the personalities that shaped them. Time squandered on developing the American side of the equation could have been used to generate more thorough portraits of the Chinese, Burmese and Thai actors that prevented the Golden Triangle from being pacified and dragged into the 21st century.

The authors have, here, a fascinating history which vividly spells out the extent to which the vital interests of small nations are ignored by the convenient needs of larger nations, no matter how immoral. It appropriately catalogues the many grievances area governments surely have towards the West which was so preoccupied with the hope of defeating Communist China that it allowed southeast Asia to burn. However, The Secret Army needed to be as much a biography as a history. It needed to introduce us to the powers in the region, put faces to the names. And this it spectacularly failed to do.

Thorough work, but it is as troubled as the region it concerns itself with. (2/5 Stars)

River Of Smoke: The Ibis Trilogy 02 by Amitav Ghosh

From The Week of April 02, 2012

Trade is the foundation of human civilization. Not only does it provide the means by which we peacefully exchange goods, it underpins and empowers our economies which are the engines of innovation. For without trade, there would not be a means by which the inventive could profit from their ingenuity. Remove this incentive to innovate and our world would swiftly devolve into pre-industrial tribalism, knowledge hoarded by a select few while the masses eke out meager and ignorant existences in a world without light.

While we cannot dispute trade's value to our civilization, we can question its morality. For it often seems as though goodness and decency are left behind in the name of profit. All too often, the lives of the exploited are gathered up and ground down without the profiteers taking even a passing notice in their unjust fates. Is this simply a reflection of human nature, greed overpowering honor on the road to the future? Or is it a failure to look beyond our own stars, our own gain, to gaze upon a world driven by incentives but moderated by fairness? These are the questions Mr. Ghosh weaves into his textured tapestry of life in 19th century Asia. They are questions we all should ponder.

The year is 1838 and China is dusting off the drums of war in preparation for a vigorous pounding. For decades, this proud nation has looked the other way while British opium, grown and shipped from colonial India, made its way into its harbors and thence into the lungs, minds and dreams of its countless millions. For decades, China has watched helplessly as British merchants were enriched by this amoral trade while its own subjects were indentured, sold into slavery to the poppy. No longer... This situation is an offense to the dignity of the Chinese emperor and will not be tolerated, hence the appointment of an imperial commissioner to see to it that this addictive scourge is banished from its shores. Endowed with extraordinary powers, this commissioner must not be swayed by British bribes or British power in an effort to execute his divine mission.

Arrayed against the will of the emperor are the men who have made opium their exploitive stock in lucrative trade. A consortium of British and Indian operators based in the coastal town of Fanqui, they consider opium merely a product to be bought and sold, hiding behind the enlightened principles of free trade in order to avoid the grim reality of the lives their product destroys. Among this consortium is Bahram Modi, an Indian merchant who has elevated himself, through skill and marriage, from his meager roots into a position of wealth and status. This prominence is threatened, however, when the machinations of his family necessitate that Bahram wager his career and future on a single shipment of opium whose value could make him entirely his own master. Having succeeded in bringing this shipment through a terrible storm, Bahram is confronted by the Chinese crackdown on his product and must, with the help of is household, weather this latest and greatest tempest that threatens to engulf the entire region in war.

Picking up soon after the conclusion of the excellent Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, the second, expansive novel in a proposed trilogy by Mr. Ghosh, plunges the reader into the fumy tumult that presaged the First Opium War. Gathering up most of his well-rendered characters from the prior novel, the author transports Neel, the deposed Raj, Ah Fat, the escaped convict, and Paulette, the would-be botanist, from the sea to the hustle and bustle of the Chinese ports. Here, Mr. Ghosh is at his best, bringing to life a dead world with such exquisite clarity and lifelike vitality that the reader can almost feel the oppressive humidity, see the waterways clogged with fishboats, and hear the self-important justifications of British merchants trying to excuse their perfidy. Politics, culture and self-interest have rarely been more judiciously used to spice such a rich literary stew.

For all of Mr. Ghosh's imaginative and reconstructive talents, however, River of Smoke is severely hindered by a shocking absence of plot. At the best of times, the author's novels have a tendency to meander, a complaint readily forgiven when, as with Sea of Poppies, their conclusions are so rewarding. Here, though, Mr. Ghosh doubles down on this less-than-pleasant trait while failing to deliver anything like the conclusive punch that made River of Smoke's progenitor so memorable. This is, without doubt, a novel to delight the senses, a stimulating revivification of a world now lost to us. But this virtue, along with the author's nuanced critique of amoral capitalism, is not enough to rescue it from a disturbing absence of story.

Mr. Ghosh has few peers when it comes to quality, cinematic fiction. Unfortunately, his storyteller's instincts are, here, not equal to his imagination. (3/5 Stars)

Autumn in The Heavenly Kingdom by Stephen R. Platt

From The Week of March 26, 2012

Rebellion is a fascinating aspect of human civilization. For while it is a marvelous tool for the oppressed to use to sweep away the political hierarchies which, in their calcification, have descended into corruption and self-interest, it is, at the same time, innately alienating. It is a gestalt of the most earnest wishes of the most passionate people within the citizenry. For moderates, from those complicit in the ruling regime to those who aimed simply to keep their heads down and survive, such strong emotion, and the actions that flow from them, are a threat to everything they know and hold dear. The result, then, is a messy conflagration of gravitational forces pulling at one another in an attemptt to impose their unique vision upon their opposition. The stresses, understandably, are often enough to rip society apart at its seams. If the Arab Spring's various uprisings are not proof enough of these consequences, then let us turn to 19century China for a most vivid example. Mr. Platt enlightens us.

Considered to be the most lethal civil war in human history, the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) consumed 19th century China like a virus, leaving in its wake wide swaths of starvation, disease and despair. Thought to have claimed the lives of approximately 20 million Chinese, it was sparked by attempts by Christian converts to dispel the sins and the stagnation of the Qing dynasty and replace it with a new, westernized nation founded on fundamentalist Christian values. It would not die until it had claimed more than 20 times as many casualties, and lasted almost four times as long, as the more famous American Civil War.

Despite the rebellion's virtuous cause, its successful recruitment of native Chinese to its banner, its numerous military victories and its extension of the hand of friendship to a western Europe with which it shared much in the way of ideology, the insurgents were unable to uproot the Qing dynasty which would survive another five decades until the fall of imperial China in 1911. Not only did the rebel's fundamentalist Christianity clash with a strongly Confucian China, Europe was skeptical of the promises of reform and solidarity falling so eagerly from the lips of the rebels. Their resulting skittishness lead the European powers to largely throw their imperial weight behind the devil they knew. The devil in this case was the Manchurian emperor of China, the centuries-old legacy of the Mongolian conquest of China, a man so un-Chinese, so removed from the day-to-day plight of his people, that cities were built within cities simply to house him, to keep him apart from the unwashed.

Lacking external support, and having effectively divided China into warring camps, the rebels failed to create their new, modern China. Instead, they delivered her into a prolonged conflict that only re-affirmed western ideas of Chinese barbarism while strengthening a failing dynasty of authoritarians set on commanding the fealty of this country of nearly half a billion. In the ashes of Nanjing, freedom would have to wait.

Autumn in The Heavenly Kingdom is an exquisite, narrative history of an important insurrection largely forgotten in the West. Dwarfed in cultural importance by both the Crimean war and the American Civil War, contemporaneous conflicts that helped to reshape western notions of freedom, justice and statehood, the Taiping Rebellion is, nonetheless, a pivotal moment in history. Had the followers of Hong Xiuquan managed to transform China into something resembling a western nation, Mao never rises. He never clashes with the United States. Millions upon millions of people do not die. The Korean War never comes to pass. Harnessing this consequential energy, Mr. Platt submerges us in a world of resplendent cities and gigantic armies, religious zealots and imperial stalwarts, European hypocrisy and earnest idealism, all in a successful effort to bring to life a distant world and the sometimes inscrutable war that convulsed it.

While Mr. Platt renders the conflict's prime movers with style and skill, and while he vividly depicts the numerous battles that characterized this failed rebellion, there are moments in which his chronicle yields under the weight of names and events lacking context for the 21st century reader. So much has happened since, both to China and the world, that the morals and the ideologies that underpinned the actors here seem at times bewildering. The author would have done better to have concentrated his narrative on a few key figures in the conflict instead of spreading out to encompass what must be dozens of characters trapped in a spiderweb of shifting alliances and elusive motives.

Notwithstanding the historical dislocation, this is a wonderful journey into a most violent and pivotal time. As exciting as it is tragic... (4/5 Stars)

Afghanistan by Stephen Tanner

From The Week of March 19, 2012

While our fortunes are shaped by many factors, our parents, our nations, our eras, it may well be that the most pivotal force, in the determining of our destinies, is geography. For not only have exploitable land and natural resources, separately and together, altered the futures of nations and empires, forbidding mountains and impassable oceans have protected and nourished cultures that, otherwise, would have been long-since absorbed by more powerful societies. However, as much as these natural barriers can shield populations from assimilation, they can also invite attention by those rapacious greats of history who see only challenge in the unconquerable. And wherever there is conquest, ruin is not far afield. No country has ever labored more beneath the curse of geography, than Afghanistan. Mr. Tanner explains in this, his military history of that battered country.

Sprawled at the intersection of empires and continents, tribes and civilizations, lies Afghanistan. For thousands of years, this country of mountains and deserts has been the fascination of warriors and scholars, the former having tried with some success to conquer it; the latter having tried in vain to understand it. For Afghanistan, which has crouched between east and west for centuries, is an inexplicable blend of past and future. It is a country of cities and tribes, of cultured merchants and horse-born nomads. In any other land, such divisions would have been forced to amalgamate, to be normalized by the inevitable blending of cultural elements that occurs any time people are forced to comingle. However, Afghanistan's geography shortcircuited this process, allowing the tribes to live and survive in the mountains while, below, the citydwellers moved on, their fortunes rising and falling with the succession of kings and warlords, emperors and high priests, who, over millennia, have laid claim to this most vital and rocky roadway between Europe and Asia.

From Alexander the Great to Chandragupta Maurya, from the British empire to the Soviet Union, Mr. Tanner recounts Afghanistan's long and bloody history with armies and imperiums. He describes how these experiences imprinted upon the people of Afghanistan both the Way of the Warrior and the will of the resister, values that, along with the country's challenging geography, has kept it from cohering into a stable, united society. The absence of this national identity has bestowed upon Afghanistan a terrible legacy of chaos, the misery of which has only been added to by arrogant empires who sought to subdue through force a world they barely bothered to understand.

Though Afghanistan is not without flaws, it is, in the main, an excellent primer on the history of this cursed country. From the Mauryans to the Mongols, Mr. Tanner, a military historian, bombards the reader with a dizzying array of empires that have trampled and besieged this diverse land. In the process, he introduces us to the great men of history, the savage and the enlightened, who've driven their standards down into Afghanistan's hard soil. But as illuminating as the author makes this long and winding journey, he sheds very little light at all on the Afghanis themselves, their customs, their treasures. This may not be the fault of the author. An absence of written records for much of the country's history surely does not aid in a fulsome portrait of Afghanistan. More over, the works' core revelation, that Afghanistan is little more than a collection of disparate fragments which have been so long left in pieces that they can no longer fit together, raises the question of which culture, the city or the tribal, should be expanded upon. Nonetheless, the absence of cultural information leaves the work, at times, to read like little more than a succession of battles, the details of which eventually blur into a haze of bloodshed and suffering.

For all its handicaps, Afghanistan is revelatory work that leaves little doubt that this fractured place will continue to be a troubled country. Published in 2002, the author concludes his history on the positive tone created by the NATO defeat of the Taliban. However, we know better. For we have had the benefit of watching those early gains recede in the face of Talibani truculence which, ironically, only underscores Mr. Tanner's overall portrait of an Afghanistan divided, an Afghanistan burdened by countless invasions, an Afghanistan without a national identity in an era of nation states. Much to the cost of the Afghani people, this portrait leaves little doubt that this country will continue to be what it has always been, the road over which great civilizations destructively churn. (3/5 Stars)