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)

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 darkly imaginative, entertaining epic in The Magister Trilogy

From The Week of November 4th, 2013

Excluding a few, notably greedy exceptions, we all want to believe that life should be lived in balance, harmonies that govern man and nature, man with his fellows, and man with himself. Humanity has invented entire faiths in hopes of propagating this notion, of establishing this karmic linkage at the root of our existences. After all, what better way to ensure that the excesses of the few are discouraged by the prudence of the many? There's only one problem with this belief however; it is a facade. Life, like the universe, is governed only by opportunity, its resources exploitable, its blessings random. Some god, some force, may indeed have conjured it into being, but that animating intelligence has done little to curb the disharmonies in our world that put the lie to such utopian notions as fairness and equality.

But what if the world was karmic? What if the universe was chained to balance in such a way that consequences automatically followed on from actions? What would such a world look like? C.S. Friedman imagines in her enthralling trilogy.

In a medieval world of kings and magic, sins and sacrilege, life, for all but a few, is difficult and often all-too brief. While royals wile away their years with the plots and the rivalries that define their existences, the commonborn put their shoulders to their many labors, hoping to fashion for themselves lives for which they can be proud. In the event that they succeed, they might even live long enough to pass down these hard-won advantages to their sons. After all, in such a world, a woman's place is either prone upon her back, a willing vessel for the desires of others, or stooped over a stove, in order to provide for her family.

Kamala should be no exception to this rule. Sold by her mother into a life of sexual slavery while still a child, she has known only degradation and forced service to the whims and pleasures of others. And yet, a fire burns inside her that cannot be so easily put out by such darkness. For Kamala is a witch, a relatively rare soul born with the ability to draw upon her own life's essence to perform feats of magic. From healing to the manipulation of the weather, she, like witches the world over, can win honor and acclaim with her powers, and yet, each mystic act, each re-arranging of the stuff of the world, saps her lifeforce until she is a spent shell, ready for death's cold embrace.

Of course, there is one way to circumvent this inviolate rule, to cheat death on the road to immortality, and that is to become a magister, a witch who uses the lifeforces of others instead of her own to perform her feats. Only, there has never before been a female magister, that is, until Kamala's indomitable will rewrites history. And just in time. For her world is facing an old foe so long banished that it has become nothing more than faintest myth. And if the world is to not be devoured by this darkly jewelled threat, then it will need her and more besides to face it down and restore the balance that has been upended.

Successfully building upon some of the vampiric themes explored in her Coldfire Trilogy, Ms. Friedman's The Magister Trilogy is dark fantasy at its most sublime. Not only does it lay claim to a magic system that is as exquisitely simple as it is brilliantly karmic, it cheerfully gathers up some of the genre's more lazy tropes, shapes them to its own, wicked designs and then gleefully unleashes them upon the unsuspecting reader. This boldness, this willingness to make firm choices and stick to them, to have enough respect for the laws of the world that refusing to break them for the sake of convenience is virtually taken for granted, establishes a bond of trust wit the reader that allows the work to be thoroughly enjoyed without any fear that he is being beguiled into wasting his time on some dull, derivative adventure through well-trodden lands.

More than Ms. Friedman's authenticity of form and function, though, The magister Trilogy is remarkable for its heroine. For this is no abused spirit waiting for the love of a good man to make her whole. She is a creature that burns with her own ambition, her own desire, her own lust for triumph. Others have tried their hands at featuring such anti-heroines before -- The Mistborn Trilogy perhaps coming closest --, but these creatures were ultimately meant to be seduced into reform, raised up by loving hands into a melodramatic world of love and grace. Not so Kamala whose evolution is not towards being lovable, being clean, or even being pretty, but to be strong and whole, a self-sufficient sword forged of stuff far too stern to ever be broken by the selfish desires of others.

For all her thrilling independence, though, Kamala is simultaneously the work's primary weakness. For we are never really allowed to see Kamala's painful, formative years, the events, emotional and otherwise, that scarred her. Given the nature of Kamala's abuse, it's understandable why the author chose to tread lightly here. However, without any real experience with the most scarring and transformative moments of Kamala's life, her anger is rather pale, something we are asked to take as fact instead of witnessing it first hand. Ms. Friedman's choice to leave these dark events out is prudent, but it does rather mute Kamala's emotional impact on the reader.

Certainly, The Magister Trilogy indulges in its fair share of familiar themes: the unstoppable evil, the aloof magicians, the powerful and despotic kings. But even these are given new and interesting slants that, though not as authentic as Kamala'sevolution, do well to provide her a supporting and supportive cast. This, along with one of the best magic systems in recent memory, makes this a winner any lover of fantasy would be happy to encounter. (4/5 Stars)

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

From The Week of September 9th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A phenomenal look at a forgotten massacre in King Leopold's Ghost

From The Week of August 26th, 2013

Of colonialism's many sins, the degree to which it encourages humans to separate the strong from the weak, the momentarily superior from the disadvantaged inferior, must be its most grievous. After all, by dint of being both the planet's apex predator and foremost intelligent species, humanity is already predisposed to a self-centered view of the world, skewed to favor the viewer at the expense of all else. To then exacerbate this existing trait with all of colonialism's criminal enticements is akin to pouring gasoline upon a fire, an inferno of injustice, exploitation and degradation from which few ever recover.

Worse yet, though, is what this mental sense of otherness does to the victims who, starved, beaten and destroyed, having no culture or resource left to fall back upon, cultivate the victimizer's toxic tactics in hopes of lifting themselves out of the mire into which their fellows have been plunged. Abused becoming abuser creates the most pernicious vicious cycle imaginable, one in which peace and justice are made foreign concepts to entire generations. This Adam Hochschild exquisitely and passionately captures in his valuable investigative work.

Positioned in the heart of Africa, the war-torn and resource-rich country we know today as The Democratic Republic of the Congo has had a long and tragic history. Though claimed by the Portuguese in the 15th century, it was virtually inaccessible to European imperialism until the nineteenth, when Henry Morgan Stanley successfully traversed its dangerous terrain in hopes of locating Dr. David Livingstone, the missionary doctor and explorer who had famously vanished into this strange and foreign place. Until this time, and despite the Portuguese's unenforced claim, the Congo was an organized, self-sufficient kingdom ruled from present-day Kinshasa by a lord known as the Manikongo. But once Stanley's expedition proved that Westerners could withstand the dangers of the Congo, albeit with an excess of luck and endeavor, this kingdom would fall to the voracious hunger of Western appetites.

By the late nineteenth century, most of the world had been claimed in one way or another by the major western European powers of France, Germany and england. When Stanley's expedition proved that the Congo could be a prize to be won, tiny Belgium, lead by the ambition and hunger of its king, Leopold II, leaped at the opportunity to conquer it and, in a stroke, vastly expand its power and prosperity. Though this conquest would take many years to complete and be recognized by the international community, King Leopold II, with a combination of guile and relentlessness, would eventually prove victorious, creating the Congo Free State which began to export large amounts of priceless ivory and rubber to Belgium in exchange for relatively worthless items like glass and beads. But however horrendous this economic exploitation, the human cost was far worse. For in order to create this trade, Leopold's men instituted one of the most ruthless and degrading administrations in history, one in which women and children were systematically starved, beaten and murdered to encourage Congolese men to labor for Belgian gain.

The tale of these abominable crimes and how they came to light, King Leopold's Ghost is a mesmerizing and moving work of non-fiction. Mr. Hochschild, a first-rate historian who rarely disappoints, has set his nimble pen and sharp mind to detailing an all-but-forgotten chapter of western imperialism, one made all the more shocking for its darkness. For make no mistake. The crimes of King Leopold II and his men are at least as grave and despicable as those of the holocaust. The only difference here lies in Leopold's motives which were not forged by ethnic hatred but by greed, made no less potent by its simplicity. Step by cautious step, Leopold convinced the western powers that his intentions with the Congo were humanitarian, even pious, all while implementing, throughout this conquered land, a rule so foul, so cruel, that it inspired the writing of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a work which was, in no way, forced to exaggerate for effect.

Of King Leopold's Ghost's many virtues, the most memorable is the way in which it it reveals the role bias plays in the lives of man. Belgian crimes in the Congo were brought to light by a series of brave men, white and black, European and American, who, thanks to first-hand experience with the systematized beatings, shootings and rapes of the Congolese people, saw through leopold's lies and began declaring them to the public. However, these individuals were only few in number, a tiny fraction of the thousands of Europeans who had been to the Congo under Leopold's reign and watched the hands of the disobedient chopped off, looked on while entire villages were wiped out and the survivors forced into chaingangs, and observed the punishments with the vicious chicotte which often left its victims mortally wounded. This vast majority were silent. They were content to steal from an oppressed and brutalized people. They were content to earn and look the other way.

Even more troubling, though, are the biases amongst the social crusaders, all of whom believed in the rightness of British imperialism. The queen's justice was righteous and true, a light that should be shone upon the whole of the savage world. But Belgian imperialism was another story, the sins of which had to be exposed. This narrowness of thinking, this inability to recognize the universal despotism and criminality that arises out of colonialism, is utterly arresting, but no moreso than the will of the Belgian people to deny that their little country was complicit in the deaths of nearly ten-million people. Not until the 1980s were the records of this time revealed. And even then, no one was encouraged to read them. This is a crime against humanity they would just as soon bury.

But while there are in this tale no clean skins, there is this. When others forget, we can remember. We can read great books and remind ourselves that all crimes have been executed before, in one form or another. And in this way, when they are tried again,we can recognize them. We can be there to say "stop," "no," "this will not be allowed to pass."

A work as riveting as it is valuable... (5/5 Stars)

A long, filthy descent into nihilism in The Avery Cates Series

From The Week of July 8th, 2013

For civilization, devastation is a disease. For not only does it destroy buildings, disrupt basic services, and overturn the rule of law, it infects the humans exposed to its necrotic caress with a persistent sense of nihilism. It entices them to believe that society, as it was, is gone and that only fools would waste time re-establishing it. It convinces them that the only worthwhile virtue of their new existence, amongst the smoldering rubble of what was, is to survive and to do for oneself at the expense of everyone else in the name of that survival. But herein lies devastation's true perniciousness. For if everyone adopts this selfish attitude, then nothing is ever repaired, rebuilt, reborn. The world, staffed by survivors, is allowed to decay until even the memory of civilization is gone. This is the attitude that pervades the first three volumes of Jeff Somers' series and its one he wields to great and depressing effect.

It's the 21st century and life as we know it is gone. Nation states, and the individual freedoms they granted to their citizens, have been swept away by the System, an apolitical surveillance state that has, in the name of uniting the world, deployed bombs and droids, wars and assassins, as a means of establishing a new, peaceful order. For a time, widespread resistance to this new, globalist regime burned bright, but eventually even these organized pockets of rebellion were ground out beneath the ruthless bootheels of the System cops and their masters, men and women who would rather rule over rubble than not rule at all.

Through this dystopian world simmering with resentments slouches Avery Cates, a 27-year-old mercenary who barely remembers the world before unification. The totality of his adult life has been lived beneath the merciless eye of the system and their enforcers who roam the ruined streets of his native New York with a kind of brutal and uncaring vigilance. Cates' only means of survival in this world of solitude and disenfranchisement is to hire his gun out to those who can pay for murder. But though his skills have kept him alive for longer than most of his compatriots, his luck appears to have run out. For Cates has been tricked into killing a system Cop, a crime that generally results in long spasms of torture, at the hands of these new brothers in blue, prior to a painful death. His only escape from this particularly grim fate is to allow himself to become a tool for the director of the system Cops' Internal Affairs division, an exploitative relationship that will send Cates on a long, destructive spiral into the very bowels of his dirty, corrupted world.

A dark and difficult experience, The Avery Cates Series is a coarse and clumsy take on dystopian science fiction. Mr. Somers draws on 20th-century history to essentially recreate, in the 21st century, life imagined by the Third Reich, corporate fascism in which people were only allowed to act with the permission of the all-powerful, all-seeing state. This framework is then married to a series of explosive challenges for Cates to overcome at the expense of everyone around him. This union of historical influences and Hollywood blockbusterism initially stirs powerful emotions, particularly for those readers even passingly familiar with Nazism. Unfortunately, this is where the author's creativity ends. For all else is merely a stress test to see how far Cates can be pushed before he cracks and relinquishes what's left of his humanity.

Perhaps the most unpleasant part of Mr. Somers' work here, though, is his reliance on foul language. Any good story deploys its fair share of epithets which, when properly and sparingly used, have an unrivaled impact upon the reader. But the author completely rejects this philosophy, instead, peppering his work with every permutation of what George Carlin called the seven dirty words. Yes, to some degree, this harsh and violent language helps convey both the brutality and the hopelessness of Cates' world, but he accomplishes this at the expense of the reader's attention and respect, both of which are eroded by his reliance on such a flippant means by which to communicate personal and societal desolation.

There are virtues here. The Avery Cates Series challenges notions of what it means to be human. It adopts and darkly distorts proposed technologies such as digitized consciousness, mechanized exoskeletons and the artificial hivemind to create an affectingly grim view of a possible future. Imagining and spinning out such scenarios is not a simple achievement. And yet, this is at far as it goes. Mr. Somers does not grasp these tools and fashion something with which to advance the conversation. He has, instead, adopted the themes and the rhythms laid down by the masters before him and, sadly, re-constituted them with only marginal success.

For those looking to be entertained by a swift, atavistic plunge into a grim, pugilistic world, there is material here worth exploring. But for anyone seeking to find enlightenment amongst the ashes, such embers are few and far between. (2/5 Stars)

Political self-destruction in Preston's informative The Spanish Civil War

From The Week of June 24th, 2013

As much as the last few centuries have seen a significant advancement in most forms of human endeavor, we still lack a consistent, feasible strategy for properly harnessing and altruistically deploying the powers of collective action. For thousands of years, charismatic firebrands have rallied mobs with their voices and their deeds, unleashing these crowds in the name of a goal they desire to achieve. Moreover, entire communities have organized along similar lines in hopes of upending the status quo. But in both cases, the ends fail to justify the means. For the act of deploying the power of the collective, in the furtherance of a specific agenda, encourages others to do so for their own agendas. And it never takes long for these different groups to crash into one another, directly or indirectly, creating chaos in their wake. How we improve this dire outcome is beyond the scope of this review, but its consequences are not. They are vividly demonstrated in Paul Preston's excellent history of one of Spain's darker periods.

The consequence of years of political instability, ideological feuds and economic hardship, the Spanish civil War (1936-1939) was as brutal as it was swift. Pitting political leftists, supported by the legitimate government, the Soviet Union and thousands of foreign fighters drawn to their righteous cause, against right-wing nationalists, supported by fascist Italy, Nazist Germany and much of the Spanish military, it was a devastating conflict that not only claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of belligerents and civilians, it ripped apart Spanish society, plunging it into a kind of nihilistic chaos that would become all-too-familiar when the Second World War would break out only a few years later. The war, which saw towns besieged and bombed, soldiers starved and mutilated and civilians raped and murdered, annihilated the Spanish state, replacing it first with discord and then with Franco's victorious iron fist which would remained firmly wrapped around Spain's throat for more than 20 years.

But how could such a horrific conflict be allowed to unfold? Where were the moments of hesitation, of compromise, that would have kept its ravages from Spanish shores? And why was it such a rallying cry for European commoners and intellectuals? For these answers, we turn to the political turmoil that preceded the conflict, a succession of overturned governments, unchecked egos and ideological disputes that were a microcosm for a pre-WWII Europe gripped in a feverish and contentious debate between communism on the left and fascism on the right. These diametrically opposed forces, armed with proxies and adherents, ideas and weapons, were determined to impose their views upon the world, an insistence that succeeded only in tearing it apart.

This complex, factious world is brilliantly captured in The Spanish Civil War. Beginning with the fearsome politics that launched it, and concluding with the long, Francist nightmare that followed it, Mr. Preston details the thinkers and the commanders, the loyalists and the autocrats, the politics and the self-belief that characterized a dispute that would not only act as a harbinger for the wider, European war to come, but demonstrate the true cost of a heavily populated and profoundly divided continent that, seized by the legacies of imperialism and colonialism, eschewed union for nationalism, wisdom for pride. Every human flaw is on display here, taken up and spilled across 400, swiftly paced pages that never succumb to the bondage of that most notorious fetish of historical non-fiction, endless specificity. That Mr. Preston manages to capture such a rollercoaster conflict without completely losing the reader is an achievement all its own. That he does so while engendering both horror and sympathy is remarkable.

Though Mr. Preston primarily focuses on untangling the knotted rivalries that caused the conflict's breakout, the work's strongest moments are taken up with the ways this war bestirred and repulsed the European community. Mr. Preston makes us witnesses to the foolishness of British politicians like Winston Churchill who dismissed the loyalists as murdering propagandists, to the eagerness of Italian territorialists who were eager to extend their influence in Europe, and to the thoughtfulness of German Nazis who were keen to perform a

dress rehearsal of the tactics that they'd soon be deploying against the Europe they intended to conquer. Seeing all these familiar forces arrogantly jockeying for power, while readying themselves for a war from which it would take Europe 50 years to recover, is as eerie as it is sickening. But lest we lose all hope in humanity, the European idealists who came to fight in such an ugly war receive their own lengthy treatment, one in which we see both the selflessness of individuals willing to fight for something bigger than themselves and the terrible price that is paid for that selflessness.

The Spanish Civil War is not a perfect work. It lingers overlong in the esoteric nature of the conflict's background. Moreover, it skims over the fallout from the war, confining it to an all-too-swift epilogue. However, these are but small imperfections on a tapestry that reveals to what tragic degrees humans invest themselves in ideas that, when empowered by collective belief, can set the masses to marching right off the cliff and into darkness. Not a read for the faint of heart... (4/5 Stars)

The long, complicated life of a remarkable individual in Nelson Mandela

From the Week of June 10, 2013

For all of civilization's advantages, for all that it creates capital, organizes industry, encourages socialization and allows for institutions that aid us all, it is not without risks. Beyond the libraries and the schools, the theatres and the shopping malls, the courts and the law-enforcers, made possible by it, civilization is fundamentally a system for concentrating power from the disparate and disordered masses and into the hands of the few who in turn put it to useful purpose. Most often, this power is applied reasonably, even constructively, but it can also be twisted, shaped into a weapon for controlling the people instead of aiding them. Sadly, we Mont' have to look very far into our history to find horrific examples of just such abuse.

When civilization goes bad, when those we trusted most turn against us and use the powers we have given them against us, what do we do? We can fight, but in a time of increasing, technological advancement, are our overwhelming numbers sufficient against a well-armed, well-drilled force of professional killers? We can disobey, speaking out and winding up in jail for our pains, but will anyone listen to us over the din of the government's demonization of our characters? We can leave, but what message does that send to those we leave behind? Worse, what does it say to those brave souls who chose to stay and fight? What is the right thing to do when faced with such a massive threat? We turn to Anthony Sampson's biography for answers.

Only eight years younger than the state of South Africa, Nelson Mandela is undoubtedly one of the most famous freedom fighters in modern history. The son of a proud, tribal lineage, he was born into a land that had been conquered and colonized by the British Empire which, along with other western European powers, had spent the preceding century laying claim to an entire continent of people and their resources. However heartless this imperialism, having itself only come in the wake of centuries of enslavement and forced relocation, it was, to some degree, a world with standards of education and faith, morals and dignity, all of which a young Mandela soaked up as a citizen of this civilizing system which promised opportunities to those willing to seize them.

Nelson Mandela's customary, colonial existence, however, came to an end in 1948 when, freed from British rule, the newly elected National Party institutionalized racism. The seeds of western superiority sewn into the fabric of South African society flowered with apartheid which not only outlawed interacial marriage, but called for the uprooting of Africans out of white neighborhoods, crowding them into ghettos in which they could safely be ignored. Forbidden from owning businesses by white colonials, the black Africans were confined to narrow lives of unemployment and servitude, a situation the young Mandela found intolerable. Rejecting his life as a lawyer, he spoke out against apartheid's cruel policies, fighting them in court and in public until his vociferousness, and his community organizing against Apartheid, finally earned him a long stint in the infamous robben Island prison where he and his fellow political prisoners would linger for decades, chained by a government that could no more understand them than recognize its own ignorance.

From jail, Nelson Mandela became an agent of change. For 27 years, he read, learned and spoke out against the government that had jailed his friends and taken him away from his family. This constant, dignified agitation bore little fruit until the 1980s when a combination of international political pressure and the rising power of Mandela's political party at home compelled the ruling party to negotiate with Mandela and the ANC, talks that would eventually lead to Mandela's freedom and the freedom of his country from decades of appalling oppression.

The biography of a most remarkable man, Nelson Mandela is an eminently readable chronicle of an extraordinary life. Mr. Sampson, a journalist present at some of the key moments in his subject's life, guides the reader through the many fazes of Mandela's existence, beginning with the young and relatively innocent lawyer and concluding with the powerful symbol of freedom in the face of tyranny. Between, he examines, at length, Mandela's long career as a political agitator, from the incidents that lead to Apartheid's banning of the ANC to the the negotiations that would end his long exile in prison. All of this is accomplished with clarity and without becoming bogged down in any one part of Mandela's long and complicated story which is itself an accomplishment.

Though the work contains numerous revelatory moments for those unversed in Nelson Mandela's story, none are more potent, or moving, than his intellectual and spiritual resistance to the many forces that sought to reduce him from a man of character to an animal of savagery. Provocations from the apartheid regime and pressures from his fellow freedom fighters sought to encourage Mandela into greater acts of violence that would discredit not only his leadership, but the legitimacy of his movement and the message it sought to convey to South Africa and the world. Above all else, it is this that makes Mandela special. For he did not fall back on spiritualism to resist the temptation to fight fire with fire. He used his mind. He read, he thought, and he formed arguments that stripped away the veneer of apartheid and exposed it for what it was, a selfish, foolish disgrace that stained the world for far too long. Mandela's capacity to rise above those who sought to break him will be an inspiration for generations of freedom fighters to come. He is one of humanity's best and most noble children.

For all of its subject's glory, Nelson Mandela is a flawed work. Mr. Sampson succeeds in bringing Mandela to life, but he fails at virtually every other turn to flesh out the world around him. The key events in the struggle against Apartheid are never described in any detail. Moreover, the actors who both aided and opposed Mandela are cruelly underrepresented here. With but one or two exceptions, they are simply names who appear here only as a means of furthering Mandela's story. This is a biography of Nelson Mandela, but he was but the most important spoke in a large wheel. To have the other spokes be so marginalized does them, and the reader, a disservice.

Nonetheless, this is a most thorough document of a legend of humanity. We will all be diminished when he leaves us. For in him, we see the potential for greatness in our species: kindness and fierceness, compassion and determination, cooperativeness and leadership. That he was able to master these virtues in the face of endless provocation and temptation is a lesson to us all. He will never be forgotten. (3/5 Stars)

The wonderful, eerie and ultimately dated The Handmaid's Tale

From The Week of June 3, 2013

Of all the freedoms that human civilization has conceived, popularized and distributed throughout most of the world, those of the individual are of paramount importance. For though the powerful have always held largely unassailable positions, Olympian heights from which to judge and manipulate those less fortunate than they, the powerless have not. In times past, this uneven application of laws and privileges was justified by any number of self-serving notions such as Divine Right and Might makes Right. But thanks to both the Rule of Law and to those numerous champions of democratic freedoms, some of us now enjoy societies in which the homeless are sheltered by the same laws as the elites.

For some of us, these societies have nurtured us for the totality of our lives and the lives of everyone we know. But for others, these societies are but a dream, a fanciful theory of equality that may or may not ever come. For them, the present is defined by the rulers, for the rulers leaving the many to be merely pawns for their pleasure. This world Margaret Atwood vividly animates in her chilling, award-winning novel.

In the near future, the celebrated nation once known as the United States has given way to revolution. A dominionist organization calling themselves the Sons of Jacob, guided and inspired by the Old Testament, has orchestrated a devastating terrorist attack upon the seat of national government, wiping out most of the executive and legislative branches. Blaming the attack on Islamic terrorists, the Sons erect a military junta in the power vacuum created by the Republic's fall, a junta that proceeds to implement the Sons' particularly stringent form of Christian fundamentalism throughout what will henceforth be called the Republic of Gilead.

In the wake of these shocking developments, the rights of women and minorities begin to rapidly disappear. Jews are given a choice between conversion to Christianity or forced relocation to Israel. African Americans are reclassified as the Children of Hamm and deployed as plantation-style labor. Gay people are ordered to reconsider their sexual orientation or face lethal consequences. But for all of these dark developments, perhaps the worst plight is reserved for women who are forbidden to work, to read, and virtually to think for themselves. They are reduced to incubators for the next generation of Gileadians, with the most fortunate of them placed as wives to defenders of the state and the least exiled to work the vast, radioactive zones that occupy the outskirts of the republic.

Within this narrow, colorless world, Offred endures. A handmaid, or concubine, within the house of one of the regime's elites, she barely remembers her previous life as an American who worked, played, had friends, went out to parties. Her husband is gone and her daughter seized by the state for indoctrination. But worst is perhaps Offred's own re-education at the hands of a special segment of Gilead women who have been privileged to re-train society's women to obey, to please and, most importantly, to be fertile for their masters. Despite her many sorrows, Offred persists until her owner picks her out of the crowd of handmaid's, starting a series of events that will thrust her into an uncertain future.

As grim as it is introspective, The Handmaid's Tale is imaginative, dystopian fiction. The award-winning product of one of Canada's most famous authors, it posits a future America in the grips of a perverse fundamentalism that has seized upon America's ills as an excuse to carry out mass-slaughter and the mass-reorganization of society along patriarchal lines. In this, the work, originally published in 1985, is very much of its time. For these are concerns specific to the 1980s in which a succession of American presidents, both Republican and Democrat, had encouraged, rather than choked off, the meteoric rise of those potent strains of American teleevangelism that would, in response to the liberalization of society in the 1960s and early 1970s, eventually coalesce into the Religious Right. This, combined with the dissipation of Women's Lib, which had already begun to devolve into various and somewhat competitive waves of feminism, created fertile ground for the imagination of an author and a possible, if not probable, future.

Consequently, though The Handmaid's Tale is chilling, its anachronism robs it of some of its power. We live, now, in an age in which threats emanate from the abuse of technology, not the distortion of faith. We live in a time in which the surveillance state is the dystopian boogeyman, not dominionism which is given about as much heed as Neo-Nazism. The idea that generals and scientists, market researchers and corporate executives would get together to create a new society in which they restricted their own behavior, in the misguided belief that they were executing God's will, seems silly from the hindsight of 2013 in which the heat has gone out of the culture wars and in which the freedoms of the individual are, if not expanding, then certainly static.

That said, The Handmaid's Tale is nonetheless a forceful illustration of the immense power of totalitarianism. Re-education has managed not only to turn women upon one another, distracting them from the greater goal of overthrowing their oppressors, it has succeeded in changing their norms, in convincing them that what they enjoyed before was wrong, sinful. This kind of behavioral conditioning is not only possible -- see North Korea --, it is terrifying. Ms. Atwood most convincingly demonstrates this power in the form of Moira, Offred's coarse, boisterous and combative best friend who, instead of being hardened into an opponent of the regime, is shattered by its oppressive practices. In this, Ms. Atwood leaves no doubt of totalitarianism's power, nor its willingness to use it, a demonstration that provides the novel with its best moments.

Moreover, Ms. Atwood's decision to make Offred her heroine is brilliant. For Offred is not a hero. She is not a survivor. She's not even especially interesting, or smart, or earnest. She does not stand on rooftops, calling out for change. She is gray, a plain, colorless canvas upon which the Republic of Gilead can scrawl out their beliefs. She is painfully and tragically average, just like most of us who will read her story. She is us in less fortunate circumstances.

For readers even passingly familiar with technological and societal trends, dated and even at times humorous. But for those even mildly interested in societies that care nothing for the rights of the individual, quietly gripping. (3/5 Stars)

The extraordinary labors of a revolutionary in Sperber's Karl Marx

From The Week of May 20, 2013

No life is without challenges, moments of crisis and uncertainty that leave us grasping for answers and yearning for stability. The daily intersection of personalities and fortunes essentially ensures that something, at some point, will go wrong. But it's one thing to understand that life has its difficulties; it's entirely something else to deliberately steer one's existence into the winds of such uncertainties, to face them head on with brashness and truculence, and to do so while knowing full well that it may be decades, even centuries, before any of one's labors will make a meaningful difference. The will that must be required to never take the easy road, to forever endure the hardships of deprivation, in the name of a singular goal is remarkable. Mr. Sperber elucidates in his winningly thorough biography.

One of the most pivotal figures of the last 200 years, Karl Marx was a German political philosopher and armchair economist who lived during the twilight of empire. A polemicist who believed strongly in the corruptive power of the elites, his writings provided the intellectual fuel for a series of revolutions that would, after his death, sweep away the monarchies of eastern Europe and replace them with a powerful and equally corruptible proletariat, or people's party, that aimed to create a Marxist heaven on Earth by empowering the collective whole at the expense of the greedy individual. Though he would not live to see any of his predictions, or his beliefs, put into practice on a national scale, he became, in death, a people's hero, an intellectual whose complete and eloquent rejection of the disproportionate allotment of power and money in western society made him the godhead of 20th-century communism.

But though we know the legend well, how well do we know the man? For while Marx's role as the father of the resistance to capitalism is well known, almost forgotten is his poverty, his love for his children and his enduring devotion to his wife who, despite her upper-class upbringing, stood with Marx throughout his tumultuous life which was characterized by a scarcity of, and thus a desperation for, money. His partnership with Freidrich Engels is well-documented, but less so his unwillingness to let go of a decades-old family dispute, nor his struggles to maintain ownership of the movement he was creating, nor his deficiencies as an orator which counterbalanced, in every way, his excellence as an author. Hell, he spent more time as a newspaper columnist than he did as a revolutionary, a fact which, along with the other revelations of the man's existence, make this towering figure a creature of complexity and fascination.

Though it delves, at times, too deeply into the murky waters of economic theory and German philosophy, Karl Marx is a potent and thorough biography of a most dour and engaging man. Mr. Sperber, a professor at the University of Missouri, has gathered up Marx's works and his letters, his deeds and his friendships and fashioned from them a chronicle of the life of a giant of history, a man who has had as many deeds done in his name as some deities. The portrait that emerges from this meticulous assembly is of a man who struggled to find his place, a man who fought his enemies and his slighters at every turn, a man who spent more of his life as a political refugee than he did of a citizen of any country, and a man who knew everything about money and power except for how to make either. For this, he is both a creature of amazement and pity.

The author's characterization of Marx is simultaneously the work's best and worst feature. On the positive side of the ledger, Mr. Sperber removes the mask that history has placed on Marx, revealing him to be an emotional individual whose stubbornness often outstripped his good sense. His willingness to invest his entire life in the erudite refutation of capitalism, as practiced by the western powers, is downright remarkable in light of the Sisyphean nature of the war he was trying to wage against a completely entrenched system. And yet, this brings us to the negative. For Mr. Sperber does very little to actually explain why he was so devoted to an unwinnable war. The author illuminates Marx's influences, his schooling, his family history, his citizenship of the authoritarian Prussia, all of which go some way to sketching out an outline for his motive. But the unimaginable personal deprivations Marx suffered in the name of simple defiance demands a clearer description of what drove him to such atypical lengths. This is a man who endured the better part of a lifetime of financial humiliation, all in the name of exposing a rotten system. Why, when he so clearly possessed the talents to excel within that system?

In every other way, Karl Marx is a satisfying read that breaks the philosopher's life down into manageable sections, each of which succeeds in shedding light on Marx and his world, on 19th-century politics and 19th-century despotism, and on the eternal conflict between socialism and capitalism. But its occasional detours on the road to enlightening its readers prevents it from being truly great. (4/5 Stars)

Blood, cruelty and a dark future of exploitation in The Bel Dame Apocrypha

From The Week of March 18, 2013

Though it seems, at present, the only effective means of solving international disputes, war exacts a terrible price from its practitioners. Its bombs and bullets, missiles and machine guns, may well be blessings that resolve disagreements through conquest, but with every death, with every cratered building, hatred is inflamed in the hearts of the victims and their families, a hatred that, when properly nourished, prolongs war and ensures that neither side can extract themselves from its embrace without scars that run soul deep. Thus, war's price is more war, war that does not end. For even if the battlefields are cleared and the enemy is in chains, revenge lingers in the minds of the vanquished, making the prospect of peace nothing more than an idealist's fantasy. This Ms. Hurley makes exquisitely and tragically clear in a trilogy that is as difficult as it is engaging.

On a distant world far in humanity's future, civilization has descended into nightmare. After centuries-old attempts to terraform the planet only partially succeeded, the technologists and gene masters who sought to turn this arid planet into a paradise withdrew, leaving their descendents to flounder in the desert sands of a world baked by two vicious suns. Cities on Umayma are isolated havens protected from the worst of the planet's depravities by programmable organic filters which sheathe these ports of civilization, keeping out the grotesquely mutated monstrosities that slither and snake across the rest of its blasted surface. But even though these filters protect the humans from Umayma's natural dangers, they cannot protect them from themselves.

Since the withdrawal of the colony's founders, Umayma's inhabitants have devolved into religious and territorial warfare that has virtually halted technological and societal progress. Umayma's various nation states, each of which zealously practice a form of Islam, have fallen back on the barbarism of biological weaponry to enforce their particular beliefs. This chaos has not only sewn blood feuds into the very fabric of Umaymian life, effectively ensuring conflict for generations to come, it has distorted their faiths and their societies in ways that would be unimaginable to their ancestors. Not only have the traditional gender roles been distorted, but political power has accreted into the hands of the few, while doctrine has cruelly stagnated, offering no solace to those mutated humans who are more creations of Umayma than they are of god.

Through this hellish environment moves Nyxnissa so Dasheem, a rugged, resilient bountyhunter haunted by her past. After a stint on the front lines of her nation's most recent hot war, she was welcomed into the service of the Bel Dames, a government-sanctioned death squad tasked with removing inconvenient and undesirable elements from her country's landscape. The harsh and ruthless Nyx proves herself quite adept at being a Bel Dame, taking pride in her grizzly work, that is, until she is betrayed by her superiors and cashiered from the Bel Dames, abandoned, without friends or income, onto the rough streets of her hometown. Nyx slowly rebuilds her life, hiring on a team of assassins to help her execute the jobs that come her way. Unfortunately for Nyx, no job of significance can take her far enough from the halls of power that she won't be drawn back in to the world of vicious politics and planetary conquest that dismissed her so thoughtlessly. Nyx survived having her title revoked, but can she continue to win and live in a world that seems set upon her death? Only the gods, who have so clearly forsaken Umayma, can say.

As violent as it is bizarre, The Bel Dame Apocrypha is fascinating fiction. A harsh mashup of the science fiction and urban fantasy genres, it is a ruthless and jagged portrayal of lives lived at the very limits of physical and spiritual endurance, on a world too reminiscent of Hell to be coincidental. Sparing neither favorites nor fools, Ms. Hurley is equally savage with her wicked pen, heaping depravities and betrayals upon her beleaguered characters, demanding only that they survive, that they continue, no matter how slowly or painfully, towards their bloody destinies. This cruelty is, at times, wearing, but not since Martin has it been so successfully executed.

Though The Bel Dame Apocrypha reads, superficially, as little more than an exercise in torment, there is something revolutionary here. For Ms. Hurley has used the demands of war as an excuse to completely invert the traditional roles of men and women. In nasheen, the country that doubles as the trilogy's primary setting, the conflict has lasted so long that men are a scarcity, their numbers hurled for so long into distant battlefields that society has re-shaped itself around women who talk and act like men. In fact, were they given male names, their actions and attitudes would be completely indistinguishable from men. Ms. Hurley's is far from the first attempt to envision a society dominated by women. However, it might well be the first attempt to envision a society dominated by women who fill the roles and dispositions commonly held by men. Which begs a fascinating question.

Are the various attitudes and postures adopted by the genders inherent to those genders, or are they, as Ms. Hurley imagines, inherent only to the roles society requires them to fill? In other words, Are female politicians, warriors, assassins and merchants just as likely to be selfish and corrupt as their male counterparts, or do their natural dispositions shield them from the worst excesses of power's abuse? Arguments for both sides are plentiful, but there can be no doubt that Ms. Hurley has clearly and convincingly stated her case, that only circumstance distinguishes the genders from one another, that we only view women more favorably because we've narrowed their opportunities to be corrupted by power. A provocative view that makes for engrossing reading...

There are flaws here. The Bel Dame Apocrypha is ceaselessly violent. There are few chapters not marred by death and dismemberment. Moreover, Ms. Hurley makes virtually no attempt to gently embed the reader in her world. In fact, she seems to go out of her way to be obscure, to gleefully watch as the reader attempts to orient himself in an utterly foreign environment. This will frustrate some, but for those who stay with her trilogy, this bold strategy pays off wen the rhythms and the schemes of Umayma become all-too-painfully familiar. What's more, the trilogy could have benefited from some additional characters, individuals who would have done a better job fleshing out Ms. Hurley's world. As it is, the perspective rarely strays beyond Nyx and her team which can be, at times, tiresome.

In lesser hands, The Bel Dame Apocrypha might well have been little more than an excuse for savagery. But Ms. Hurley has imagined a world as rich and different as it is dark and cruel. From its organic technology to its paternalistic women, it churns out surprises and profundities with equal measure. This is in no way fare for the weak of heart or stomach, but for those looking for an adrenaline-fuelled ride through an outer circle of Hell, look no further. (4/5 Stars)

A beautiful, bleak tragedy slowly unfurled in Hugh Howey's Wool Series

From The Week of march 4, 2013
Our lies are always with us. For as much as we try to extricate ourselves from them, their stains linger so long as the truths sequestered by their telling remain obscured. And even though it is within our power to remove such a stain with a simple, straightforward confession, most of us cannot bring ourselves to do so. For with the passing of every moment, a lie grows in power, accreting in proportion with the damage it would cause when revealed. For most of us, this is a relatively small problem confined to relationships which operate almost entirely on trust, trust that is undermined with every falsehood. But what about the big lies? The lies institutions sell, the lies societies nurture, the lies governments spin? What if a lie is so monstrously large that the confessing of it would break the world? Mr. Howey uses this question to wonderful advantage in his engrossing and creepy series.

Centuries from now, Earth has become a wasteland. Soaring cities and resplendent nature have been rubbled and ruined by human hubris. What form this hubris may have taken has been obscured by time, by the passing of generations absorbed by the rhythms of life. And yet, the evidence of that ancient disaster remains, the images of gray skies, vicious winds and dead earth beamed into the silo that now harbors what is left of humanity. Outside, the world is cold and decayed, but within the Silo it is warm and vibrant, 144 floors of orderly existence shafting deep into the earth where oil and nitrogen, the essentials of life, can be mined and used to empower civilization.

From all outward appearances, the Silo is quite a harmonious place. Modelled on a small American town, it deploys a hierarchical power structure to safeguard the survival of the species. Its many trades, from engineering to portering, are clearly delineated, their talent pools refreshed by a well-organized cast system that, though not completely rigid, ensures that vocational knowledge is largely past down through families instead of being lost in the chaos of self-determination. This eliminates the need for universities. For aside from some basic knowledge, children grow up absorbing what they need to know from their friends, their family and their environment, a perfect incubator for the generation to follow.

This harmony, however, is a facade. For within the Silo, knowledge is tightly controlled, the rebellious sins of the past erased by not just censorship, but the pact each individual makes with the Silo's collective, that he or she will obey the laws and will avoid heretical questions about the past and the outside, the contemplation of which can lead to disaster. The Silo is largely successful in maintaining this pact, but when the wife of its sheriff is broken by the discovery of one of the Silo's most terrible secrets, the Silo's lawman initiates an investigation, the consequences of which will rock the Silo for generations to come.

One of the first major, sustainable successes in self-publishing, The Wool Series is a riveting collection of short stories which re-imagines the post-apocalyptic drama for the 21st century. Harnessing the most terrifying elements of horror, mystery and science fiction, Mr. Howey manages to infest the reader with a powerful sense of creeping wrongness, of gnawing claustrophobia, of crushing bleakness which, though potent, is rarely off-putting. This is a serious alchemical achievement. For activating such emotions can, when overcooked, provoke in the reader an antipathy that, when conjured, is all-but impossible to suppress. That Mr. Howey has found the proper balance here exemplifies his skill.

Though the series adopts a fairly novel approach to an old premise, the notion of a civilization in a bottle, this is not its only virtue. Mr. Howey has imbued his characters with winning personalities that rarely stray into two-dimensional caricatures. What at first appears to be overly simplistic blacks and whites eventually evolve into far more complicated grays whose ambiguities please far more than they irritate. Moreover, the author's sense of cause and effect is delightful. For its clear that the entire plot of the series is kicked off by a single, subtle action, one that creates a subsequent chain that ignites wholesale changes in the author's universe. Instead of fighting this, or even modulating it, Mr. Howey appears only to encourage the eruption, to follow eagerly where the falling dominos lead him. This is a refreshing development for a fairly stale genre.

For all its virtues, though, The Wool Series is not without its flaws. Some of its ex-post justifications for how the world came to be so twisted are decidedly threadbare, revealing gaps in logic that are troublesome. Moreover, after the first five stories, which grapple with the lives of those within the Silo, the series branches out to try to animate the days leading up to the disaster that created this dark world. This fails both theatrically and as a character study. For not only are the near-future characters decidedly less interesting than those who populate the Silo, the premature revelation of how the Silo came to be robs us of one of the series' most successful features, that the reader knew only as much as the Silo's characters knew, a reality which allowed us to unknot the mystery of its secrets and its origins alongside them. Granting us this omnipotent perspective severs this intimate connection with the Silo. It's clear that the author did this with an eye towards converging past and present at the climax of his tale, but the price he has paid for this is, to my mind, too high.

This is excellent, cross-disciplinary science fiction with the power to keep one up at night with dreams of a dark, authoritarian future. It would be worthy of your hard-earned even if each tale wasn't priced at $1, a supreme value that lights the way to the future of publishing, a little coin from a mass audience. One of the most inventive reads in some time... (4/5 Stars)

First two volumes of Malazan Book of The Fallen begin a dark and brutal adventure

From The Week of February 11, 2013
It's comforting for humans to believe in free will. For self-determinism means that our actions, from the bold to the boneheaded, are our own. In a world where we are all equally empowered to choose, we can celebrate our triumphs and decry our failures, knowing that we are solely responsible for the full spectrum of these outcomes. After all, how would we learn and grow if all our choices were seconded to another? What would be the point if we were all being guided to some predestined fate? And yet, for all that we enjoy this free will, most of us also believe in gods, omnipotent beings who, to greater and lesser degrees, take a hand in temporal events, steering us to certain outcomes. But what if the world was nothing more than this? Divine schemes that made of us nothing but pawns for their pleasure? What if we simply existed to act out their games? Mr. Erikson imagines in the first two instalments of his epic series.

In a world of magic and death, empires and war, gods play for keeps. Empowered by the copiousness and zealousness of their worshippers, they spin out plots millennia in the making, willing to even make themselves physically manifest in the world if it advances their unimaginable aims. Their subjects, a collection of intelligent races predisposed to war, act out their cosmic contests, most without even being aware that they are creatures of a much greater game.

In this difficult world, so often plagued by suffering and death, an empire has risen from the ashes of the old to impose order upon the tribes and clans, fiefdoms and city states, that chaotically comprise the known world. Helmed by the empress Laseen, an assassin who may or may not have had a hand in the death of her predecessor, Kellanved, the Malazan empire is set on bloody conquest, an iron-fisted and often cruel subjugation of not only the continent from which it sprang, but every other continent of which it has knowledge. Its all-conquering armies, numbering thirteen in all, trudge through storm and desert, forest and tundra, to carry out the will of their powerful empress, knowing that their lives are nothing next to the achievement of her goals.

Populated by an expansive roster of grim characters, and characterized by a show-don't-tell style of prose that often leaves the reader adrift in a mysterious world of unfamiliar customs, Malazan Book of The Fallen is a challenging, even confrontational read that spares no prisoners. Mr. Erikson interweaves moments of philosophy with long skeins of bloody slaughter to create the tapestry of a world beleaguered by rampaging armies and vengeful gods. This energy, this vibe, is so consistently depicted that it leaves the reader wondering if the world itself is coming apart at the seams, as it experiences the opening salvos of an apocalypse that will see it reduced to ash and bone.

Though burdened by the often overwhelming task of establishing such a vivid world, Gardens of The Moon and The Deadhouse Gates, the first two instalments of this epic adventure, are both successful works that, for the most part, live up to the ambitious dreams of the man who authored them. Their plots, though appearing at first to be overly convoluted, are, in the main, straightforward attempts by the Malazan empress to ruthlessly expand her empire with no thought or care for those who stand in her way. Though she has powerful mages at her disposal, her goals are primarily enacted through her exceptional armies who will often stay on campaign, in foreign lands, for years at a time, knowing more of their brothers in arms and their missions than they do of their lands and their families back home. In this, the Malazan empire is clearly inspired by ancient Rome with which it shares a similar structure, an equally voracious thirst for power, and a technical brilliance that helps it to impose its will and its customs upon those unwilling peoples who fall beneath its ravenous shadow.

However, this is where allusions to our world effectively end. For in every other respect, Malazan Book of The Fallen is a masterwork of imagination that can never quite escape the deus-ex-machina of its numerous gods. While its divine actors aid the series by lending it a unique blend of menace and weirdness, they are also its downfall. For the reader comes to understand that Mr. Erikson's characters are not ultimately in control of their own lives. They are subject to the whims of others infinitely more powerful than they. And though occasionally they luck into positions of leverage that allow them to thwart these gods, most often they become pawns of prophecy, a reality which robs them of too much of their agency. In order to emotionally invest in a tale's outcome, the reader has to possess some belief that the prime movers have some capacity to choose for themselves. Otherwise, they are merely puppets for beings we rarely see and cannot fathom. They might as well represent the author's whimsy in which case Mr. Erikson's puppeteering becomes far too apparent.

Make no mistake. This is a work of profound skill, imagination and ambition. Credit is often heaped on other creators of modern fantasy fiction, Jordan and Martin to name but two, for manifesting complex worlds. But these are all-too-recognizable as distorted reflections of our own, alternate realities that rely upon our myths, our symbols, to convey lessons we already comprehend. Malazan Book of The Fallen is, but for a few exceptions, something altogether foreign from everything we know. It is the purest manifestation of sheer creativity that I've encountered in some time. It is a shame then that it is bestowed with such a narrow slice of the emotional spectrum. Its first two volumes are works almost entirely of rage and revenge. There is no light to balance the darkness.

A promising beginning to a remarkable, if problematic, niche product. (4/5 Stars)

The rise and fall of the American Mob in Cuba in Havana Nocturn

From The Week of February 04, 2013 The rise and fall of the American Mob in Cuba in Havana Nocturn
For decades now, the American gangster has been a figure more of celebrity than ridicule. From Godfather to Goodfellas, pop culture has celebrated his anti-heroism, identified with his restlessness and cringed at the violence he's meted out to those who've wronged, crossed, or obstructed him. He embodies that strange disquiet that lives within all of us, that feeling that the strictures of our lives are far too confining and that a life beyond rules, beyond laws, beyond the boundaries of a conventional existence can only thrill us with its chaos and rebellion. The reality, naturally, while still glamorous, is far more grim. For the life of the gangster is much like one of their favorite businesses, one big gamble upon which a life's fortunes are bet. This much and more is captured by Mr. English's intriguing, if somewhat infatuated, history of the Mob in Cuba.

Prior to Fidel Castro's 1961 communist revolution, Cuba was nothing like the grim, socialist nation we know today. Open to trade from the United States, it, like other islands in the Caribbean, was a primary destination for American tourists coming down from the east coast. Much of Cuba's economy relied upon this inflow of American cash which naturally manifested in the creation of businesses to service the needs of the tourists. Unencumbered by the same morality laws that constricted behaviors back home, Americans, like most other tourists, were able to enjoy all the pleasures the island had to offer and then some, confident that their transgressions would never make it back to their native shores.

Though this tourism existed prior to the Mob's interest in Cuba, it skyrocketed when, after being deported from the United States, Lucky Luciano settled there in the late 1940s, intending to create, with the backing of the local dictatorial government, a gangster's paradise where sex, booze and gambling were as ubiquitous as the cigar smoke that would fill the beautiful hotels harboring all of this libidinous activity. Though Luciano was soon pressured out of this scheme by a furious US State Department, Meyer Lansky, the Jewish gangster immortalized in the second Godfather film, ran with their shared dream, inspiring the creation of a strip of hotels to rival Las Vegas over the next decade. These schemes would make many a gangster rich, for, this time, the mob had successfully sunk its fingers into a national government, incentivizing the politicians to encourage, rather than resist, this criminal trade. It was a beautiful dream that lasted for nearly 15 years, until the depravities of a president inspired a socialist revolution that would sweep not only the political old guard from Cuba's shores but the Mafia filth as well, leaving fortunes to dissipate into the white sands of a newly communist country.

Animated by charmers and celebrities, criminals and con-artists, Havana Nocturn is Mr. English's guided tour through an attempt by the American Mafia to create the closest thing to a sovereign state of their own in 1950s Cuba. In detail, the author describes the lengths to which the Mob linked their profitability with that of Cuba's general economy, creating all the incentives a dictatorial government would need to enable the Mob's elicit activities. This financial tapdance, along with an engrossing chronology of highlights of Lansky and Co's exploits on this most infamous Caribbean island, forms the backbone of a work that largely succeeds in its attempt to characterize the golden age of the American Mob, an age that, for inventors in Cuba, would come to an abrupt end with the rise of Fidel Castro.

Mr. English's account, full of murderers and sex tourists, beautiful girls and devilish dictators, would be dead on arrival without the unique contributions made by Lansky and his crew. Relying on details published in their own memoirs, the author amalgamates their colorful deeds with the austerity of Castro and his movement to create a captivating juxtaposition of political and economic forces. He's so successful in weaving together these narrative threads that, at times, Havana Nocturn feels like nothing les than a ticking timebomb as these two such disparate factions, criminality and communism, authoritarianism and revolution, thunder towards an inevitable, devastating collision. However, as much as the work entertains, its sincerity is not entirely convincing. Castro, here, feels white-washed, a sympathetic hero whose motivations are rarely probed. This may be thanks to a lack of eyewitness material on his rise to power and the years that would immediately follow. Nonetheless, we're left with a figure somewhat discordant with the man we know today.

This is more a work of entertainment than education. There's no question that it shines a light on a time now lost to the gloss of Hollywood history, but it lives too much in the heads of its criminals and revolutions to be completely trusted. (3/5 Stars)

Gritty The Dagger and The Coin a first rate fantasy epic

From The Week of January 28, 2013
Appearances deceive. For we are not the body we were born to nor the rank we were blessed with. We are not the profession we occupy nor the role we play. Rather, we are the talent we possess, a blend of natural ability and skill honed by knowledge and experience that has nothing to do with gender, race, class or deportment. Of course, no one can see this true self. For it is virtually impossible for anyone to disregard all of the superficial packaging that our culture and our biology value so highly. But if they could see truly, if they could conceive of this essential self, then the world would undergo a revolution as social distinctions we hold so dear collapse in the face of objective truth. Mr. Abraham flirts with precisely this tantalizing reality in the first two instalments of his new fantasy epic.

In a world mastered by dragons who have not been heard from for centuries, the thirteen races of humanity are left to muddle along without their overlords. Dogmen and snakemen, fishmen and human, they clutch at the shards of empire, trying to hold onto their little corner of what the dragons left behind. The result, then, is a fragmented world where the subversive ideas and technologies of the Renaissance clash with an entrenched feudalistic nobility whose claims to the reins of power grow feebler and feebler each day.

Into this often deadly morass of politics and theology is cast Cithrin, a half-breed orphan girl taken in by her city's local branch of a powerful bank. Discovering that she has a head for the business of risks and loans, she learns at the feet of her master until an external threat to the city compels her to adopt the life of a smuggler in hopes of secreting the bank's most valuable treasure out of the city and to the safety of a more secure branch. Along the way, her path crosses with the men and women who, through necessity and avarice, honor and zealousness, shape her world in the years to come. Some of this shaping will be to the good, but most will be ill, a savage struggle for power that will cut down the noble and uplift the unready. And always, in the midst of this storm, Cithrin endures, trying to carve out, for herself, a life worthy of her considerable potential.

The Dagger and The Coin, so far consisting of The Dragon's Path and King's Blood, is fantasy fiction of the first order. Owing more to George R.R. Martin than Joe Abercrombie, it nonetheless alchemizes the political realities of the former and the shocking violence of the latter to create a new, potent brew of gritty, real-world fantasy that has far more in common with renaissance Florence than it does with elves and dwarves. It is fired by a cast of morally gray characters, all of whom are motivated by consistent, understandable agendas born of their life experiences rather than authorial expediency. Laudably, this is as true of Cithrin, the series' ostensible heroine, as much as it is of the various villains who directly and obliquely oppose her.

Mr. Abraham possesses an exceptional talent for world-building. For though both of these volumes come in at under 400 pages, which might as well be a novella by fantasy's grandiose standards, they nonetheless establish a rich, tangled, Renaissance environment that, though inspired by masterworks that have come before them, are not in any sense beholden to them. Dragons and spider goddesses are as old as the genre itself, and yet these tropes are not master of Mr. Abraham. He is the master of them, driving them into a new world of the weird and the mechanical that speaks to K. J. Bishop and K. J. Parker, respectively, far more than it does the men who inspired the form so many decades ago.

But perhaps Mr. Abraham's greatest achievement here is the degree to which he unapologetically taps into the political realities of worlds in transition. The world of The Dagger and The Coin does not exist simply to provide an escapist thrill for its consumers. It is driven by the engine of the change that must come to all declining eras, a change characterized by irreconcilable political conflict, subversive philosophies and explosive violence that are its deaththrows. In this, Mr. Abraham is evoking our late-capitalist world which is likewise speeding towards a swift and devastating conclusion. Technological advancement, a rapid expansion of the population and acute depletion of natural resources will soon converge upon one another, undeterred by the mutually assured destruction that will result from their encounter. We are no better positioned to comprehend what will result from this as Cithrin and her clan are aware of what they will face, but we do share this much. It will be ugly, for us and for them.

The Dagger and The Coin combines yesterday and today in a manner that is as thrilling as it is intelligent. A must read for any admirer of realistic fantasy. (5/5 Stars)