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

From The Week of April 6th, 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Week of February 17th, 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Corruption and the new France in the dark The Marseilles Trilogy

From The Week of December 16th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

America's tragic and emotive decline in the outstanding The Unwinding

From The Week of October 20th, 2013

Despite our monumental efforts to secure the stability of our world, all things end. We know this not only through our experiences with the world around us, but thanks to our preserved history which, if nothing else, is a long, bewildering catalogue of the rise and fall of people and civilizations, conquerers and cultures, that now are dust. Those comfortable with the notion of change accept this entropy as a universal truth of existence, one which adds urgency and gravitas to our fleeting lives. However, those who find change discomfiting reject this all-too-natural cycle of destruction and evolution, insisting, for reasons of pride and tradition, that the now must remain thus forever. While neither view is perfect, the unchanging, in their valorizing of the now, blind themselves to the very decay they want so much to resist. Rarely has this truth been more exquisitely demonstrated than in George Packer's disquieting work.

For more than two centuries, the United States has been a beacon of hope and progress to a world often buffeted by war and oppression. Open borders, limited government, and a strong entrepreneurial spirit has not only made it the world's leading manufacturer for most of the last century, but ensured that it was considered the gold standard for innovation and entertainment dispensed throughout the world. For decades, this reputation acted like a virtuous cycle for the US, luring the talented and the beleaguered to its profitable shores and thereby ensuring its continued dominance. But now it appears as though that unbroken run of exceptionalism is slowly coming to an end.

For the last 40 years, successive governments have been undoing these glorious advantages. A combination of profligate public spending, economically ruinous wars, ideologically divisive politicians and massive income inequality have deeply damaged the social contract and allowed the wealthy and the powerful to capture ever greater amounts of the national resources. This avarice comes at the expense of not only the poor but the nation's once-dominant middle class which, in its ubiquity, ensured that a sense of fairness and brotherhood was shared through most of society. It has been a slow, agonizing fall, one spread out over many years and across many small setbacks. These are their stories.

A remarkable document, The Unwinding is a shattering, first-hand journey through the decaying social fabric of the United States. Mr. Packer, a staff writer for the New Yorker, gathers up the stories of every-day Americans, deploying their experiences to reveal just how hard life has gotten for people born on, or even near, the margins. From small-scale entrepreneurs to community activists, from the retired to stock clerks, we watch as the country in which they have all invested so much time, belief and love slowly, relentlessly chips away at their hopes and dreams until there is nothing left but bitterness and failure. One would expect, naturally, that such a chronicle be difficult to consume, being that it contains such miserable multitudes. And yet, their unwillingness to be crushed, their dogged determination to press on despite having little hope for a better tomorrow makes this a far less depressing experience than it would seem.

Though Mr. Packer largely refuses to comment, generally, on the American decline, he supplements his work with a few profiles of some of the one-percenters who either helped accelerate this decline, or were near the halls of power while it was taking place. Through this, he is able to communicate a fascinating insight. For none of these men -- and they are all men -- appear to be overtly greedy or even cruel. They merely succeeded within a system that allowed them to rocket so far beyond their fellow American's that they might as well not even share the same country. Yes, the system in question is a human creation and, therefore, humans are ultimately responsible for its flaws and its inequities. But that responsibility is spread out across too many people, and too many generations, to reliably assess.

Which brings us to the work's underlying theme. One cannot fix what one does not think is broken. Those in the halls of power have invariably succeeded thanks to a myriad of advantages both within and without of their control. Despite their testaments to the contrary, they can't relate to the lives of the poor, or the disenfranchised, or the sick, or the duped. But they can relate to those with whom they spend their days: political operatives and party moneymen, opportunists and egotists. They are creatures of narratives and ideologies which pedal the notion that everyone can succeed while knowing, all the while, that this is a pipedream. It's this cynical disconnect, not any particular law or moment, that has lead the United States to this moment.

But for a few moments of narrative dislocation, as the reader is forced to jump between wildly different points of view, The Unwinding is splendid and revelatory work. A must-read for anyone remotely interested in the real-world workings of a nation, in all its dirty, hard work. (5/5 Stars)/

The danger of nuclear weapons chillingly captured in Command and Control

From The Week of October 8th, 2013

As much as the history of human civilization has been a slow, steady slog up the hill of progress, a wending towards freedom from all forms of ignorance and oppression, there remains, inside most of us, an unhealthy fascination with apocalypse. It manifests in our literature and our films, in our religions and our dreams, that impulse to step to the edge of the known so that we might peek down into the chasm of the abyss. Why we flirt with oblivion is unclear. Perhaps, in times past, when life was, for many, a torturous, monotonous grind, this longing for annihilation might have been the understandable outgrowth of bearing up under an oppressive weight we were never designed to withstand. But life now is, by any measure, far better than at any time in our collective past. We should be celebrating our achievements, not looking for ways to obliterate them. And yet, the fascination remains, a truth that could have no better exemplar than our history with nuclear weapons. Eric Schlosser expands in his fascinating work.

Grown out of the necessities of World War II, and made possible by the extraordinary discoveries of the golden age of physics that preceded it, nuclear weapons were ushered onto the world stage in the 1940s and inaugurated the first era of human civilization in which, with a few murmured commands, the few could annihilate the many. Certainly, in times past, empires possessed the power to crush tribes and nations, cultures and customs, but their capacity for destruction was not only limited to their slice of the world, but to humanity as well, touching only lightly upon the broader ecology that underpins our existence. But with the dawn of the nuclear age, in which thermonuclear weapons claimed the power to transform entire regions of the Earth into radioactive hellstorms more akin to Jupiter and Saturn than to the planet that birthed us, humanity finally had the power to kill, forever, all forms of life, a power it has never been mature enough to wield.

This point is best exemplified by the nuclear program of the united States which, for the last 60 years, has only narrowly avoided several catastrophic accidents with these apocalyptic weapons. From the Damascus Accident to the Cuban Missile Crisis, from nuke-armed bombers left unguarded on runways to thermonuclear warheads crashlanding in the front yards of unsuspecting citizens, America has had more brushes with radioactive death than any of us would care to know. On several occasions, only a single safety switch has stood between the United States and the kind of devastation from which countries do not recover. And all this thanks to the dubious arguments of powerful men that nuclear weapons are the only way to stay free in the modern age...

At times fascinating and horrifying, Command and Control is an engrossing journey through the American nuclear program. From its shocking failures to its pivotal moments, Mr. Schlosser shines light on the committees, the powerbrokers, the generals and and the scientists that have ensured the United States' safety from foreign threats at the risk of reducing their own nation to nuclear holocaust. Across more than 500 pages, the author details the near misses we know about, hailing the men and women who prevented them from spiraling out of control. In this way, the work, despite its apocalyptic subject, maintains a relatively positive tone when it could have otherwise descended into a seething pit of fear and condemnation.

Command and Control leaves no doubt that nuclear weapons are far too dangerous to exist in our world. Even if our species possessed the requisite maturity to properly handle them, which we assuredly do not, humans and machines are simply too error prone to risk bringing these weapons into existence. No matter how hard humans and machines try to double check every reading, every switch, every cog, mistakes are inevitable. And mistakes in this case don't just lead to a few people being affected. They change the destiny of entire nations, continents, civilizations. To realize how close we've come to annihilation is to understand that some powers are simply too overwhelming for the risk that some flaw in the mechanism, or some misplaced belief by some President, will lead to devastation. Mr. Schlosser could not have done a better job of illustrating this point.

For all of its virtues, Command and Control is hobbled by a poorly conceived narrative. Essentially, the author jumps back and forth between the Damascus Accident and the broader view of the nuclear program, using the former to illustrate the foibles and failures of the latter. This is understandable. Surely, the author had compelling interviews with the survivors of the Damascus Accident, interviews that would have motivated him to use it as the the human face of a monolithic program. However, the Damascus Accident is in no way the most compelling disaster described in this work. For instance, the 1961 incident, in which a single switch stood between North Carolina and a nuclear detonation that would have reduced the east coast to a radioactive wasteland, is undeservedly summed up in a few breezy paragraphs. Meanwhile, the Damascus Accident is repeatedly revisited, but only after hundreds of pages have past, leaving the reader fuzzy on the precise point in which we last left our heroes. The author would've done well to drop the Damascus component entirely, allowing it to exist alongside the other near misses exemplified in a single, linear narrative.

Notwithstanding its missteps in construction, Command and Control is a shattering work that dispels any illusions we might have had that nuclear weapons were and are treated with the utmost care. A must-read for anyone interested in the limits of human knowledge and power... (3/5 Stars)

A profoundly disturbing look at a disintegrating American city in Detroit

From The Week of July 29th, 2013

Urban decay is a scourge on the modern world. The natural outgrowth of economic systems that discourage centralized planning, they are unsightly and unsafe. But for as much as abandoned blocks and decrepit buildings may offend our sense of aesthetics, the extent to which they degrade the spirits of those exposed to them, draining them of hope and passion, is their truest and profoundest sin. For this cancer, once rooted in the hearts and minds of people who feel as abandoned by society as their neighborhoods are of people, cannot easily be taken out. It must be bulldozed and paved over, in the hope that the new will make everyone forget the old. And yet, that damage is generational, ensuring that it will linger as long as there's anyone around to remember. This is a lesson taught with chilling effect by this mesmerizing volume from Charlie LeDuff.

Once a thriving hub of industry and wealth, Detroit, Michigan has reached rock bottom. Forty years of White Flight, corrupt politicians and automotive decline have reduced its population by half, made a sham of its city government and exposed its remaining citizens, 82 percent of whom are African American, to the kind of impoverished, urban decay more in line with the Third World than the First. This rot is most consequentially reflected in the city's emergency services which are slow, inadequate and profoundly underfunded, resulting in obscene waiting times for 911 calls that would trigger hearings in other cities. But it's most obviously represented in the city's vacancy rate which experts peg at somewhere between 25 and 40 percent, meaning that, at best, an entire quarter of Detroit has been completely abandoned by citizens looking for hope under other lights.

Charlie LeDuff knows this all too well. Having grown up in the midst of this long, devastating collapse, he moved away to pursue a career in journalism before Detroit's siren song called him home to a position at the Detroit News where he began to document the city's decomposition. From this post, he spent several years wading through government corruption and civic crime, all while ruminating on the ways in which Detroit devoured him and his family, claiming the life of his sister, the joy of his mother and the self-respect of his brother. These observations, alongside his own failings, leave little doubt of just how monumental Detroit's fall from grace has been.

Detroit is a shattering piece of gonzo journalism. Comprised of Mr. LeDuff's experiences while working at the Detroit News, its narrative is explosively propelled by the author's disgust with his and the city's failings which are entwined to wonderful and shocking effect. The reader is exposed to abandoned neighborhoods and decaying courthouses, beleaguered firemen and crooked judges, their collective stories weaving a tapestry of life in the heartland of American decline. One would naturally expect this to be a difficult and challenging experience, but such is Mr. LeDuff's skill, and such is the overpowering nature of his subject, that the reader is often left gobsmacked by the depths to which this poor place has sunk.

Though the personal nature of this account is its greatest virtue, compelling the rubbernecking reader to look past the atavistic excitement of a train wreck and to the real damage that's eventuated as a result of unchecked corruption and decay, its most memorable punches are saved for some of the local customs. Mr. LeDuff contends that Detroiters will buy cans of gasoline which they use to set vacant houses on fire, entertainment for the whole family for less than the cost of a movie ticket. Such anecdotes, which one expects to only find in dystopian novels, do more in one sentence than thousand-page reports to convey the unfathomable degree to which Detroiters have been altered by their environment. Gentrification and urban planning need no other advertisement than this.

Detroit is not without flaws. One senses that Mr. LeDuff enjoys a good story. And given the appalling disposition of his subject, it's easy to imagine that some of the details here have been exaggerated. For instance, every poignant episode seems to conveniently include an appropriately profound quote from one bystander or another. Perhaps the author is merely lucky to be have been in the right place at the right time, but the frequency of these lucky moments seems a bit too high for comfort. That said, this is also part of gonzo journalism's appeal, an intense subjectivity that draws us into the world at the expense of objective truth. So it's not as though exaggerations aren't expected.

A profound experience. It would be a hard heart that remained unmoved for the having of it. One of my best reads this year... (4/5 Stars)

Technical brilliance and corporate imbecility in Dealers of Lightning

From The Week of May 13, 2013

As much as corporations have helped to create and empower our modern world, supplying it with pools of labor and capital to bring products to our markets, they are no wiser than we are. Despite their fortunes being inextricably linked with being able to predict what's next, they cannot escape the biases, doubts and cynicism that befall us all. How is this possible? Because, while corporations possess far more intellectual might than the individual, they often fail to channel that might in any kind of productive way. Having emerged as a result of innovation, they become machines for printing money, not machines for making bets on the future. Some corporations escape this trap, but most invest in harnessing the next generation of companies, bringing them under their own umbrellas and praying that this infusion of innovative energy keeps them relevant for just a little while longer. But while this strategy works in the shortterm, the piper must eventually be paid. Few demonstrations have made this point more eloquently than Michael Hiltzik's history of Xerox Park.

Birthed in the first wave of technology firms that spawned companies like IBM and Eastman Kodak, the Xerox Corporation was a mid-century American titan. Its copiers ruled offices the world over, reducing to mere moments jobs that had once taken people hours to complete. Their brand became so ubiquitous that its name became synonymous with copying, a reality that will embed Xerox in the cultural consciousness for as long as the culture has documents to copy.

Flush with profits, Xerox could easily afford to make bets on the future which is what it did in 1970 when, in what was then just becoming the Silicon Valley we know today, it created Xerox Park, a research and development lab staffed by the first generation of computer scientists who had actually been exposed to these hulking machines while in university. Helmed by healthy egos and powerful personalities, Park became a theatre of experimentation that not only nursed key inventions like Ethernet which, even today, empowers networked computing, it created laser printers and personal computers, early models of the machines that would soon transform our world. This remarkable tide of innovation would culminate in the Xerox Star, a 1981 office product that married a personal computer with a graphical interface that could be manipulated with a mouse. The Star would also prove to be park's downfall, a grossly expensive commercial failure that heralded the mainstream arrival of IBM, Microsoft, Apple and the rest of the corporations that executed the technological revolution.

Packed with riveting characters and corporate dysfunction, Dealers of Lightning is a tour de force. Mr. Hiltzik, an American journalist, vividly captures not only the dawn of the mainstream computer age, detailing the early versions of the technologies that are so commonplace today, but the egos and the jealousies, the intellects and the foibles, of the men and women who created it. All this while painting a devastating portrait of Xerox's corporate culture, one which completely blinded the company to the reality that it held the intellectual keys to virtually every vital component of modern computing, keys it frittered away out of foolishness and ignorance.

The work is narratively driven by the young minds at Park. Drawing upon interviews and personal recollections of the principals who participated in human civilization's most glorious revolution, Mr. Hiltzik animates a host of fascinating characters who range from the irascible to the humorous, from the artistic to the introverted, capturing at once their brilliance and their frustrations. For in as much as these recent college graduates of the flower-power generation were churning out the technologies of tomorrow, their efforts seem to have been blocked at every turn by a company that understood them as poorly as it understood the future.

This leads us to the work's most effective theme. For while the quirks and the rivalries that characterized Park's geniuses are interesting enough, Dealers of Lightning is fundamentally about the abject failure of Xerox's corporate culture. Mr. Hiltzik convincingly describes Xerox as a company that had long-since parted ways with the notion of being a company about technology and had become a company about making money. He details how its fleet of managers focused on making sure the money faucet was stuck open, that this was their only concern, a reality that understandably doomed the company to a most appropriate irrelevancy. For no corporation that squandered the foundational technologies of our generation deserves to be the steward of information technology, a mantle Xerox thoughtlessly sacrificed for the sake of riding the gravy train until it ran out of track.

One would expect, then, that Dealers of Lightning would be a stinging indictment of Xerox. It's not. The blunders and the blindness so wonderfully depicted here is at least 30 years in the past, far too long for there to be any rawness to these wounds. Instead, this is a work of warning in the form of an epitaph to Xerox's cultural relevance, that it isn't enough to simply hire smart people and set them loose on the problems of tomorrow, that one must embrace change or die. No amount of money can help a corporation avoid this fate.

Outstanding work... (5/5 Stars)

The life of an extraordinary, ordinary man in Tomalin's Samuel Pepys

From The Week of February 11, 2013
As much as history is shaped by its giants, those figures of legend who come down to us from countless tales and nearly as many deeds, it is just as influenced by the smallfolk as well. For while many are ready and able to compose flowery paeans in honor of the great men and women who've danced across the stage of our shared past, no one documents the little people who fight in the wars the great generals win; no one is watching the laborers who manufacture the tools and products that allow the great ones to dispense their words; no one memorializes the lives of the slaves and builders who erected our great monuments. They are forgotten, necessary remnants who go without recognition because no one bothers to remember their deeds. At least in the case of one man, however, these anonymizing shadows have been thrust back. For his talent and his words survived the test of time to describe to us a world we might not have otherwise seen. Ms. Tomalin elaborates in her excellent biography.

Born in the dying days of the old monarchy, Samuel Pepys was a man of talent and intelligence whose life straddled the most transformative period in English history. A poor boy in Tudor England, a young, educated man in Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth, and an aging parliamentarian during the Glorious Revolution of 1688, he survived kings and misfortune, wars and uncertain political winds, to witness not only the repeated plagues that marred mid-century London, but the great fire that all but consumed it in that most apocalyptic year of 1666. He was the son of a tailor who amassed wealth and status in an England obsessed by class distinctions. And yet, he would be but a forgotten footnote in history if his most exceptional diary had not withstood the corrosiveness of time's decay to stand witness to his mind, his pen and the Britain that shaped them both.

Remaining one of the most definitive first-hand accounts of the Great Fire of London, a Hellish storm that devoured large swaths of the city, Pepys'' diary reveals the thoughts of a man on the rise in a time long past. Forsaking the clean narratives that only come with hindsight, Pepys describes his life in detail, from humiliatingly private exchanges with his wife to points of fashion and conduct in the halls of power to which he was eventually admitted. But more than the finer points of his rise and fall, beyond the vagaries of his household, the diary chronicles the appalling anonymity of the everyman, and everywoman, in his London. Not only are there nothing like public services to aid the poor and the unfortunate, there's an abysmal disconnect between the privileged monarchy, who feel entitled to their position, and the wretched outsiders who have no means at all of gaining a voice and putting an end to their powerlessness, a fact that would remain true for decades to come.

A biography of both the man and his enduring document, Ms. Tomalin's Samuel Pepys is a testament to the smallfolk of history all-too-readily neglected by a species obsessed with only the brightest stars. Fixing upon Pepys' glories and his faults, the author wonderfully captures a man's life in 17th-century England. But more than that, she exposes us to his legendary diary which speaks to a rare talent for both detail and self-examination. Pepys, at times, seems like a bundle of faults, a womanizer who has little time for people who are burdensome to him. But we only know of these failings because the man himself wrote of them. He rejected, in part or whole, the urge within all of us to present our best face to the world, to soft-pedal our warts while emphasizing our best features. And in doing so, he gifts to us a trustworthy document about the life of a gentleman in a tumultuous time.

There's no doubt that Ms. Tomalin's biography has its flaws. Its length is bloated at more than 400 pages. Moreover, the author would have done well to better embed Pepys in the world around him, both its trends and its pitfalls. But in every other respect, this is an eminently enjoyable and edifying portrait of a selfish but selflessly honest man through whom we can come to better understand a world we've mostly left behind. Pepys would make for a wonderful inspiration for Pip, the protagonist of Mr. Dickens' famous Great Expectations if Dickens' own story, coming near some two centuries on, wasn't so very much like Pepys' own.

Ms. Tomalin's prose and research more than does justice to a man of history worthy of our attention. (4/5 Stars)

Soldier Dogs by Maria Goodavage

From The Week of November 26, 2012 >
As much as our lives are defined by humanity, its emotions and its foibles, its actions and its reactions, ours is not the only species to leave its mark on our planet. Every day, creatures we barely understand, let alone relate to, persist, their fortunes rising and falling largely based on how useful they are to us. If, like with insects, we deem them to be bothersome, or even deleterious to our health, they are exterminated, snuffed out for a crime no more heinous than the fulfillment of their genetic destiny. However, if they are dogs, whose faces we find cute, whose fur we find pleasing to the eye and whose affections we find spiritually enriching, then they are permitted to populate in great numbers so long as they continue to please us. Of course, pleasure isn't the only benefit of domesticating such animal friends. Service can also be within their purview. And, truly, what service is nobler than war? Mr. Goodavage explains in her biography of the 21st century war dog.

Though dogs have, for centuries, had their noses used to sniff out the enemy and have had their fierceness and bulk deployed to guard military camps, it was only with war's recent evolution that a dog's skills were put to more complex use. With the rise of non-state actors, and given the degree to which these actors have thrown out the rulebook when it comes to the so-called honorable codes of combat, war in the 21st century is far less about numbers and battlefields, tanks and trenches. It is about fear and terror, the power to demoralize the enemy until it is willing to act as you desire it to. Consequently, all manner of dirty tricks are used to crush ones foe, the most notorious of which is the famed IED, an improvised explosive designed to harm the enemy when he least expects, in the process, causing as much damage as possible.

When it lacks knowledge of both the terrain and its culture, how does an occupying force avoid such booby-traps? By using every weapon at its disposal, the most effective of which is the highly developed nose of a dog. Reputedly to be many magnitudes more sensitive than our own, a dog's olfactory sense can distinguish from thousands of scents, over hundreds of miles, across dozens of days. Properly trained, it can pursue a particular scent for hours at a time without distraction, its mind singularly fixed on the completion of a goal for which it has been trained to expect a reward. These soldier dogs have been a runaway success in these new theatres of war, saving uncounted lives by providing an early warning system for the enemy's machinations, all while creating effortlessly the deep bonds of personality and loyalty that make it so treasured by humans. These are the new faces of a new kind of war, one that is fought with drones and Hellfire missiles, across mountains and cities, without uniforms or even command structures. It is war for which the instinctive animal is quite well-suited. Though it is not without flaws, Soldier Dogs is a buoyant and affectionate examination of this new breed of soldiers. From training methods to types of deployment, from breeds to purple hearts for bravery, Ms. Goodavage does a thorough job capturing the degree to which humans have begun to understand his best friend and to use that knowledge to execute one of its most indulged pursuits. She masterfully bestows personalities upon each of the cases featured here, their talents and their limitations covered with equal pleasure and fascination.

However, for as much as Ms. Goodavage captivates us with tales of canine heroism already acceding into legend, she gives virtually no consideration at all to the ethical questions that naturally underpin the practice of using dogs as instruments of war. The closest she comes is when she evinces her distaste for the US military's classification of them as materiel, arguing that they deserve much more status than that. But this strong opinion arises out of the author's belief that the faithful service of these war dogs has earned them much more respect than they are now given. It does not stem from the far more fundamental question of whether this is an even remotely ethical practice, to train guileless and relatively unintelligent animals to fight our wars, to clean up our ugly business, to avoid unpleasantries we put in place. By her own admission, Ms. Goodavage recognizes these dogs do not understand that they are fighting a war. All they care about is the reward of a job well done, having no concept of the terrible risks they take every time they are sent sniffing after buried explosives easily powerful enough to obliterate them when triggered. This is a glaring omission for a work with aspirations of understanding the world of war dogs. By and large, Soldier Dogs is a charming glimpse of a world few of us will ever see. However, in not confronting the most fundamental issue of this practice, it is also a work that surrenders any aspirations of being consequential or journalistic which this reader considers a shame. Fun for what it is... (3/5 Stars)

Seasons In The Sun by Dominic Sandbrook

From The Week of November 19, 2012
In spite of every human effort to avoid it, life appears to be subject to eternal cycles, disruptive ups and downs which excites creation as much as it energizes destruction. From the climate that shapes our planet to the fads that define our culture, these cycles are as ubiquitous as they are influential, leaving humanity no choice but to adapt in the face of constant change. But while, for the most part, we have done well to incorporate these cycles into our daily lives, some have proven to be so profoundly devastating to our way of life that men and women have devoted their careers to ameliorating them, simply in the hope that some measure of suffering can be mitigated.

The most obvious case of this self-made category is the Business Cycle, that here-to-for unsolved byproduct of the modern economy that churns relentlessly onward, aiding the fortunate while drowning the blindsided. And where economics resides so human government dares to tread, hoping in its half-formed wisdom to make for its people a square deal out of the unknowable morass that is the national economy. Mr. Sandbrook captures just such an episode in Seasons in The Sun. Its effects are as consequential as his account is thorough.

Though much of the world has advanced considerably since the 1970s, few countries have undergone a socioeconomical facelift as profound as the United Kingdom. Less than 40 years ago, during the heyday of the Rolling Stones, Britain was a country ravaged by colossal gaps in everything from income inequality to equal opportunity. Lacking even basic necessities like toilets in a significant percentage of its homes, england had emerged from the Second World War a scarred but victorious nation. However, despite its triumph in that most consequential conflict, it enjoyed few economic successes. In fact, it lagged considerably behind its vanquished foes in West Germany and Japan, both of which benefited from finely tuned workforces, economic aid and industrial-based economies.

Meanwhile, england, which was once the world's workshop, a nation that once claimed to be at the throbbing heart of an empire upon which the sun never set, found itself burdened by absurdly high taxes, a highly unionized labor force, and cruelly misguided monetary policy which eventually culminated in the IMF having to extent England a line of credit. The British Empire, with its hand out... This was a humiliation few could bear, least of all the Conservatives who, after more than a decade of Labour-party rule, finally seized power in 1979 and, under their Iron lady, implemented sweeping changes that transformed the country forever.

But before that renaissance, there was Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan, punk rock and the IRA, labor disputes and institutional corruption, all of which would be summed up in a single, suggestive phrase, the winter of discontent. This is the history of those tumultuous years, before Thatcherism, when the final dreams of empire were relinquished to others.

Though it comes in at a staggering 990 pages, Season of The Sun is a tome as moving as it is lengthy. While it primarily concerns itself with British politics from 1974 to 1979, and the events that shaped it, it sinks its many, inquisitive tentacles into most aspects of British society, recounting the major theatrical, comical, controversial and even salacious events of the decade. Mr. Sandbrook masterfully collects the full expanse of this material, deploying it in the furtherance of a single, subtle argument, that most aspects of British society, at the time, were influenced by the calamities spilling out of whitehall. This assessment, though difficult to prove, seems all but certain given the degree to which the ruling Labor government bungled the administration of national affairs, preoccupied as it was by internal politics and fear of the country's powerful unions.

Yes, Seasons in The Sun might well have done better to surrender some of its political focus and turn its eye more thoroughly to art and music; after all, the politicians here are rendered in near excruciating detail. However, in every other respect, this is marvelous work. On any number of occasions, it could have slipped into the dryness of self-absorbed academia. And yet, astonishingly, Mr. Sandbrook not only avoids such a fate, he injects his colossus with consequence and pathos, energy and argumentation, making it easily the most accessible scholarly work I've read to date, an absolute credit to its dogged creator. Excluding fiction, I doubt the activities of the IRA, nor the desperation brought on by labor unrest, nor the perfidy of politicians, nor the riotousness of the Sex Pistols, have been more vividly rendered.

For all its ponderousness, a wonderful book. Highly recommended for anyone even mildly interested in cultural histories, economics, politics and fate. (5/5 Stars)

The Expanse: Books 1 and 2 by James S.A. Corey

From The Week of September 24, 2012 While many, in our civilization, have rightfully blamed religion for much of the chaos and war that have tormented the last 2,000 years of human history, science is equally capable of enshrouding the world in death and darkness. For science without morality is not a tool by which progress is made through rationality; it is nothing more than a systemic means by which the few exploit the many in the name of the greater good. Good science, then, must adhere to the same standard that drives good religion, a positive, ethical framework that always places the rights of the individual above the welfare of the masses, knowing that, to do so, guarantees the rights of everyone. This is a difficult lesson, one that requires us all to overlook our biases to glimpse a deeper, more universal truth about human behavior. It is a lesson devastatingly taught in these first two volumes of a fascinating and disturbing trilogy.

Centuries from now, humanity will not have solved all of the problems that plague it today. There will not be medical cure-alls that dispel all diseases; there will not be wonderful technologies that obviate the need for extractive economies; there will not be political structures that promote good works while discouraging corruption. Instead, there will exist a species much like our own. Oh, humans will have invented interplanetary engines that will allow them to settle on the planets and moons of our solar system. They will even have made discoveries in genetic engineering that will allow them to grow useful crops on these inhospitable rocks, allowing humans to live and breathe in any of a dozen habitats beyond the orbit of Earth. But the underlying inequities will remain. The shortsighted sins that have hobbled our species for the whole of recorded history will still be with us, only now the greedy and the lustful, the powerful and the ambitious, will be armed with weapons and engines capable of destroying entire civilizations.

In Leviathan Wakes, the series' opening salvo, we meet two very different individuals trying to live in this dangerous, complicated universe. James Holden is the executive officer of the Canterbury, a spaceship designed to retrieve water, in the form of ice, from the solar system's less hospitable zones and deliver it to human habitats where it can be bought and consumed by the some 40-billion humans who now live and flourish in the glow of our star. An idealist, formerly of the UNN, the naval arm of the United Nations armed services, Holden endeavors always to act in the best interests of his crew and of humanity. And if that means he must trumpet dangerous truths from the deck of his ship to the rest of the solar system then that is how it must be. Consequences be damned... For truth must always triumph over secrecy. There is no other way for justice to prevail over corruption.

Joe Miller is Holden's polar opposite. A middle-aged detective thoroughly captured by the harsh demands of policework, he has been beaten down by thirty years of investigations and arrests that never seem to make a dent in the crime he's been contracted to control. No matter what he does, no matter what he says, vice will continue to flourish in a society plagued by inequities and broken dreams. His life takes a decidedly sharp turn, however, when he is asked to retrieve a wayward rich girl from the slums of the asteroid belt and forceably return her to the wealth and privilege of her Martian parents. For in accepting this contract, he stumbles upon a terrible secret. Someone is playing with genetics in a way so foul that it disgusts even the hard-hearted Miller who, through circumstance and good fortune, teams up with a grieving and infuriated Holden to get at the heart of a most grotesque mystery. Someone has unleashed a terrifying virus upon humanity. But why? And to what end? In Caliban's War, the series' second instalment, ambition has once again endangered the human race. The protomolecule, that most alien and incomprehensible virus that ignited so much death and chaos in Leviathan Wakes, has resurfaced in two vastly different ways. The most obvious strand is currently feverishly reconfiguring Venus, transforming it from a Hellish hothouse into a planet of unimaginable design and destiny. The subtler strain is at work in a secret laboratory on Ganymede, a populated moon of Jupiter, where the theft of some immuno-compromised children has gone entirely unnoticed thanks to a quick but brutal shooting war between troops loyal to Mars and Earth. When the dust has settled and Ganymede lays in ruins, sixteen missing children is hardly a priority except for one man, the desperate father of one f the girls who'll do anything to get her back. Holden and his crew, made frantic by the protomolecule's re emergence, adopt the father's mission in hopes of it leading them to the powers who insist on risking humanity's very existence.

Dominated by blood and war, zombies and viruses, The Expanse is exquisite, cinematic science fiction. James Corey, the pen name for a collaborative effort between Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, has assembled from numerous inspirations two powerful, winningly original novels that are as painfully realistic as they are unflinchingly gory. Many influences are made manifest here, from the horror of Dean Koontz to the institutional corruption of Richard Morgan, to the space-combat realism of C. J. Cherryh, to the biological realism of Paul McAuley. But The Expanse is neither a re-imagination of, nor dependent upon, these influences. On the contrary, it rises well above the fray, rejecting the derivative destinies of most works of its kind to chart its own ambitious and exhilarating course.

There is plenty here for everyone: political corruption, institutional mismanagement, zombie horrors and creepy alien technology. There are wars and firefights, terraforming and genetic engineering, but in the end the series' genius lies in its characters who were as carefully laid out as they are stunningly realized. Holden's idealism set against Miller's cynicism is the most obvious and successful polarization, but Abraham and Franck have taken just as much care with their world's secondary characters, animating them with a power that can be both delightful and terrifying. There is an exquisite exactitude here, a vanishingly rare attention to character detail that makes every single one of the actors in this drama come to life to a degree that puts to shame the efforts of lesser lights.

There is no question in my mind that The Expanse is the kind of science fiction that could be successfully brought to the silver screen, causing a new generation of TV-viewers to fall in love with the genre. For like the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, The Expanse puts the fiction before the science. It cares more about its characters and the ethical dilemmas they are confronted with than it does about the science which, nonetheless, is successfully welded atop this foundation of character. It is a futuristic war shaped by a Wikileaks-style debate over the control of information and the ambition of institutions to do as they please. In this, it cannot but be relatable to our masses.

Winning work. Occasionally a bit too preoccupied with gore, but in every other respect extraordinary. (5/5 Stars)

L.A. Noir by John Buntin

From The Week of September 03, 2012 Corruption is a pervasive force. An infection as rife among the righteous as it is among the morally bankrupt, it plays no favorites. Why should it? It matters not to corruption what manner of man falls beneath its seductive sway, only that he does, only that he tastes its sweet fruit, learns its cunning ways and extends its dark doctrine. Corruption does not have an agenda. It offers only opportunities by which the willing, and the desperate, can avail themselves, opportunities sure to enrich them while swelling its ranks of converts. The golden age of Los Angeles learned this lesson all too well, a truth demonstrated with style and skill by Mr. Buntin's excellent biography of the coming of age of a global city.

Originally envisioned as a white spot, a safe harbor for caucasian Americans in an ever-more immigrant United States, Los Angeles would swiftly shake off this narrowminded mantle to explode onto the world stage as the foremost destination for glitz and glamour. Thanks to Hollywood, it would come to be invested with the hopes and dreams of millions the world over, millions who would sacrifice all but the shirts on their backs to arrive in its beautiful basin, to sample its seductive wears, to try to make it big in a town with the power to vault the nameless into the stratosphere of the celebrity.

With fortunes being minted on a nightly basis, it's unsurprising that Los Angeles would become a magnet for crime. However, the degree to which the powerful institutions of this city of dreams were corrupted by outside influences would leave even hardened cynics slackjawed with shock. After all, for nearly two decades, from the 1920s to the 1940s, a Combination of crooked cops, hardened gangsters and officials on the take ran Los Angeles. They established rackets, endorsed black markets, profited off of gamblers and skimmed off all manner of vices. Through a mixture of brutality and ruthlessness, they ensured that justice would be available to the white man, scarce to the criminal man, and all-but non-existent to a man of any other color or minority.

This amoral status quo was challenged in the 1940s by the methodical rise to power of William H. Parker, one of Los Angeles' most zealous cops. Notoriously straight-laced in this city of sin, he became a crusader for police power, using a combination of intelligence, legal expertise and persistence to finally elevate himself to the cultivated post of chief of police. From this lofty height, he set out to reform his sprawling town of millions, coming up hard against not only resistance within his own crooked ranks but the powerful interests of organized crime, represented by the infamous Mickey Cohen, entrenched in the city. Time and again, Parker and Cohen would square off for control of the city, driving the former into paranoia and authoritarianism and the latter repeatedly into prison where justice was no less scarce than on the star-studded streets of L.A.

A fascinating stroll through the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles' most golden era, L.A. Noir is a dark and delightful clash of powers that have long since lapsed into legend. Mr. Buntin's lively prose captures the stylishness and the impishness of these gilded decades, managing to induce, in the reader, as many laughs, at the exploits of its unforgettable characters, as grimaces, at the blood and corruption that drenched and controlled its streets. Cohen and parker, natural enemies, provide the work an excellent framework upon which the author fills in the history, good and bad, of a unique city in the grips of a unique time. Moreover, they permit the reader to conceive of just how thin a line exists between cop and criminal. For while one may swear to uphold the law and the other may swear to trample upon it, both can be equally and devastatingly ruthless in the per suit of their aims, leaving behind not only the ravished body of the law but the corpses of those many obstacles that had to fall in order for them to achieve their ends.

though Cohen, the boxer turned criminal, and parker, the hard-head turned police chief, provide the work an axis around which all else rotates, and though their life stories stand in for the numerous other figures who must have worked L.A.'s streets for good and or ill, they pale in importance to L.A. Noir's latter chapters. For as much as humor and panache enliven the first half of Mr. Buntin's history, the latter is consumed by a serious examination of the miserable race relations between the city's minorities and its police force from 1965 onward. From the Watts Riots to the Rodney King incident, Mr. Buntin soberly captures the scandals that deeply tarnished the reputation of the LAPD and the degree to which these incidents were outgrowths of the ambitions of men like Parker who sacrificed all for the sake of their own goals. Thus, while L.A. Noir entertains, it also leaves its readers humbled by a true taste of ruthlessness, both its execution and its costs.

A well-balanced history of a city enchanted by vice and power... Mr. Buntin neglected to do justice to the final years of Mickey Cohen, but in every other respect a captivating read. (4/5 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)

Full Body Burden by Kristen Iversen

From The Week of June 25, 2012

While, yes, we are awash in axioms about power, its virtues, its drawbacks and its responsibilities, there can be no doubt that they are, from the witty to the corny, all profoundly true. For power does attract the avaricious, and it does corrupt the young, and it does burden the few with the problems of the many. Which is why, above all other things, it must be both feared and respected. It's tendency to corrupt must be recognized; it's eagerness to be wielded must be checked; and its willingness to be used as a shield against numerous grievous sins mustn't be ignored. For to do so is to acknowledge, to everyone, that we are ruled by power and, as a result, by those who wield power. And yielding ground, both moral and societal, to them is to consign ourselves to lives in which we are deceived, dissembled and dismissed by the authorities who claim to act in our interests. This is a point movingly made in Ms. Iversen's captivating memoir.

For nearly four decades, the Rocky Flats nuclear facility operated less than fifty miles from Denver, Colorado, one of America's most populous metropolitan areas. A manufacturer of Plutonium triggers for the nations' arsenal of nuclear bombs, it was a privately operated, government-funded site whose true purpose was concealed from the public on the grounds of national security. It harbored hundreds of employees drawn from nearby towns to work its cafeterias, fill out its first-responder teams, staff its cleaning services and guard its premises, all in the name of securing the national defense. And yet, for much of the 30-plus years it was operational, it burned, spilled, dumped and discharged, into the environment, some of the deadliest particles known to science.

Ms. Iversen was raised in the shadow of Rocky Flats. She drank water in adjacent streams, rode her horse through nearby fields, and suffered in her neighboring house the dignities and the sorrows of growing up in a home fractured by alcoholism and broken dreams. While she went to school and attended parties, learn to ride and kissed boys, Rocky Flats was being grossly mismanaged, enduring two massive fires, first in the 1960s and then later in the 1980s, either of which could have resulted in Chernobyl-level contamination to the surrounding area. The 1969 fire
was particularly bad and could have easily rendered the greater Denver area uninhabitable were it not for the bravery of the firefighters who battled the blaze and the good fortune of a few random events that kept it from raging out of control. Later, when Ms. Iversen moved away, to attend school, marry, have children and live her life, many of her childhood acquaintances, along with employees at the facility, would suffer cancer and worse. And though no official investigation would ever be launched, by the government or otherwise, it seems likely that at least some of these cancers were caused by the criminal laxness that was standard policy at this most secret institution.

Though at times plagued by awkward framing, Full Body Burden is an emotive document that demonstrates the extent to which the intersection of power and complicity can give rise to extraordinary crimes. Ms. Iversen, an author of non-fiction and a professor of literature, draws upon interviews with numerous key men at the heart of Rocky Flats' many disasters to describe, in chilling detail, how the government's desire to create a ridiculous number of nuclear bombs lead to the passage of a law that inoculated the companies contracted to make said bombs from any responsibility for the environmental damage that resulted from their processes. The natural result of this cart-blanch protection was mass-negligence on the part of the facility's operators, negligence that lead to the secret mass-dumping of highly hazardous materials into an inhabited environment. Despite an FBI raid that caught the facility red-handed, no prosecution of the facility's operators has yet stood, allowing them to escape entirely from a noose they, in all their blithe ignorance, happily fitted about the necks of unsuspecting victims.

Ms. Iversen juxtaposes her emotionally charged childhood with a surgically cold history of Rocky Flats to create a rare fusion of history and memoir that is both effective and moving. But though her walk through the facility's history is profoundly instructive, documenting the fires, the raids, the grand juries and the cleanups, her decision to weave herself into this tale is, at times, problematic. There's no doubt that the aching humanity of her difficult adolescence serves to lend a human face to what would otherwise be a cold story about a corrupt institution at a monolithic remove from the people it harmed. But after Ms. Iversen leaves home to go to college, her half of the story falls away for some fifteen years, leaving the formerly bipedal narrative to limp along on one leg for a considerable portion of the work. Ms. Iversen is welcome to her own privacy, of course, but having included what seemed like every detail of her life up to the age of 20 and then to essentially return to us in her mid-thirties is unavoidably jarring.

Notwithstanding its rough edges, Full Body Burden is, at times, mesmerizing and eviscerating, a captivating demonstration of how men and women, companies and governments, are willing to stoop to any level in order to cover up their sins. This is going to linger with me for some time. (4/5 Stars)

A Great Improvisation by Stacy Schiff

From The Week of June 18, 2012

Though wars are most visibly and vividly contested on the field of battle, they are arguably won and lost by diplomats wielding nothing sharper than their pens and their wits. For while soldiers are trained to kill with frightening proficiency, they are merely the most obvious manifestation of the will of those who comprise the government. They make and break the treaties; they pay and provision the soldiers; they even give them their orders, telling when to fight and when to hold their fire. They hold the reins of power. And so it's little wonder that a diplomat has been credited with perhaps the second most influential contribution to American independence, behind only that of George Washington. Benjamin Franklin, and his years in France, secured the existence of the fledgling republic. Ms. Schiff explains in this her history of the great inventor's time there.

For the first nine years of the American republic (1776-1785), Benjamin Franklin, that most famed inventor and rebel, was the ambassador to a country without whose support America would have never won the war. France, the shining light of cultural Europe and a staunchly monarchical country with a centuries-long rivalry with England, had little in common with the breakaway colonies attempting to rid themselves of their British masters. Not only were most Americans emigrants from England, they had just recently participated in a war with England against France, culminating in a French defeat that saw them lose virtually all of their North American holdings. What's more, no matter how much enmity the French crown had for england, no matter the outstanding grudges yet to be settled, America was a pathetically weak power with virtually no international profile and, thus, no reputation as a nation capable of keeping its promises and punching above its own meager weight.

And yet, for three, long, frustrating years, Mr. Franklin toiled and schemed, negotiated and cajoled, manipulated and wheedled, until France finally agreed to financially and materielly support the Americans in their bid for independence. Grunts, gold and gunpowder were all dispatched to American shores where they were received by George Washington and his desperate army. With this fresh infusion of support, the Americans turned the tide of their rebellion and thrust the Tories from their shores, forever altering the course of history. And all of it made possible by the cunning, the charm and the cleverness of one man, 3,000 miles away, at the court of a French king...

Full of contentious rivalries and venomous disputes, selfish agents and pompous egos, A Great Improvisation is a vivid reconstruction of the heady years of the American war for independence. Entirely focused on Franklin's machinations at the French court, Ms. Schiff, an American historian who most recently penned a captivating biography of Cleopatra, animates Benjamin Franklin to a wonderful extent, revealing a man of breadth and power. For this most libertine of diplomats was intoxicated by both women and wine, reality and abstraction. A giant of his time, he possessed a powerful mind capable of manipulating kings into going against their own best interests all while fending off treasonous attacks, from his own delegation, which sought to undermine his authority, thus jeopardizing his most critical mission.

But as much as Ms. Schiff succeeds in bringing Mr. Franklin to life, her work's greatest virtue is the extent to which, with an archaeologist's care, she removes the shroud of legend that the American founders sought to wrap about themselves, revealing them to be mere mortals, driven by grudges and biases. She vividly details how the depth of their discomfort with licentious France, coupled the desire to believe in their founding mythology, lead them to commit the age-old sin of nation-builders the world over, to whitewash their own history, downplaying the contributions of their allies in order to make their own efforts, to repel and even defeat what was then the world's most powerful empire, seem all the more extraordinary. This whitewashing caused Franklin's reputation to suffer a double blow. For not only was he himself licentious, and thus worthy of the same suspicions directed at France, his efforts at the French court to secure aid for the American rebellion could hardly be significant if, indeed, the mythologizers were right and America sprang, fully formed, from the womb of liberty.

A Great Improvisation is compelling history lyrically told. Ms. Schiff does, at times, assume that the reader has more knowledge of events of this period than is perhaps reasonable or wise to expect, but then this is nothing a quick trip to Wikipedia can't cure. Fine work... (4/5 Stars)

Private Empire by Steve Coll

From The Week of May 14, 2012

For two centuries, the western world has been dominated by the nation state, a concept which unites, under the banner of lawful, representative government, all of a country's peoples and faiths, traditions and institutions. While the nation state is prone to fostering dangerous skeins of nationalism in those it harbors, this downside is more than compensated by the extent to which it gathers up the disparate and forges of their factiousness a common cultural identity that is moored by the rule of law and equality for all.

Recently, however, the nation state has come under increasing strain. For the British Empire showed us all the power of the economy, that everpresent engine of innovation that advances our world while keeping our people employed. As the nations of the world have progressively given themselves over to this pursuit of profit, the companies nourished by this capitalist climate, have grown more powerful. Many have even shaken off their nationalist chains to become global entities which answer to no government and heed but one god; money. For good or ill, they are here to stay, bound to only grow in power in the years ahead. Exxonmobil is foremost among these international entities and this is Mr. Coll's vivid history of its life.

One of the many offspring of the 1911 dismantling of Standard Oil, Exxon has honored its Rockefellerian roots by becoming one of the 21st century's most profitable corporations. Infused by a potent strain of American Protestantism, it has deployed a mixture of ruthlessness and prudence to navigate some impossibly bleak nights on the way to prominence. The worst and most scarring of these calamities came in 1989 with the disastrous sinking of the Exxon Valdez. No matter how grim the circumstance, however, Exxon has endured, learning from its mistakes and writing its subsequent reforms into its very DNA in hopes of ensuring that, come the dawn, it will sail into clear skies and profitable seas. In light of the fact that Exxon's annual profits often exceed the GDP of entire countries, its capacity to find daylight cannot be questioned.

But just how has Exxon been so successful? Mr. Coll, an award-winning journalist, dives into the company's corporate culture, surfacing with a treasure trove of clues that lead back to the fateful 1989 spill which was nearly the company's ruin. In the disaster's aftermath, Exxon was a discredited institution, a humbled giant whose employees were the butt of late-night jokes and whose practices were the target of environmentalist scorn. In the years since, Exxon has been one of the world's most profitable companies with a sterling safety record, a propensity for avoiding some of the world's worst conflict zones, and record profits which gave it more than enough leverage to purchase Mobil, a sibling from the Standard Oil days. This turnaround, argues Mr. Coll, stems from the powerful leadership of Lee Raymond, a career Exxon man who rose to helm the company through the Spill's aftermath and the years that followed. A scientist by training, Raymond transformed Exxon's practices by ruthlessly demanding the absolute best from his employees, standards which culled the weak and the non-compliant from the Exxon herd, leaving behind loyal troops willing to follow in the wake of Raymond's abrasive but competent leadership.

Private Empire is first-rate journalism. Mr. Coll's clear, linear reconstruction of Exxon's history, its sins and its lessons, is as digestible as it is compelling. From the White-House politics to Exxonmobil's corporate culture, from insurgencies in Indonesia to dictatorships in western Africa, he walks us through the politics, the science and the realities of the world's biggest oil giant and the conflict-riddled regions in which it operates and competes. What emerges is a captivating portrait of a hyper-efficient company governed by an ethos that insists upon both excellence and conformity to the exclusion of all else. Nothing must interfere with its core principles, for which it is proud, or its core business, for which it is willing to stop at nothing to protect.

Private Empire is a vivid history of a fearsome multinational corporation, an entity so vast and so profitable that it cannot be shackled by government. For our world runs on oil. It provides the power that fuels our cars and the trucks that carry our goods, our food, our capacity to live as we do. Worse yet, oil is a necessity that, absent any breakthroughs in alternative energy sources, will only continue to grow in importance in the decades to come which, in turn, will only make companies like Exxonmobil all the more potent. How long before, in the face of attempts at government regulation, companies like Exxonmobil simply deny the right of government to interfere with them and declare themselves sovereign? How long until the nation state is replaced by the corporate state? It is both a chilling and a fascinating prospect which this captivating work makes seem imminent.

An outstanding read with any number of jaw-dropping moments... One of the best reads this year. (5/5 Stars)

Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets by David Simon

From The Week of April 30, 2012

Despair has many faces. It lives in the crumbling facades of vacant buildings relinquished to economic decay. It beds down with the homeless, encouraging them to surrender to the cruel vicissitudes of fate. It aids criminals, allowing them to take financial nourishment from the hopeless. And it saps at the will of those good souls who try to make a difference. Despair is not only pernicious, it's cancerous, metastasizing through the body of society until it's driven its corrupting tentacles into every aspect of life.

For all of despair's power, it can be attacked. After all, it does not just appear from nowhere; it has a source from which its darkness flows. But what is that source? We may have our own opinions, but they will not sway Mr. Simon. For he is firmly, and understandably, convinced that this despair flows from institutions which all-too-rarely function as they ought. Homicide is a masterful illustration of his contention.

The year is 1987 and Baltimore, Maryland's largest city, is awash in corpses. Stabbed and beaten, shot and crushed, they appear crumpled on her streets, sprawled on the floors of her apartments, and abandoned like trash in her alleys. Young and old, male and female, gangsters and citizens, they are Baltimore's murdered, victims of a thousand crimes. Some were felled by a more violent culture while others were ruined by an ever-more competitive drug trade. Some were cut down out of opportunism while others were discarded by whim. Whatever the cause, whatever the circumstance, they will all, more than 200 of them this calendar year, find their way into the minds and the casefiles of the homicide division of the Baltimore Police Department.

Overworked and underpaid, plagued by problematic bosses and burdened by foolish policies, they are the men and women who labor to solve murders in one of America's most violent cities. Every day, they are called into Baltimore's poverty-riddled streets, to bloody crime scenes with bodies chalked out in the dust. And from this, they must find truth, to pull it from silent witnesses and lying relatives, to lift it from trace evidence and leaps of logic, to rest from the cosmos the knowledge necessary to collar a murderer. After all, a society that allows its killers to roam free, unafraid of the long arm of the law, is no society at all.

In Homicide, Mr. Simon, then a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, chronicles his year attached to the homicide division of the BPD. For twelve long months, he rides in their cars, drinks with them at their bars, watches them in their interrogations and looks on as they collar their suspects. Night after night, case after case, he is a witness to men and women who overcome all of the obstructions placed before them to find some measure of justice for the fallen. This accumulated experience, the joyous and the painful, the exquisite and tragic, he bundles together, forms into a coherent narrative and lays down in this 600-page paean to police work in "the darkest corner of the American experiment."

Had Homicide merely liberated police work from the cliches of television, it would have been a success. Had it merely built on this achievement by painting vivid portraits of the colorful murder police who roamed Baltimore's streets in the final years of the 20th century, it'd be wonderfully instructive. In Homicide Mr. Simon digs deeper, beneath the cases and the headlines, the criminals and their pursuers, to mine deeper truths, that we are all part of a corrupt system; that systems generally, no matter how large, are corruptible; that to sin against those few souls who try to keep the system functioning is itself criminal; and that to fail to recognize this, to fail to act against this corruption, is not only a sin against those who are murdered and victimized by the system and its policies, it's a crime against those few brave and battered souls who risk their lives and their mental health in order to keep the system functional. This is why Mr. Simon's work here rises to the level of masterpiece. It is why The Wire is, even years after concluding its run, still considered by the wise to be one of the most powerful television shows in living memory.

A read made both momentous and memorable by its subjects, its themes, its world, and its author's devastating prose. Outstanding work... (5/5 Stars)