China's flailing birth into modernity in Age of Ambition

From the week of June 9th, 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From The Week of April 6th, 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From The Week of March 31st, 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the heartbreaking legacy of corruption and ideology in The Oligarchs

From The Week of March 10, 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Corporate greed and a righteous cause in Tom's River

From the Week of February 17th, 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Corruption and the new France in the dark The Marseilles Trilogy

From The Week of December 16th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The greed, corruption and the disasters aboard The Outlaw Sea

From The Week of November 25th, 2013

For as much as globalization and the Internet have helped to homogenize human civilization, humanity remains fractured, an assembly of nation states which possess their own ideas, ethics and agendas. Certainly, there are occasions in which these national interests overlap, prompting some of the world's countries to accrete into blocks which act to achieve a common goal, but for the most part the international spirit, not to mention international law, is little more than a glossy veneer for strong nations to impose their values and their desires upon weaker ones, leading to conflict and discord that sometimes takes decades to unravel. For most of us, this is simply the world we live in, a known commodity that we can no more alter than ignore, and yet, this divisiveness causes real damage, a truth made frighteningly apparent in William Langewiesche's excellent work.

Earth is a misnomer. For the surface of our world is more than 75-percent water, an intractable, unfathomable oceanic expanse that is as eternal as it is ever-changing. It is not only a necessity for life on land, serving as the source of both our food and, indirectly, our water, it is, even in the 21st century, the primary means by which humans shift resources around the world. Without the oceans, international trade, the mechanism upon which all our economies rest, would be much more costly and complicated, having to take almost exclusively to the skies.

However, despite the inarguable value of this commonly held resource, the laws and the practices that characterize international waters are a strange mishmash of traditions and might-makes-right mentalities that make traversing it less than ideal. For not only do captains have to be aware of natural hazards that can sink their vessels, they must also combat the threat of piracy which is a profitable trade, particularly for those who come from impoverished countries and backgrounds. These risks, along with the inevitable corporate greed which precludes merchant vessels from being properly maintained, ensures that our oceans will remain a dangerous, alien place for decades to come.

Operating brilliantly at the intersection of nature and human avarice, the Outlaw Sea serves as an excellent primer on the commercial state of our modern oceans. Shaped by two telling sea-born disasters in the last 15 years, the MS Estonia, a passenger ferry, and the Crystal, an aging freighter, it sets out to illustrate the perils and the imbecility that often governs human activity at sea. In this, it is a success, a well-reasoned and carefully methodical takedown of a culture crying out for reform and oversight. For while most of the captains who steer these mammoth vessels may be creatures of honor and respectability, they are in the employ of corporations that not only put their lives at risk by making a sham of inspection processes, they deliberately set out to limit their liabilities for spills and disasters, hiding behind false flags and meaningless registries to obscure the extent of their culpability and responsibility.

And yet, as Mr. Langewiesche details at some length, it is difficult to enforce an international standard of any kind when such a standard is bound to be against the interests of at least some of the nations that make up our world. And given that all nations must trade in order to survive, and that trade over water is essential, then it becomes much easier to subvert and ignore these standards than it is to face the prospect of lost profits. And of course, these are the governments who actually have a sufficient grip over their own affairs to act one way or the other. There are many more failed nations who lack even this minimal amount of control, allowing private interests to run roughshod beneath flags with already tattered reputations.

Mr. Langewiesche is a thorough journalist who clearly cares deeply about his craft and the subjects he investigates. And while this may, at times, cause him to fixate on seemingly small details in the grand pictures he's presenting, this is more than compensated for by his ability to expose and communicate the dirt, the grease and the grime that we have allowed to accumulate upon the gears that make up this great machine we call commerce. If he strikes a somewhat pessimistic tone as a result of this reporting, well, one needs only read his chronicles to understand why. For reform can only flower when powerful interests are properly checked and there seems little hope of that when so much wealth and advantage is at stake.

A chilling and revelatory glimpse of a world we never see... (4/5 Stars)

Mesmerizing tales of failed emigrants in Laila Lalami's first two novels

From The Week of November 18th, 2013

Though some among us possess the talent and or the good fortune to enjoy good lives, enriched by friends, family and the rule of law, many others are not so gifted, or lucky. For them, life, and the sociopolitical circumstances that define it, is something to be endured until they can reach better horizons, distant lands where their contributions are fairly earned and properly remunerated. They are not marinated in the love and hope that characterizes the lives of the successful. They are, instead, forced to stew in a toxic sea of poverty, a place where what few opportunities exist fail to offer any chance of achieving something more, something grand, something worthy of all of us. This is the value of immigration, granting labor to advanced nations and honest prospects to the poor people trying to get there. And it's this notion that underpins both of Laila Lalami's excellent novels.

Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits welcomes us into the minds of a boat full of Moroccoan immigrants fleeing in the night across the Strait of Gibraltar. Having each paid their boat captain handsomely to sneak them into Spain, they pray for good weather and careless coast guards, both of which will aid them in finding their way off Spain's beaches and inland to where they can work to better themselves and the families they've been forced to leave behind. But when all but one of the illegals are seized by the watchful Spanish authorities, their hopes for a future in Europe are dashed and each must, in their own way, deal with the fallout of being forceably returned to the corrupt country they turned their backs upon.

Secret Son eschews such multiple, tragic perspectives to focus on the singular family drama of the Armanis. Poised at the top of Moroccan society, their hands thrust deeply into its business and its politics, they can quite literally make or break the lives of the many thousands who work for them. This not only burdens their only child, amal, with the expectations of inheriting an empire, even while she studies in America, it reaches out to forever alter the life of Yousseff el Mekki, a youthful boy living in the slums outside Casablanca who gradually realizes that he is the bastard son of the Armani patriarch. Despite his mother's efforts to keep him out of the Armani world, Yousseff falls headlong for the wealth, the power and the pride of his father's world even though it's bound to break his heart. For this is not power wielded in the name of anything like social justice. It is, like power in all corrupt nations, deployed for the betterment of those who already have it and at the expense of those who do not.

Slim volumes whose narratives are shaped by a tone akin to observational journalism, Secret Son and Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits are mesmerizing works of fiction made all the more potent by their unusual perspectives. Western culture is awash in immigrant stories, tales of hardship endured for the sake of "the children," the generation that, in following on in prosperous nations, make the enormous sacrifices of their parents worthwhile. Ms. Lalami sifts out these success stories in order to find those who tried and failed to emigrate, people who were willing to pay the same ultimate price of their successful brothers and sisters but who were ensnared by blood, by bad luck and by circumstance, compelled to linger on in a corrupt country with little hope and few jobs. The despair is a palpable throb just beneath the surface of these works which cannot be read without at least once provoking the thought "there but for the grace of god."

Though not explicitly stated, a powerful sense of fate pervades these novels. From Yousseff, the slum-dweller, to Murad, the thwarted academic, ms. Lalami has crafted a host of characters whose talents are rarely appreciated and never allowed to fully flourish. Sparked by a conscious desire to change such grim destinies, they fight for better futures, better destinies. And yet, the more they try to reject what they are, the more Fate seems to crush them beneath its jacboots, grinding them down until they are forced to return to their stations in life and accept what's coming to them, the good and the bad. Naturally, there are those in life for whom this consequential reality does not apply, but one cannot help but think of the damage one must do to oneself when forced by necessity to reject identity, reject friends, reject family, even reject station, in order to improve one's fortunes. It is impossible to imagine this deed done without a severe price.

There's no doubt that, in being exposed to the lives of the damned, we are left with some measure of despair, a sad hollowness that is not easily shaken. And yet, not only does this come to seem like a small price to pay for being amongst the fortunate, it, in Ms. Lalami's talented hands, is shaped into a powerful tool that widens our perspectives, allowing us to see more clearly the lives of those forced to bear up under life's most difficult burden, that of enduring in the face of hopeless, exploitive toil. This is a gift that cannot be overstated.

Two of the most moving reads this year... (4/5 Stars)

A forgotten stain on the American character in The Blood Telegram

From The Week of November 18th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of the most shameful episodes in French history in The Dreyfus Affair

From The Week of September 9th, 2013

There can be no doubt that the concept of the nation state has been a net benefit to humanity. It organizes disparate populations, it implements a standard of law and personal conduct that fosters communities, and it ignites the twin fires of enlightenment and industry that are the engine of progress. However, no matter how long the nation state abides, it will forever be plagued by an unreconcilable conflict of interests that is sure to eventually doom it. For the nation state requires individuals to believe in a collective idea, an artificial construct of borders and traditions that, as time advances, as its honor, its past, and its values become ingrained in generations, its adherents will increasingly strive to protect. And given that national power is accrued at the expense of individual power, eventually, the rights of the individual will become completely subject to the whims and the needs of the state, requiring revolution and upheaval to reset the balance. This lesson is made exquisitely clear in Piers Paul Read's excellent work.

In 1894, France found itself embroiled in a scandal that, with the benefit of hindsight, seems fitting for its troubled nineteenth century. For these hundred years were, for this proud nation, some of the most turbulent in its history. Continental wars, political crises and social upheaval all had their violent moments in the sun, requiring the French people to continually adjust themselves to ever-changing circumstances. But while most of these conflicts were instigated by external provocations or internal ambitions, the Dreyfus Affair was a trauma that bubbled up from a most unexpected and well-regarded source, the grand French army.

A relatively well-off French Jew, Alfred Dreyfus was a difficult man to like. A serious officer who had attained the honorable rank of captain, he appears to have had little regard for what others thought of him, a disposition no doubt accentuated by the fact that he earned, as a result of his family's extensive holdings, a pension far in excess of the wage of most of his comrades. However, no matter his social shortcomings, he seems to have been an honorable member of an honored institution, making it all the more shocking when, in 1894, he was accused of treason.

Still smarting from defeats in the Franco-Prussian war, French relations with Imperial Germany were uneasy at best. So when evidence arose, of classified French-Army documents being passed to the Germans, an investigation was feverishly launched to find the perpetrator. Suspicion immediately fell upon Dreyfus who, despite the case against him being weak-unto-nonexistent, was hurriedly convicted, court marshalled and sent to rot in a hellish French penal colony. This injustice inspired a five-year campaign, spearheaded by his wife, his family, and certain honorable members of the Army high command, to exonerate him, an effort that was ultimately successful, though, not before damages to health, to career and to reputation were done to Dreyfus, to his allies, and to France itself, damages that would leave scars well into the next century.

A riveting tale of betrayal and determination, The Dreyfus Affair is first-rate micro-history. Drawing upon the documents from Dreyfus' two military trials, as well as the victim's personal correspondence, Mr. Read has fashioned an arresting work of injustice and dishonor that not only explicates this 120-year-old crime, but rightfully elevates it into a parable for humanity. All of the players in this repugnant incident are given life and form. Moreover, the reader is made to understand both the agonies of the wrongfully accused and the torments of solitary confinement in ways that will linger for some time. All of these virtues do merit to the memory of a shamefully persecuted man.

The Dreyfus Affair is a complex work that is at its best when speaking to the shortcomings of humanity, in general, and French culture, in particular. The men and women who fought righteously for Dreyfus are inspiring. For these ranks were not merely made up of a family that would naturally be expected to defend him. Officers, novelists and politicians all rallied to Dreyfus' cause. And while it's too much to expect that they did so without any sort of personal agenda, it's clear that their motives were pure in a manner that does honor to the French character. However, on the other side of the ledger lies some of the most shameful conduct imaginable. The strong skein of anti-Semitism that ran through French society at this time is made eminently and revoltingly clear. Moreover, the willingness of the Army's high command to blithely let Dreyfus rot even long after they learned that the case against him was nonexistent is nothing short of the definition of selfishness. For these men put the health of the state and the honor of the army ahead of the truth and, in doing so, consciously protected a "pure French" traitor while condemning the innocent "French Jew." The state over the individual, concealing a crime to shield the honor of institutions... It does not get more convenient, nor more despicable.

An absolute must-read that transcends time and place and speaks to political and philosophical conflicts as real today as they were in the nineteenth century... Excellent work... (4/5 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)

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

From The Week of July 22nd, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

Ordinary lives during the Cultural Revolution in Under The Red Flag

From The Week of May 13, 2013

Traditions are difficult to uproot. For humans are, by and large, creatures opposed to change, huddling around the fire of what's known while periodically peeking out at the darkness of the scary unknown. It's perfectly natural, then, to codify the truths we understand and impose them upon subsequent generations. From time to time, however, this chain of traditions is broken, interrupted by governments that seek to impose upon us their ethics, their ideals. They do this even while fully aware of the cognitive dissonance this creates within a public trying to marry generations of knowledge with months of political re-education. The results are understandably tragic and that is demonstrated to wonderful effect in this collection of short stories from Ha Jin.

China under the Cultural Revolution was a dangerous and merciless place. Thousands of years of Chinese history and tradition was forced to make way for a new, Maoist world, a theatre of imposed Communism that compelled all those within its grasp to not only act according to a new morality, but to meet standards of organized, centralized productivity never before seen in this country, much less in the world. Driven by a need to compete with a West awash in capitalistic competition and anchored by industrialized workforces, this new world sought to reach its hands into the lives of every-day Chinese to prod, manipulate, coerce and threaten them into contributing to the whole. No aspect of private life was exempt from government scrutiny which possessed the power to make even the brave tremble.

From lasciviousness to food-hoarding, from heroes created from happenstance to villains forged from jealousy, Under the Red Flag knits together a tapestry of rural and semi-rural, mid-century Chinese, men and women who largely endure the misfortune of being born in a chaotic time. Mr. Jin, who has won numerous awards for his literary work, steers clear of the tales of great and consequential men, choosing instead to document, with fiction, the lives of ordinary people growing up during the dawn of the modern Chinese state. In this, we come to understand the ripple effects caused by the uneven application of a new set of rules. For where some might implement them out of an earnest belief in the new China, others implement them with only personal gain in mind, using them to indulge their own biases, their own desires, their own jealousies.

It's often said that nothing great can be created without breaking a few eggs. Well, these are the broken eggs, lives distorted and set adrift by a new set of standards. For all this, though, Mr. Jin's tales are not heavy-handed. On the contrary, it's to his credit that each tale of woe and adolescence, of confusion and desperation, is enjoyable and affecting. And yet, at every turn, we see the shadow of the Cultural Revolution flickering at the edge of our vision, its caresses, its influences, subtly and drastically altering a way of life so familiar to generations prior. In this, Under the Red Flag Manages to not be in the least bit depressing. It is, instead, a testament to human adaptability, to the awareness we all possess of life's fleeting nature, and how we are, in some sense, subject to both external forces we cannot control and internal desires we cannot resist.

This is a brief and effective introduction to Mr. Jin's work. A fascinating glimpse of a world that, though it has slid into our past, will certainly rise again. For governments invariably seek to impose the moralities of the moment upon the publics they purport to serve. It is merely a question of how bold they are willing to be in the forging of that idealized future. (4/5 Stars)

Scams, corruption and the new Africa in Ferguson's 419

From The Week of April 8, 2013

What do we owe one another? More than seven billion people inhabit our planet, seven billion souls who dream as we do, work as we do, fail as we do. They possess different personalities, different goals, different cultural ethics, but they are fundamentally beings built from the same blueprint, individuals who descend from a common place and a common time. And yet, with this being true, we still fight one another, steal from one another, denigrate one another, all in the hopes of reserving for ourselves the largest portion of available resources and privileges possible. Some might argue this is right and proper. After all, of those seven billion, we will only ever meet a vanishingly small fraction. And we don't owe anything to people we'll never meet. Or do we? What are the costs of acting against those we'll never know? Will Ferguson ruminates in his intriguing novel of modern reality.

Known colloquially as a 419 scheme, drawing its name from the section of the Nigerian criminal code that prohibits it, this infamous practice attempts to defraud an individual of their savings by making the victim an offer temptation won't allow them to refuse. Having risen to prominence with the popularization of email, the Nigerian Scam is the most famous strain of this disease. Though it has various derivations, the scam generally offers the victim a lucrative payout if they will wire the scammer a substantial sum of money, ostensibly used by the scammer to unlock an even greater sum of money such as an inheritance. In reality, however, the scammer has no intention of paying back the victim. For the entire enterprise is a fiction used merely to capture the victim's initial investment. Though the odds of success are low for the scammer, the rewards are high enough for them to persist until they find someone credulous enough to fall for their lies.

Laura Curtis, a copy-editor living in Canada, is made painfully aware of the price of this scam when, after her father's death in a car accident, his bank accounts and email history reveal a devastating truth, that he is only of 419's victims. Preying on his chivalry, the scammer has defrauded the elder Curtis out of not only his savings but the money from a loan Curtis took out to aid a fictional girl. Though Laura's brother is enraged, haplessly threatening to sue everyone involved, Laura is the only one determined to act. Driven by grief, she attempts to track down the specific scammer, traveling to Nigeria where she is immersed in a world utterly foreign to her, a world of vicious criminal gangs, ruthless government troops, cold-hearted oil companies and beleaguered natives of the Nigeria delta trying to survive in a hellish, ever-changing environment.

A slow and steady build towards a darkly moving crescendo, 419 is at times laborious and mesmerizing. Mr. Ferguson deploys three primary protagonists, a Nigerian scammer, a native of the Nigerian delta and a beleaguered, pregnant girl from inner Africa, to draw the reader into a noisy world as utterly foreign to the West as it is harsh on its inhabitants. As the narrative switches between Lagos, the delta and the dubious roads and polluting oil derricks that connect them, we can feel modern Africa in all of its post-colonial splendor and corruption. Through the eyes of these partially empowered actors, we come to understand not only the heavy burden of colonialism's legacy left on the souls and the societies of this continent, but the razor-sharp keenness of the Resource Curse that afflicts Nigeria, miring it in so much corruption that it's nearly impossible for the country to lift itself out of economic chaos.

For all of the emotive power of 419's African characters, Laura Curtis is the novel's driving force. Sharing with the reader both culture and ethics, Curtis channels the reader's empathy and outrage which she shapes into a cold sword of justice. She is a bright spot of familiarity and vengeance amidst a sea of foreign ways and means. And yet, for all that she is the reader's port in the storm, she is also the novel's downfall. For Mr. Ferguson is never able to bring Laura to life in the same way he does the Nigerian cast. He tries to inject her with grief and rage, but these powerful emotions seem to slide off of her impenetrable exterior, leaving behind an austere shell. We sympathize with her plight and cheer on her desire for action, but this never coalesces into anything like a human being we'd recognize.

With an engaging cast of characters, cinematic prose and an expanse of quality research into both Nigeria and 419, Mr. Ferguson has produced an interesting read that pays off those who persist with it. However, periods of inactivity and the occasional slide into spiritualism prevent it from truly standing out. (3/5 Stars

Human folly and the power of Malaria clash in Shah's The Fever

From The Week of April 1, 2013

From trees to tigers, from eagles to kelp, evolution has shaped our world for billions of years. Without it, Earth would be little more than a volcanically active water world with a few single-celled organisms listlessly occupying various oceanic vents and superficial pools. There would be no other life, nothing to revel and no one to do the revelling. It is, then, a necessary driver of permanent change. But for all that humanity would not exist without evolution's many gifts, it also presents some problems. For what worked to create us can just as easily work to create things to kill us. Evolution was not a means to our end. It is a means to the development of life. And for all that we may have outpaced our fellow species on the race to intellect, we have not, and never will, corner the market on the right to exist. This is made chillingly clear in Sonia Shah's sweeping biography of a most pernicious and persistent disease.

For nearly half the lifespan of the human species, Malaria has infected our world. Generated from pools of stagnant water in which mosquito larvae happily grow, this crippling illness spreads from these humid nurseries in the saliva of female mosquitos who, with every successful attack upon a living target, inject Malaria's devastating payload into the bloodstreams of their unwitting victims. From there, the disease spreads to the liver, a base from which it can, over the next few weeks, cause havoc to its host, lashing it with debilitating fevers and headaches which, if sufficiently severe, can be fatal. Even if malaria was self-aware, though, it would not care about these consequences of its existence. For its only purpose is to exist. And this it achieves by infecting the blood of the host, blood which is then slurped up by other mosquitos eager for a meal.

So what can be done about this? Ever since humanity has had the tools to battle disease, it has been fighting Malaria. But though there have been soem successes in creating medicines that armor uninfected hosts against Malaria's impact, there is, as yet, no vaccine. Worse yet, some of the agents developed to fight Malaria have strengthened the disease, bestowing it with teeth it once did not require. Failures in the medicinal front have turned inquisitive minds to the prospect of chemically eradicating Malaria's delivery system, the mosquito, efforts that famously culminated in the widespread application of DDT, a wonder insecticide that soon proved to be a poison chalice. Hopes remain for a vaccine, but until then malaria persists, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives a year.

Depicting the pathological, sociological, medical and evolutionary histories of Malaria and its impact on the world, The Fever is a stark account of ingenuity and failure. Ms. Shah weaves a terrifying tapestry of Malaria's causes and effects, a dismaying portrait matched only by her tragic, and at times shocking, account of humanity's calamitous attempts to eliminate this most effective infectious disease. Tales of failed drugs, boastful promises and arrogant assumptions culminate in a truly disturbing portrait of the degree to which humanity leaps before it looks. For so eager are we for cures to the afflictions that trouble our days that we are willing to apply them before we fully understand their consequences, a hastiness that has lead to unimaginable ecological damage.

As much as Ms. Shah's account reserves its most effective blows for these failures, it is equally free with praise for the low-tech methods we've developed to fight Malaria. From mosquito nets to the draining of the stagnant pools that are malaria's breeding ground, the disease has been forced to retreat from many parts of the world. Unfortunately for the impoverished, however, most of these retreats have occurred in the developed world, causing Malaria to be, much like AIDS, a problem experienced by others, elsewhere.

The Fever might well have done with some first-hand accounts of Malaria's impact, the better to exemplify Ms. Shah's arguments. Nonetheless, it is a riveting demonstration of how little we actually control our world and how much we rely upon systems like evolution, that are far older than us, for defenses against the threats that live and grow across Earth's ecology. Wonderfully edifying... (4/5 Stars)

A ringing condemnation of prisons in Abramsky's American Furies

From The Week of March 25, 2013

Of the many pillars of progress that have marked humanity's existence none have had more of an impact than civilization. For it is this gestalt of societal evolution that creates beautiful structure from tribal chaos, that sews together peaceful communities from antagonistic cultures, and that carves out harbors of innovation to elevate us above stagnancy. Our thoughts and our dreams, our extraordinary brothers and our earth-shaking sisters are all remembered by civilization which allows each successive generation of the species to stand on the shoulders of those who came before. And yet, not all of us contribute positively to civilization. In fact, there are a substantial number who, for various reasons, threaten civilization with strains of destructive violence that range from the nihilistic to the greedy. Are we not entitled to seal these criminals away? Is it not right that we remove from them the freedoms the rest of us enjoy? Perhaps, but to think that we do so without consequences would be deeply unwise. This point Mr. Abramsky drives home in his uneven work.

In much of the world, prisons are stressful and dangerous places, institutions that contain the worst humanity has to offer. For years on end, men and women who have broken society's laws endure in these hard places, suffering a kind of purgatory in hopes that, some day, they will be released back into the world and have restored to them the privileges they once enjoyed. This is the hope. But so scarring are these penitenturies, so fraught with animalistic violence and cognitive decay, that this is nothing more than wishful thinking, dreams one holds to when nothing else remains.

It was not meant to be this way. In the breathy reforms of the post-Renaissance West, where it was no longer sufficient simply to execute troublemakers, prisons were conceived of as places of rehabilitation, idealistic schools of reform that would capture destructive non-conformists and shape them into healthy, stable influences. But while some penal systems still notionally cling to this hopeful ethos, the United States does not. Despite drastic reductions in crime over the last 40 years, more and more Americans, every year, are forced into these violent pens, compelled to sleep, eat and endure alongside society's worst. Many of these offenders haven't even committed violent crimes. And yet, here they languish, either worked for pennies or neglected to count down their days, with rapists and murderers, pimps and traffickers, until they can rejoin a society that will only ever half-heartedly welcome them back.

From Jeremy Bentham's optimistic conceptions to the cold, present-day realities, from the harshness of Joe Arpaio's Arizona to the ruthlessness of Miriam Shehane's Alabama, American Furies seeks to chronicle, through statistics and anecdotal accounts, the price, both fiscally and societally, the United States has paid for its punitive approach to crime. Mr. Abramsky, who leaves no doubt that his sympathies lean heavily towards the imprisoned, lays before the reader a series of movements and societal attitudes that go some way to explaining the heartlessness with which Americans approach incarceration. His conclusion, that a toxic combination of the depravity of sensationalist crime and the ongoing privatization of the prison system has lead the US to its current state -- a higher percentage of its people behind bars than Stalinist Russia -- is passionately argued. And yet, there are profound flaws here.

As strong a case as Mr. Abramsky makes, his account tries to be all things and succeeds at none of them. He attempts to make two cases, one based in dry statistics and the other ground in hard reporting. And yet, when he combines his academic research with his face-to-face gum-shoeing, the result does not become a pleasing souffle of passion and erudition. It does not become, as the author so clearly wishes it to be, a declarative statement against the evils of American-style incarceration. It is, instead, a scattered jog through an ever-changing landscape of shifty characters and inferred agendas that imply a great deal but conclusively prove little.

This is not to imply that I disagree with Mr. Abramsky. His argument rests on firm ground. There's been a great deal of sociological research that has attempted to explain the rise of the prison population and why that rise has suspiciously corresponded with the building of new prisons. However, Mr. Abramsky's goal here was to distill that research into a work of narrative non-fiction, capped off with a passionate appeal for understanding and sympathy for prisoners, many of whom are non-violent offenders. And, sadly, that task he failed to accomplish.

Valuable, but ultimately uninspired. The American prisoner will have to rest their hopes for a brighter future on other shoulders. (2/5 Stars)