Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie

From The Week of December 26, 2010
Is it possible to enjoy being repeatedly punched, hard, in the gut? Until I first encountered Mr. Abercrombie, my answer was a definitive no, but now, infected by the masochism of this most noir of British fantasy authors, perhaps I can find pleasure in a story that leaves me wide-eyed and whimpering.

Best Served Cold returns the reader to the universe of The First Law where, on some godsforsaken planet, a series of city states have been, for 20 years, lurching towards barbarism. Providing the momentum for this slide into darkness is the egomania of Grand Duke Orso, a noble who, though he indulges in most of the seven deadly sins, reserves a special affection for avarice for power. His main instruments, the Murcattos, sibling mercenaries who have, through ruthlessness, risen up through the ranks of a mercenary army to find themselves commanders of its fickle fidelity. Monza, the sister and elder of the pair, is loyal to the duke until one too many victories in his name elevate her and her men just a shade too high up in the estimation of the city states for Orso's liking. His subsequent betrayal of Monza cuts so deep that she devotes herself to Orso's downfall, thinking of nothing else but the achievement of that one, bloody aim. Companioning her on her vengeful odyssey are a group of hired hands who count among them a master poisoner, a savage Northman, a lethal madman and a reformed drunk. And yet, for all that they are misfits, they each can lay claim to the kind of cruel talents that would make it unwise for anyone to trouble them in a dark alley.

Mr. Abercrombie specializes in pain and suffering. Few, if any, of his characters escape his nihilistic plots unscarred. But though this grimness can be off-putting, the resulting savagery charges his work with memorable explosiveness. Indeed, Best Served Cold, a novel that can be read without prior knowledge of The First Law is essentially a series of thunderous detonations which familiarize the reader with true shock and awe. But for as much as Mr. Abercrombie can lay waste to his world with biblical heartlessness, there's subtlety here as well, an understanding of human nature that brings his characters to life. Monza is so focused on the singular goal of vengeance that she gives no time whatsoever to its costs to her own soul, much less to the lives of her companions. More importantly, she gives no thought at all to the consequences of success, allowing Mr. Abercrombie to paint a vivid portrait of what life is like after the devil is dethroned without a plan in mind for the aftermath. The first 50 pages are exceptional; the remainder is solid enough to bring it home, bloody and unbroken. 4/5 Stars)

1968 by Mark Kurlansky

From The Week of December 26, 2010

Certain years are so clogged with events so calamitous, so explosive, so ruinous, that both the years in question and the events which shaped them deserve closer scrutiny. Mr. Kurlansky has picked out 1968 as one of these years, arguing that no other year in living memory has been so thoroughly plagued by so many disasters both political and military. And though there's plenty of room to question Mr. Kurlansky's premise, the litany of incidents he explores here makes his both a strong and an entertaining case.

The Tet Offensive, the seizing of the USS Pueblo, the rise of student activism in the United States, the murder of Martin Luther King, the promising birth and crushing defeat of the Prague Spring, student protests in France nearly toppling their government... 1968 was afflicted, from stem to stern, with war, political oppression, and the death of hope. But while 1968 was an end to many things, it was the birth of many more. It liberalized college campuses, laid the groundwork for the protests that would help end the Soviet Union two decades later, created an entire generation of activists willing to challenge the status quo, and sparked the modernization of society into something freer and truer than the oppressive religiosity and patriotism which characterized the prior decades.

Mr. Kurlansky writes vividly of these events and the pain they brought, the blood they spilled, and the changes they spawned. But while his narrative is compelling, the case for the interconnectedness of these events leaves something to be desired. Mr. Kurlansky points to the newness of television and the universal opposition to the turbulent Vietnam War as spot fires from which 1968's various anti-authoritarian rebellions drew their fuel. But while a sense of burgeoning globalism and the overextension of American power may have provided inspiration for the various student protests, he fails to convince me that 1968 was any more apocalyptic than 1972, or 1945, or 1948, or 2001, or any of a dozen other years in which the impact of indirectly connected events sparked passionate and sometimes violent reactions. The more people we have living on the planet, the more events we have. And given that all humans operate from the same basic code, it's unremarkable to me that some of those events can cluster together to form an apocalyptic-seeming year like 1968.

But even if the grander explanation here fails to satisfy, 1968 remains a wonderful biography of a most tempestuous year. The events Mr. Kurlansky puts under the microscope are as riveting as they are disturbing. There's a lot here and it is presented with clarity and passion. (3/5 Stars)

Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff

From The Week of December 19, 2010

Cleopatra VII, now known simply as Cleopatra, lived a life so monumental, stood at or near the center of so many Earth-changing events, that her name, her deeds and her legend have survived 2,000 years of turbulent history. Why is she so famous? What was her life like? Was she as alluring as she's been portrayed? Ms. Schiff's wonderful and readable biography of a most exceptional person answers these questions and, in doing so, pulls back the curtain on a life to which we can only barely relate.

Born in 69 BCE, Cleopatra was destined to have a challenging life. Since Ptolemy I, the Alexandrian general who hurried to claim the kingdom after the death of Alexander the Great and the balkanization of his empire, Egypt had been uneasily ruled by his descendants. The kingdom was, in Cleopatra's time, suffering from a fusion of Greek thought and Egyptian custom which Ptolemy had stirred together before layering it with an invented religion designed to turn skeptical Egyptians into faithful defenders of his dynasty. As such, Cleopatra grew up Greek in a kingdom of Egyptians, deified by them but also kept apart from them for most of her life. What childhood she may have had was overshadowed by the practicalities of Egypt's royals. Co-ruler with her father, then married to her brother who shared the throne with her according to Egyptian custom. But relations between the siblings were never solid. In fact, by the time the Roman civil War spilled over into Egypt, a teenaged Cleopatra was in exile, having been successfully booted from power by her brother's powerful advisors. At her lowest ebb politically, a death price on her head and unable to raise a substantive enough rebellion to resurrect her political fortunes, her life must have seemed at an end. But Cleopatra would go onto live 20 more years, courting and bearing children for two of Rome's most powerful rulers, all this without sacrificing to them her crown or her freedom, commanding the loyalty of her own country with an iron hand and living unchallenged internally until her now famous suicide after the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE.

The means by which Cleopatra managed this remarkable feat occupy the bulk of Ms. Schiff's chronicle. From the disastrous execution of Pompey the Great, to the hasty removal of her brother, to the alliance with Julius Caesar, and then the love with Antony, Ms. Schiff has provided not only a coherent record of startling events, but context for the many twists and turns in a dizzying period which not only saw Egypt's power on the wane, but also witnessed the fall of the Roman republic and the establishment of its empire, with Egypt a jewel in its imperial crown. From the strange customs to the ruinous decisions, Ms. Schiff has encircled a life drenched in mythology and attacked it until the truth spilled free. This biography had me at its first, outstanding page. (4/5 Stars)

Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson

From The Week of December 19, 2010

While Mr. Johnson is, at times, a bit too convinced of the importance of his own arguments, he has never failed to engage me in a fascinating discussion, be it science, truth, or disease. Where Good Ideas Come From, being an examination into the nature of invention, is no exception to. In fact, it may be, for me, his best work yet.

Mr. Johnson argues, here, that the West misunderstands the nature of invention. Being a society founded on individualism, a thick vein of hero worship runs through our culture. We celebrate successful people because we might someday be among them, feted by the same admiring press and adoring crowds. Among those we hail are inventors, imagining them to be singleminded geniuses, working doggedly to improve our lives with the fruits of their powerful minds. But though some of our modern conveniences were invented this way -- the air conditioner and the pacemaker to name two --, Mr. Johnson has assembled research that claims the opposite is true, that a preponderance of the technologies we use today have manifested from open systems. He defines an open system as a collaborative effort to bring something into being. These systems are typically found in universities, where the technical and intellectual dilemmas that need to be knocked down to invent something can be shared among several bright and inventive minds which, collectively, may hit upon an insight the original idea-holder missed.

Though this notion may seem conveniently egalitarian, it stands to reason. Many minds bent to the solving of a single problem may not always hit upon a solution as quickly, or as inventively, as a single genius working alone, but the overall productivity and success rate of the group should outperform the one. After all, the world is not blessed with millions upon millions of Einsteins, but it does have millions upon millions of people who might be 75 percent as smart as Einstein. Train the minds of a dozen of these three-quarter Einsteins upon a problem and will they not do better than one, smarter mind? Though Mr. Johnson spends considerable time working to dispel the cultural misconception of the lone inventor, he also points out that open systems outperform other models such as corporate, profit-driven endeavors and government-directed efforts. Bureaucracy seems to sicken invention rather than aid its proliferation.

There's a joyousness about Where Good Ideas Come From that is hard to ignore. We should celebrate individualism; it's an important way we know that we live in a mobile society where anyone can achieve their dream. But individualism cannot provide the same kind of communal, spiritual nourishment that flows out of a collaborative project masterfully done. That cooperation is what knits society together. It should be properly valued. Mr. Johnson makes an excellent and clear case without indulging in too many digressions. It's lovely work. (4/5 Stars)

E

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

From The Week of December 19, 2010

Ms. Vowell has always been delightfully quirky and, in Assassination Vacation, which is both a tour to and a reconstruction of the first three presidential assassinations in the United States, she does not disappoint. Armed with a treasure trove of ghoulish facts about each killing, Ms. Vowell devotes as much time to a discussion about the tourist traps that, today, have grown up around the sites of the assassinations as she spends on the actual assassinations which were each about 20 years apart: Lincoln at the theatre, McKinley as he was to give a speech in Buffalo, and Garfield as he was walking to his alma mater.

Though her account is predictably amusing, there's gravity here too. It's fascinating to see the extent to which citizens had access to the President prior to the 20th century. Nineteenth century America did not have anything like the Secret Service. And so, in the case of McKinley, an anarchist could, and did, walk right up to the President and shoot him. Contrast this with the dozens of bodyguards, hundreds of advance agents, bullet-proof cars and endless motorcades the current president is surrounded by. The ethos of these men, especially McKinley, is striking as well. There was no malice there, just acceptance of what had come to pass. One does not expect to find equanimity in, even mercy, in great men felled by bullets.

Ms. Vowell is a wonderful memographer, if her strange and enjoyable kind of micro history can be defined thus. More accessible than The Wordy Shipmates, but maybe a touch less revelatory. (3/5 Stars)

Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

From The Week of December 19, 2010

I'm no Russian scholar, so many will extract from this an understanding of Dostoyevsky's ideas and the politics and culture of 19th century Russia superior to my own. Despite my inexperience however,I have found value here, a powerful message that has relevance to our time, even though much of the crushing inequality that motivated its writing has fallen into the past.

If one set out to create a crucible on Earth, one would not have to go beyond life in 19th century Russia to find a good model from which to build the perfect, hellish test. Socially rigid, manifestly unjust, and bitterly, bitterly cold, it was a country that lost out on the industrial revolution and the Enlightenment, the two key drivers that economically and intellectually powered western Europe into the 20th century. While Western kings were yielding to empowered parliaments, Russia's monarchs remained harsh dictators who, even when they tried to do good, managed only to perpetuate harm and inequality. It is into this bleakness that Dostoyevsky has penned this philosophical piece about a man who, under the weight of so much injustice, cracks and becomes a spiteful, ugly creature who preoccupies himself with petty grievances that, for the lack of anything else in his life, he converts into lifelong grudges that consume him.

Penned in diary form, the narrator, whose name is never given, first relates his dark philosophy and his cynical views on man and then goes on to convey three episodes in his pathetic life which demonstrate why he believes as he does. From his anger at his insignificance to the man who bumps into him but refuses to apologize, to his fury at being alternately tolerated and ignored by dinner companions he considers beneath him, and to his dismay that the prostitute he sleeps with might think him a good man, our nameless antihero lashes out at every one and every thing around him, hating and blaming the society that has made him such a disgusting creature.

Though the sentiment here is made a little archaic by the advancement of liberalism through much of the world, Notes From Underground remains a potent expression of how the society in which we live influences us, to good or ill. In a lawful, equitable society, optimism and idealism are nurtured by the belief that merit is the only consideration by which one succeeds or fails. But in a dictatorial, inequitable society, the opposite is true. Centralized power deprives all but the privileged few of the opportunity to achieve anything meaningful. Merit is tossed aside for favoritism and nepotism, a rigid reality which only ensures that the masses are stuck with no future but the endless repetition of the task at hand. But as much as I can imagine how this would drive anyone insane, our antihero here isn't let completely off the hook. Even if a good life can't be practiced in an inequitable society, it still should be attempted. After all, to break is to surrender, to admit that the oppressive power has won.

This is not an easy read, but it's a valuable one. And though its melodrama is characteristically Russian, its message about the perniciousness of inequality shines through. (3/5 Stars)

Running The Books by Avi Steinberg

From The Week of December 12, 2010

It's only necessary to read a few pages of Mr. Steinberg's book before concluding that he has lead an unconventional life. Born in Jerusalem, settled in Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard, Mr. Steinberg should be buzzing around Wall Street, or closing cases at a high-powered law firm. But no. Instead of living out his life in the echelons of power, he became the librarian for a Massachusetts prison. The recipient of the practical jokes and life stories of inmates who, in nicknaming him Bookie, acknowledged his lifelong love of books, Mr. Steinberg narrates, here, his years inside: intercepting love notes slipped into books buried in the stacks, learning the ins and outs of thug life, and navigating the often choppy waters that churn between fidelity to his job and friendship with the inmates with whom a rapport is inevitable.

Running The Books is a playful and endearing memoir of a man following his heart and finding himself in unfamiliar surroundings. But though it is both funny and charming, narrating the screwball antics of prisoners while making the most of Mr. Steinberg's naivety of the prison system, the book is best in its dark moments. In the spirit of The Wire, Mr. Steinberg has captured the other side of prison life, the side we never see: the mothers separated from sons they'll never know, the sons isolated from the fathers who abandoned them, the brothers in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the orphans who never knew another way. In filling out the backgrounds of the men and women he comes to know inside, Mr. Steinberg forces our society, intent upon reducing prisoners into a single, generalized, faceless villain, to see that the people we throw away, the people we consider trash, have names and families, pasts and plans. They are people, people who've done wrong, but people who haven't done wrong in a vacuum. They are people who deserve to be known and accounted.

To the extent that one person can enlighten us to the lives of those we condemn, Mr. Steinberg has managed the thing with grace. Yes, there's humor here and that's valuable, but the social undercurrent is what gives the piece its gravitas. (4/5 Stars)

The Ghosts Of Cannae by Robert L. O'Connell

From The Week of December 12, 2010

Hannibal, Mithridates and Spartacus... Of these three great, external, existential threats to the Roman Republic in its last century of existence, prior to being converted into an empire by Augustus, Hannibal came the closest to conquering the unconquerable Italians. After marching his expeditionary force out of Spain and into Italy via the Alps, he vanquished Roman army after Roman army until he stood at the very gates of Rome, his sworn enemy. How was a son of Carthage able to impose himself and his largely international army into achieving such an unthinkable feat against the world's mightiest power? Cannae, the site of a battle that transformed warfare, changed an empire and sowed Hannibal's downfall.

Though estimates vary, it is generally assumed that Hannibal, after his victories over the Romans had a fighting strength of some 40,000 Spanish, Galls and Carthaginians. Opposing him?Almost 90,000 Romans who, in spite of Hannibal's prior victories, were commanded by generals far too confident in their own abilities. Trusting that the massed might of the Roman republic would smash the Carthaginians to dust, they pursued a seemingly skittish Hannibal to Cannae where they were finally able to engage with his forces, eager to dispatch him. But Hannibal was ready. Retreating the center of his force before the Roman charge, he lured the bulk of the enemy force into the midst of his army, putting terrible strain on the men along his interior line who had to hold long enough for his flanks to pincer in from the sides, collapsing down on the Roman from three sides. Though this maneuver had been speculated upon previously, history records Cannae as the first successful deployment of the Double Envelopment, a tactic that annihilated the Roman army at Cannae, scattering only a few thousand survivors to the wind.

Mr. O'Connell describes the battle in vivid detail, attempting to reconstruct key points like its precise location, the weather conditions, and the mindset of the belligerents, but his tale is strongest when elucidating the consequences of the battle. We admire roman culture, but we don't understand it. This was a people who believed so strongly in their own superiority that, when the few thousand Roman soldiers fled the field, they were condemned by the republic, stripped of all comfort and glory, and banished from Rome. But while the defeat seemed to have put the republic on the ropes, Mr. O'Connell explains how this was, in a real sense, an illusion. Hannibal's army was never built to besiege Rome. He could terrorize the countryside all he liked, but if he couldn't take the capital, he could never complete his victory. Hannibal assumed that Rome would surrender, but when they refused, Hannibal was actually forced, thanks to a series of tactical retreats, to leave Italy where, upon his return to Carthage, he oversaw the downfall of his homeland as Cannae became a rallying cry for a merciless Rome which punished Carthage and sent Hannibal into permanent exile. Cannae was one of the greatest tactical victories ever recorded, but it was also the moment at which Hannibal lost the larger war. Such a dichotomy makes Cannae one of the most unusual and fascinating moments in history and Mr. O'Connell does it justice with an account both vivid and expansive. (3/5 Stars)

Big Girls Don't Cry by Rebecca Traister

From The Week of December 12, 2010

\ We all harbor prejudices. Some of us do all we can to eliminate them while others of us wear them proudly, but all of us possess them because it's impossible not to. Prejudice is the result of judging what we don't understand, what we have no experience with. And as we can't have experience with everything, prejudice, ranging from the inoffensively mild to the viciously strong, is the natural result. Most of the time, these prejudices, when encountered, are annoying and disappointing, but they are handled, absorbed, disposed of. But when prejudice plays a role in electing, or not electing, someone to the presidency of the United States, widely considered to be the most powerful position humanity has ever created, then prejudice can't just be shrugged off. It must be acknowledged, put up to societal scrutiny, and then dealt with. With regard to the role sexism played in the 2008 Presidential Election, this is what Ms. Traister has set out to do.

Using her own voting vacillations in 2008 as the backbone of her tale, Ms. Traister fills out Big Girls Don't Cry with an examination into the sexism that plagued, primarily, the Democratic nomination and, secondarily, the wider contest for the presidency. Though she touches on other political women, Ms. Traister concerns herself mostly with Hillary Rodham Clinton, chronicling not only the treacherous ground she was forced to walk by dint of being the first female candidate for the office with a serious chance of victory, but the extent to which the news media seemed eager to write her off once it was clear Barack Obama was going to be a major force in the election. Ms. Traister's argument is no more powerful, here, than when she asks, in the wake of Ms. Clinton being told by media members to quit the race to spare Mr. Obama the bloody fight, if a man in Ms. Clinton's position would have been told to make the same sacrifice. Wouldn't he be heralded for fighting bravely on for what he believed in rather than, as Ms. Clinton was, being blamed for making the nomination gorier than it ought to have been?

By Ms. Traister's reckoning, the media was not alone in doing a disservice to female candidates in 2008; female voters too have some responsibility to bear. Hillary Clinton, the first woman in U.S. history with a clear shot at the top job and women sided more with Mr. Obama than with Ms. Clinton? Ms. Traister believes that Ms. Clinton's transformation from a staunch progressive into a pragmatic centrist alienated women. But more over, the expectations women had for Ms. Clinton made her impossible for them to like: too dainty, too strong; too cold, too emotive; too nasty, too weak. So many excuses generated to explain away the fact that they were throwing away an opportunity to make history.

Ms. Traister presents a clear and convincing case for the sexism that helped derail Ms. Clinton's candidacy, but I'm not so sure that Ms. Clinton's difficulties, with women, with her messaging, and with the media weren't more the result of her being a first. Mr. Obama dealt with similar difficulties. He had to win over African Americans who thought he was too white, whites who thought he was too black, all while avoiding any talk of racism which, if broached, would surely swallow the campaign whole. I sympathize with ms. Clinton. Ms. Traister makes eminently clear the extent to which Ms. Clinton had the deck cruelly and unfairly stacked against her. But I doubt it will be this way the next time a serious female candidate runs. We evolve, particularly when we are forced to witness inequities. We evolve and we better appreciate what we've taken for granted. I suspect, however, this is cold comfort to Ms. Clinton who, though she made her fair share of errors, deserved a fairer fate. Delightfully written and excellently argued. (3/5 Stars)

Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman

From The Week of December 12, 2010

Superficially, Practical Magic is a fun read about coming-of-age witches and the burdens of living with powers they barely understand and do not want to accept, but there's a depth here, a philosophical gravitas, that gives Ms. Hoffman's book unexpected punch. This is, at root, a tale about the choices we make: to reject what we know to be true, to hurt the ones we love, to flee from situations we do not have the courage to face, and to take for granted the loyalty and kindness of good people.

Sally and Gillian are sisters who, after a disastrous fire that claims the lives of their parents, are raised by their two eccentric aunts whose witchy powers, though never overt, are present throughout the novel. Though the freedom they are provided by their hands-off aunts seems ideal for rule-allergic teenagers, the sisters are socially tarred by a community that wants nothing to do with the Owens family or its creepy house. The sisters characteristically react in opposite ways to this rejection. Gillian rebels and Sally sinks inside herself, but both eventually flee the Owens home. Gillian jets to parts unknown, leaving in her wake a string of shattered marriages and broken promises as she tries to outrun her feelings. Sally, meanwhile, settles in New England, not far from the aunts, and raises the next Owens duo, her own two daughters who are just as dissimilar from one another as Sally is from Gillian. Persevering in the face of heartache, Sally endures until, one day, Gillian shows up on her doorstep with trouble in the trunk of her car and a detective hot on her heels, forcing Sally to decide if sisterly love should trump doing the right thing.

There's so much here. Ms. Hoffman engages us in a discussion that ranges from loyalty versus truth to a debate on the good life, pausing at points along the way to ruminate on the sibling dyad and the ways in which it forces us into a kind of polarization of personality. The denial of truth to oneself even pops up now and again to haunt the multiple generations of the cursed Owens girls. This is a busy piece of engaging fiction that, somehow, manages to be totally glossed in easy and affable charm. To the extent that it's possible to write a book that is both light-hearted and deep, Ms. Hoffman has nailed the thing with admirable potency. (3/5 Stars)

The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule

From The Week of December 05, 2010

I generally steer clear of true crime fiction. The cases are so awful, and their dissection is so ghoulish, that I find it difficult to enjoy them. Crime fiction may be bloody, but at least we know those stories are the products of human minds, not human crimes. True crime, meanwhile, profits from real crimes with real victims, many of whom carry around the burdens of scars that cannot be forgotten. But this effort from Ms. Rule I could not resist. After all, this is a crime writer who knew Ted Bundy before he was Ted Bundy, serial killer, a woman in a unique position to speak to not only what the man was like, but how his mind worked. It is a fluke of history, but one from which we benefit as much as Ms. Rule herself.

They were nothing alike, of course. Ted Bundy was a young and charming student with the fullness of a life in the law ahead of him. Ms. Rule was a mother of two with a challenging marriage and a life at the crossroads. And yet, over their work at a Seattle-based suicide hotline, they befriended one another, beginning an acquaintanceship that, though intermittent, would last until Bundy's execution in 1989. In the intervening 20 years, Ms. Rule sees the nightmare unfold, a witness to Bundy's immense charm as he repeatedly extracts himself from situations that would have condemned a less persuasive man to ostracism. She exchanges letters with him, helps him bridge occasional shortfalls in cashflow,commiserates with him, all while, unbeknownst to her, his obsessive need to express his power over women leaves victims from Seattle to Florida.

Though Ms. Rule's first hand knowledge of the man fascinates, voyeuristically, and though she provides a clear chronology to the 15-year odyssey to find, charge, convict and execute Bundy, it's the extent to which she's able to shed some light on his pathology that is most illuminating. Her argument that Bundy was primed for his spree by the stigma of his birth to an unwed mother, by his psychopathic brain, and by the rejection of a woman at a key time in his formative development may be drawing a long bow, but she makes a convincing case.

It seems, at times, we're no farther ahead in our understanding of psychopathy now than we were when Ted Bundy killed all those sorority girls in Florida more than 30 years ago. It is connected to an inability to feel remorse, yes, but why? What malformation of the mind causes someone to do so much harm? Bundy was, Ms. Rule makes clear, an immensely talented person with a promising future which he threw away to get off and to prove that he was better than everyone else. That's not smart, or superior; that's weak. Superior people have no need to actively convince others of their superiority. It is demonstrably obvious that they are superior. Perhaps we'll never know, but Ms. Rule at least goes some way to informing our discussion of the matter. Excellent and chilling work. (4/5 Stars)

Black Blade Blues by J. A. Pitts

From The Week of December 05, 2010

I'm often guilty of demanding too much from my literature. Not every story can be original, inventive and entertaining. Sometimes, a story is what it is and it's down to me to change my expectations; after all, demanding more than what a story has to offer is the quickest way to ruin its appeal. And look at Harry Potter. Some stories are just great at what they do. Black Blade Blues is exactly this sort of tale. It's balky, uneven and longwinded, yet, it knows what it is, fun and playful. So long as it is read this way, its inventive virtues will outweigh its hackneyed sins.

When we meet Sarah, our protagonist, she is a struggling blacksmith, living paycheck-to-paycheck in Seattle, Washington. She makes rent by working parttime as a crewmember on a local movie shoot which, being that it's a film about dragons and damsels, requires the presence of sword props which have a nasty tendency to break when flung about by oafish actors. Volunteering to mend the latest broken blade, Sarah re-forges the sword at her boss' workshop, not realizing that the blade she is working with is ancient, powerful and the product of Norse mythology. When wielded by a worthy hand, it is an object of strength and influence. And so it comes as something of a shock to Sarah when the sword decides she is its proper owner. Unsettled by this revelation, Sarah sticks stubbornly to skepticism despite her girlfriend's encouragement to embrace her destiny. But when trolls and dragons start appearing, determined to rest the sword from her through bribes or brute force, her belief in a rational, agnostic universe collapses in the face of the dark truth, that she has a destiny and that only through embracing that destiny can she attack the evil confronting her.

This first effort in a proposed series is plagued with problems. The prose is choppy, the celebration of SCA culture is geeky, and the story veers, at times, off on some truly unnecessary tangents, but its strengths earn it a charm I'm having a hard time shaking. Sarah is a wonderfully flawed character who is as conflicted about her destiny as she is about her sexuality. What's more, the Norse mythology is amusing, entertaining and definitely bloodthirsty, providing Sarah with opportunities to be incredulous, fearful, and heroic. And so the maturation of a confused girl into a kind of hero pleases more than the cartoonish villains annoy. Black Blade Blues is good at what it is, entertainment from which much oughtn't be asked. It's at its worst in the moments it tries and fails to be more. (3/5 Stars)

PS: It's very possible that I was simply charmed by the protagonist's struggle and, consequently, lost any capacity for objectivity. If so, feel free to scorch me.

Sarah by Kaylene Johnson

From The Week of December 05, 2010

You would've had to have spent the last two years living in a cave somewhere to have avoided being a witness to the rapid rise to prominence of Sarah Palin, the once obscure governor of Alaska who was rocketed into the public consciousness after John McCain tapped her to be his Republican running mate in the 2008 presidential election which sent Barack Obama to the White House. From the fire of her initial speech in Minnesota, to being spectacularly parodied by Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live, she was, for a solid six months, everywhere: canonized and vilified, profiled and pilloried. The family, the reality TV show, the elevation of social network to a political platform... The noise is, now, so loud that the actual person is buried underneath layers of analysis, exposure and spin, by Ms. Palin and by the media obsessed with her. So what's one to do if one wishes to know more about this most controversial figure dominating the political scene? No biography of her published since the Palin brand went nuclear can be trusted. Ms. Palin is famous for giving away little to those she doesn't trust. And certainly we can't trust her own autobiography because no one can write objectively about their own failings. The only option is to stretch back in time, before the phenomenon and seize upon a portrait written prior to the uproar. Maybe here we can find a few answers.

Ms. Johnson, a resident of Alaska, has assembled a fairly complete portrait of a woman who rose out of political obscurity to challenge and threaten Alaska's deeply entrenched political establishment. She catalogues the ways in which Ms. Palin risked her political future to confront what she viewed as corruption and wrongheadedness, a courage which earned her allies and enemies. A momentum for her upward mobility begins to accrue, we're introduced to Ms. Palin's expansive family and her personal ethos, both of which play starring roles in her political life. But as much as Ms. Palin dominates the narrative, Alaska also shines. The beautiful and stark remoteness of the place has clearly had an impact on its residents, including Palin whose family seems far more physically active and filled with the spirit of the frontier than any other political family I can think of.

From knocking on doors to townhall meetings, from her small offices to the governor's seat, Ms. Johnson gets a look at the life of the materfamilias of a hardworking family which does not seem at all obsessed by ideology. This is worthy work and I can see, from this, how Ms. Palin was popular in her home state prior to 2008, but there are deficiencies here too. For instance, there's lots of credit thrown Ms. Palin's way for running on an ethics-in-government platform, but no discussion at all of Troopergate. What's more, Ms. Johnson's drawing of Ms. Palin as a non-ideological crusader for good government is completely incongruous with what we know of the current Ms. Palin who is drenched in ideology. So did Ms. Johnson miss the obvious, or did the last two years change this self-described hockey mom who never wastes an opportunity to tout her own values?

We'll probably never know Ms. Palin. She's too isolated from an everyday life and the lens through which we view her is too coated in preconceptions to ever get a clear picture. But to the extent that any snapshot can be taken, Ms. Johnson has managed it. But I needed more shrewdness from the author, more discernment. Too much mouthpiece and not enough objective assessment. Informative, but suspiciously subjective. (3/5 Stars)

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan

From The Week of November 28, 2010:

Those of us old enough to have had parents or grandparents who lived through the Great Depression will have heard many stories of the pain and the hardship endured by those poor souls who suffered through the 1930s. But it is one thing to hear the stories, of the deprivation, of the weather, of the dust; it's entirely another to have the whole of that dark decade laid before us, bare and raw. Mr. Egan, a talented memographer, captures this time and its causes by marrying descriptions of the period with the policies that gave it life. And in doing so, he creates a completely gripping account of a time spent in Hell.

With or without the devastating agricultural policies that lead to the creation of the Dust Bowl, the 1930s would have been a time of economic hardship. The Dust Bowl merely symbolized the apocalyptic nature of the decade. This symbol rained down prairie land onto cities as far east as New York City and Washington D.C.. The cause of these massive dust storms? The systematic stripping away from grassland in the heart of the North American continent, beginning with the grass-burnings to drive out the native Indians and then completed with the turn-of-the-century free land policy which encouraged European immigrants to settle not with existing communities along the crowded east coast, but westward, in Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska. Believing that converted the destroyed grasslands into farmland could feed the country for decades to come, the prairies were transformed into agricultural land, but not without a monumental price.

Unprotected, the soil which nourishes our crops is naked to the vicious wind storms which blow through the flat prairies, scooping it up and incorporating it, transforming a simple wind storm into a gigantic shovel full of countless tons of dust and debris. Grass is what normally prevents this nightmare from occurring, providing the necessary shelter for the soil to stay rooted in the ground. But with the grass either burned off, or swapped out for crops, the soil was laid bare, free to be hurled with great force all over the continent, nutrient-rich material that took millennia to built up scattered to the winds by ignorance.

The Worst Hard Time is a wonderful illustration of the folly of acting without thinking through the consequences, of acting before one understands the system, of acting without regard to anything but ones own self-interest. Mr. Egan switches between eyewitnesses to the burning grasslands and the hellish dust storms and the policymakers who made it happen, but his narrative is most potent when it describes the phenomenal efforts of early environmental scientists to lobby for and implement a policy change that attempted to stanch the bleeding of the prairies and to go some way to repairing what had been destroyed. This is excellent work which will never allow me to forget the vivid descriptions of the terrible dust storms that destroyed so many lives. Unbelievable... (4/5 Stars)

Lenin: A Biography by Robert Service

From The Week of November 28, 2010:

If not for the tyrants of the Second World War who overshadowed him, Vladimir Lenin would have surely been one of the most talked about figures of the 20th century. He played a key role in bringing the Soviets to power in Russia, actualizing a Marxist dream that doomed half the world to two generations of authoritarian governments, corrupted bureaucracies and economic despair. And this man was eclipsed by greater dictators? Yes, it was that kind of century.

Mr. Service, a celebrated professor of Russia at Oxford University, grasps the whole of Lenin's long and winding life in a lengthy biography of a man who did as much damage to his country as any of the czars he so vociferously condemned. Though many have argued that Lenin was radicalized by the government crackdown on his brother and sister for their failed attempt to assassinate czar Alexander III in 1887, Mr. Service contends that Lenin was already well on the road to his destiny before his brother's brashness. Fifty years of subversive writing, beginning with the Decembrists and culminating with chernyshevsky, had already planted the seed of violent revolt in Lenin's powerful mind. Couple this to a well-nurtured sense of intellectual superiority and one has all the necessary ingredients to create an autocratic leader. Lenin, who practiced law, seems to have managed his career as if waiting for the right moment to speak out, deliberately, provocatively, that he might leave the company of acceptable voices and earn his stripes as a true Russian radical. After all, political exile, as a result of government censure, carried with it not only the weight of Russian tradition, but the clout necessary to earn himself a spot amongst the ranks of the revolutionaries he wanted to lead and guide. Though his position was at various times challenged by other radical Bolsheviks, Lenin was never dethroned. And so, when the February Revolution overthrew the monarchy in 1917, he was in the perfect position to return to Russia, claim credit for the revolt and force himself and his party into the halls of Russian power, establishing a system of government Stalin would use to slaughter millions of his own people.

Mr. Service is a first rate historian. His chronicle benefits from the access he had to the papers on Lenin in the Russian archives which were opened up, briefly, to public scrutiny after the fall of the Soviet Union, but his own knack of engraving his narrative with the sights and smells of the time, with the undercurrents of the contemporary culture, makes his work shine. The reader is allowed to acclimate to a time and a world he may not know well, emerging from the reading with a sense of the big picture, not just the recitation of a series of facts. He does bog down from time-to-time in the Bolshevik infighting, but these episodes pale next to the excellent portrait he draws of a man who wanted power at all costs. I'd forgotten that, after the abdication of Nicholas II in 1917, Russia had a provisional government composed of parliamentarians who could have, if given time, implemented liberalizing reforms that might have lead to democracy, science and economic freedom. But Lenin refused to allow that government to function. He smashed it, believing that he knew best, that he was the man to lead Russia forward, that nothing but Leninized Marxism would do for his country. These are all, of course, conceits to hide a darker truth, that Lenin revolted not for the betterment of Russians. He revolted because he believed that he ought to occupy the pinnacle of power, not some foppish czar.

A challenging read, but absolutely worth it, not just for what it tells us about the man, but for what it says about the folly of extremism and the dangerous, selfish intractability of those who practice it. (4/5 Stars)