The problem of income inequality in Capital in The 21st Century

From The Week of May 1st, 2014 Wealth has become one of society's most enduring obsessions. Its acquisition preoccupies our musicians, its distribution fascinates our economists, and its possession enables our powerbrokers. Perhaps, this is unhealthy. After all, to ascribe so much value to something is to virtually guarantee that it will become a point of serious societal contention. But while some may successfully convince themselves to deny its seductions, wealth, and the money it represents, is much too deeply embedded in human civilization to simply shrug off. For it not just conveys prestige, its pursuit has endowed our greatest minds with the will and the drive to strive against all risk, a truth that has revolutionized our world and brought us wonders our agrarian ancestors couldn't have imagined. But for all of its unimaginable influence, wealth still starts more arguments than it ends. How much is too much? How much should be freely given away? How much should be taxed? How much should be invested? Wealth is hardly a new invention, and yet, even after all these centuries, it remains controversial, a state not at all alleviated when it is examined by the inquisitive regard of Thomas Piketty who attempts to explain wealth, in all its forms, in his dense and sprawling work. For centuries, economists have understood that economic growth comes in two basic varieties: income and capital. The former is any wage that one might receive for services returned, money that one can then spend on wants and needs. The latter, meanwhile, is the equity that one has invested in what one owns, anything from shares in companies to the roof over one's head. Over time, both of these forms of wealth can accumulate value; technological advances can make products cheaper and thus cause one's money to possess more buying power than it once did while land can become more scarce, as the human population expands, increasing its value sometimes overnight. These forms of growth have allowed human civilization to rise beyond subsistence farming and into the rarified air of industry and technological innovation. Traditionally, economists have equally connected the value of capital and the value of income to the health of national economies. After all, it seemed safe to assume that, in the event a national economy fell into recession, the value of a factory would suffer as much as the value of one's wage. Conversely, should a national economy grow at an auspicious rate, the values of both capital and income would grow equally. But on this vital point, Mr. Piketty begs to differ. Drawing upon 300 years of economic data from numerous western nations, he has reached the conclusion that the growth of capital, thanks to its greater durability, its capacity to weather purely financial shocks, and its concentration in the hands of the wealthy, is considerably more than the growth of income which is not only far more destructible, its value is much more subject to the fluctuations of national fortune. Charged with this insight, Capital In The 21st Century becomes more than a 700-page slog through a veritable forest of charts and research. It becomes a work of disturbing intensity that coalesces around a single, compelling argument, that capitalism is fundamentally flawed. Drawing on centuries of data, Mr. Piketty, a decorated French economist, argues that because the value of capital is more stable than the value of income, and because most of the available capital is owned by the rich and not by the many, the wealth of the few is accelerating away from the wealth of everyone else and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. In this way, the author has set himself in opposition to prevailing opinion, that the fortunes of capital and income are linked, rising and falling together. This bold stance is no doubt part of the reason for such a lengthy laying out of his case. There's no doubt that Mr. Piketty's argument is intriguing. He contends that economists have been tricked into believing growth of capital and income are linked because of the peculiarities of the 20th century which experienced two colossal world wars which destroyed much of the capital of Western Europe. Additionally, this blood-soaked century also labored through decades of Left-leaning governments whose socialist tendencies caused them to implement steeply progressive income taxes which harnessed the profits of the wealthy, thereby precluding their wealth from racing away from the pack. After Europe recovered from WWII, and once the policies of these governments were rolled back in the 1970s and 1980s, the growth of capital returned to its more typical state, of outstripping income growth two to one. If Mr. Piketty is right, and assuming the 21st century avoids capital-destroying calamities like those experienced by the 20th, then the chasm between the haves and the have nots will only continue to dangerously widen. But however much we may be exercised by his assertions here, there is far less excitement for his proscription, a global tax on wealth, between one and two percent, aimed at redressing the imbalance between capital and income, thereby narrowing income inequality. Only a fool would declare this an impossibility, but neither would anyone but a fool think it probable. The United Nations doesn't even harbor a full complement of the world's nations. And if a body designed to unite the world in a single, diplomatic congress can't even agree on membership, how are we to implement a truly global tax on wealth that would undoubtedly prove even more controversial than a global tax on carbon emissions which are arguably just as consequential to civilization? The hope for such movement seems dim unto darkness. In some respects, it is foolish of me to have penned this review; I am by no means a trained economist. And it is clear, to anyone who reads even a dozen of the pages herein, that no less a figure is required to properly assess Mr. Piketty's case on economic grounds. But as a work of literature, it is profound. Yes, it is difficult, yes, it is stifling, but when one comes to understand the man's contention, the implications elevate the text into something well worth exploring. A fascinating and disturbing slog... (3/5 Stars)

Comprehending the self and its states of being in Being And Nothingness

From The Week of April 20th, 2014

Who we are, and defining how we fit into the world in which we find ourselves, has been a problem preoccupying philosophers for thousands of years. In millennia past, where human understanding of science - particularly biology and physics -, was poor, it was an unanswerable question. After all, how can the self be understood without any conception of neurology? But even as the steady march of progress endows us with knowledge the ancient Greeks could've only dreamed of, the debate continues. Can we truly be reduced to component parts? Can all of our memories and emotions, our actions and our insights, be summed up in neurological code? Or do the desires and the motivations of a conscious being extend beyond science and into realms both theological and psychoanalytical? It may be many more centuries before proof removes these questions from the argumentation of philosophy, but in the meantime some of our greatest minds will continue the discussion in hopes of answers. Being And Nothingness is Jean-Paul Sartre's contribution.

Being and Nothingness is a defining work of Existentialism, a philosophical movement that seeks to characterize the human experience as a subjective amalgam of consciousness, emotions and actions. Existentialism contends that humans are, as far as we know, unique in that we have both existence, defined as awareness of self, and essence, defined as existence as an object - a human is a human in the same way as a table is a table. Because we are endowed with self-awareness, we can make choices in ways objects cannot. And if we can make choices, then it follows that we are profoundly free in ways objects cannot be. We are individuals, enslaved to no will but our own. We can fulfil our desires, obtain knowledge, achieve our goals, all without subjecting ourselves to anyone else's definition or mastery.

Being and Nothingness further refines this idea by laying out Sartre's key components of Existential existence: Being For Itself - awareness of self and of the world around us -, Being In Itself - the object that we are, the physical human form -, and Being For Others - the subjective and objective selves that we put forward for public consumption. He argues that to be conscious is to be free, to act, to choose, but that this freedom is refined and reduced by not only our own actions but the regard of others. For when other conscious beings look at us, they objectify us. We become a thing in their reality just as they become a thing in ours. These tensions are deepened by what Sartre calls Bad Faith, the tendency of conscious beings to objectify themselves, to squander their freedom by reducing themselves to form and function. This struggle, the subjective with the objective, the Being For Itself with the Being In Itself, he argues, damages us, defeats us, in ways profound and disturbing.

A dense, 630-page treatise on the nature of consciousness and social interaction, Being And Nothingness is, despite its length and its complexity, a statement about the nature of personal responsibility. Mired in the midst of an ugly war in which Mr. Sartre not only witnessed many of his countrymen willingly surrender to the Nazis, but found himself imprisoned by the Third Reich, the famous philosopher had a great deal of experience with the complexities and difficulties of personal choice. These experiences lie heavily on this work, charging it with a kind of pessimism about human nature that seems both understandable and tragic.

And yet, the Second World War acts as a kind of proof for Sartre's key insight here, that humans continuously squander their freedom by suborning themselves to either their own weaknesses or to the power of others. How else to explain not only the millions who senselessly died in the absurdity of WWII, but the equally numerous excuses that poured out from the survivors, excuses that either sought to justify their inaction in the face of Hitler's society of hate or sought to play down their role in it.

Excuses have no place in a life lived well. Consciousness either endows us with freedom or it doesn't. If it doesn't, then we are slaves to our genes and none of this matters. But if we are free, then we are completely responsible for our choices. We may choose well; we may choose badly, but we can choose. Even a prisoner, stripped of all dignity, all physical freedom, can choose how to endure his or her deprivation. To excuse away our choices is to reduce ourselves to objects. It is to claim that we are not free, that something or someone else rules us, defines us. And to do that is to become nothing more than a table.

This is an insight as fascinating as it is powerful. It endows the individual with total responsibility while giving him or her nowhere to escape to when matters go against them. It compels the individual to live a life of honesty, both with the world and with the self, that must foster both consistency of action and authenticity of being that would be both welcome and rewarding.

And yet, this is harsh. For it leaves little room for what seems to me an understandable, and justifiable, distinction between reasons and excuses. The success and failure of our actions are often determined by circumstances beyond our control. Uncovering those circumstances and incorporating them into the justifications for our choices seems reasonable. And yet, it is almost impossible to define when these justifications descend into the realm of excusemaking. This is not just a slippery slope. It's a slippery slope in the midst of a darkness so complete we don't know we're even on the slippery slope. Making some accommodation for this weakness in our cognitive character seems warranted.

Which is why Being And Nothingness feels incomplete. Yes, once one gets past the stuffiness and the headache-inducing defining of terms and conditions, is inarguably potent manifesto for human responsibility which, many would argue, is the perfect tonic for our age. But it is also too much of its time. It is drenched in a kind of grim certainty that must, at least in part, stem from one of the darkest, most violent periods in human history. It argues for a doom that does not seem appropriate for a more peaceful age, one in which the self is not under constant siege. It feels as though Mr. Sartre was looking for an analytical cure for the helplessness that anyone would feel in the midst of colossal warfare and that states of being in conflict with one another was the result.

As difficult as it is insightful... (3/5 Stars)

Elephants, their majesty and their power in The Elephant Whisperer

From The Week of March 3, 2014

The world is a playground for humanity. This is the inevitable conclusion drawn by a species that, for thousands of years, has flourished as Earth's apex predator. No other creature can match our intelligence, our self-awareness, our emotional depth. No other species has produced poets and playwrights, gods and scientists. These findings, these thought experiments, distinguish us from the great dumb herd that comprises the world we are free to exploit.

But naturally, this is nonsense, the destructive conclusion of biased thinking. For humans typically only respect as intelligent things they understand. Present to us music and math problems, politics and prose, that we, on some level, comprehend and we are more than willing to acknowledge your personhood, your worthiness. But communicate to us in a language we're not geared to understand -- the skitterings of the monkey, the song of the whale, the bone-deep vibrations of the elephant -- and you are a beast of burden, a thing whose power is to be harnessed and used to our benefit. This inexcusable intellectual arrogance has not only allowed us to ravage our planet, it has permitted us to do it guilt free. The costs are immeasurable, a truth vividly illustrated in Mr. Anthony's touching life story.

Compared to much of the rest of the world, Africa is a wonderland of biodiversity. Swamps and forests, deserts and jungles together contain a breathtaking spectrum of life, from tiny spiders to gigantic elephants, from venomous snakes to harmless dogs, a balance ecosystem in which the ruthless, millennia-long dance of nature and evolution has unfolded. But now, after countless centuries of natural ebb and flow, this treasure trove of life is under threat, not only from encroaching humans but their externalities as well. Urbanization, climate change and trophy hunting have reduced this once vibrant place to a shadow of what it was. Every year, the deserts grow at the expanse of the forests and once populous creatures are hunted for their meat and their horns, as the glories of evolution are reduced to cliched mementos of man's undeserved prowess.

Recently, however, movements have ignited to push back against this butchery of the wild. Conservationists have succeeded in having huge swaths of African territory designated as nature preserves where the ecosystem is allowed to flourish unmolested by all but a handful of poachers who are dealt with violently and mercilessly. Staffed by naturalists whose life's work is the understanding of and treatment of animals, and funded both by governments and tourism, these reserves hold a mirror up to the world, of how it once was and how it will someday never be, the essence of natural, if cruel, harmony.

The story of Lawrence Anthony, the head of the Thula Thula Game Reserve, The Elephant Whisperer is a charming adventure through the life of a world-class conservationist. Organized around Anthony's reception of a herd of elephants abused and hunted by man and the means by which he restores their health and their trust, the work expands to include lush descriptions of the Reserve: its incredible wildlife, its caring staff, its venomous dangers and its thorny politics which are uneasy at the best of times. Throughout, we are afforded glimpses of lives lived with purpose, not to gain advantage, not to hoard wealth, not even to accrue power; simply to hold on to the glories of what came before, beauty we are all-too-eager to bulldoze in favor of another town, another residential complex, another hotel and casino. In this, it is hard not to think of Anthony and those like him as the guardians of nature, as stewards of life the rest of us dismiss as unworthy.

There can be no doubt that Mr. Anthony's charm and passion rides high throughout The Elephant Whisperer, but it is to the credit of Anthony and his biographer that the elephant herd is the work's beating heart. Over and over, the authors demonstrate the grace and intelligence of these majestic creatures who appear as emotionally connected to their allies and their environment as they are willing to fiercely protect it. Described in vivid detail, their five-ton bodies seem as massive as their awareness of the external world is keen, communicating complex notions of friendship and suspicion with devastatingly simple gestures that leave the reader yearning to witness even one of these life-altering moments of cross-species connection. For they leave no doubt that we are not alone on this world we've claimed, that we share it with others who too-often go unheard in the congress of Earth's affairs.

There are flaws here. For a conservationist, Mr. Anthony is a little too fond of recounting his own successes. The Elephant Whisperer's first half is almost entirely about the compassion that Anthony and his friends have for the animals they steward. One cannot help but imagine an alternate text in which the animals feature more prominently than the humans. However, beginning in the work's second half, a series of devastating failures on Anthony's part allows the reader to forge an emotional connection with him and his cause. We are made to understand just how much this means to him and how much of a difference it makes to the creatures in the reserve. This sweeps aside concerns of egotism, leaving in its wake a heart warmed by the world he is fortunate enough to know so well.

A read with the power to re-shape the way one thinks about both Earth and our role in its concrete future... (4/5 Stars)

The genius and the curse of Walmart winningly captured in The Walmart Effect

From The Week of August 12th, 2013

Of all the traits humans share with their fellow organisms, a desire for a efficiency must be considered the most pervasive and consequential. For though it does not rise to the surface of our everyday thoughts, in governing everything from the way we walk to the manner in which we approach daily tasks, it shapes our every action. This is not altruism, nor is it a conscious effort to leave as little a footprint in our wake as possible. It is an outgrowth of the harsh discipline evolution has stamped upon our genes. For when energy is scarce, as it has been for most of our genetic history, what little is available must be preserved at all costs in order to improve the odds of survival. Unlike every other creature on Earth, however, humans have freed themselves of the chains of that limited energy environment and exploded into a world where the desire for efficiency can have a global impact. And it is difficult to imagine their being any organization to better represent both the glories and the tragedies of this truth than Walmart. Charles Fishman explains.

Launched with humility and little fanfare in 1962, Walmart has become, in the decades since, a retail phenomenon that has swept the globe. Sporting a workforce of 1.6 million associates, enough to populate a small country, and amassing sales that make it larger than much of its competition combined, it has deployed the singular vision of its founder to create a retail empire unrivaled in human history. Eschewing flashy sales and headline-grabbing headquarters that so often tempt its competitors into profligacy, its philosophy is shockingly simple; sell for the lowest price possible. Then, next year, find a way to sell for even less. And continue until every possible inefficiency has been wrung out of the retail system. This not only fosters trust in customers who don't have to worry about waiting for half-off sales to purchase their goods, it drives their suppliers to streamline their practices until every non-essential element has been eliminated from their business.

This thirst for the lowest price has had a transformative impact upon the retail chain, allowing customers to purchase goods at prices that, adjusted for inflation, are a fraction of what they once were. However, it has also placed many of Walmart's suppliers in an impossible position. For there are only so many inefficiencies to eliminate. Once they are gone, Walmart's relentless drive presents them with one of two unpleasant options: lower the quality of their goods in order to save money, or lowering their prices and eliminating their profit margins which exposes them to the risk of being hurled into bankruptcy at the next bump in the economic road. Their only other choice is to remove their goods from Walmart's stores which, given Walmart's reach, would be tantamount to business suicide. This is the new reality and one entirely created by a company that did not exist fifty years ago.

The Walmart Effect is a revelatory examination of a remarkable company. Mr. Fishman, adopting a frank and conversational tone, walks the reader through not only Walmart's history, but the philosophy that has made it one of the first organizations to master the commercial opportunities of the global economy. From the humble wisdom of its founder to the everyday realities of its suppliers, the author discusses in glowing terms the delightful ways in which Walmart's single-minded devotion to the lowest price has improved the practices of countless companies, passing these savings onto the customer. We're invited to revel in the simple brilliance of a company that understands the basic human desire to get the best deal and not to be made to feel the fool, desires that Walmart has woven into the very fabric of their business.

However complimentary, The Walmart Effect in no way shrinks away from the company's dark side. Walmart's zealous pursuit of the lowest price has not only driven many of its suppliers out of business, it has forced many others to eliminate their unaffordable American workers and export their manufacturing needs to Asia where a toxic mixture of poverty and unenforced labor laws have created a fouls stew in which millions of desperate people are forced to toil for pennies. Walmart, like many other American retailers, makes all the appropriate noises about ensuring that it sources goods only from reputable suppliers, but these lame assurances ring utterly hollow, especially when one considers that Walmart would have to violate the core tenet of its belief system to avoid using virtually indentured workers. It would have to raise prices.

For all its virtues, The Walmart Effect, feels terribly dated. The degree to which it exposes Walmart's unforgivable insensitivity to the plight of those affected by its drive for efficiency is still relevant, but Mr. Fishman published his work in late 2005, before the rise of Amazon.com which, though still not as massive as Walmart, threatens the Arkansas giant's entire business model by offering the customer an opportunity to get the lowest price without even leaving his couch. Walmart's inability to combat amazon.com with a comparable online presence suggests that amazon will eventually consume Walmart once it can guarantee same-day delivery of its innumerable products. This is a consequential chapter of this story that Mr. Fishman did not foresee in 2005.

Nonetheless, this is a fascinating read. Walmart has undoubtedly done the customer a great service in making all manner of products more affordable, but in doing so it has helped to create a monstrous system of exploitation that cannot be ignored. Engaging work... (3/5 Stars)

The devastating history of eugenics chronicled in War Against the Weak

From The Week of July 8th, 2013

Though the question of what we individually owe to our fellow man is the pressing, sociological issue of this new, global civilization, there's an equally important debate to be had. What do we owe the least fortunate among us? From the mentally ill to the physically deficient, millions of people never receive a fair shot at a successful life. Is this merely a necessary outgrowth of a democratic, capitalist system, that some of us simply will be left behind, or is this inequality a consequence of poor ethics and poor morals? Perhaps, some day, we will have answers to these questions. Perhaps one will help solve the other. But until that day, we have only our past actions to go by. And where misfits are concerned, this is decidedly grim, a truth relentlessly demonstrated in Edwin Black's thorough examination of eugenics.

A scientific movement that grew out of nineteenth-century revelations of the remarkable role evolution plays in the advancement of life on Earth, eugenics is an ethical framework that argues for the purification of the human species through proper breeding and genetic engineering. Popular in the first half of the 20th century, it was originally confined to agricultural and horticultural fields before being seized upon by scientists and philosophers as a means by which to eliminate human malformations. After all, would the world not be better if disabilities from Spina bifida to blindness could be erased from the gene pool? Imagine the benefits to society if it, and its people, could be relieved of the costs of caring for those who, because of some genetic deficiency, cannot care for themselves.

However innocent the origins of this view of humanity's future, eugenics soon took on a sinister air, made all the more obvious with hindsight. For how could the enfeebled and the disabled be trusted to remove themselves from the gene pool? Would it not be prudent for society to sterilize them as a means of assuring that such genetic mistakes would die out with them? Armed with scientific funding from powerful, turn-of-the-century trusts, an American organization set out to lobby state legislatures to pass sweeping laws that would make commonplace the forced exclusion of deficients from the gene pool. Drawing on biased, reprehensible science, the American Breeders Association became a haven for racial purists who disseminated their ugly conclusions not only throughout North America, but to a receptive Europe eager to have its white, Nordic superiority re-affirmed by sham science. Of these new, European adherents, none were as enthusiastic as the group of German scientists who would go onto play key roles in Hitler's attempted extermination of the Jewish population, participating, in the name of eugenics, the worst crime in modern history.

A lacerating account of the history of eugenics, War Against The Weak is a shattering examination of one of organized science's darkest hours. Mr. Black, who possesses a first-class mind for research, has not only assembled an authoritative account of the attempt by a small group of humans to play god over the future of an entire species; he has brought to light, with color and compassion, the many thousands of souls who suffered at their hands. For the eugenics movement was not a victimless crime. It was not simply a foolish idea rooted in a series of unfortunate misapprehensions. It was a systematic attempt to strip groups of innocent people of their basic human rights, passing judgement on them in a manner that is both abhorrent and obscene. From the American Breeders Association's first steps into the arena of public policy, through to the unimaginable Holocaust into which it eventuated, the work reveals the corporations and the actors, the governments and the bodies that sought to destroy the individual freedoms we all hold so dear.

Though the work's most obvious quality is its exceptional thoroughness -- Mr. Black presents the reader with pages and pages of sources that must have taken years to organize and compile --, its most enduring virtue is the manner in which it exposes us to an inescapable truth about the human mind, that it is unavoidably biased. Shaped by its social, cultural and economic environments, and hardened by personal experience, it favors conclusions it likes and ignores those it finds unpleasant. In this, it creates for the individual a narrowed view of the world that, while agreeable to the individual's sensibilities, is colored in the extreme. We now know, thanks to the work of both social and scientific crusaders, that the physical, intellectual and emotional differences between the races are at best negligible. And yet, seeking to find an explanation that justified their distaste for the tide of non-white, non-Nordic ethnicities flooding into their homeland, these eugenicists created pseudo science, convinced receptive governments of its voracity, and then implemented a program of social engineering criminal in its intent and tragic in its scope.

War Against the Weak has its blind spots. For all its rigor, Mr. Black's account is nonetheless a polemic against eugenics. He has no time for seemingly any argument in its favor. Given eugenics' costs, this is understandable, though, regrettable. We should be able to have a debate about what society owes the individual. We should be able to have discussions about the blessings of genetic engineering. But these are areas now profoundly poisoned by the sins of our past, certainly where the author is concerned.

An absolute must-read for anyone even mildly interested in science, justice and human nature... (5/5 Stars)

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

From the Week of June 10, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The history and science of that most desired part of the female anatomy in Breasts

From The Week of June 3, 2013

As much as we'd like to think that humans are creatures of the mind, empowered by intellect, shaped by morals and fired by curiosity, we are still driven by the base desires for what we can see, touch and taste. We can create the most complex technologies and philosophize at length over the finest points of Aristotelian logic, we can implement free-market economies and devote our days to the beauty of the printed word, and still we are consumed by food and sex, by shelter and family, by kisses and caresses. Perhaps this is well. There is, after all, a great deal of joy and comfort to be found in the treasures of fleshy, epicurean delights. And yet, these same excitations have the power to consume us, to reduce our grand intellects to the pursuit of pleasure at the expense of all else. Of these temptations, few hold the power and the objectification of the female breast, a truth expanded upon in Florence William's eminently engaging exploration.

Throughout recorded history, in carvings and sculptures, in song and story, we have celebrated the breast. It has been a source of nourishment and obsession, of critiques and signalling, of pleasure and frustration. It comes in a dizzying array of forms and sizes, a symbol of sufficient power as to warrant the creation of taboos in its name. But what is the breast made of and why has it become such a potent symbol of womanhood?

From the academic controversies that have swirled around its origins to the medical research that has revealed its vital role in the nourishment of newborns, Ms. Williams attempts to not only answer these questions, but to provide this most fetishized part of the female anatomy with some entertaining context. Beginning with its uniquely omnipresent manifestation in human women and ending with a sobering analysis of the ways in which it acts as a dumping ground for toxic chemicals that have accumulated over the lifetime of its host, she investigates, in Breast, its form and function, its social impact and its medical mysteries, all in an attempt to better understand this object of so much cultural attention.

Alternately humorous and chilling, Breasts is no fluffpiece masquerading as literature. There is no titillation here, nor is there any moral posturing. It is a serious and sincere attempt to determine the value and the purpose of the breast, to record its history, to measure its trends and to predict, in some limited way, its future. Drawing upon dozens of interviews and almost as many personal experiments with diet and environment, Ms. Williams sifts years of data and research into an eminently readable chronicle that leaves the reader as informed about the breast's physiology as he is about its augmentation. To have reduced such a mountain of information into such a digestible and engrossing product is, to say the least, a triumph.

While readers will be no doubt entertained by the vicarious glimpse of the breast-augmentation industry, Breasts is strongest when it stands firmly on scientific ground. Ms. Williams familiarizes us with fat and milk glands, with estrogen and other hormones. But most importantly, she enthusiastically joins with those researchers who have sounded the alarm about the way in which our modern world has disturbingly played with and reprogrammed the female body, tricking it into maturing earlier and earlier. These trends suggest devastating consequences for women in the future, exposing them to a host of savage cancers that have the power to rob them of good health and good fortune. Her call to arms, for increased regulation of these damaging chemicals, is heartfelt and level-headed. There's no wailing here, no rampaging feminism masquerading as popular science. Ms. Williams is calm, clear and thorough in a manner that should inspire plaudits.

Women's health is a fraught field in which to wade, one that contains as many opinions as it does curatives, as many clarion calls as it does conflicts. Breasts won't avoid drawing criticism. But that its purpose is clear, its motives pure and its conclusions eye-opening ought to earn it a place of prominence, even amongst this challenging crowd. (4/5 Stars)

An excellent, playful takedown of the DSM5 in The Book of Woe

From The Week of May 27, 2013 Compared to the talents and the weapons claimed by the great diversity of life on Earth, humans are an unremarkable species. We cannot hide ourselves in plain sight nor poison our enemies with venom. We cannot glide through the skies nor survive at the bottom of the oceans. But what we lack in tusks and gills, wings and exoskeletons we make up for with the power to think, an ability that has given rise not just to dreams and language, science and culture, but the only advanced civilization to have ever graced our planet. Our minds are remarkable machines that evolution has shaped into tools that we will use to rise beyond our base genetics, our root circumstances, and take to the stars. But for all its glory and its plasticity, the human mind is not without its flaws. For while it has enabled some to make discoveries that have re-imagined our world and our universe, it has also steered some into the pits of hell, condemning them to lives of madness and confusion, obsession and disassociation from which it is difficult to recover. And it has encouraged yet others to study these malformed minds to both glean knowledge of their illnesses and to aid in their healing. But just how successful has that effort been to catalogue and heal the array of human mental afflictions? Gary Greenberg explains in his fascinating polemic. The diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) is the psychiatrist's handbook. An oft-revised classification of mental illnesses, it is an encyclopedia of disorders that range from the disassociative to the obsessive. Though largely confined to the psychiatric community, the alphabet soup of its terminology, BP, OCD, BPD, has spilled over into mainstream culture, causing some to prematurely diagnose themselves with its theatre of mental horrors while motivating others to rebel against its labels, rejecting them as nonsense. Between, it has given rise to an eruption of proscriptive drug use unimaginable fifty years ago, a result that none of its authors could have predicted. The DSM has undoubtedly been beneficial to some. Its classifications, assembled from thousands of studies, have helped clinicians accurately recognize and properly treat mental illness in their patients. However, the DSM is simultaneously, and unavoidably, the work of men and women who cannot escape the biases of their culture. Thus, over the years, "afflictions" such as homosexuality have been included in its pages, proscriptions offered for its curation. These incidents damage the Manual's credibility. For if illnesses can so easily slip in and out of its pages, then what truly is mental illness? Can we ever know? The result of both a career as a clinician and the most recent and controversial revision of the DSM, The Book of Woe is an excellent and utterly unforgiving examination of the DSM: its history, its implementation and its architects. Though Mr. Greenberg pays particular interest to the pointed criticisms of the DSM5 by Allen Frances, the author of the previous version, this exercise in mud-slinging is merely an entertaining and clarifying lens through which to view the ways in which the DSM has impacted psychiatrists, their patients and the wider culture. In this, Mr. Greenberg is clinical in his ruthlessness, raising awareness of the numerous ways in which the DSM's various revisions have been exploited by doctors and pharmaceutical firms to create highly profitable drugs of dubious effectiveness at the expense of patients and their concerned families. This work is hardly the first to raise such concerns, but they are handled here with both care and passion. Though much of The Book of Woe's critiques of the DSM5 will be of little interest to non-psychiatrists, Mr. Greenberg is effective in taking the reader into the anatomy of a diagnosis, not only revealing how thin the line is between mental health and mental illness, as defined by the DSM, but the ways in which such diagnoses offer hope to bewildered families seeking answers. The author poignantly captures just how desperate some people are to get help, help that, at times, the DSM actually hinders instead of aids. The Book of Woe only re-enforces the critical importance of being one's own best advocate, of questioning everything as a means to getting the proper diagnosis, a task made all the more difficult when one's mind is clouded by illness. The Book of Woe is certainly not without its flaws. Mr. Greenberg barely even attempts to be objective about the DSM5, featuring here its critics far more than its promoters. Moreover, he has chosen to prominently focus on the bumps in the road to the DSM5's publication, making it seem as though the book is a nonsensical result of bureaucratic bumbling. His desire to emphasize these flaws gives what would appear to be a distorted view of the DSM5's quality. However, even in this, Mr. Greenberg's work serves a purpose, chiefly, to reveal the degree to which the APA has deployed all the typical and despicable tools of a bureaucracy on the defensive to fend off criticisms and discredit its criticizers, a reality that leaves the APA looking both disorganized and greedy. For those interested in the history of the DSM, The Book of Woe is a wonderful read, full of colorful characters and powerful minds. But for those looking for a good catfight between deeply interested parties, looking to preserve both fame and fortune, look no further. (4/5 Stars)

Temple Grandin's exquisite, moving examination of Animals in Translation

From The Week of February 25, 2013
Humans trust most what they can see, touch and taste. For ones senses not only provide a means by which reality can be verified, they grant us the opportunity to distinguish the advantageous from the punitive, the pleasing from the painful. They are the filters by which we come to understand our world. Sadly, though, like any useful tool, relying too much on our senses can be dangerous, welcoming us into a kind of dependence that causes us to discard any piece of information we do not comprehend. We hear birdsong, but do we understand that it conveys information? We see pollution clouding our skies, but do we investigate the damage it causes? We re-shape the earth, but do we consider the domino effect this has on the climate and the species who share it with us? No. We blunder forth, our reliance on our senses having programmed into us an arrogance that all-too-often leads us to our doom. Rarely has this ignorance been so winningly demonstrated than in Ms. Grandin's charming and fascinating examination of animal behavior.

Autistic long before the condition was even notionally understood, Temple Grandin grew up in a world she did not understand. The world that we take for granted, the world that seems so orderly and obvious to us, was, to her abnormal brain, a chaotic mess of stimuli and distraction which not only made little sense, but kept her from maturing alongside her peers. However, what Ms. Grandin lacked in sociability with humans she more than made up for with animals, creatures whose motives and actions seemed comprehensible to her in a way that the rest of us either dismissed or took for granted.

Harnessing this fondness, Ms. Grandin embarked upon a career working with animals of all stripes. From healing to killing, she has spent 30 years watching their behaviors, experiencing their emotions and sussing out the bent of their thoughts. And in this she has made some wonderful discoveries about what triggers their rages, what sooths their spirits, and what defines their desires. These personal experiences, along with her extensive research into the creatures she's devoted her life to, are gathered together to reveal an animal world that is hardly the two-dimensional game of predator and prey that we see, but a universe of emotions, experiences and talents that are not only beyond human ken, but human capacity as well. This is a world of dogs and horses, cows and cats, that seems all-the-more obvious for this journey.

animals in Translation is mesmerizing work. Peppering her chronicle with facts about the creatures most familiar to us, Ms. Grandin needs only 300 pages to convince the reader that the animal kingdom is a rich and diverse world defined as much by motive as genetics. From the subsonic vibrations of elephant communication to the complex emotions of horses, from the sexual violence of roosters to the brutality of dolphins, she captures an environment of routine and mystery, of power and death, that is as far from the fluffy and the cartoonish as it's possible to get. Though she devotes considerable time to numerous other creatures, dogs feature here most prominently. From their bites to their mysterious abilities to sniff out our seizures and our cancers, Ms. Grandin uses their minds and their attitudes to reveal to us a world that has to be studied without biases, without blinders, to be properly understood.

The work is not without its flaws. To someone who has not experienced autism, the validity of Ms. Grandin's theory, that this condition helps the human to think more like an animal, is unclear. The author provides examples of how animal and autistic behaviors overlap, experiments whose results are admittedly quite striking, but these conclusions are largely drawn from anecdotal data. This is a problem also apparent in the parts of the work that concern animal behavior. Here, Ms. Grandin uses personal experiences, along with those of her acquaintances, to exemplify her contentions about the work-ings of the animal mind. It may well be that anecdote is the easiest means by which the author can convey her decades of accumulated knowledge to the reader. If so, it is certainly successful. But it does leave some doubt as to the scientific veracity underpinning her conclusions.

Notwithstanding its personal nature, Animals in Translation is a captivating adventure through the minds of creatures who, for some of us, are not only our friends but our sustenance. In this, it is as revelatory as it is enlightening. The animal mind will never be thought of the same way again. )& # ((4/5 Stars)

America's Founding Fathers and the land they loved in Wulf's Founding Gardeners

From The Week of February 11, 2013
All nations are shaped by the thoughts, dreams and ambitions of their founders. For the generations that follow these men exult them, elevating their beliefs and their deeds until they are legend, a reality which ensures that their fundamental ideals are perpetuated down through time, even unto the present day. Naturally, as decades become centuries, there are more and more disagreements over what these founders intended, as cultural dislocation causes the meaning of their words to be dissipated by the winds of time, but we still try to live up to the standard they set which makes of them creatures of endless fascination. What was their vision? And how would their views have changed in the face of a rapidly evolving world? Short of availing ourselves of a time machine, we will never know, but we can sift among their letters and their musings for clues, something Ms. Wulf does here with mixed success.

The Founding Fathers of the United States of America are giants of history. The power and the resonance of their names exceeds virtually every one of their contemporaries, even those most royal. And yet, thanks to the success of their glorious experiment, Jefferson and Adams, Madison and Hamilton, Washington and Franklin, commoners all, are the names celebrated in books and memorialized by monuments, their actions having helped to usher in an entirely new world free of the decrepitude of authoritarianism in all its forms.

But who were these men? And what influenced them while they were shaping their legendary ideas? Summoning their journals and their proclamations, interpreting their symbols and their analogies, Founding Gardeners argues that the Founding Fathers filtered their experiences through the lens of environmentalism, a naturalistic approach to the world that began at home and extended out to the rest of the world. From the plantations they so assiduously cultivated to the farmers they hailed as heroes, they celebrated ones connection to the earth, describing it as the most profound and moral partnership man could forge. When all else is uncertain and troublesome, when temptation lurks behind every corner, working the soil will never steer a good man wrong.

Though too narrow in scope and too deprived of analysis, Founding Gardeners is a fascinating read. Ms. Wulf draws upon the copious correspondence of America's legends to establish both their connection to the land that gave them a second life, free of the aristocratic strictures of the old world, and to describe the ways in which these men manifested from this connection a code of conduct, for themselves and the world, that they considered upstanding. In this, Ms. Wulf is most thorough, excavating declarations and obsessions about the earth that seem downright radical by today's standards. Were one to present these quotes, stripped of attribution, and ask the public to guess who spoke them, surely their most common answer would be treehuggers and Gaia-worshippers, minds without any grasp of the complexities of the modern world which brings us to the book's central problem.

It is difficult to imagine how the views of these founders are relevant to our era. Ms. Wulf claims to have written the book after journeys across America's landscapes inspired her to investigate what the Founders thought of the land to which they'd devoted themselves. But it is nearly impossible to read her work here and not imagine that she sought to demonstrate the degree to which modern society has deeply drifted from the ideals the Founders had for the country they birthed. This is a point worth making; for if we're to celebrate these men for their vision and their views, then we have to take in their environmentalism as well. And yet, Ms. Wulf at no point acknowledges the extent to which the intervening centuries have transformed the world. In the time of the Founders, America claimed a population of ten million. Today, that number is 315 million, nearly a 32-fold increase that does not even come close to representing the manifest change that industrialism and technology has wrought upon a crowded planet. This needs to be said. We cannot go back to what we were. Nor should we wish to. That world is as unchanging as it is rife with illness.

There's much here to admire. Ms. Wulf has perhaps overemphasized the role the land played in the lives of these men, but in highlighting it she has humanized them in ways both fascinating and endearing. But if Founding Gardeners wished to be more than a piece of nostalgia, it needed to confront the question of how the thoughts and dreams of the Founders could operate in our world, not theirs. (3/5 Stars)

Excession by Iain M. Banks

From The Week of October 22, 2012 We can only know what we know. While at first this statement may seem ridiculously obvious, it holds deeper truths. For while it is easy enough to confront a difficult problem and recognize that we lack the knowledge or the expertise to solve it, it is much harder to predict the manifestation of problems we cannot solve. For to predict such problems, we must be able to understand both our world and our universe much better than we do now. Only through understanding can come proper anticipation of the unknown. And even then, well, can anything short of a god perfectly anticipate the future? How should a society act when confronted with an unanticipatable problem, especially if it is an existential one? Should it attack it with vigor, or study it in hopes of future understanding? Mr. Banks speculates in one of the most thoughtful of his Culture novels.

Spanning much of the galaxy, the Culture is a multi-special, interstellar civilization of trillions of souls spread across thousands of worlds, orbital habitats and interstellar spacecraft. Governed by machine Minds that have in part transcended normal space, thus circumventing the laws of physics that apply to our reality, it is a post-scarcity, post-human, post-national collective driven and organized by a single primary purpose, the preservation and the protection of all forms of life, providing them a peaceful environment in which to acquire knowledge, experience pleasure and generally live as they choose. It is a utopia with teeth, a construct capable of defending itself and the egalitarianism it believes in.

However, a recently discovered anomaly threatens that existence. An object in space orbiting a dead star that appears to be older than the universe, Excession is, at best, a paradox. At worst, it is an incursion from another universe, another reality. It is what the Culture calls an Outside-context problem, a challenge it couldn't have predicted. With no planning in place to deal with such a problem, the Culture dispatches members of its Special circumstances division, a dirty tricks squad, to investigate, but foes of the Culture are aware of the existence of this mystery and they are determined to use it against their enemies. Time is short and the galaxy may well hang in the balance. For one, no one can anticipate the future.

Though at times burdened by wayward musings, Excession is a worthy and even gripping successor to the trio of early Culture novels that made Mr. Banks a master of speculative science fiction. Animated by alien environments, fatalistic humor, violent races and existential questions, it fuses together the funny with the macabre to create a typically British amalgam that startles as much as it entertains. Mr. Banks' characters here are as they ever were, interesting but ultimately disposable, a means to the end of his thought experiment. For in the Culture, no one man, one Mind, or one thing can save the galaxy. It cannot even save the Culture. Events are too broad, depend upon too many players, for a handful of individuals to change the fates of billions.

Instead, Mr. Banks deploys his characters as windows through which his readers can view key events in the history of the Culture, that most enviable and yet cloying of positive, galactic futures. For what else can be so simultaneously enriching and yet boring, so enlightening and yet numbing, than a civilization that requires nothing from the individual but to exist only as he sees fit? And yet, there is no outcome for our species more nobler than the one the Culture represents. It is a fascinating dichotomy.

Mr. Banks can, at times, overwhelm us with the vastness of his mindspaces. However, the degree to which they prod us to conceive of problems and possible futures prevents his work from ever slipping beneath the radar of the worthwhile. (3/5 Stars)

The Moreau Series by S. Andrew Swann

From The Week of October 08, 2012 Playing god is a tricky game. For as much as we have summoned the technical and cognitive powers to master various scientific disciplines, we are in no way divine. We lack that wealth of wisdom and understanding, of patience and vision, possessed by such theoretical beings. And yet, our expertise in the sciences has given us the keys to unlock the doors to the properties of the life around us, to alter the very genes upon which these organisms live and grow. Are these not the powers of god? And if so, do we not owe it to the life that we create that we take on the responsibilities of parenthood, of stewardship? These are vital questions we will all be forced to confront in the decades ahead, decades defined by genetic engineering and depleted resources. They are questions Mr. Swann confronts in his fascinating if overly bombastic series.

By the middle of the 21st century, war will have utterly reconfigured the world we know. From japan to India, Asia, including the Middle East, will be a wasteland, the devastated gestalt of several disconnected conflicts now known simply as the Pan-Asian War. Refugees from that consequential conflict have found their way to Europe and North America, further fraying the already decaying social safety nets present in those marginally healthier regions of the globe. Worse than the refugees, though, are the Moreau, genetically engineered soldiers from the Pan-Asian War which have flooded into the still-standing cities of the west.

The result of experiments designed to bestow upon the human form the many gifts of the animal kingdom, the Moreau are halfmen, humans crossed with strains of feline, rodent, ursine and canine. Blessed with speed and skill, claw and tooth, these fearsome creatures, made for war, have bred with one another, producing offspring who, while possessed of genes engineered for combat, have never experienced the depravities of the battlefield. No, these second generation Moreau know only the ghettos of the west into which they were born. These so-called Moritowns are 21st century slums, places of death and disease which have been scarred by neglect and exploitation. For other than the purposes of relieving their fetishistic urges, the humans who created the Moreau want nothing to do with them now that the wars are over. After all, the Moreau are walking, talking reminders of the abandonment of their own morality and forsaken responsibilities.

Into this tangled web of corrupt geopolitics and twisted science are dropped a loosely connected group of three genetic experiments, each of whom have found some kind of home in this challenging environment. Nohar Rajasthan is the son of a martyred deserter from the Pan-Asian War. A tiger strain, he rolls his talent for finding people into a career as a private investigator which lands him in the heart of a strange and explosive conspiracy. While clawing his way to the truth, he befriends angel Lopez, a young, Peruvian rabbit breed left for dead in the slums of Cleveland where Nohar was born, and encounters Evi Isham, an government asset formerly of Israeli intelligence engineered to be the perfect human soldier. Together and separately, they pry apart bits of a massive, multi-pronged coverup, the exposure of which is bound to completely transform human civilization.

Though infected by its own strain of over-the-top blockbusterism, The Moreau Series successfully imagines a near-future world contorted by human arrogance and selfishness. Mr. Swann, who went on to pen an excellent trilogy that build on this dystopian foundation, allows Nohar, Evi and angel to each feature in their own volume of this chronicle, a decision which permits us to become intimately familiar with the quirks and needs of the various forms of Moreau. Mr. Swann may not have the most creative prose, but what he lacks here in the way of polish he more than makes up for in inventiveness. For he's constructed a plausible, if grim, world, welded atop this morass of crippled ethics and broken dreams a vicious conspiracy, and wrapped this lethal package in layers of Hollywood thunder and 1940s-style whodoneits which hold together passably well. It's a conglomeration of styles and influences which neatly mirror Mr. Swann's Moreau who are themselves a hodgepodge of various genetic sources.

To whatever extent The Moreau Series is flawed in execution, it more than amply earns the benefit of the doubt by asking thoughtful questions that will inevitably make themselves the centerpiece of mainstream discourse in the years ahead. The Moreau are sentient weapons. They are things created by humanity to serve a single, destructive purpose. When that purpose is completed, they are abandoned, unwanted, subjects of an ugly chapter in history that humanity is ashamed to even acknowledge, let alone admit to. This is, of course, the natural result of innovation without wisdom, of creation without understanding. For all of the issues the Moreau face would have been perfectly obvious to their creators if they paused for a moment's thought. But no, driven by the necessities of war, and unhindered by conscience, they blazed forth and created a new race of beings that quickly discover their gods are profoundly flawed. We should all hope that, when our future selves inevitably grapple with precisely these dilemmas, they are not so shortsighted.

As engaging as it is hampered... The Moreau Series is not Mr. Swann's finest work, but there is much here to keep fans of ethics, science and combat well-entertained. (3/5 Stars)

The Red Market by Scott Carney

From The Week of September 17, 2012 As much as we are wont to jeopardize them with junk food and cigarettes, stimulants and depressants, our bodies are precious to us, especially when their failure threatens our existences. They are the self-repairing machines that allow us to have families, to perform work, to create beauty and to experience the world. They are the means by which we understand ourselves and the universe. And yet we ride them hard, expecting them to recover from whatever abuses we inflict upon them. Moreover, we expect science to repair them when they cannot repair themselves, confident that their hiccups will not shorten our time on this earth. But what if they do? What if we need the eyes and lungs, the hearts and the livers of others to grow old? What wouldn't we do extend our lives? Mr. Carney explores in his chilling investigation.

Wherever there is supply and demand for a product, there is a market; human flesh is no exception. From hair and skin to organ and tendon, the human body's component parts are of considerable value not only to traders in this market, but those souls desperate for a new lease on life. While some of these red markets are heavily regulated to ensure that the unfortunate aren't exploited by those of means, regulation does not eliminate the need. It merely compels the honor-bound to curtail their behavior while forcing underground all those willing to surrender their scruples to feed the need of the desperate.

From the collecting of Asian hair for sale to American women to the harvesting of the eggs of poor women for sale to the fertility-challenged, Mr. Carney immerses himself in this dark, exploitative underworld that has long-since given up on the notion of the body as sacred. He meets women who felt compelled to sell kidneys in order to procure medicine for their children. He encounters young women who saw no other option but to sell their eggs in order to make rent. He even spends time with men and women who have turned the clinical trialling of medicines into a profession, jeopardizing their longterm health for shortterm profit. If someone can live without it, someone has sold it, participating in a system worth billions of dollars, annually, very little of which flows into the hands of those who need it most.

For all its ghoulishness, The Red Market is captivating work, no moreso than in its introduction which seizes the reader by the throat and demands his full attention. Mr. Carney, a freelance journalist and frequent contributor to Wired Magazine, converts the tragic death of one of his colleagues, abroad in Asia, into a complex journey that takes him from the slums of India to the gleaming labs of Europe, exposing, throughout, a system far from clean or transparent. He contends that, though our ethics and our legislation have the best of intentions, the notion of organ donation is a fallacy that attempts to salve our consciences, to keep from looking too deeply at the necessary costs of a market in human flesh. For while it may be that some of us agree to surrender our organs when we have no more need of them, the system that procures those organs has tangible costs both financial and moral.

Moreover, Mr. Carney makes the powerful case that the regulating of red markets, though in some sense necessary, serves to create the very forms of exploitation they are attempting to stamp out. After all, if someone's need is sufficiently great, or grave, they are not going to listen to their government decry human flesh; they are going to procure what they require. And wherever there is money willing to be spent on a thing there are people willing to take the risk of procuring that product in the hope of handsome remuneration. It is an economic principle as old as human history. Legislation has no hope of standing up to such ancient power.

Tying together economics, exploitation and the human spirit, The Red Market is a deeply disturbing examination of the extent to which we will sell our health for those we hold most dear. There are no easy answers here, but their stories cry out for justice, for some system of sanity to keep these unsfortunats from being so unmercifully used. For until science bestows us with the blessing of artificial organs, the needy will always be out there, just waiting for the desperate to give them what they require. (4/5 Stars)

Social Engineering by Chris Hadnagy

From The Week of September 10, 2012 Ever since humans possessed the power of speech, they have been in the con game. For we are social, hierarchical animals, qualities which lend themselves to the manipulation of the thoughts and feelings of those closest to us. These tweaks of ego, these posturings for status, needn't be malevolent, or even harmful. They might be as innocent as looking our best in order to make a good impression upon someone we desire, to get a job we wish to have, or even to express our trustworthiness to those who might otherwise judge us. But they can just as easily bear cruel intent -- deflating truths murmured into the trusting ears of our competition, misdirections knowingly bestowed upon the credulous --, actions which allow us to gain advantages at the expense of both the feelings and the fortunes of others. Though these skills have always played important roles in human interplay, they have never loomed larger than they do now in our interconnected, global world. Mr. Hadnagy demonstrates in his uneven work.

Defined as the victimization of individuals through trickery and manipulation, social engineering is one of the most powerful and pervasive weapons in the world of modern espionage. Deploying a host of tools, from confidence games to software exploits, the social engineer typically preys upon both the kindness and the credulity of strangers in order to achieve one of three customary goals: to penetrate and control computer networks, to test the security systems in place to protect such networks, or to harvest information for fun and profit. Though

Whereas hacking requires the hacker to possess extensive knowledge of both computers and the languages used to program them, social engineering demands that one only possess enough charm to convince the innocent to unknowingly act against their own best interests. Consequently, while its weakness resides in the fact that the exploiter needs a mark upon which to prey, its great strength stems from its capacity to entirely bypass every form of computer encryption implemented to protect sensitive systems. A social engineer does not need usernames and passwords; he does not rely upon the manipulation of ones and zeros. He hacks people, not computers. And but for their own sense of self-preservation, humans have no such safeguards.

As frustrating as it is enlightening, Social engineering is a sometimes fascinating journey through the world of human hacking. Mr. Hadnagy, who has specialized in this field for some time, discusses numerous, nightmarish scenarios in which data vital to both corporations and individuals has been stolen by simply convincing a receptionist to put a USB key into her work computer. The gravity of both his claims and his observations have been backed up by two recent cases, that of Matt Honan and of Stuxnet, both of which used social engineering to destroy an individual's digital life, in the case of the journalist, and to significantly damage an Iranian nuclear reactor, in the case of the worm. In this, Mr. Hadnagy reveals a most critical truth, that a system is only as secure as its weakest point.

Hackers are not foolish. Why lay siege to a digital fortress when one can poison its wells, or parachute onto its walls? A clever exploiter probes for weaknesses, flaws in the system, and attacks there, applying as much pressure to the most vulnerable point until it yields to his demands. It is not the fortified gates we must worry about. It is the smiling, friendly person who can be used as an unwitting pawn in a game they cannot understand.

But while Mr. Hadnagy demonstrates this point with admirable clarity, Social Engineering reads, in every other respect, as an exercise in self-aggrandizement. These 350 poorly composed pages are saturated by the author's ego, the masturbatory fantasies of which stain the entire work. I have no doubt that Mr. Hadnagy has helped people. Nor is there any question that his work may arm the credulous with weapons against the attacks of the devious. And yet, it is impossible to escape the smugness with which Mr. Hadnagy conveys these lessons. Consequently, his supercilious tone, which is as offensive as his prose is childlike, mars the work irreparably.

This is an important topic. And though Mr. Hadnagy has much to teach, his ego and his pen both fail him. (2/5 Stars)

Metatropolis by John Scalzi Et Al

From The Week of July 23, 2012Though there remains much argument over the extent of the resource crisis and the degree to which it will impact our lives, there can be no doubt that human civilization is not resource neutral. Not only do we rarely recycle the raw materials we dig out of the ground and refine into useful products, we lack the requisite knowledge to reduce many of those finished products back to their constituent elements for re-use. If we lived on a planet of infinite resources, or had some feasible means of extracting them from elsewhere and bringing them to Earth, this would not be a problem. But such a utopia is precisely that, a fantasy with which reality does not truck. We do live on a planet with finite resources and we don't know how to replenish them from elsewhere. Thus, eventually, we will run out of stuff.

What will happen to our civilization when we fall off the resource cliff? When a lack of supply drives the prices into the stratosphere, how will the billions of demanding humans respond? Will they riot, feverishly snatching what little remains and hording that surplus as currency? Or will they approach the problem rationally by shifting to a resource-neutral economy that will stabilize prices and create a lasting blueprint for prosperity on a planet sucked dry? These are the questions that Elizabeth Bear, Tobias Buckell, Jay Lake, John Scalzi and Karl Schroeder grapple with in this collection of short stories on the nature of the cities of the near future. They fascinate and terrify.

Thirty years from now, the world is unrecognizable by those of us alive today. Where we live and thrive in sprawling cities, where we enjoy unmetered water and cheap electricity, where we think nothing of driving gasoline-power cars and shrug at the news of oil spills, those who descend from us will either dismiss such legends as fantasies, loose talk around warm fires, or they will rage, knowing that our profligacy has contributed to their current state. For in the years between now and then, a series of crises, from the political to the economic, from the climate to the materialistic, will ravage civilization, angering populations, weakening governments, and gnawing away at the social ties that bind us all. Wars will spark up from these many, potent frictions, and the fallout from such conflicts will be the death knell for the nation state, replacing it with chaos, at first. But slowly, gradually, communities will reform, organizing around different principles, different necessities.

In this changed world, the hungry and the hopeless strive for the basics of food and shelter. In Detroit, they bounce for bars and turk for lawyers, courier messages and fight for the future of their children, all while laboring in the heart of a burnt out city. In New St. Louis, they work for co-opts and fill out militias, all in the hopes of creating and maintaining a totally self-sufficient city capable of growing its own food and engineering its own products. In Cascadia, that mountainous corridor between Vancouver and Seattle, they cook and they clean, philosophize and stand guard, trying to imagine and ignite a new society that, even if it takes generations to actualize, will re-shape the world into something better. The world over, new frontiers are being explored from the digital to the oceanic, the new bobbing up to try to fill the vacuum left by the old. And yet, many powerful remnants of the old world remain, military units and corporate boards both of which are more than willing to ruthlessly strongarm this new world into conforming to their vision of the future.

A collaboration between five of science fiction's talented voices, Metatropolis is an engrossing, if fatalistic, glimpse of an increasingly probable future. Having begun from the premise that life cannot continue as it has, the reckoning they envision is devastating, leaving behind only the bones of the world we know and replacing it with a grimmer, sleeker version that, though it packs a mean bite, augurs some promise for the future. After all, humans, when not pressed by necessity, are highly resistant to change and to the voices that warn of its coming. But when necessity does come, and the choices are evolve or die, the explosive powers of change are unleashed and trained upon re-imagining a stagnated world. The result, as envisioned by these authors, is as mysterious as it is sheened in hope.

For all its intrigue and its consistency of vision, it must be stressed that this is but one possible outcome. The authors don't appear to give much credence to the equally plausible notion that the advancement of technology will outstrip the depletion of resources, creating machines capable of solving the resource problem for us. In such a case, civilization will still have to adapt, but with far less turmoil. This notion is eschewed for the darker, more cynical view, that humans are foolish when not compelled by circumstance to change. This is understandable -- this is fiction after all --, but it is perhaps less than honest. For there is, playing out all around us, a race against time, to see whether or not technology can reach a critical threshold before the humans propelling it burn themselves out. Should that threshold be reached, we will find these problems negligible when viewed in the context of what we can do with our new machines.

Interesting work, but its negativity is strongly suggestive of paranoia and pessimism more than reality. (3/5 Stars)

The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo

From The Week of July 09, 2012

Humans set great store by good character. Virtues from kindness to generosity are understandably packaged up and sold as a commendable ideal to which we'd all do well to strive. Those who succeed in earning this elusive monicker are heralded as paragons of the community, dependable souls who keep the world turning, while those who fall sinfully short are dismissed as wretched creatures, disappointing offspring who weigh society down with their weak wills and their depraved souls.

Notwithstanding its judgmental nature, there are no surprises here. Communities should self-select for virtuousness over sinfulness. They should cultivate integrity, honesty and drive. But what if these virtues are not teachable? What if they aren't innate? What if they can be realized and relinquished, attained and discarded, by the same human based on nothing more than circumstance? Society would implode, torn apart by an untenable realization that virtue is malleable and that trustworthiness is situational. And yet this is precisely the contention advanced by Mr. Zimbardo's excellent rumination on the nature of evil.

In 1971, while a young grad student at Stanford University, Philip Zimbardo conceived of an experiment that would shake the ivory towers of psychology departments the world over. Selecting two-dozen paid volunteers from a pool of nearly a hundred, Zimbardo established a life-like prison in the basement of the university's psychology building into which he poured his willing participants, each of whom was given a role as either a guard or a prisoner. Guards were bestowed with nightsticks and uniforms, anonymizing sunglasses and supreme authority. The only check on their power was a prohibition against physically abusing any of their charges. Prisoners, meanwhile, were, like their real-world counterparts, compelled to let go of their individuality by adopting a uniform outfit and dehumanizing numerical designations. They were caged and malnourished, also like real prisoners, and warned that disobedience would be punished. If the experiment became too intense, they were free to quit at any time.

This was a college experiment, staged on college grounds, directed by a college graduate and performed by college students. It ought to have been, in every sense, a controlled and controllable experiment. And yet, over the next six days of the scheduled two-week experiment, the experiment's designers witnessed, in the abusive guards, the degraded prisoners and the wardens who allowed the many acts of humiliation to take place, a shocking, nightmarish truth about human nature, that human decency is situational, that good people, when endowed with extraordinary authority, are capable of equally extraordinary cruelty, that those who are deprived of their liberty quickly become cognitively captured by the degradation of their environment, and that those involved in such power scenarios are completely oblivious to these profound shifts in behavior. Simply put, while we can be said to have baseline personalities that are the gestalt of all of our experiences, these personalities are made utterly malleable by the demands and the temptations of authority to the extent that, when placed in altered circumstances, they are re-shaped to fit a newer and darker reality.

Reflecting on this seminal experiment and those that came after it, Mr. Zimbardo, in The Lucifer Effect not only examines the chilling degree to which we can be made monsters by circumstance, he applies these experimental results to the horrors of the Abu Grabe prison scandal which rocked the US military during the early stages of the most recent Iraq War. He details how, for humans, normal is a variable, not a constant. It can be shaped and toyed with, stretched and manipulated, such that not even the humans affected by it comprehend that their normal has changed. While Mr. Zimbardo points out that this logic can be beneficial, used to elevate dark normalities by slowly lifting them into the light, he acknowledges that this is vanishingly rare compared to the frequency with which kings and warlords, revolutionaries and drug-traffickers, prey upon human malleability to debase the noble and silence the unwilling.

Though burdened at times by Mr. Zimbardo's oppressive humility, The Lucifer Effect is a captivating journey through human nature. His premise, that institutional circumstances made good apples bad, rather than the common view that bad apples sour good barrels, claims both the ring of truth and the solidity of good research to support it. All other contentions appear to fall well short of convincing when set against the terrifying evidence of both Mr. Zimbardo's revolutionary experiment and Abu Grabe, it's real-world counterpart.

However, more fascinating than even the monsters and the revelations unleashed here are Mr. Zimbardo's reflections on the nature of heroism. He spends a considerable portion of his work contemplating why some among us appear to be largely immune to the seductions of authority. Indeed, such paragons appear to actively resist such authority, fully aware that to do so is to profoundly jeopardize their own self-interests and even their safety. And yet these individuals do so anyway, secure in the knowledge that right is right and that no darkness can separate them from virtue. After being chilled to the bone by the author's analysis of authority's power, the notion that, to some degree, goodness stands beyond and above temptation is as heartening as it is mystifying.

No 600-page, autobiographical text on human psychology has the capacity to be gripping. But if such work can ever claim to be revelatory in a meaningful way, The Lucifer Effect claims the mantle. For it compels its readers to re-imagine not only human nature in general but the suffocating nature of prisons and the extent to which they leech from both guards and prisoners alike hope and humanity. Well done... (4/5 Stars)

A Theory of Justice by John Rawls

From The Week of May 07, 2012

Though intelligence separated humanity from the animal kingdom, allowing us to invent the tools that would eventually steer us onto a new, evolutionary course of profound self-discovery and world domination, intelligence is but the key to a much greater lock, a necessity for the grander goal of society. For it is society that harnesses that raw intellect and capitalizes upon it, chronicling its many inventions and innovations and putting them to widespread use not only for the general advancement of all, but so that others might improve upon what came before, creating an endless chain of advancement that will one day elevate us to the stars. Without society, the genius of one is never remembered, savored only by those he happens to encounter. His death causes his knowledge to pass into the ether, obligating humanity to sputter along at a level not much higher than the apes from which we branched.

Being that society is critical to our development, it would be advantageous to discover society's ideal form. What rules should it enshrine? What principles should it uphold? Should it favor one class over another, or should everyone be equal? Should innovation be the cornerstone, or should it be the acquisition of knowledge that begets wisdom? Mr. Rawls, a famous 20th century philosopher, grapples with these vital questions in this his classic 1971 treatise on the ideal society.

From the principles of justice to the Veil of Ignorance, from the ethics of civil disobedience to the sins of freeloading, A Theory of Justice is Mr. Rawls' systematic attempt to logic out society's most beneficial form. To do so, he requests that the reader join him in a most detailed thought experiment. The reader is asked to imagine that he is society's ultimate architect, free to work upon a blank and perfectly malleable canvas. He is free to set any rule, to impose any right, to pass any law, to harbor any prejudice. He may shape and contort his society to his heart's content. However, there is one critical stipulation that he must adhere to while he molds his world.

Upon the completion of his experiment, when it comes time for the reader to enter his ideal society, he will do so without any knowledge of where, in that society, he will appear. He does not know what job he will hold, what family he will have, what class he will belong to, or what talents he will possess. He may be the highest of the high, or the lowest of the low. Over this one aspect of his experiment he has no control. With this veil of ignorance in mind, what will his original position be? Will he engineer a society that is fair, fearing that he might enter it as a drudge in need of external support? Or will he engineer an unequal society, trusting himself to rise on the back of his natural abilities? Will he enshrine equal rights to all as insurance against his position at the bottom, or will he opt for unequal rights, confident the powerful will not need such flimsy protections?

Though A Theory of Justice is a challenging read, written more for the benefit of the author's colleagues than it is for the layman, it is nonetheless a powerfully persuasive piece of political philosophy. The Veil of Ignorance, an idea as revolutionary for philosophy as Einsteinian Relativity was for physics, is surely one of the 20th century's most powerful thought experiments. For it forces the reader to recognize that birth is random, that the extent to which we succeed is at least partially based on the luck of the draw, and that opportunity has a huge bearing on our quality of life. Taken altogether, these principles demand that we examine anew our successes, not only to be thankful for the moments in which we were helped by others to achieve our dreams, but in order to recognize that whatever we are is as much to the credit of others as it is to the credit of ourselves. This notion has widespread implications for our future and the societies it will birth.

As much as this work is understandably dominated by the Veil of Ignorance experiment, it is as much a 600-page logistical construct that makes a profound and profoundly simple argument for equality. While we know that society cannot grant us all equal shares of resources or income -- endeavoring to do so is nightmarishly complicated and utterly senseless --, we do all wish to live in a society with equal rights to liberty, to conscience, to life. So how do we justify creating a society that has equal rights but not equal opportunity? By creating a society whose laws, institutions and instruments are designed to consider first the least among us. For to do otherwise is to not only consign the most vulnerable among us to short, pain-filled lives, it is to abandon even the conceit of the notion that society is based on logic and reason.

A Theory of Justice is, at times, interminable and insufferable, a volley of intellectual arrows fired at targets most of us will never meet or know. But within its megalithic logic there are shattering truths that possess the power to reform the reader's conception of society and fairness. In this, it is deeply and enduringly transformative. (4/5 Stars)