A thoughtful glimpse of civilization's fall in The Last Policeman

From The Week of March 31st, 2014

Civilization is so pervasive, so consequential, that it's all-but impossible to imagine our lives without it. It has sparked ideas and ignited industrialization, enshrined the rule of law and elevated the power of the people, but it has also virtually blinded us to the truth, that it has bound us up in its conformist chains. This is a good bargain. After all, whatever we lose by way of personal freedom we more than gain back in enlightenment and wealth. This is indisputable. But just what have we surrendered? Is the absence of civilization truly so destructive? Would a world predicated on personal freedom necessarily be anarchic? Philosophers and anthropologists have been asking themselves these questions for generations, but Mr. Winter's has run the experiment. And though the destination may not be revelatory, the journey certainly is entertaining.

It is virtually certain that, in six months, everyone on Earth will be dead. This is the truth that confronts Harry Palace one unforgettable morning when he wakes to the news that a planet-killing asteroid is on a collision course with Earth. A policeman in a quiet, new-England town, one would expect that he, like every other living human, would be tempted to throw off the boring mundanity of daily existence, either by revelling in the freedom of these final days, or by ending it all on their own terms. But Harry Palace is not like the thieves and the opportunists, the professors and the pilots, who have forsaken their lives and their posts for a final, explosive experience. Harry palace holds the thin blue line against the darkness, righteously holding up the law in a world going to pieces.

The only problem is that it's almost impossible to be a policeman in the endtimes. Cell service is spotty, hospitals are barely staffed and the police force's investigative powers are being shut down. After all, what's the point in solving any sort of crime when there's so little time left? But to harry palace, truth is truth, right is right, and an oath is an oath. And even if it kills him, he's going to hold that line until the bitter end, as best he knows how.

An engaging journey through a tragicomic landscape, The Last Policeman and its successor Countdown City are pieces of imaginative near-future fiction. Ben Winters, though far from the first to attempt to conceive of a world careening through its last days, nonetheless manages to lay it out with style, with passion and with originality. His post-Announcement New England is vividly and organically drawn, a place where, though law and order is practically maintained, the soul has been ripped out of the community. There remains a societal superstructure within which to operate, but families are deteriorating, services are decaying and people are wandering off to please themselves before the end. Consequently, the author's world is not one of instant and gratuitous violence, but one in which the social, economic and civil webs that bind us all together are being sundered thread by thread, widening existing holes through which yet more vulnerable people slip into oblivion.

More than its rich environment, though, The Last Policeman's protagonist is also relatively rare. In a world slowly fraying at its seams, harry Palace is a humble, even geeky, rock of stability. He's a square, a man who does good because he has never thought to do anything else. While many of his fellows escape their obligations, he stays to do the job he's always wanted to do, an unthanked, unwanted, and unacknowledged pillar of civilization that someone will eventually break. In this, Palace does the series wonderful service as both an object of amusement and admiration. The former comes as the reader snickers at his naivety and his earnest doggedness; the later arrives when we come to understand just how much he must sacrifice in order to stand up in the face of a tide that even he seems to know will wash him away.

The first two volumes of the Last Policeman are by no means perfect. The author's mysteries are as threadbare as they are insignificant. Thus, as Harry labors to solve them, we are left to snicker and scorn him for either his thick-headedness or his gullibility. And given that Harry was already a square, having these attributes emphasized in this way is less than flattering. Moreover, we're often left with the impression that Harry's humanity only exists as a means by which to highlight its absence in everyone else around him. Which draws scrutiny to Harry's spotless character that it cannot withstand. Howevermuch the works may be flawed, the extent to which Mr. Winter's has avoided the cliches of apocalyptic fiction, and attempted instead to ask intriguing questions about what the world would realistically look like if all our deaths were as certain as sunrise, grants his work imagination and depth that easily overcomes its shortcomings.

An interesting idea that is neither boring or derivative... (3/5 Stars)

A delightfully creepy journey through a twisted world in Annihilation

From The Week of March 10, 2014

In life, there are few certainties. Seven-billion humans stuck on an unpredictable world that is largely governed by chance ensures that much. But one thing we can be certain of is the sanctity of our own minds. These sublimely tuned systems of pattern recognition sort reality from fiction, friend from foe, even wisdom from foolishness, so effortlessly, so reliably, that we're often barely even aware these assessments are taking place. Our minds are the gatekeepers of sanity, providing boundaries without which the world would not make sense. Remove the mind's capacity to make these distinctions, damage its ability to see clearly, and the world becomes a foggy morass of which nothing can be certain, not even the fidelity of our own thoughts. This is a truth chillingly explored in this first entry in a new trilogy from Jeff Vandermeer.

Located just off a stretch of unpopulated coast in one of Earth's more tropical climes, Area X is a deadly and torturous enigma. A place of undefined borders, it appears to be populated by some kind of organizing intelligence made manifest in the behavior of the animals residing there. And yet, but for a handful of chilling encounters, few have ever seen physical agents of this most hidden and pervasive power. Which is not to say that humans haven't felt its presence. Repeatedly, governments have dispatched expeditions to Area X, in hopes of learning its secrets, only to have these highly trained professionals returned to them in extraordinary disarray. For some, their memories are gone, others, their health. But one constant remains. None come back unscarred.

The twelfth and most recent expedition is no exception. Comprised of four women, a biologist, a surveyor, a psychologist and an anthropologist, they are given training, equipment and a mission, to investigate Area X, in particular, a tower that seems to shaft deep into the earth. At first, they seem to be making progress in understanding this twisted place, but then soon events begin to proceed out of their control and, beforelong, nothing will be familiar, not even their own minds. There will be no comfort in this place without rules.

As creepy as it is swift, Annihilation is an entertaining piece of weird fiction. Mr. Vandermeer, who rose to prominence with a series of stories set in the strange city of Ambergris, has channeled his talent for creepy fantasy and carved out a foothold for it on our own world. This proximity, this sense that the rot now exists in a place we hold dear, invests the work with anxiety and urgency, neither of which the author wastes as he marches the reader down into his dark, infested imagination.

Of its many accomplishments, Annihilation's most important achievement is the degree to which it teases the reader into accepting that the line between sanity and madness is whisper thin. The governor of this line, the mind, can be tricked and influenced in so many ways that it's rather surprising that madness isn't a more pervasive problem for society. After all, how could anyone function if they could not trust their senses? Their memories? Their actions? How does anyone distinguish what must be fought from what must be loved when there is no cognitive anchor to hold onto? When there is only Area X, its lies and its mysteries laid bare in the warped light.

Mr. Vandermeer has always excelled at presenting his characters with an environment capable of driving them mad, of tormenting them with things they cannot understand until they have no safe ground left upon which to tread. Annihilation is no exception. But where this volume joins those in its power to entrance, it fails to back that up with compelling characters. In some sense, this is intentional. For Area X leaves no more room for personal identity than it does for personal freedom, devouring all before its strange, expansive threats. However, the reader is left to quietly rue these omissions, as none of the human wills present here amount to much more than their archetypical foundations. Certainly, the creeping sense of otherness makes up for this absence, but only just.

More delicious than disappointing... Weird promises to be an exciting genre for some time to come, particularly with minds like Mr. Vandermeer to guide it. (3/5 Stars)

The stressful world of the NFL explored in Collision Low Crossers

From The Week of January 6th, 2014

Most of us strive for balanced lives, existences in which the joys and burdens of work and family, obligation and friendship, are distributed in such a way that we anticipate, rather than dread, the dawn. It is generally accepted that this is healthy, a sensible approach to grappling with the complexities of modern society and our place within it. And yet, some among us, even while being aware that this is true, wholly reject such balance, eschewing it in the pursuit of glorious victories both personal and organizational. These individuals want nothing of our mundanity. They do not want to find their place in the whole. They want to invest themselves in the dream of achieving something rare, a moment of purest triumph in which they rise above their competitors to be acknowledged as champions. This perfect moment, this gestalt of planning and purpose, is worth any sacrifice, no matter how consequential. Rarely has this drive been detailed with such clarity than in Nicholas Dawidoff's excellent examination.

American football is a tumultuous sport, an autumnal ritual of codified violence in which teams of exquisitely trained and highly paid athletes repeatedly careen into one another in the pursuit of victory. This theatre of pain and glory has become the United States' most popular spectacle, a pastime taken in by tens of millions each weekend not just because of its gladiatorial ruthlessness, but because of its esoteric intricacies. Each Sunday, teams execute the most complex of plays, drilled into them by endless practice, oftentimes to spectacular effect, leaving onlookers as awed at the result as they are mystified by the process. It is the sport whose strategies and plays are least understood by its fans, precisely because of a complexity that demands that its coaches and its players devote sometimes hundreds of hours to gameplans that play out over a single afternoon.

One of the 32 teams that compete at this sport's highest level, the New York Jets have been a largely moribund franchise. Burdened by a history of failure punctuated by a few legendary successes, and overshadowed by the more celebrated giants with whom they share a city, they are the team only its fans could love and admire. However, in 2009, its status as one of the NFL's also-rands is overturned when, after hiring a flamboyant and innovative head coach and drafting a celebrated and talented quarterback, they begin an era of winning, one built on a powerful defense characterized by "organized chaos" designed to fool opposing quarterbacks into consequential mistakes. This new, creative approach to a game that so often hails traditional modes of play elevates the Jets, over the next three years, to the brink of ultimate success which, nonetheless, remains frustratingly elusive.

The tale of a singular season during this era of Jets success, and a biography of the men who shaped and characterized it, Collision Low Crossers is an exceptional piece of sports journalism. Mr. Dawidoff, an author who has written for numerous sports and news publications, was given unprecedented access, during the 2011 NFL season, to the New York Jets: their facility, their players, their coaches, and their games. From these countless hours of observation and camaraderie emerges a fascinating portrait of men, of all ages and from all walks of life, coming together to chase the white whale of ultimate success. From the office dramas of bickering coaches to the complicated motivations of team mates in conflict, we watch as the hope of a promising season is sidetracked by errors and injuries, by immaturity and ill fortune. And yet, these failures seem less the result of poor coaching, or organizational control, than they are the inevitable outcome of a highly stressed and obsessive workplace. And yet, these misfortunes are overshadowed by the vivid depiction of the bonds forged by common purpose and shared sacrifice that smacks more of the military than of football.

However much Collision Low Crossers concerns itself with the vicissitudes of football, it is ultimately a study of the men who have given their lives to it. From the the creativity and brashness of Rex Ryan to the quiet intensity of Mike Pettine, we are given a glimpse of human beings who have completely turned their backs on conventional existence. Health and family, anniversaries and holidays, all the high points in our lives, seem secondary to men lost in the dream of the perfect play, perfect execution, perfect success. For the players, the rewards for their devotion, and their sacrifice, are obvious, access to exorbitant wealth that can set them up for life. For the coaches, however, the motivation is murkier, rooted more in their relationships with their fathers, with their backgrounds and with the need to get it right. In this, their obsessiveness is no different than that which seizes any professional seeking to master his craft. And yet, at least they have the reasonable expectation of reward. Here, the sacrifices are made not only without the guarantee of success, but while knowing the odds are against it.

Collision Low Crossers could have been more thorough. For instance, the author doesn't appear to have spoken to even one of the partners these men have effectively widowed. Nor does he give any real context to the long-term physical toll the sport takes on its participants. However, much like his subjects, Mr. Dawidoff never promised balance. This is an expose of the life of a practitioner of football, of men worshipping at the altar of glory while knowing that, to be glorious, they must count on the contributions of men with whom they might have nothing in common. And in this, it is a its own kind of triumph, one that does honor to the tradition of imbedded sportswriting from which it descends. Spellbinding work... (5/5 Stars)

A thrilling demolition of tropes and expectations in The Demon Cycle

From The Week of December 30th, 2013

There are many ways to measure a man. We can judge him on how he treats his fellows, on how he acts when there's no one around to watch him, even on how he represents himself to those who know no better. But these observations can only tell us so much, and mostly about the public and private faces of someone shaped by a million different experiences and interactions. Hence, it's popular to suggest putting him to the most extreme test, of stripping away every advantage to see what he is like when the crucible is upon him. But even cowards can find courage when there's nothing left to lose. No, the best way to measure a man is to give him the world, to grant him godlike powers to change the destinies of himself and everyone he knows. Only then, when there are no societal checks left to confine him, can you truly know him. And this truth is vividly rendered in Peter V. Brett's fascinating and often exhilarating series.

In a devastated world, ground to dust by an unstoppable threat, life is as difficult as it is short. Civilization has been reduced to isolated hollows, semi-autonomous hamlets notionally under the control of various neighboring duchies. But while these regional authorities provide a threadbare framework of centralized control, this is, at best, lip service to a humanity traumatized into servitude by immortal demons which, every night, rise up from the earth's core, yearning for destruction and sustenance. Manifesting from stone and wood, from wind and fire, these seemingly unvanquishable foes reek havoc upon society, preventing it from advancing upon the medieval creeds and conditions that define it.

However, despite the insurmountable obstacles these demons represent, not all hope is lost. For these creatures are susceptible to sunlight, which dispatches them back to the hell they came from, and to the Wards, a hieroglyphic language that, when properly composed, has the power to not only repel the demons with magic, but to harm them as well. Only, the secrets of this language have been long lost, forcing the surviving humans to huddle in their houses, behind the few wards they remember, and pray for a dawn that never comes swiftly enough.

This gruesome stalemate, however, is shattered some 300 years after the rising of the demons when an ancient city is re-discovered by a wandering youth, searching, earnestly and hopelessly, for answers to the demon threat. At great peril, the young man liberates not only warded weapons from this sacred place, but also knowledge of long-lost wards that may well allow humanity to hold its own against the demons. However, this city is not of his heritage and the fight that ensues, over possession of its relics, and the mantle of its stewardship, may well shatter humanity forever and see a permanent night ascend from the Core to claim the world.

A thrilling ride through a broken world yearning for any sign of hope, the first three volumes of the Demon Cycle is, on balance, excellent fantasy fiction. Drawing on the venerable traditions of the epics that have shaped the genre, Mr. Brett begins with a premise that that has underpinned thousands of tales like it, the young man rising out of obscurity to defeat the indefatigable dark power. And yet, instead of relying upon the tropes typical of such tales, he exploits them, establishing the reader's expectations only to shatter them with creative developments of character and plot that charge what should be a stale adventure with energy and vigor. This is no mean feat; it is far easier to travel the well-worn path than it is to strike out on one's own. Thus, Mr. Brett should be celebrated for the exhilarating surprises his subversiveness generates.

While The Demon Cycle, thus far, has a cast of engaging, if overexposed characters, and a familiar world so reminiscent of more epics than I can name, it is pleasingly original in its willingness to draw in the symbols and the tropes of different genres to forge something new. Elements of horror, romance and dystopianism are all present here, lending the work the doom of a post-apocalyptic novel. And yet, these various threads are united by the work's protagonists, all of whom stubbornly put a shoulder into the plot until it is flying along, the work of potent, if opposing, wills. What's more, the author has drawn on the tropes of the video-game world to provide an even more familiar structure to the plot which sees heroes and villains alike methodically ascending from powerless obscurity to triumph and wonder.

The Demon Cycle ought to be a Frankenstein, a monster built from the stolen parts of unconnected creatures and, certainly, it has its bad moments. The genre-bending sees Mr. Brett discordantly inject episodes of extreme violence and physical and sexual abuse into a tale that, at times, feels as emotionally harmless as the Lord of The Rings. What's more, it's borrowing of things familiar to us leads it down a road to cultural insensitivity. For Mr. Brett has uncritically appropriated swaths of Bedouin and Arabic society to stand in for his world's desert people, exposing his readers to a thoroughly westernized view of cultures more complex than he often gives them credit for. These are flaws that drag on the three published novels, burdening them with unnecessary baggage. And yet, given that the series' strength is its capacity to subvert, perhaps these too are simply expectations being set up to be knocked down. We can hope.

This is a superb and unexpected delight that resists being set down. An adventure of the most darkly engaging kind... (4/5 Stars)

The intersection of genetics and will in the fascinating The Sports Gene

From The Week of November 25th, 2013

Even if human civilization wasn't already driven by the desire for commercial success, the answer to the question of what makes certain people successful would transfix humanity. We are all, to varying degrees, creatures of gifts and opportunities, ideas and pivotal moments. So why do some of us rise to the top while others of equal talent and ability slump into obscurity? Fortune surely plays a key role here; after all, the chaotic clashing of wills that defines the modern, competitive environment, is bound to spit out some who triumph as a result of being in the right place, at the right time, to gather up the pieces left behind by their bested betters. And yet, there are too many examples of successful individuals who have honed their bodies, and trained their minds, to achieve the improbable that lady luck's beneficence, be it circumstantial or genetic, cannot be the determining factor. Well, then, what is it? David Epstein investigates.

Though organized displays of feats of human skill are nearly as old as we are, the last hundred years has seen an explosion in competitive sports. The rise of the modern world, and all its expanding wealth, has fuelled the professionalization of what was, as late as the early 20th century, a largely amateur field, with men and women laying down their burdens to perform their talents for curious audiences eager to see the best that man had to offer. Now, thanks to televised broadcasts and corporate sponsorship, almost every conceivable pursuit of athletics contains a golden pot of wealth and prestige just waiting for the victor to claim it.

This yearning for status and income has thrown professional competition into overdrive, creating specimens of human skill and power unimaginable a century ago. These supremely toned machines have shattered records that scientists and experts thought unbreakable. But more than that, they've spurred a curiosity about why some athletes are better than others. CO2max and the 10,000-hour rule, the sprinter gene and fast-twitch muscles have all entered our lexicon as we probe at the heart of the human body in its highest, present-day form.

From Jamaican sprinters to Finnish skiers, from Kenyan runners to Scandinavian pole-vaulters, The Sports Gene is a fascinating, non-dogmatic exploration of the intersection of mind and muscle, genes and success. Mr. Epstein, a track-and-field athlete in his not-so-distant youth, eschews the Gladwellian approach to social and sports science, refusing to hail any given talent as the root of all athletic triumph. Instead, he gathers up all the various threads that might play a role in finishing first and attempts, in an open-minded way, to weigh them by their significance. In this, he takes fewer chances than the Gladwells and the Lehrers of the world, but he also profoundly reduces the odds of misleading his readers by oversimplifying what is inherently an extraordinarily complex system, extreme achievement.

Though Mr. Epstein devotes much more time to his investigation than he does to his pontifications, his conclusions do surface from time to time and seem, on the whole, reasonable and agreeable. The author rejects the notion that any one virtue lies at the heart of physical success; rather, it flows from the fusion of natural talent, mental fortitude and a great deal of practice. Certainly, there are athletes whose physical gifts outstrip these other components, individuals who rise on account of having won the genetic lottery, but it's equally clear that some among the genetically average have prospered thanks to an iron-willed desire to win. In this, we come to better understand both sporting success generally and generational athletes specifically. For when genetic gifts are married to a well-trained mind, there are few barriers left to ultimate success.

the Sports Gene could have been more opinionated. It could have attempted to dig more deeply into the truly exceptional amongst us, but we cannot call these flaws or missteps. For the work's virtue is in mixing together the small and the famous, the modest and the showy. It is a celebration of how success comes in simply too many forms to be so blithely defined by those who cynically set out to reduce thousand-dollar questions into ten-cent answers. For this, we all should be grateful.

An excellent and enlightening journey through the extremity of the human form... (4/5 Stars)

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

From The Week of September 9th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A vivid but disappointing sea-stained journey in Jamrach's Menagerie

As much as life would appear to be a series of experiences chained together by familiar environments and occurrences, friends and attitudes, it is, at root, the gestalt of billions of choices that are as unquantifiable as they are immeasurable. Most of these decision points are numbingly mundane, having long since fallen into the rhythm of automatic reflex. And yet, others are so consequential, so profound, that they leave one's existence unfathomably altered. This can be for good or ill, but it is most certainly one of the two, a reality that gives extra significance to hindsight and regret. If nothing else, Carol Birch's novel demonstrates this in engaging detail.

Born in the east end of Victorian London, little Jaffy Brown was facing a grim future. The son of a working-poor mother and a father in the wind, he was a prime target to become a statistic, another victim of the merciless, Dickensien England of the 19th century. But then, when he was but eight years old, an encounter with a tiger that had escaped from the cages of Charles jamrach, famed naturalist, transformed his mundane existence into one of adventure and opportunity. For being exposed to jamrach's animals not only landed him a new friend, Tim, and a girl to love, Tim's sister, it opened up his world to the possibilities of science and the sea, the latter of which he wholeheartedly embraced.

Added to a crew hired to fetch a fabled dragon from Asian shores, Jaffy and Tim, now teenagers, set out on a grand adventure, imagining that they'll return home if not heroes then certainly in the good graces of their employer, Jamrach. But when a series of calamities strikes the expedition, they are compelled to re-evaluate not only their choices and their friendships, but their ethics and their futures. For fate and fortune have turned against them and all that's left is the desperate need to survive.

A vivid, sea-stained yarn of endurance and fortitude in the face of catastrophe, Jamrach's Menagerie is a rocky, uneven experience. Ms. Birch is an accomplished storyteller who demonstrates as much skill capturing the joys and the hardships of the sea as she does in crafting the voices of her characters who remain pleasingly human in the face of extraordinary circumstances. But while her tale is buoyed by these virtues, along with moments of explosive beauty and violence, it is profoundly weighed down by long stretches of listless inactivity that left this reader feeling suffocated and repulsed.

Jamrach's Menagerie sports some unforgettable moments. Several encounters with legendary creatures of the sea are taut with tension, the reader forced to look helplessly on as Jaffy, the narrator, is overwhelmed by situations he could've never practiced for, much less appreciated the gravity of. These incidents are heart-wrenching, not just because they imperil our protagonists, but because they memorably capture the unimaginable violence inherent in whaling, a practice that would have driven the species to extinction had humanity not found, and properly exploited, other sources of oil.

And yet, as much as one is floored by these riveting passages, they are far and few between, brilliant spots of brightness amidst an otherwise featureless sea of suffering and degradation. Which leads us to the novel's gravest flaw. For other than casting the practice of whaling in a more violent light, Ms. Birch makes not a single, novel contribution to the genre in whose waters her novel wades. Dozens of classics on this very salty subject have been penned, works that seek to so grievously test the wills of their actors that normal, for them, becomes a distant and unachievable memory. And while that should not in any way preclude Ms. Birch from writing her own account, it does compel her to advance the genre in some way, to bring something new to the sea-voyage maptable. She has sadly failed to do so.

A disappointment. For a work long-listed for several awards, I expected far more. But unoriginality and lethargy doomed the work beyond repair. (2/5 Stars)

As much as life would appear to be a series of experiences chained together by familiar environments and occurrences, friends and attitudes, it is, at root, the gestalt of billions of choices that are as unquantifiable as they are immeasurable. Most of these decision points are numbingly mundane, having long since fallen into the rhythm of automatic reflex. And yet, others are so consequential, so profound, that they leave one's existence unfathomably altered. This can be for good or ill, but it is most certainly one of the two, a reality that gives extra significance to hindsight and regret. If nothing else, Carol Birch's novel demonstrates this in engaging detail.

Born in the east end of Victorian London, little Jaffy Brown was facing a grim future. The son of a working-poor mother and a father in the wind, he was a prime target to become a statistic, another victim of the merciless, Dickensien England of the 19th century. But then, when he was but eight years old, an encounter with a tiger that had escaped from the cages of Charles jamrach, famed naturalist, transformed his mundane existence into one of adventure and opportunity. For being exposed to jamrach's animals not only landed him a new friend, Tim, and a girl to love, Tim's sister, it opened up his world to the possibilities of science and the sea, the latter of which he wholeheartedly embraced.

Added to a crew hired to fetch a fabled dragon from Asian shores, Jaffy and Tim, now teenagers, set out on a grand adventure, imagining that they'll return home if not heroes then certainly in the good graces of their employer, Jamrach. But when a series of calamities strikes the expedition, they are compelled to re-evaluate not only their choices and their friendships, but their ethics and their futures. For fate and fortune have turned against them and all that's left is the desperate need to survive.

A vivid, sea-stained yarn of endurance and fortitude in the face of catastrophe, Jamrach's Menagerie is a rocky, uneven experience. Ms. Birch is an accomplished storyteller who demonstrates as much skill capturing the joys and the hardships of the sea as she does in crafting the voices of her characters who remain pleasingly human in the face of extraordinary circumstances. But while her tale is buoyed by these virtues, along with moments of explosive beauty and violence, it is profoundly weighed down by long stretches of listless inactivity that left this reader feeling suffocated and repulsed.

Jamrach's Menagerie sports some unforgettable moments. Several encounters with legendary creatures of the sea are taut with tension, the reader forced to look helplessly on as Jaffy, the narrator, is overwhelmed by situations he could've never practiced for, much less appreciated the gravity of. These incidents are heart-wrenching, not just because they imperil our protagonists, but because they memorably capture the unimaginable violence inherent in whaling, a practice that would have driven the species to extinction had humanity not found, and properly exploited, other sources of oil.

And yet, as much as one is floored by these riveting passages, they are far and few between, brilliant spots of brightness amidst an otherwise featureless sea of suffering and degradation. Which leads us to the novel's gravest flaw. For other than casting the practice of whaling in a more violent light, Ms. Birch makes not a single, novel contribution to the genre in whose waters her novel wades. Dozens of classics on this very salty subject have been penned, works that seek to so grievously test the wills of their actors that normal, for them, becomes a distant and unachievable memory. And while that should not in any way preclude Ms. Birch from writing her own account, it does compel her to advance the genre in some way, to bring something new to the sea-voyage maptable. She has sadly failed to do so.

A disappointment. For a work long-listed for several awards, I expected far more. But unoriginality and lethargy doomed the work beyond repair. (2/5 Stars)

The fusion of marketing, the Internet and SciFi in Pattern Recognition

From The Week of July 29th, 2013

As much as we would like to claim that capitalism rests on high-minded ideals of freedom and free markets, it is, inescapably, a system designed to encourage people to buy stuff. For it is only through this base consumerism that businesses can be profitable. Profitable businesses hire more employees which results in more people with employment. And what do employed people have? Money that they can spend on more products. This, capitalists argue, is a virtuous cycle, a means by which to iterate and innovate humanity towards a better, brighter future, but how can we know that it is not just a single, enormous pyramid scheme designed to line the pockets of the privileged few while everyone else is sold, through advertising, a vision of progress that most of them will never actually benefit from? Perhaps we can't know this for certain, but this first in William Gibson's contemporary works of science fiction will surely offer some cause to be cynical.

It is the summer of 2002 and the world is still recovering from the aftershocks of 9/11, an event which particularly haunts Cayce Pollard, a 32-year-old advertising consultant who lost her father on the same day, and in the same city, as the World Trade Center attack. Possessing both an affinity for the cultural effectiveness of trademarks and a peculiarly allergic aversion to brand logos potent enough to drive her to completely eliminate branding from her wardrobe, she is an invaluable asset to corporations looking to capture the zeitgeist of consumers and ride that wave to unimaginable riches.

This insight into the nature and value of semiotics, however, is a double-edged sword for Cayce. For while it has provided her with a skill that is as rare as it is prized, it has also driven her to seek patterns in everyday life in a manner similar to paranoid schizophrenics. This obsession comes to a head when Cayce finds herself mesmerized by snippets of mysterious footage leaked onto the Internet, the origins of which she must find. With the encouragement and aid from her friends in an online forum, she journeys to Tokyo, London and Moscow in an attempt to untangle a knot she cannot resist. For it in it lies truths about herself and her father that she must know.

A departure from the cyberpunk dystopia that made Mr. Gibson famous, Pattern Recognition is a headlong plunge into the vagaries of modern marketing that represents the culmination of the author's peculiar ideas about the zeitgeist begun in The Bridge Trilogy. Mr. Gibson's unusual insights into the manner in which some people process information were best represented by that trilogy's protagonist, Colin Laney, a man modified by a cocktail of drugs to find patterns in oceans of data. Cayce is, in a literary sense, the origin of that story, a creature who manifests an earlier, and considerably less potent, strain of that particular talent and uses it to locate and unknot significant events of the moment. Few people have explored this avenue of thought. Even so, it is difficult to imagine anyone doing it more justice than the author has here with his unique blend of weirdness, grace and cool.

More broadly, Pattern Recognition is, in spite of its protagonist's aversions, transfixed by brands. Scarcely a paragraph goes by in which a product name is not referenced. Moreover, Mr. Gibson drives home the degree to which brand names have become synonymous with their products by only referring to them as brands, iBooks, not computers. This creates a delightful reading experience, but more than that it invites the reader to contemplate marketing's power which only promises to grow as people and algorithms get better at understanding our eccentric tastes.

Amusingly, this fixation conjures up Pattern Recognition's most charming feature, the degree to which it is rooted in the now quaint technologies and rhythms of the early aughts. Cayce uses Netscape instead of Chrome, newsgroups instead of social media, laptops instead of smartphones. Indeed, written five years before the first iPhone, the mobile economy and the extent to which it has completely altered the information-sharing landscape is not present here in any way. Had this book been written merely three years later, we can well imagine Cayce having found her mysterious footage on youtube which almost seems designed for the express purpose of feeding Mr. Gibson's information obsessives.

This is by no means a perfect work. The plot is weak unto non-existent. The author makes some attempt to connect Cayce's journey to something that resembles action and drama, but this has mixed results at best. No, this is a novel almost entirely about the merits and flaws of men and women who, for reasons both internal and external, are compelled to live outside the box. In this, it engages our every sense. But if such speculative musings fail to capture the reader's interest, there's almost nothing else here.

Charming, fascinating, and sobering work... (3/5 Stars)

The Battle of Tora Bora vividly catalogued in Kill Bin Laden

From The Week of July 1st, 2013

Humanity puts great stock in symbols, images and individuals who can either inspire us to achieve our wildest dreams or remind us of the darkness that lies within us all. They can drive civilization forward on the back of all they've sacrificed to give us peace and stability, or seize us in selfish hatreds that harden our hearts and narrow our minds. But for all their historical and rhetorical power, symbols are only what we invest in them. After all, our symbols would be meaningless to someone who lived a thousand years ago, much less a thousand years from now. And yet, in the heat of moments of pain and confusion, this lesson is forgotten, neglected for the pleasures of exorcising them, a lesson taught quite well in Dalton Fury's adrenaline-fuelled memoir.

Though the September 11 Attacks sent powerful shockwaves of emotions through much of the world, they, in their audacity and their horror, also formally introduced the general public to Usama Bin Laden, the Saudi-born jihadist who had spent most of the previous 20 years funding and engineering acts of rebellion and terrorism. His crimes, even prior to 9/11, were legendary within international circles, but after this bold and heinous strike at monuments of American economic power, he became legendary, a creature of near-mythical powers who could direct devastating assaults against the world's most powerful nation, all from the relative comfort of the remote, tribal Hindu Kush.

This mountainous, central Asian region shared by Afghanistan and Pakistan had already proven, in the 1980s, to be a successful base of operations from which Afghan guerillas, supported by Arabian jihadists, attacked and disrupted the Soviet occupation of their country, eventually leading to the USSR's withdrawal from the unruly nation. Now it would perform a similar function for Usama Bin Laden who hoped to use his attacks against America to provoke his enemy into a ruinous war in the mountains he knew so well. Here, on familiar ground, he could watch America's might break against his winter stronghold and, in doing so, reveal to the world the extent of American weakness.

Instead of committing to such a war, the United States sent special operatives to Afghanistan, teams of Rangers, Deltas, SBS operatives and CIA agents armed for battle and packing the millions of dollars necessary to purchase the loyalty of local warlords who would execute the American-backed assaults against both the Taliban and al-Qaeda. This campaign would culminate in the Battle of Tora Bora, a series of skirmishes that would eventually smash Al-Qaeda, sending its key men into hiding and largely ending it as an organized force.

The commander's eye view of this most consequential battle, Kill Bin Laden is an arresting narrative of a hunt that narrowly missed capturing the world's most famous terrorist. Dalton Fury, the pseudonym for the Delta commander in charge of this mission, draws from his journal of those difficult few months to paint a thorough, if nationalistic, view of the battle, its protagonists, antagonists and the circumstances that lead to them clashing in this most remote mountain range. Supplementing his account with colorful anecdotes of life as a special operative, and detailing the absolute extremity of the training these soldiers endure to join such elite companies, Fury succeeds in conveying a sense of what it's like to be a member of the world's supreme fighting force, both its rewards and its disappointments. In this, he leaves little doubt of just how far these men have deviated from the normal life and the price they pay for living so far outside this most customary box.

However much Kill Bin Laden educates us about the lives and the demands of special forces, it stumbles when attempting to carry out its primary mission, to provide an unbiased account of the Battle of Tora Bora. Fury certainly reconstructs the combat, and the chain of events that lead to it, but these details are drowned out by his incessant need to denigrate the Afghans with whom he operated. In light of the fact that these warlords and their armies required American cash as motivation to fight, it seems reasonable to conclude that Fury is right to criticize their reluctance to fully engage with a fundamentalist enemy ravaging their homeland. But his tone so often devolves into outright scorn that his contempt for these men and their ways creates a great deal of room for doubt as to whether or not he's given them a fair hearing here.

That said, one gets the sense from these pages that Fury is not a man interested in outside criticisms, that he'd no more be interested in disguising or shading truths than he would be in retreating from a battle. And so, though we may harbor some doubts as to his fairness, the author has absolutely succeeded in his attempt to communicate his own personality and the ethos of the Deltas, facts which, alone, make this a worthwhile read.

History shifts on pivotal moments like these. Had Bin laden died at Tora Bora, it seems likely that the pretext for the War in Iraq would have been too weak for it to eventuate. The history of the 21st century's first decade would have unfolded far differently in the wake of such a monumental change. To see such a moment play out is a gripping experience no matter how prejudicial the execution. (3/5 Stars)

A bloody rumination on faith and sacrifice in Abaddon's Gate

From The Week of June 17th, 2013

Concerted, collective action towards a single, unified goal is, for humans, a challenge without peer. For though most of us possess the requisite generosity to selflessly offer our aid in times of stress and confusion, we are still creatures of ego, individuals who believe that our ideas, our beliefs, our plans, represent the right way and that everyone else's ideas, beliefs and plans are inherently less for being other, for being not of us. This self-centered mentality is not without its merits. After all, often, there is a right way. And if someone who possesses the requisite strength of personality leads his fellows in the direction of the truth, then the whole benefit. But how do we know what is right? How can be we be sure? And are confidence and ego our only guides? Abaddon's Gate ruminates.

In a future solar system dominated by political rivalries, ideological disputes and commercial realities, life is difficult and dangerous. Population pressures on Earth have not only forced society to adopt radically different ideas of the family unit, they've compelled the bold and the ambitious up the gravity well and into the solar system where opportunities are as wild as the various space stations, orbital habitats and domed moonbases are liberal. Though this offworld expansion has both developed beneficial technologies and brought back useful resources to the humans who need them, it has only deepened the balkanization of humanity into several distinct and contentious groups which are as selfish as they are bellicose.

Perhaps these rivalries would have resolved themselves in time, allowing humanity to enjoy a more united future, but even this optimistic outcome is short-circuited by a terrifying, alien threat that escaped from a research station in the solar system's outer reaches and migrated to Venus where it has systematically transformed the planet into a great, energetic ring inside which the understood laws of physics seem to give way to the secrets of an ancient, advanced civilization that, though it has past into darkness, has left behind its powerful and unknowable technologies. Fear of the unknown initially precludes the various factions from exploring the ring, but soon a desire for revenge overwhelms their common sense and they chase an apparent saboteur into the ring and humanity's future.

The probable, bloody conclusion to the riveting Expanse series, Abaddon's Gate is a long and savage last stand against both ignorance and justice. James S.A. Corey, the pen name for the writing team of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, largely relinquishes the tropes of horror and science fiction, deployed to such heart-pounding effect in The Expanse's first two volumes, and takes up in their stead the more complex themes of sacrifice, faith and collective action, each of which prove to have nearly as many interpreters as human beings. For there is no clean sacrifice, just like there is no true god. There is only what we as individuals want to think is true and right, realities which often clash with the conceptions of other humans with devastating and debilitating effect. We can no more find accurate confirmation for our beliefs than we can touch god. We have to rely, instead, on clear minds and good intentions and hope that these lead us into the light.

There is no doubt that Abaddon's Gate suffers from this switch in scope. Where the prior two entries mined such profitable material from the genres of horror and survivalism, this most recent effort has much more in common with the modern conception of the Western, a play in which sociopolitical realities thoroughly give way to the relative simplicity of two opposing forces fighting over control, over how things ought to be done, over who gets to do them and why. This ambitious switch in theme mirrors the switch in perspective. For most of the towering figures introduced in the prior works, excluding a handful of necessary principals, are discarded in favor of a new cast of largely female actors who, though refreshing, fail to capture the reader's interest to the degree of prior casts.

Moreover, the new cast keeps the perspective trapped on the various ships jockeying over the Ring and all that it contains, robbing us of the opportunity to experience, to some degree, what life inside the ring is like. Perhaps future volumes will dispel some of the mysteries left here, but this is cold comfort to this reader who felt as though Abaddon's Gate lacked the balance of the previous works and failed to deliver all that the series had promised.

Notwithstanding its flaws, The Expanse, overall, is wonderful, dark, imaginative science fiction that challenges our conceptions and insists that we view our optimism for the future through the lens of today's political realities. For this, it has earned a place amongst the great SciFi series of the 21st century. We can only hope that future additions to this series will help make Abaddon's Gate feel less vestigial. (3/5 Stars),

The remarkable, collaborative effort to put man in space in Rocket Men

From The Week of April 29, 2013

We all endeavor to inject life with meaning, to ensure that, after we are gone, we will be remembered as more than just a single link in a near-infinite generational chain. For some of us, this legacy is rooted in concrete notions of meaning:the rearing of children, the writing of books, the holding of public office. Such deeds cannot easily be forgotten. But for others, meaning is found only in less tangible locales, in ideas of achievement, of philosophy, even of freedom, concepts so ethereal as to be dismissed by our concretists who can only endow meaning in what they can hold.

And yet, this would be a narrow view. For while the concretists keep our world moving, the dreamers inspire us to heights of accomplishment and understanding that their contemporaries could have never fathomed. They accelerate, sometimes literally, the progress of civilization towards its enlightened endgame. There is no higher legacy. And that much Mr. Nelson demonstrates in his excellent history.

The 20th century's relationship with the rocket was one of moral and technological complexity. Originally born centuries ago in Greece and China, this awesome assemblage of violent propulsion took modern form in the fertile mind of a German scientist who, in the 1930s, had his dreams funded by a Third Reich seeking a means to defeat a pugnacious and physically isolated Britain. This destructive partnership produced the V-2, a machine of terror that launched from Germany and France and landed explosively amidst English industry, seeking both to cripple and subjugate that nation. This advancement was so notable in its day that, when the Second World War ended, those scientists and their families and fellow rocketeers were secreted away from a defeated Germany, protected from charges of war crimes and relocated to the American south to kindle a new dawn in military technology.

That dawn, though not without its consequences, kickstarted a revolution in 20th-century technology. For the powerful rockets, developed for the US military, not only made possible a whole range of satellite technologies, they bore aloft, for the first time, man from the planet upon which he evolved. In the early days, these missions were quick and dirty, barely controlled flights through near orbit of largely symbolic value. But as time advanced, and with efforts focused by a president's vow to land on Earth's only moon by the end of the 1960s, man finally left Earth orbit and joined the stars, planting a flag on the moon and, in doing so, igniting the imaginations of generations to come.

A history of both the rockets and the men who built and flew at their behest, Rocket Men is a sublime and exhilarating work of non-fiction that both inspires and enthralls. Drawing heavily from the personal accounts of astronauts and engineers from NASA's space program, it is, at times, an oral history of the Apollo program, one that documents deeds of already famous and well-chronicled men in a manner that is as refreshing as it is unbiased. For there is no lionization here. Mr. Nelson certainly admires the dedication of the 400,000 souls who worked to send these precious few into space, but he's equally willing to acknowledge not only their faults, but the early faults of NASA which saw the Apollo missions conducted with a substantial degree of disorganization and disunity.

Despite the rhetorical strength of Rocket Men's first-hand accounts, Mr. Nelson's effort to step back and adopt a wider, more historical view is equally potent. The reader is furnished with a brief but thorough summation of the Soviet rocket program that raced the United States to the stars. Moreover, he is filled in on historical details such as how the defeated German scientists found themselves working in Alabama, how that transition took place and what became of it. Finally, he is blessed with a broader view of NASA's cultural impact on the United States of the 1960s and 1970s, a time when American power, excepting the Vietnam War, seemed endless.

Rocket Men is not a perfect history. But for a brief mention of the means by which women were senselessly disqualified from the Apollo program, Mr. Nelson pays almost no heed to the rampant sexism of NASA during this period. Moreover, he dispenses with the rocket's pre-20th-century history with a few casual paragraphs about the deeds of past civilizations. A harsh marker would certainly characterize these as unforgivable omissions from a work such as this. But one senses that Mr. Nelson was more interested in the taste and feel of Apollo, the enormity of the rockets that powered it, the complexity of the systems that nourished it and the exceptional natures of the men who populated it, a reality which makes these omissions understandable if regrettable.

A riveting history of an inspiring era that makes clear all that America has lost in turning away from its dangerous and difficult manned missions. Excellent work... (4/5 Stars)

Gritty The Dagger and The Coin a first rate fantasy epic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A sweeping epic brought to a fitting end in A Memory of Light

From The Week of January 7, 2013
While it can, at times, descend into a hell of pompous verbosity, a composition riddled with more splash than substance, few forms of human expression rival the epic. For its numerous volumes, its thousands of pages and its countless words are, for the reader, not a flowery attempt to maximize profits by stretching to its limits a good idea but a singular commitment to the author's literary fantasy, an act of faith that is rewarded with membership to an exclusive club of fans, who like Brahmin, know the secret words and gestures, the symbols and the poetry, of something special, of something unique. The epic creates a world of ideas and textures, heros and villains, made three-dimensional by not only the room to be more fully developed, but by the passage of time outside the epic, years in which the reader matures in both his understanding of the world and of its universal themes. This simply cannot be replicated by a single, passing volume. For nothing that can be consumed in a day can evoke the same intensity of emotion, much less kindle, with its conclusion, the same sense of loss. It is a parallel world and few have been woven with such vividness and flair than The Wheel of Time which is brought to a fittingly apocalyptic end with The Memory of Light.

In a world of magic and sword, of beauty and taint, the Last Battle has come, heralding the end of everything. For what was set in motion thousands of years earlier, with the opening of the Dark One's prison by ambitious men and women made foolish by an unquenchable lust for power, has now culminated in a climactic war between the beleaguered and vulnerable forces of the Light and the ascendent and merciless powers of shadow which clash to determine the future of the world.

The Light, helmed by the Dragon Reborn, the reincarnated general who failed in his attempt to mitigate the damage of his former friends who bored into the Dark One's prison, seeks to preserve what they know, to fight for the queens and customs, the banners and the lands, that comprise their battered world. The shadow, meanwhile, guided by Shai'tan, the manifestation of annihilation, seeks to end it, to unweave the Pattern of life and either replace it with nothingness, as some would have it, or, alternatively, with a world of manifest darkness, a world of fealty and slavery, of suffering and ownership.

The Light cannot win. For they failed in their only other attempt to stanch the shadow, an attempt which broke the world, devolving it from a jewel of technology and freedom into a morass of ignorance and loss. And if the Dark One could not be stopped by the skill and the knowledge of a civilization at its peak, then how can a ragtag collection of medieval farmers and knights, of self-important mystics and magicians, do better? And yet they must. For should they fail, everything that they ever were, centuries of lives and memories, of love and labor, will be lost, leaving beauty to be consumed by the void.

Begun with 1990's The Eye of The World, The Wheel of Time spanned 23 years, 14 volumes and two authors. At times, it was devoured by its own self-importance, descending into an obsessive attention to detail that caused its conceiver, James Rigney, writing under the pseudonym Robert Jordan, to dramatically expand the series from its six initial volumes, a choice which both haunted the epic and necessitated, with Mr. Rigney's death, its conclusion by another, younger hand. It was a series characterized by shrewish women, overwrought mysticism and countless plot digressions. And yet, for all its flaws, it was a work of astonishing imagination, of unbelievable complexity and of unrivaled escapism that encouraged a generation of readers to reconceive of everything from love to war, of heroism to cowardice. In this, it was a remarkable success.

For all its virtues, though, The Wheel of Time would have been little more than an exercise in torment had its concluding volume failed to steer this ponderous ship into a rewarding and safe harbor. Fortunately, then, A Memory of Light is a worthy end to a worthy epic. For after the series spent thirteen volumes promising a war to end all wars, A Memory of Light delivers with 992 pages of cacophonous conflict that, at times, seems to turn the entire world to rubble. The destinies of all of its primary characters are finally fulfilled and in a manner which pleases far more than it frustrates. This is no minor achievement from a series that promised so much for so long.

For all its heros and its battles, its magic and its apocalyptica, The Wheel of Time will be remembered for its mythos which lurches to a surprising conclusion in this final novel. This was an epic about balanced polarities, light and dark, purity and taint, women and men, implying strongly that the world is only balanced through a cosmic game of tug of war executed by two equally potent opponents. This seems like an overly simplistic conception of a world which appears to be much more about spectrums than polarities. Moreover, the series elevated steadfastness of character to the foremost rank of virtue while largely rejecting the notion that wisdom comes through knowledge. It contends, rather, that knowledge leads to power and that power breeds the kind of pride and selfishness that can break the world. This sad tale has surely occurred and yet the inverse is also true. Simple folk have produced just as many narrowminded, ignorant souls as the educated have produced powermongers. It is a matter of temperament not lifestyle, of personality not temptation. Nonetheless, that the series dares to ask these questions, and that it answers them with a fully formed opinion, puts it well above the fray.

This is, for most of those who read it, a memorable series that has, here, been brought to a close with a momentous coda that won't be soon forgotten. A wonderful series that, now that it is over, can proceed to have its annoyances and missteps polished by the fondness of time's passing. (4/5 Stars)

the origins and value of salt explored in Mark Kurlansky's Salt

From The Week of December 31, 2012
As much as we endeavor to give proper credit to the substances and systems that underpin our lives, we all take for granted life's staples. For from the global climate that protects us to the earthly food that nourishes us, these things have always been there, readily available and rarely absent. Their sheer ubiquity leads us to foolishly conclude that it has forever been, and will always be, thus, a truth that has put at risk everything we hold dear. As dire as this may sound, there are ways of mitigating this damage, just as their are ways of not taking the ubiquitous for granted. The most effective of these is knowledge, the means by which all ignorance is banished and reality embraced. Mr. Kurlansky helps us make just such a transition with one of life's most underappreciated commodities in this fact-heavy exploration of salt.

Thought once to be exceedingly rare, salt is one of the most widespread substances on earth. Used in everything from the enlivening of our oceans to the functioning of our minds and bodies, it is a fundamental substance in the propagation and nourishment of life. These truths, however, have only become apparent in the most recent centuries, times in which science has had the freedom to expose salt's secrets. In earlier eras, salt was thought rare enough to be not only a commodity, but one precious enough to be treated like gold, confined to chests and guarded by soldiers. This period of artificial scarcity has left a lasting legacy in our language where salt is the etymology for any number of frequently used words and idioms.

Beyond its role in biochemistry, however, salt performed a key service in the creation of human civilization. For its deployment is one of the most effective means of preserving food, a reality which allowed early, adventurous societies to spread out from their origins, across mountains and over oceans, to explore the unknown and plant there civilization. Without salt, we might have never had empire. And without empire, we might not have today.

From ancient China to medieval Europe, from saltmines to salt chests, Mr. Kurlansky relentlessly exposes the history of this most widely used substance. And so effective is his capturing of salt's prior preciousness that it makes poignant irony out of the fact that we, today, suffer from an doverabundance of salt in our diets. This would have been dismissed as absurd in times past, when salt was considered valuable enough to be the stuff of state monopolies. The notion that it would have been spent so thoughtlessly would have been cause for uproar. But the author is out to achieve more than irony. He has set himself here the goal of capturing the ways in which salt has shaped civilization, revealing, on the journey, a surprising set of enjoyable facts that, while once deadly, have settled comfortably into the arena of intriguingly humorous.

For all its facts and its revelations, however, Salt fails to cohere around a narrative,a throughline with which Mr. Kurlansky can guide his readers. Too often, the author simply trudges from era to era, society to society, reconstructing the traditions of the past for the amusement of the present. He does not engender the work with vision, with a unifying sentiment that would allow us to come away moved instead of simply charmed. And there can be no doubt that such a narrative it exists. For how else would civilization have spread if the preservation of food was unto impossible? How would we have evolved differently if salt was as scarce as once thought? Mr. Kurlansky's work is the poorer for neglecting such speculation.

Salt will entertain those readers who enjoy both trivia and irony, but its failure to be more than this narrows its audience considerably. (3/5 Stars)

The race to unearth the secrets of Venus revealed in Chasing Venus

From The Week of December 31, 2012
No matter how far we advance, our search for scientific knowledge and spiritual understanding will never end. For while we can explore the depths of our oceans and search out life among the stars, we can peer into the heart of atoms and measure the heft of galaxies, we will never solve all of the universe's mysteries. To do so, we'd become like gods, so far removed from our human shells, our biological brains, that we would no longer be who we are today, creatures driven by a desire to know, by a need to see, by the thirst to compel the enigmas of our world to surrender their secrets. As much as any other characteristic, this is what defines us, a fact made all the more apparent by Ms. Wulf's engaging micro history.

The brightest planet in our sky, Venus has, for millennia, captivated humanity. Endowed with divinity by various faiths and recognized as an enigma by others, its eccentric orbit has caused it to be identified as both the Morning Star and the Evening Star, positions it occupies at various points in the year. In more recent times, astronomers even bestowed upon it an Earth-like atmosphere, speculation that flowed from a strange, visual effect, seen from Earth, when Venus eclipses the sun. Only Mars has prompted more astronomical and astrological musings, though, even here Venus outstrips its red brother. For its unusual cosmic dance with Earth allows those of us in the present to better understand human cultures of the past which associated Venus with the number eight, the number of years that separate the two ends of Venus' once-in-a-century transit.

For centuries, this was all Venus was, a heavenly object made sacred by a lack of scientific understanding. But when human society rose out of the ashes of Middle-Age ignorance to embrace the Renaissance of science and discovery, Venus became not only a point of study, it was recognized as the key to fathoming the distance of Earth from its sun. By measuring Venus during its stellar transit, astronomers could calculate the stellar parallax, providing a conclusive answer to one of the outstanding questions of the Copernican era. There was just one problem. Venus only eclipses the sun only twice every 105 years. Should weather or circumstance conspire to thwart the efforts of astronomers to take measurements from this transit, they would have to come back eight years later and try again. And should they again be defeated by misfortune, they would be long dead before they would ever again see its like.

In Chasing Venus, Ms. Wulf chronicles the most pivotal of these transit cycles, the 18th-century pairing which, first in 1761 and then in 1769, allowed astronomers to take the stellar parallax. Introducing her readers to the scientific minds of the day, the author describes the extraordinary efforts of various European scientific societies to dispatch their best and most adventurous minds to key points on the globe where the observing of Venus' transit would be most advantageous. But while the harrowing journeys of these mostly brave men provides the backbone to Ms. Wulf's history, her examination of Europe and its politics during this time grants it its punch. For while scientists and astronomers agitated with their royal governments for the funds and the indulgences to execute this rare and intricate endeavor, their needs and desires were utterly eclipsed by the agendas of the monarchs of Russia and Britain, France and Germany, powerful men and women who not only controlled the fates of millions, but used this astronomical oddity to advance the dignity of their kingdoms. This two-tiered perspective allows the novel to operate on scales both individual and imperial, local and global, without losing any of its poignance.

There's no question that Ms. Wulf's work is buoyed by the remarkable efforts of now forgotten men, scientists who braved Siberian winters and equatorial summers to better understand their world. The sheer amount of thought, planning and effort that these individuals invested just in the hope for clear skies and good readings is inspiring. Today, it takes only hours to fly anywhere in the world. We need not brave tempestuous seas and their ruthless pirates, we need not be subject to unknowable diseases and the whims of royal governments. And yet, this achievement meant more to them than it does to us even though it is easily within our grasp. However, for as much as the material sings, Ms. Wulf's contributions are up to the task of reminding us of our past and the giants who characterized it. As excellent as it is expeditious... (4/5 Stars)

Soldier Dogs by Maria Goodavage

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

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

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

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

Dragon Sea by Frank Pope

From The Week of November 5, 2012

Though many would argue otherwise, there are few among us who can resist the lure of the glorious score, that incredible, transformative moment in which one's life fortunes are completely changed, vaulting them into the stratosphere of wealth and status. In our classist world, the rewards are simply too rich, too plentiful, for anyone short of a saint to turn down the opportunity to abandon drudgery for the soft lap of luxury. However, such moments rarely just arrive on one's doorstep. They have to be sought out and pursued, wooed with a mixture of prudence and persistence. They have to be planned for, every detail anticipated, if success it to be achieved. And even then, Lady Luck has her say. Thus are the many fortune-seekers weeded out, the soft bark falling away to reveal the hardness within. What kind of mind does such a treasure-hunter possess? And is all the planning and the yearning worth it? Mr. Pope is deeply qualified to answer this question. He does so with thoughtful skill in Dragon Sea.

Packed to the gills with Vietnamese pottery, the Hoi An was a 15th-century merchant vessel that plied the warm seas of Southeast Asia. Sunk before it could deliver its payload, the wreck spent 500 years entombed under more than 200 feet of water, just 22 miles off the coast of Vietnam, until it was chanced upon by fishermen in the 1990s. The discovery was a fateful one for the Hoi an and its long-dead crew. For its re-emergence caused it to tumble onto the radars of treasure-hunters and archaeologists, pragmatists and idealists, each of whom wanted nothing more than to get their hands on this ancient prize. But recovering artifacts from a 500-year-old wreck, half-buried in the ocean floor is no simple feat.

Enter Ong Soo Hin, a Malaysian businessman with a hunger for profit and mastery. Enchanted by both the retrieval of the wreck, and all that it would earn him, Hin sought out and received the blessing of the Vietnam government, assembled a diving team, chartered a pricy boat as his base of operations and, with collaborations from archaeologists and conservationists, began to pull up what had lain buried for so long. But no sooner was the pottery rising to the surface then problems began to plague the mission, a series of calamities that not only sapped the morale of the expedition's members, but culminated in profound disharmonies between Hin and the mission's lead archaeologist which would eventually leave both men feeling as though they'd been betrayed by the other. An appropriately Shakespearian end to a tragic enterprise...

From its re-discovery to the epic calamity of the sale of its goods, Dragon Sea is an engrossing journey into the world of treasure-hunting. Something of an understudy to the expedition's archaeologist, Mr. Pope is by no means an objective narrator. For he spent months with the international dive team that retrieved the Vietnamese pottery, helping to catalogue it all while being sheltered by the very man (Hin) who was trying to sell it. However, for all that we must take Mr. Pope's account of events with a grain of salt, his detailed description of the treasure-hunter's life is as vivid as it is enlightening. In the course of his tale, the author not only elucidates the history of diving and the saturation system that allowed Hin's team to retrieve valuables under conditions that would kill an unprotected human, he generates dynamic profiles of the divers and academics, the businessmen and the thrill-seekers, who made up the expedition's roster. In this, he admirably entwines edification with entertainment to create an excellent product.

For all this, Dragon Sea is not without its blindspots. Though Mr. Pope touches on the moral dilemmas inherent in allowing treasure-seekers to claim salvage of cultural relics, selling off substantial amounts of invaluable art to pay for their expenses en-route to filling their pockets with profit, he fails to touch on the degree to which looting shipwrecks is, for all intents and purposes, graverobbing. People died on the Hoi An. Some were even buried with it. And yet no one, from the moneymen to the academics hesitate for even a moment to consider that, were this graveyard on land, no one would allow them to sell off grave goods to the highest bidder, on Ebay of all places. Instead, it's simply accepted that, because treasures at sea are harder to get to, and consequently more expensive to fetch, a compromise has to be made; some loot is given to the expeditions' backers to sell and other pieces go to the academics and the museums to study and display. This is not only insensitive, it's narrowminded. Even If we assume, for a moment, that it's morally acceptable to loot the wreck, then ban all public sales of the relics. Compel museums to contract with treasure-hunters to retrieve the loot and hand it on to the museums. The excuse that museums cannot fund such projects seems incompatible with a world in which substantial sums are frequently raised for all manner of projects consequential and otherwise.

This is quality work. Mr. Pope pulls back the curtain on a dark and sleazy world we'd do well to familiarize ourselves with. For perhaps then its practices would be all the cleaner for the scrutiny. (3/5 Stars)