Fires of The Faithful: Eliana's Song 01 by Naomi Kritzer

From The Week of February 27, 2011

I found Ms. Kritzer in one of my periodic plunges into the depths of the internet, trolling for good, dark, fantasy fiction. And though the results of such searches can be frustratingly hit or miss, this potent, allegorical tale is certainly a success.

Set in a fantasy realm inspired by, and which closely hews to, renaissance Italy, a hardworking family manages to send their young and talented daughter to a musical conservatory where, while she is learning the violin, she has her eyes opened to the powerful religious and magical forces that underpin her existence. The former becomes evident to Eliana when one of her fellow students introduces her to a kind of earth music that the dominant, monotheistic faith has banned because of its connection to the now suppressed pagan faith that inspired it. The latter arrives in the form of Eliana's roommate who carries within her a strength that Eliana and her fellows cannot imagine. As the country beyond the conservatory devolves into savage war, Eliana flees her schooling only to discover terrible truths about her family, her land, her emperor, and her faith, truths that have forged for her a rebel destiny she has no choice but to embrace.

Ms. Kritzer has served up a full platter of issues for her readers to sink their teeth into. Theologically, her decision to cast the enforcers of the Christian-like religion as cruel and oppressive villains leaves little doubt that her sympathies lie with the pagans. But whatever one might think of her religious politics, the extent to which she's highlighted the brutality of one religion's suppression of another is worthwhile. It It has come to pass, many times in our world, that religions which claim to practice only peace wind up having some of the most heinous crimes committed in their honors. More interesting to me, though, was the conversation here about the nature of power. That magic in Eliana's world is drawn out of the earth and, as a consequence, sickens it, serves as a wonderful analogy for power of any kind that is gathered up and used regardless of its consequences. Our entire world is powered by fossil fuels, the use of which sickens our world, but we use them because we believe we must, because we are driven by necessity. So too the magicians here who use their powers because they believe they must, choosing not to think about the price that is paid. Finally, politically, the necessity of good people to stand up to tyranny is, while hardly a new theme in literature, successfully drawn. Ms. Kritzer's tale suffers from a bad case of the predictable. Most of the outcomes here are readily apparent before they occur which can make the 400 odd pages drag as our heroine plods her way to conclusions the reader's already drawn.

For those who appreciate good fantasy that uses its world to speak to some of our own issues, this is worth a pickup. For Christians sensitive about their religion, be prepared to be reminded of your faith's bloody history. The parallels are not subtle. Good work... (3/5 Stars)

Emma Goldman by John C. Chalberg

From The Week of February 20, 2011

My admiration of Emma Goldman demands that, someday, I read her two volume autobiography, but until I can bring myself to sit down with 800 pages of someone's personal thoughts and deeds, I settle for Mr. Chalberg's much more manageable, and objective, 240 page biography of this Russian-born, American individualist who helped give birth to modern libertarianism.

Emma Goldman's extraordinary life was characterized by a lifelong struggle against governments far more powerful than she. Having emigrated to America at 16, she carried with her the injustices of the Russian empire and the hope for a new, fairer existence in America. But after realizing that America was plagued by some of the same inequities she had suffered in her homeland, beliefs crystalized by the Haymarket Riot, she took up her anarchist pen and signed away a normal life by writing and then publishing essays and pamphlets which challenged the oppressive policies of successive American governments. For this, she was hounded and spied upon by authorities looking for a reason to deport her. When she advocated against the citizen draft for the First World War, she finally gave them that reason and she was thrown out of the country, returning to Russia where she was one of the first intellectuals to see through Vladimir Lenin.

Mr. Chalberg covers the major events in Goldman's life, articulating her politics and the core principles that motivated them. He also delves into her complex love life which seems to have brought her no more happiness than her public life which ended badly. Her particular strain of individualism, while admirable in its advocation of the end to all personal prejudice, was staunchly anti-war, a position which obligated her to oppose the Second World War against Hitler. This may not be the most lyrical or insightful of biographies, but Mr. Chalberg's thorough and concise account of exceptional individual does honor to a subject worthy of more attention than she receives. (3/5 Stars)

Angel Of Vengeance by Ana Siljak

From The Week of February 20, 2011

Today, we in the West live in countries which have evolved beyond righteous political assassinations. When killings, and attempted killings, do take place, we find they are inevitably instigated by minds troubled by mental illness. The reality is, our standard of living, coupled with our general belief in a just society, has leeched all of the righteousness out of the act. There is no striking a blow for freedom, but this wasn't always the case. Ms. Siljak's moving and chilling chronicle of the attempted murder, which kicked off an age of terror and revolution in 19th century Russia, not only animates the radicals who first gave us the concepts of terrorism and nihilism, it shines a light on the soul-crushing conditions which are necessary for people to knowingly give up their liberty, and even their lives, to perform acts of violent justice.

On January 24th, 1878, Vera Zasulich, the radicalized daughter of an impoverished noble family, capitalized on a public audience with the governor of St. Petersburg, withdrawing from her clothes a powerful revolver and shooting the governor in the lower torso. She made no attempt to flee in the chaotic aftermath; in fact, she deliberately allowed herself to be arrested in the belief that to flee would make her seem, to the people, ashamed or guilty. She wanted Russia to know why she had committed this crime. She wanted them to follow her example and stand up for themselves and demand justice from a monarchy and a nobility that had been leeching off of them for generations. The assassination, however, backfired on Zasulich in two dramatic ways. First, the governor survived her attack, the bullet having lodged too low in his pelvis to do damage to his vital organs. But secondly, and much more importantly, Zasulich, rather than being martyred by the Russian establishment she so loathed, she was the beneficiary of a newly liberalized judicial system which bent over backwards to grant her a fair trial. Her lawyer was able to argue that Zasulich was a victim of the system, a convenient lie Zasulich detested. Consequently, her act became the trigger event for an age of terror, but her message of vengeance and justice was lost in the tumult.

This is an outstanding biography of a woman pushed into radicalism by rank injustice and the ambition of vicious revolutionaries. Ms. Siljak is juggling a lot of balls here: illuminating Zasulich's background, articulating the injustices Zasulich sought to give voice to, and fitting the events of 1878 into the broader framework of Zasulich's unhappy life. Ms. Siljak succeeds in every respect. Highlights here include the depiction of the unspeakably cruel and undoubtedly charismatic Sergei Nechaev, the revolutionary leader and nihilist who radicalized Zasulich, and the incredible irony that Zasulich's message was lost in what amounted to the 19th century version of the O.J. Trial! Unbelievable. Lowlights are mostly limited to Ms. Siljak's plodding description of Zasulich's frustrating and depressing later life. On balance, this is an exceptional biography. Top five this year, easily. (5/5 Stars)

The Floating Brothel by Sian Rees

From The Week of February 20, 2011

The power of human mores never ceases to amaze me. Racism and sexism, slavery and eugenics... Something can be perfectly normative in one generation and be perfectly abhorrent in another. We don't have a gene that encodes for decency, for morality; so we fall back on the cultural norms of our times to teach us good from bad, acceptable from objectionable. Is it any wonder, then, that each generation seems to reveal the sins of the one just prior? After all, these generational mores are the only judges of what is a virtue and what is a sin. The Floating Brothel is a wonderful and devastating example of this power and the inability of people to see beyond their own prejudices to truths which are, to us, now blindingly obvious.

Ms. Rees has put together, here, a chronicle of the systematic attempts of 18th century British authorities to gather up their country's petty, wasteful criminals, impose upon them punitive sentences, and then mercilessly banish them from their homeland and their families, consigning them to hardship and struggle in the new Australian colony. These authorities could not conceive of a truth so obvious to us now, that, in large part, crime flows from poverty. If the laws and customs of the land prevent human beings from pursuing and attaining their basic needs for sex, shelter, food and comfort within the law, then they will try to find extralegal, and even illegal, ways of satisfying those needs. Human need will always trump the laws of the land, especially when those laws are seen by the less fortunate to be unjust. As a consequence of this self-righteousness, politicians and judges of the period ordered ships bound for Australia to be filled with women who had stolen to feed themselves and their families. Not only were these ships rife with disease, many of the women in question were ordered to become the ship-wives of the sailors who lead them across half the known world to to an as-yet untamed land.

Ms. Rees does an exceptional job of illustrating the cruelty of not only the men who consigned these petty criminals to hazard and death, but the journey that followed their banishment from England. The narrative is more or less divided into three parts: the first covering the socioeconomic pressures that lead to their crimes and their sentences, the second illustrating their tempestuous journey to Australia, and the third detailing the existential challenges of staying alive in the new world. As successful as Ms. Rees is at revealing the inequities that launched these ships, parts two and three suffer from a descent into the dry recitation of dates, times, facts and figures typical of creaky histories. Nonetheless, part one empowers the story enough to carry it over the line. (3/5 Stars)

Reading Lolita In Tehran by Azar Nafisi

From The Week of February 20, 2011

Is there a more pernicious, human force than extremism? From enslaving minds to destroying governments, it has a whole host of virulent powers, but perhaps the most terrifying of these is its capacity to silence intellectuals who, in all their knowledge, are a danger to that special brand of illogic practiced by extremism. Reading Lolita In Tehran does many things well, but its articulation of this assault on society's educators is, by far, its most important achievement.

Born in Iran to a successful family, Ms. Nafisi was educated in America before returning, in the late 1970s, to her homeland to teach English at the University of Tehran. Not long after taking up her professorship, the Iranian revolution brought to power zealots who swept away many of the secular freedoms Iranians once enjoyed. Frustrated and offended by stricter and stricter codes of religious conduct, Ms. Nafisi quits the university when it is made clear to her that she will no longer be allowed to teach the great works of Western civilization made verboten by the new regime. Refusing to go quietly into the night, she establishes a small reading circle for some of her female students, running it out of her home under the guise of ladies who lunch. And it is this circle which forms the core of Ms. Nafisi's memoir, exposing us to the young women of revolutionary Iran, women who have had their freedoms usurped, their life choices narrowed, their futures dimmed by ignorance.

Though there are numerous self-indulgent detours into Ms. Nafisi's uncompelling personal history, the narrative is primarily driven by the fallout in the classroom of the Regime's crackdown on universities and the consequences this crackdown has on Ms. Nafisi's female students. The story creatively cuts back and forth between Ms. Nafisi's attempts to teach English literature in a university being radicalized by Islamic fundamentalists and the personal lives of her students, all of whom struggle with all they've been made to sacrifice. Their pain, at being treated as objects, not people, is acute, and it's a pain that I can well imagine applies to the whole of Iranian society which has now spent 30 years being slowly devoured by radical Islam. What will be left when the clerics are done? Will there be a civil society who knows of Nabokov and Joyce, Fitzgerald and Twain? We'll have to wait to find out.

Ms. Nafisi is a bit too taken with her own story -- the plight of her students is infinitely more interesting than her own --, but the extent to which she has captured the slow descent into chaos of a world governed by anti-intellectuals is powerful and revealing. (3/5 Stars)

Player One by Douglas Coupland

From The Week of February 20, 2011

Though Player One is superficially about the consequences of reaching and then enduring the shock of Peak Oil, at the story's core is a fascinating conversation about the need for all humans to connect, to speak a mutual language, and to belong to something that matters.

In the very near future, the world changes forever when humanity reaches Peak Oil, the point at which the extraction of oil from the earth, thanks to both demand and scarcity, enters a phase of permanent decline. Because no effective alternative to fossil fuels has been found, the cost of oil rockets up from $100 to $400 in hours. Thanks to the law of supply and demand, it will never again decrease in value. During this eschatological event, four, random Canadians cross paths in an airport bar, bonding as they watch the world's economy dismantled. Karen, a middle-aged mom, has arranged to meet a date from the internet. But when he proves disappointing, she turns her interest upon Rick, the bartender of the lounge, a man who has placed all his faith for a new beginning in a personal wellness guru who has promised to meet him today, of all days. Luke, a preacher who recently lost his faith in god, has stolen thousands of dollars from his church's charity fund, but his nihilistic intentions are swayed when he meets Rachel, a beautiful genius who lacks even rudimentary social skills. As the hours pass, and the world's plight deepens, these four will share their stories and their desires and their needs as they struggle to survive the deaththrows of the civilization they once knew.

Mr. Coupland has put together a pleasingly philosophical novel which, while narratively driven by the apocalypse, concerns itself with themes of belief and communication. The former manifests in each character's need to have faith in someone or something that has the power to deliver them from their own failings. The latter makes itself felt through each character's attempt to communicate to someone, anyone, their need to belong, to be made whole. Mr. Coupland makes no bones of these themes; his characters openly proclaim their fears in outbursts of unrealistic dialogue. Nonetheless, it works precisely because this is a philosophical piece that draws its value from the articulation of human nature and human need, not from an exact reconstruction of reality. Wonderfully thoughtful, pleasingly succinct, and, for all its declarations, well-plotted. (4/5 Stars)

Hater by David Moody

From The Week of February 20, 2011

In order to explore the various aspects of human existence, dramatists often find it necessary to capture relatively minor, societal trends and blow them up to apocalyptic proportions to ensure that their audiences heed their messages of warning. This is what fuels the popularity of genres like zombie fiction, stories built on the fear of our fellow humans devolving into mindless slavishness as a result of repetitive work, poor education, and a willingness to be mastered by their social betters. Mr. Moody is as guilty of this over-amplification as anyone, taking the basic zombie scare, welding some us-versus-them politics on top of it, and then turning the heat up on his re-imagined stew of horror until only an inferno remains. If this is literary art, it is the art of the sledgehammer.

In contemporary England, everyday Britains go about their daily lives, unaware that doom is about to befall them. A new kind of virus is sweeping the country, an affliction which, if contracted, has a good chance of turning the infected into a hateful, violent savage. The condition is characterized by a sudden certainty that everyone around the infected has decided to kill him. The Haters, as they come to be called, respond to this threat by lashing out and brutally murdering the totally innocent bystanders surrounding them. No one, no matter how precious to the victim, is safe from his attacks.

Danny, our narrator, is scraping by at a fairly menial job while supporting a wife and kids. He is the one who communicates to us the slow build of the Hater virus. It is through his eyes that we watch civil society pulled apart while the government looks on, paralyzed. Soon enough, life across Britain has ground to a halt as the Haters threaten to take over and destroy civilization with their nihilism. Will Danny save his family? Will his loved ones contract the illness? Where is it safe to go?

This might have been a thought provoking book if it was not so completely covered in gore; after all, Mr. Moody is playing with some powerful themes: the frailties of identity, both personal and national; the catch 22 of paranoia; and the oppositional nature of our us-versus-them societies. However, the tale mirrors the devolvement of its British society, beginning innocently and intellectually and ending in an orgy of mindless barbarism. In-between, it is a steady march down into Hell. This is not instructive or revelatory; it is gleefully anarchic, as mindless as its Haters. The extent to which Mr. Moody was able to flip the paradigm, exploring paranoia and violence from the inside, is interesting, but the explosions and the noise and the blood make it impossible to hear anything meaningful here. Searing, overwhelming and caustic... (2/5 Stars)

Curfewed Night by Basharat Peer

From The Week of February 20, 2011

In this gripping memoir, Mr. Peer brings to life a part of the world which, while familiar to us in name, is, for most of us in the West, nothing more than disputed ground on a distant continent. For Mr. Peer, however, Kashmir is home: where his parents raised him, where his grandparents loved him, and where his community nurtured him into adulthood. Though it has been contested ground since 1947, it was, in his youth, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, a largely peaceful place where the author and his peers underwent adolescences not unlike those experienced by teenagers in the developed world. But with the acceleration of violent posturing between India and Pakistan in the late 1980s, and through into the 1990s, Kashmir became a proxy state, neutral but mutually claimed ground in which armies from both sides skirmished in a kind of Asian cold war which obliterated Kashmir's civil society and triggered an exodus of native Kashmiri to other lands.

Curfewed Night is an exceptionally moving piece of journalism. Mr. Peer's understated narration permits the reader to be a vicarious witness to an underreported tragedy of cold war, the fallout that lands on innocents ground up between the gears of two massive and conflicting states. There are political opinions here, as Mr. Peer leaves little doubt of his resentment over the Indian crackdown which was a deathblow to his homeland, but this is primarily a chronicle of one boy's coming of age in a time of tension and strife. First, he watches some of his friends radicalized to fight in a hopeless war, then he feels the terror of having his honorable father and his proud village both put squarely in the crosshairs of Indian reprisal. By the end of his adolescence, it's clear that he has been changed forever.

This is an old story that has, and will, be told of many lands, places destroyed because of quirks of politics and geography that fatefully entrap them between agitated behemoths. I doubt, however, many of such accounts have been composed with such pride, sadness, empathy, and passion. In exposing the price he paid for watching his homeland sundered, Mr. Peer teaches those who read this book a lesson about the consequences of national conflict and national policy they won't soon forget. (5/5 Stars)

The Bookseller Of Kabul by Asne Seierstad

From The Week of February 13, 2011

I imagine that all of us who read books about international conflicts do so in hopes of learning about the root causes that both underpin and empower them. The problem is, while books can grant us an understanding of a conflict's broad strokes, it can't ever get at its essential truths. These can only come through immersion in a culture. Everything short of this relies on the opinions of reporters and their subjects, people whose educations, biases, agendas, we can't possibly know and account for. And so the portrait we wind up with is impossibly distorted by fragments of moments blown up to fit the author's expectations.

So what do we do? We turn to books like The Bookseller of Kabul, point-of-view accounts which give voice to the silenced citizens from whom we would never otherwise hear a word. The Afghan family, with whom Ms. Seierstad devotes a year of her life, living under their roof, eating their food, observing their fights, gives us an incredible texture, a reality, to life in war that broader, more journalistic efforts simply cannot match. The family's mundane struggles to survive during the foundational period of the American occupation, post-Taliban, is more powerful than any summation of the key events, the policies, the generals, the corruption, the national aspirations. It shows us the heartbeat of a place, its loves and its jealousies, its terrors and its triumphs. And in doing so, it allows us to understand the cruel prejudices which have been allowed to shape a land like Afghanistan into what we see today.

Ms. Seierstad does her best to disappear inside her own book, handing the narrative completely over to the fascinating family who take her into their home. But while this grants the reader a first-hand account of life for Afghanis in war-torn Afghanistan, it runs the risk of controversy. After all, Ms. Seierstad claims to know a great deal about the emotions and motivations of her characters, intimacies which we cannot know for sure she drew out of them. But while the patriarch of the family has disputed her version of events, her characterization seems both solid and remarkable. From the stress polygamy puts on the patriarch's wives, to the silenced but intelligent daughter who is treated like a mule by the family, everyone here is believable and tragic, leaving the reader to mourn for their lost potential and hope for their better future.

The Bookseller of Kabul is experimental non-fiction. It tells a true story, but does so without the author's voice to explain where the detail emanates from. And in this, it reads like narrative fiction. Whatever its classification, it is an intense experience which, while explaining little about the overall conflict, imparts a great deal about the price the little people pay in times of war. This is a book about both the sadness and the hope of a land obliterated by zealotry and combat. I won't soon forget it. (3/5 Stars)

Tea With Hezbollah by Ted Dekker & Carl Medearis

The spirit of reckless adventure animates Tea With Hezbollah, a tour of the Middle East guided by two Western authors who, driven by a need to understand hatred of America, set out to interview the region's key figures. Though some of their intended targets refuse to meet with them, they get surprisingly far in their quest, meeting with some of the Middle East's most reclusive powerbrokers and putting to them some basic queries about love, forgiveness, justice and brotherhood. Though this book will not re-shape the way the West views the Middle East, it is not without its fascinations and its revelations.

From Egyptian cabs to Saudi palaces, Mr. Dekker and Mr. Medearis give as much respect to the views of the average Arab as they do to the most powerful cleric. Once the religiosity has been parsed out, the interviews transcribed here reveal a universality of human wants and behaviors which span all ideologies, all faiths. All cultures have a tendency to gin up conspiracy theories to explain away defeats; they manifest belief in personal gods so that meaning can be applied to life; and they make important distinctions between the decency of regular citizens and the selfishness of governments who represent their interests. While These are all reassuringly human sentiments, it is this last which offered me the most comfort. Our governments may be the faces our nations put to the world, but they are hardly representative of us, of our sensitivities, our interests. They are snapshots of our emotions on election day and little else. And so, when the leading cleric of Hezbollah recognizes this distinction, choosing to focus his enmity on Western governments and not Western people, the reader is given a small but valuable glimpse into the rationales of men who are otherwise incomprehensible to us in the West.

This is far from a perfect book. Its portrait of the region is not only filtered through the conversations and the subjects Mr. Dekker and Mr. Medearis chose to include here, it is obscured by the agendas of the men with whom the authors spoke. But even if we must keep many grains of salt nearby while consuming this piece, there's value here. Humans are more or less the same, driven by the same goals, the same needs. Their circumstances are what make them different. We are all born into specific times, in specific places, with specific custom's, into specific traditions. These mores combine with our personalities to create our identities. But even if the finished products look, talk, act, and believe differently, the underlying software is still the same, urging us to seek out the same peace. Perhaps, if we all keep this in mind, West and East, the themes of brotherhood expressed in this book will be strong enough to quiet the hatred.

Interesting work. The interview with Nasrallah is captivating, but the tone here is ragged, veering between light-hearted and zealous. (3/5 Stars)

Dreams And Shadows by Robin Wright

From The Week of February 13, 2011

While freedom is the birthright of all intelligent beings, it is, in some parts of the world, a right rarely practiced or protected. Though there are many different superficial reasons for this most grievous oversight, there is, to my mind, only one root cause, instability. It can corrupt political systems, corrode economic practices, and destroy societal norms, all this while flowing effortlessly across national borders. After all, what are the odds that country A remains a peaceful, neutral, multicultural, economically viable state while country B, with whom it shares a border, descends into violent, chaotic, despotic conflict? Poor, to say the least. And yet this is the Middle East, a collection of re-drawn nations whose populations know only colonialism and authoritarianism, where, for the last 50 years, instability has had its AK47 pressed to the sweaty temple of intellectual and scientific enlightenment. Find peace in that...

Ms. Wright, a veteran, American journalist, has travelled to, and clearly spent a great deal of time in, the Arab world. Dreams And Shadows is as much a distillation of those many adventures as it is a political and historical primer for the region, its many states, its violent regimes, its savage politics, and its heroic dissidents. From the hama Massacre in Syria to the most recent flare-up between Israel and Lebanon, she covers, here, many of the region's key events, painting a 30 year picture of political and religious extremism and the extent to which brave souls, armed with nothing more than their minds and their courage, have tried to stanch it. Iran's zealousness, Syria's ruthlessness, Egypt's corruption, Lebanon's sadness, and Morocco's darkness all play prominent roles here, illuminating, for those of us lucky enough to know stability, what it's like to live in a world where hope can be so easily and cruelly snuffed out.

This kind of sweeping narrative can be prone to generalizations, as the author's mind, built to seek out patterns, tries to make all the pieces fit. But Ms. Wright does an admirable job of steering clear of grand pronouncements, substituting them for descriptions of the events she's seen and the meetings she's had, with the oppressed and their oppressors. I found her succinct characterization of the 2006 Israeli-Lebanese war particularly revealing. The only major flaw here is the necessarily inconsistent approach Ms. Wright has taken with each of her national subjects. In Lebanon, much of the conversation is taken up with its leaders, while elsewhere the action is focused on beleaguered dissidents trying to overthrow their jailers. But I imagine this to be a largely unavoidable consequent of following the story. One can only talk to people who will talk to you... Excellent, sobering, enlightening, and especially relevant in the light of the Arab Spring. In this, it is far more prescient than dated. (4/5 Stars)

The Grave Tattoo by Val McDermid

From The Week of February 13, 2011

In the past, I've enjoyed Ms. McDermid's work; she has created some wonderfully complex protagonists and some truly revolting villains. The Grave Tattoo, however, did little else than but disappoint. There's a wonderful idea here, but the execution of the idea leaves much to be desired.

In contemporary England, the corpse of a man who might provide answers to a 200 year old mystery washes up out of the past, triggering a series of events which can only lead to darkness and deceit. Taking center stage in the drama that follows is Jane Gresham, a Wordsworth scholar, who lives a lonely and frustrated existence. But when the body in question seems to lend credence to her theory, that one of HMS Bounty's mutineers might have secretly returned to England, Jane's life is transformed as her tireless endeavor to get to the bottom of the mystery invites jealousy and chaos from the selfish men who surround her. Companioning her on this hunt for the truth is Tenille, a teenaged girl whose impoverished upbringing makes her escape into Romantic poetry all the more necessary. Together, they just might solve Jane's mystery despite the best efforts of the police, art dealers and other scholars to thwart them.

It's clear that a great deal of research went into composing this rare, stand-alone volume from Ms. McDermid, but dogged research and a good idea don't always amalgamate into a good tale. The Grave Tattoo lacks focus, defusing its potency across way too many unnecessary protagonists. Way too often, I found myself flipping pages in hopes of returning to characters more vital to the story. It is meticulously plotted, but what it gains in symmetry it loses in dramatic punch. Needed to be a hundred pages shorter and two protagonists lighter to move me. Disappointing... I sensed that Ms. McDermid was rather too enchanted with her concept to see that her finished product lacked the sharpness and the intensity of some of her other work. (2/5 Stars)

The Woman Who Fell From The Sky by Jennifer Steil

From The Week of February 06, 2011

It was a surreal experience to read this book while protests in Yemen threaten to topple Ali Abdullah Saleh from power; for The Woman Who Fell From The Sky concerns, in whole, the trials and tribulations of an American woman's attempts to bring the standards of Western journalism to a Yemeni newspaper. Though her efforts to teach Journalism 101 to her reporters has its ups and downs, Ms. Steil has totally succeeded in penning a fantastic memoir of her years living in this particularly enchanting Arab dictatorship.

Yemen practices what we might charitably call a faux democracy. While all the instruments of representative government exist, corruption rules the day. President Saleh maintains his position through the liberal use of force against those who disagree with him. Though Yemen has a notional free press, the reality on the ground is far more pragmatic, with the publishers of newspapers well aware of the lines that must not be crossed. Any criticism of the government will be swiftly and mercilessly punished.

This is the country into which Ms. Steil falls. Invited to leave her cozy New York life for an uncertain and problematic existence as chief editor of a Yemeni newspaper, Ms. Steil seizes the opportunity for adventure. But it's not until she arrives in Yemen that she realizes she must not only publish a newspaper, she must teach everyone at the newspaper how a paper is published. Confronted by censorship, sexism and institutional arrogance written into the Yemeni DNA, Ms. Steil soldiers forth with admirable doggedness, leaving as profound a mark on her fellows at the Yemen Observer as the country itself leaves on her. For she makes clear in her account that she's fallen in love with this most crazy, and yet oddly lovable, Arab nation.

While this memoir speaks eloquently to the weighty issue of press freedom inside a dictatorship, it's Ms. Steil's fondness for Yemeni culture that makes her effort here memorable. She unreservedly throws herself, headlong, into a world she barely knows, seeking out knowledge and experience with an admirable absence of prejudice or judgement. Her love for the people she befriends seems as genuine as her antipathy towards the blockheads at the newspaper who ignorantly squander the resources around them. Yes, Ms. Steil devotes too much time to her love life which matters a lot more to her than it does to her readers, but this flaw did little to diminish my enjoyment of a book which taught me as much about a culture as it did the subject. A rare feat. (4/5 Stars)

The Grand Turk by John Freely

From The Week of February 06, 2011

For Nearly eleven-hundred years, the Byzantine empire sheltered the flickering flame of Western civilization, preserving the knowledge of the Greeks and the Romans long after the fall of those societies. But after many rulers and many victories, the Byzantine empire met its match. In 1453, it faced its existential threat and, deprived of the cunning that had kept it alive for so long, collapsed before the onslaught of its Ottoman enemies. On may 29th, 1453, the world changed forever, when a 21-year-old Mehmed II, the Conquerer and Grand Turk, entered shattered Constantinople, making it, for the next 500 years, the seat of Ottoman power.

Mr. Freely indulges in some unnecessary details, trudging through Mehmed's complicated family tree, but this is, on the whole, a balanced and vivid account of one of the world's most successful conquerers. From the politics which surrounded his early life to his myriad conquests, Mr. Freely valiantly illuminates the life of a man who seized his opportunity to be at the heart of world events. For in conquering the Byzantines, he banished the last remnant of the old world and replaced it with the new, a world still somewhat familiar these 550 years later. Mehmed the Conquerer lengthened the arm of Islam and permanently reconfigured the boundary between the eastern and western worlds, ensuring generations of war and conflict between Asian and European civilizations, each of which laid claim to the one right and true god.

Understandably, Mr. Freely devotes most of his time here to the siege of Constantinople, Mehmed II's crowning achievement. But he does spend some time with the Grand Turk's incursions into Europe, efforts which met with mixed success. For while he would make inroads into Bosnia, he suffered great losses in Hungary, losses which, it could be argued, were all that stood between him and the Islamification of Europe. A giant of history at a nexus point in time... Mr. Freely does justice to an area of history all-too-lightly regarded in the West. (3/5 Stars)

A Needle In The Right Hand Of God by R.howard Bloch

From The Week of February 06, 2011

The Bayeux Tapestry is an exceptional piece of history. Likely commissioned by members of William The Conquerer's family, it is a visual retelling of the Norman Conquest of England, encapsulated and transferred to a 224 foot length of cloth that has survived for more than 900 years. Stop and consider that for a moment. Fires, religious wars, natural disasters, lootings, political upheavals, the Nazis... It has endured all to remain with us, an invaluable resource for our understanding of a medieval world so often clouded by the mists of time.

Mr. Bloch, here, not only recounts the Tapestry's long history, he details the ways and means of its creation by reconstructing the labors of countless women to embroider colored yarn on a linen backdrop. Every image, from the grandest battles to the simplest of letters was the result of incalculable hours of necessarily errorless stitching. But while its making and its adventures fascinate, Mr. Bloch is at his best, here, filling in the events depicted by its myriad scenes. Being an account of the Conquest from the viewpoint of its victors, the reader requires a historian to provide both context and balance to a biased tale. And while Mr. Bloch's account is more pro-Norman than the version posited by Harriet Harvey Wood, it is just as edifying.

It's such a shame that the piecing together of our history has been reduced to the interpretation of wall hangings, yet, there's something glorious about such necessities. For while we pick it apart for nuance, we're forced to acknowledge that all history, all understanding, is transient, that who we are and what we achieve will be retained, forgotten, remembered and forgotten again as we and our descendants endure the rapids of the future. There's nothing especially revelatory about Mr. Bloch's work here, but he certainly does justice to a worthy subject. (3/5 Stars)