A forgotten stain on the American character in The Blood Telegram

From The Week of November 18th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The devastating history of eugenics chronicled in War Against the Weak

From The Week of July 8th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Survivalists, cold wars, and a Hellenic future in The Major Ariane Kedros Trilogy

From The Week of April 29, 2013

As much as we treasure free will as a concept, many of us do not exercise it. For the world as we know it must have structure. It must have rules. And if those rules are to have any force or effect, there must be individuals willing to enforce them, to follow orders that they might find personally distasteful or disagreeable. This is the bargain these individuals make with society, the ignoring of their own right to choose in the name of advancing the greater good. But what if the orders they are asked to execute are so monstrous, so unimaginably beyond the greater good? What does the order-follower do then when all her training tells her to do what she's been told? Then the individual is divided between their duty and their honor, between the smart thing and the right thing. And heaven pity her if she chooses wrongly. Laura Reeve demonstrates in her uneven trilogy.

In a future where the limitations of faster-than-light travel have been circumvented by N-space travel, human civilization has reached for and grasped the stars. Humanity now inhabits any number of worlds and space stations, journeying between stars almost as commonly as as they once traversed the roads of old Earth. But for all this technological freedom and planetary diversity, harmony is an exceedingly scarce commodity. For once the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano on old Earth made inhabiting that planet challenging, at best, and Hellish, at worst, Earth and its colonies calcified into two distinct and antagonistic factions that, even many decades on, continues to fester.

One of the central events in this hot and cold war was the ostensible destruction of one of the Terran factions star systems via the use of a banned weapon capable of annihilating stars. This genocidal act not only fuelled Terran enmity towards the Autonomists, the one-time colonies of Earth that banned together in defiance of its power, it instigated a hunt for the war criminals who carried out the mission to destroy an inhabited star system.

Major Ariane Kedros was the pilot of that mission. An augmented human, re-engineered to survive the psychological stresses of N-space, she belongs to the autonomist's intelligence directorate, an organization of special operatives tasked with black missions in the defiance of the colonies. However, since that fateful mission, which now haunts the major's dreams, Kedros' service to the directorate has become somewhat involuntary, a forced relationship that, thanks to their protection of her identity, she cannot exit. For should she force their hand, they might reveal her true identity and consign her to a short, brutal life on the run.

With this blackmail firmly in place, the directorate tasks Kedros with a series of dangerous missions that result in the enemy suspecting her true identity. And yet, for as much as the Terrans may want to kill Kedros, she might well have access to something even greater than revenge, an alien artifact, that she and her partner discovered floating in space that belongs to no culture humanity's ever encountered. Revenge or discovery, justice or knowledge... Whatever the Terrans choose, Kedros will have to endure. For she will never escape her past.

A trio of action-packed mysteries, all of which, in some way, stem from Kedros' past, The Major Ariane Kedros Trilogy is an adrenalized but ultimately unsatisfying adventure through an inventive future world. Providing virtually no backstory for her bewildering amalgam of current and future technologies, languages, cultures and disputes, Ms. Reeve relies on her readers to tease out the vital links that will offer some sort of context to what is otherwise a dizzying array of alliances and cultures that fail to track with our own.

From all appearances, Ms. Reeve has used the Peloponnesian War as inspiration for her two primary factions, with the role of the democratic Athenians taken up by the autonomists and that of the autocratic Spartans represented by the Terran League. For anyone lacking in familiarity with this most ancient Greek conflict, the Terrans will appear to be as utterly unrecognizable to us as their motives are to the autonomists. This is not cleverness on the author's part, a slow unspooling of a dense and interesting mystery that's gradually filled in as the narrative progresses. It is a failure to communicate, to provide a basic framework from which the reader can intuit the rules of the game.

The setting, though, is only the beginning of the flaws here. Ms. Reeve fails, at virtually every turn, to endow her characters with three-dimensionality. Kedros' partner, her boss, even the Terrans who pursue her, are all only partially realized people, a constellation of dim stars that are only here to provide a means by which Ariane Kedros can act. Kedros herself, meanwhile, is a mass of contradictions. She is the embodiment of self-pity and guilt for what she's done, and yet she at no point exhibits remorse for what she's done. On the contrary, she insists that she would do it again. Perhaps this is merely bravado, but it certainly suggests an inconsistency of character that is all-the-more devastating for it being rooted in the trilogy's major protagonist. In fact, the only individual in this entire saga who appears to have consistent motives is one of Ariane's past crewmates who has been tormented and twisted by her guilt.

There are virtues here. The Minoans, Ms. Reeve's alien race, are fascinating creatures with a fairly original society and relationship with their technology. Moreover, the third human faction, space-born generationalists who have built enormous ships with which to slowly explore the universe, are a fascinating, inward-looking culture that is worthy of the time Ms. Reeve spends with them. However, these virtues are even more frustrating when one realizes that Ms. Reeve has genuine talent, especially for imagining alternate societies. She merely fails to fully animate them and bind them together with plots that will showcase them.

At times, a thoughtful and engaging exploration of the limits of human endurance, but ultimately marred by an unwillingness to take full advantage of the pieces of the puzzle... (2/5 Stars)

the rocky road to Justice in postwar Kosovo in Under The Blue Flag

From The Week of April 15, 2013

When tallying up the cost of war, it's natural for our minds to first turn to the most obvious losses: lives and fortunes. These are measurable deficits, quantifiable burdens that can be inscribed into the hearts and textbooks of a people and used as a crude means by which to compare conflicts. But just because they are obvious doesn't make them foremost in importance. On the contrary, sometimes those things we cannot measure -- the grief of a broken heart, the arrested development of a child without a school, the cynicism of a citizen who knows the rule of law does not hold -- have far more lasting consequences than the readily apparent. Their ephemeral natures trick us into underestimating their collective power to instill in war's victims a gloominess about the future that means far more than a rubbled building. After all, a building can be rebuilt. A broken spirit cannot so easily be mended. This Philip Kearney convincingly contends in his memoir of the most fascinating and challenging adventure of his career.

One of the bloodiest chapters in a most gruesome campaign, the Kosovo War, lasting little over a year, pitted two ethnic communities against one another in a vicious fight for freedom. Unwilling to allow one of its provinces to secede from its collective, Yugoslavia endeavored to crush Kosovo by subjecting it with crimes the likes of which Europe had not seen since the Second World War some five decades earlier. Equally unwilling to be ground out beneath the Serbian bootheel, Kosovo violently resisted, an act which caused it to spawn the powerful and ruthless Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) which sought to win, through terrorism and guerilla warfare, what could not be won in open combat. Though the war lasted over fifteen months, it devastated Kosovo to such a degree that the United Nations stepped in to run the protectorate until it could stand on its own.

At this time, Mr. Kearney was a successful prosecutor in his native San Francisco. Married, and with work to keep him occupied, the prospect of him traveling to Kosovo to help the UN bring cases of war crimes against some of Kosovo's foulest characters must have seemed impossibly remote. And yet, the restlessness of a midlife crisis, combined with an abiding desire to do lasting good while at the height of his powers, found Mr. Kearney applying to the UN for a six-month stint in Kosovo as a UN-appointed prosecutor in a postwar Kosovo coming to grips with its deep and enduring wounds. This first adventure begot a second and, before he was through, Mr. Kearney would have spent eighteen months in war-ravaged Kosovo, helping to restore order to a lawless and broken place.

While problematic as a work of history, Under The Blue Flag is nonetheless an inspiring document that wonderfully captures the rewarding nature of dangerous, but ultimately righteous, work. Mr. Kearney virtually abandoned his comfortable life, trading it in for an existence in Kosovo that was both imperiled and difficult. Threatened by gangsters and terrorists, none of whom were interested in the niceties of civilization, he helped bring to that war-torn place a measure of justice long lost in first the corruption of Communism and then in the depravity of ethnic strife. He did all this all while knowing it would cost him money, friendships and even his marriage. He did it to satisfy the thirsts of his spirit, but also for a sense of rightness, of accomplishment, the potence of which only comes from a job well done under extraordinary circumstances.

However, for all that Mr. Kearney paints vivid portraits of the men he prosecuted, and while his detailing of their crimes sheds light on the awfulness of postwar Kosovo, his prose leaves a great deal to be desired. Under the Blue Flag is devoid of literary flare. Other than a few paragraphs describing the destitute nature of the author's environs, we're almost never presented with a verbal image of Kosovo. Mr. Kearney is fond of describing how much he loves this beleaguered place, and the loyalty he feels to the men and women with whom he worked to put some truly gruesome characters behind bars, but his talents utterly fail him when it comes time to root these criminals in the homeland for which so many died. Moreover, Mr. Kearney makes virtually no attempt to describe the Kosovo War, much less to place it in any historical context. Other than a few scant references to 14th-century battles that live on in the hearts and minds of modern-day Serbians, he makes no attempt to inform his readers about the creation of Yugoslavia, much less the Kosovo war which gave him the opportunity to serve in such a remarkable way. These are bodyblows to a memoir that aspires to be more than self-aggrandizement.

Under the Blue Flag is moving work that inspires us to take chances and be true to our selves and our desires. However, its failure to educate its readers on any issue but the personal history of Mr. Kearney, and the suffering of the peoples of the Balkans endeavoring to find justice in a broken world, prevents it from achieving greatness. (3/5 Stars)

A beautiful, bleak tragedy slowly unfurled in Hugh Howey's Wool Series

From The Week of march 4, 2013
Our lies are always with us. For as much as we try to extricate ourselves from them, their stains linger so long as the truths sequestered by their telling remain obscured. And even though it is within our power to remove such a stain with a simple, straightforward confession, most of us cannot bring ourselves to do so. For with the passing of every moment, a lie grows in power, accreting in proportion with the damage it would cause when revealed. For most of us, this is a relatively small problem confined to relationships which operate almost entirely on trust, trust that is undermined with every falsehood. But what about the big lies? The lies institutions sell, the lies societies nurture, the lies governments spin? What if a lie is so monstrously large that the confessing of it would break the world? Mr. Howey uses this question to wonderful advantage in his engrossing and creepy series.

Centuries from now, Earth has become a wasteland. Soaring cities and resplendent nature have been rubbled and ruined by human hubris. What form this hubris may have taken has been obscured by time, by the passing of generations absorbed by the rhythms of life. And yet, the evidence of that ancient disaster remains, the images of gray skies, vicious winds and dead earth beamed into the silo that now harbors what is left of humanity. Outside, the world is cold and decayed, but within the Silo it is warm and vibrant, 144 floors of orderly existence shafting deep into the earth where oil and nitrogen, the essentials of life, can be mined and used to empower civilization.

From all outward appearances, the Silo is quite a harmonious place. Modelled on a small American town, it deploys a hierarchical power structure to safeguard the survival of the species. Its many trades, from engineering to portering, are clearly delineated, their talent pools refreshed by a well-organized cast system that, though not completely rigid, ensures that vocational knowledge is largely past down through families instead of being lost in the chaos of self-determination. This eliminates the need for universities. For aside from some basic knowledge, children grow up absorbing what they need to know from their friends, their family and their environment, a perfect incubator for the generation to follow.

This harmony, however, is a facade. For within the Silo, knowledge is tightly controlled, the rebellious sins of the past erased by not just censorship, but the pact each individual makes with the Silo's collective, that he or she will obey the laws and will avoid heretical questions about the past and the outside, the contemplation of which can lead to disaster. The Silo is largely successful in maintaining this pact, but when the wife of its sheriff is broken by the discovery of one of the Silo's most terrible secrets, the Silo's lawman initiates an investigation, the consequences of which will rock the Silo for generations to come.

One of the first major, sustainable successes in self-publishing, The Wool Series is a riveting collection of short stories which re-imagines the post-apocalyptic drama for the 21st century. Harnessing the most terrifying elements of horror, mystery and science fiction, Mr. Howey manages to infest the reader with a powerful sense of creeping wrongness, of gnawing claustrophobia, of crushing bleakness which, though potent, is rarely off-putting. This is a serious alchemical achievement. For activating such emotions can, when overcooked, provoke in the reader an antipathy that, when conjured, is all-but impossible to suppress. That Mr. Howey has found the proper balance here exemplifies his skill.

Though the series adopts a fairly novel approach to an old premise, the notion of a civilization in a bottle, this is not its only virtue. Mr. Howey has imbued his characters with winning personalities that rarely stray into two-dimensional caricatures. What at first appears to be overly simplistic blacks and whites eventually evolve into far more complicated grays whose ambiguities please far more than they irritate. Moreover, the author's sense of cause and effect is delightful. For its clear that the entire plot of the series is kicked off by a single, subtle action, one that creates a subsequent chain that ignites wholesale changes in the author's universe. Instead of fighting this, or even modulating it, Mr. Howey appears only to encourage the eruption, to follow eagerly where the falling dominos lead him. This is a refreshing development for a fairly stale genre.

For all its virtues, though, The Wool Series is not without its flaws. Some of its ex-post justifications for how the world came to be so twisted are decidedly threadbare, revealing gaps in logic that are troublesome. Moreover, after the first five stories, which grapple with the lives of those within the Silo, the series branches out to try to animate the days leading up to the disaster that created this dark world. This fails both theatrically and as a character study. For not only are the near-future characters decidedly less interesting than those who populate the Silo, the premature revelation of how the Silo came to be robs us of one of the series' most successful features, that the reader knew only as much as the Silo's characters knew, a reality which allowed us to unknot the mystery of its secrets and its origins alongside them. Granting us this omnipotent perspective severs this intimate connection with the Silo. It's clear that the author did this with an eye towards converging past and present at the climax of his tale, but the price he has paid for this is, to my mind, too high.

This is excellent, cross-disciplinary science fiction with the power to keep one up at night with dreams of a dark, authoritarian future. It would be worthy of your hard-earned even if each tale wasn't priced at $1, a supreme value that lights the way to the future of publishing, a little coin from a mass audience. One of the most inventive reads in some time... (4/5 Stars)

The Moreau Series by S. Andrew Swann

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sunflower by Simon Wiesenthal

From The Week of May 28, 2012

Forgiveness is a powerful and vexing pursuit. For to forgive is, in a critical sense, to absolve, to wipe clean the slate of past wrongs in hopes of normalizing relations between perpetrators and victims. Considering that, by and large, more is gained from friendship than from enmity, such a normalization is beneficial to both sides, draining from an emotional wound that ugliest of poisons which harden our hearts and calcify our grudges.

Such logic, however, depends upon the perpetrator being, to some degree, sane. It depends upon him grasping the incentive not to wrong in the future. It depends upon the wrong not reaching the level of the heinous. For how can we forgive the unforgivable? How can we allow our most wicked crimes to be absolved with but a few heartfelt words? Are some sins not too grievous, too nihilistic, for forgiveness? Mr. Wiesenthal compellingly ruminates on this question in this short but moving work.

The year is 1943 and much of Europe is awash in war. Though Nazi Germany has recently endured two decisive defeats in their efforts to conquer Great Britain and Russia, their ubermensch war machine churns relentlessly onward in hopes of realizing its Fuhrer's dreams for an Aryan world. In the path of that terrible destiny stands Simon Wiesenthal, a young, European Jew, whose life is irrevocably altered when he is condemned to unimaginable deprivations in the Lemberg concentration camp for no better reason than he is Jewish.

While at the camp, as he and his fellows suffer, Mr. Wiesenthal is approached by a nurse who leads him to a wounded Nazi soldier. Over an afternoon, the blinded warrior describes, to Mr. Wiesenthal, the circumstances and the tragedies that lead him to this moment, asking, at the culmination of his tale, for the Jewish man's forgiveness. Struggling with this burden, Mr. Wiesenthal solicits the opinions of others in the camp, agonizing over his responsibilities in a matter both consequential and insignificant. After all, one soldier's appeal for forgiveness does not absolve the Nazis. And yet, is it not a key piece of information in the understanding of how this horror came about and how it can be made right in the future? Haunted, Mr. Wiesenthal is liberated from the camp and seeks out the soldier's mother, in hopes of finding some cruelty there that will ease his conscience, but when she only has sadness and regret to offer him, his search must go on.

The Sunflower is a momentous and disturbing search for the truth to an unanswerable question. What are the limits of forgiveness? Harnessing the malevolent energies of perhaps the worst, most systemic crime in human history, Mr. Wiesenthal, a man who would eventually become a noted hunter of Nazis, confronts the notion that forgiveness might well be too small, too soft for crimes against humanity. For when faced with a collaboration of men and women intent upon the arbitrary extermination of a people, what can be gained by forgiveness? What future is there after the apologies are made and closure found? The dead remain. The atrocities remain. History cannot be undone, nor paved over. Some stains cannot out.

And yet, there must be an end sometime. The burdens conveyed by such wicked crimes must be laid down. For to clutch close such pain is to allow ones life to continue to be ensnared by the cruel ideologies that once sought to be dominant in the world. They cannot be forgotten, but nor can they be allowed to rule what time the victim has left. If forgiveness can be a means through which peace can come to the victim, and it seems to me a necessary component to the finding of peace, then it must be granted, if only as a means of smoothing the victim's return to something resembling normality.

As a piece of literature, The Sunflower is intriguingly composed. Divided into two parts, it first relates Mr. Wiesenthal's experience and then answers that with essays from prominent figures who have consumed the story, digested its philosophical nourishment and provided, in turn, their individual answers to his ultimately subjective question. Can one man grant a regime absolution? Does forgiveness even matter in a secularist world? How do we weigh the need to move past horror against our need for justice? All such thorny aspects to this persistent problem are raised and addressed by the luminaries, both light and dark, who speak to Mr. Wiesenthal's brief but telling experience with his wounded captor.

There are no limits to forgiveness. There cannot be. For what has been done cannot be unmade. What has past cannot be rewritten. It is. It must be met, assimilated, and, finally, fatefully, laid to rest. To not forgive is to be consumed by the crime, to extend the suffering conveyed by it. there must be an end.

Moving and provocative work... (4/5 Stars)

The Shaol Sequence Trilogy by Gary Gibson

From The Week of April 30, 2012

Though colonialism has left behind a legacy of racism, classism and economic decay from which half the world is still trying to make a slow, painful recovery, its practice nonetheless imparted one enduring lesson that humanity would do well never to forget. In the name of self-preservation, of ourselves and our society, our interests and our resources, we will do anything. There is no crime too heinous, no betrayal too bitter, no compromise too dark, capable of dissuading us from preserving that which we consider ours.

If we are willing, in the name of ideology, to send our young off to die in the jungles of foreign wars just as readily as we are willing, in the name of self-interest, to make deals with the devils of our world, so long as they benefit us, then we certainly won't hesitate to exploit inferior societies with whatever technological advantages we have over them, not even if those advantages are nuclear, capable of annihilating entire populations when deployed. Though Mr. Gibson's cyberpunk-inspired space opera is packed with action and aliens, alliances and betrayals, this enduring truth is what underpins his epic. He uses it to thoughtful effect.

By the 26th century, life has become complicated for the human race. Having taken to the stars and colonized over a dozen worlds, humanity ought to be prospering thanks to a wide array of technologies which have improved the quality of life of its many members. However, all of this prosperity is contingent on a single technology, faster-than-light travel, a feat of engineering that, though still beyond human understanding, is essentially leased from the Shaol, an imperious aquatic species as long-lived as they are mysterious. Aware that they have humanity over the proverbial barrel, the Shaol can essentially write the treaties they have with humanity and the other races in the local arm of the galaxy, laying down terms they know their client races will tolerate in exchange for interstellar transportation.

One such Shaol stipulation allows them to evict their client races from their own colonies if said colonies are less than 20 years old. This mysterious clause is more of a curiosity to humanity until, for the first time in their history, the Shaol invoke it, forcing a human colony to relocate to Redstone, a human world dominated by a violent strain of political libertarianism that has inculcated its subjects with a dangerous bellicosity that, perversely, may eventually prove the downfall of the Shaol.

In Stealing Light, the sequence's first instalment, we meet the trilogy's three main actors. Dakota Merrick is a Machine Head, a military pilot who has been augmented with surgical implants that allow her to telepathically communicate with her craft. A human, deeply scarred by a genocidal incident in her past, she is manipulated, by some of Redstone's most virulent leaders, into hiring onto a mission to excavate an ancient, derelict spacecraft from the depths of a dead world.

On this mission, she meets Lucas Corso, one of Redstone's beleaguered academics. A scholar of ancient languages, Corso is blackmailed by the Redstone faction leading the expedition which requires his expertise to break the codes that have locked away the Derelict's systems for all these countless centuries. Understandably reluctant to cooperate with his enemies, he eventually finds an ally in the mission's strange machine-head pilot, but will they be able to overcome their distrust to extricate themselves from their bondage?

Though the mission is meant to be a secret from the Shaol, it is closely monitored by one of their oldest and most highly ranked members. Fearful of the consequences to the Shaol should the Redstone faction succeed in harnessing this ancient power, he attempts to steer events to a more satisfactory conclusion, but it may well be that not even his legendary experience can bring fate to heel.

In Nova War, the sequence's second entry, events have overtaken the ability of any faction to control. For a new alien race has appeared on the scene. The Emissaries From God are enormous beings whose destructive powers are on par with their religious zealotry. Here-to-for kept from human space by the machinations of the Shaol, they have surprised their old enemies with their proficiency and their willingness to weaponize faster-than-light technology to devastating effect. Intent upon destroying the derelict, and its kind, that Dakota and Lucas have worked so hard to understand, they will stop at nothing, no depravity, no amount of annihilation, in order to realize their merciless vision of the universe.

In Empire of Light, the trilogy is brought to a shattering conclusion when the Shaol and the Emissaries From God engage in a contest for the local arm of the galaxy, a conflict that promises to leave subordinate races on both sides devastated, their home systems laid waste by weapons of unimaginable power. Within this Long War, as it comes to be called, Merrick and Corso, now powers in their own right, struggle to steer the war away from its apocalyptic conclusion by pursuing a dangerous but critical piece of technology that is more myth than reality. Should they locate it and bring it under their command, then perhaps the long night ahead of all the known races can be avoided and something like sanity restored to all the parties involved.

Though plagued, at times, by poor pacing and repetitive plot elements, The Shaol Sequence loudly hits most of the notes it aims for. Having clearly drawn inspiration from the uneasy nuclear peace that troubles our own world, Mr. Gibson is successful in his attempt to broaden the question of nuclear deterrence, inject it with galactic gravitas and then position it at the philosophical heart of what is otherwise a futuristic techno-thriller. When technological innovation outstrips our wisdom and our morality, what do we do? When we invent weapons that have the capacity to annihilate us all, and then hand those weapons over to an elite over whom we have remarkably little sway, what is the expected outcome? These fascinating and momentous quandries are imagined and then spun out, to devastating effect, across a lively universe.

But as much as these philosophical musings lend the trilogy some intellectual heft, they cannot entirely rescue it from its myriad flaws. Mr. Gibson subjects his characters to amounts of abuse that, by the series' conclusion, have reached the ridiculous. Worse, when his characters understandably seek revenge for the stupendous violence heaped upon them, the author shamelessly manipulates events to block them from fulfilling their desires. Yes, all plot is, in some sense, a manipulation of events in order to reach an imagined conclusion; Mr. Gibson is merely following in the footsteps of a few thousand years of dramatic tradition. However, the extent to which he clumsily fails to hide these deus-ex-machina contortions leave the reader both frustrated and annoyed by the unrealistic circumstances his characters find themselves in. This, along with the author's inability to give depth to his universe, beyond the template necessary to tell his story,, burden the work.

Its challenges aside, The Shaol Sequence is quality science fiction. While a sizeable swath of the galaxy is being loudly and obnoxiously pounded into oblivion, the author's protagonists and his questions of morality and power are, respectively, pleasingly flawed and eminently engaging. A solid diversion... (3/5 Stars)

The Crisis Caravan by Linda Polman

From The Week of October 17, 2011

When we look into the world's most troubled corners, only the most callous of us cannot but feel empathy for our fellow humans who must live, every day, with chaos and despair. Families forced from their homes, famines ravaging communities, genocides playing out over regions... These ought to be crimes with penalties so severe that no savage dare indulge in them. And yet they unfold, seemingly on a yearly basis, devouring the lives of those who deserve so much more.

Should not those of us with the power to mitigate such atrocities do so, if only to spare the innocents from fates they did not invite? The answer must be a resounding yes. Not so fast, argues Ms. Polman, who points out, here, that humanitarian aid is so fraught with squandered funds and unfocused efforts that it can barely be called aid at all. In this, there could not be a larger gap between the goodness that imbues the desire to help and the dismaying corruption that results from its pure intention.

The Crisis Caravan devotes its 200-some pages to a scathing expose of the corrupted culture of humanitarian aid. Ms. Polman, a freelance journalist, reconstructs her experiences covering African conflicts, from the Rwandan Genocide to the conflict in Sierra Leone, to demonstrate that, though aid organizations (NGOs) are launched with the best of intentions, they swiftly devolve into professional fundraisers. Because NGOs do not generate their own products, because they have no internal economies to sustain them, they live and die on external funding that flows from the United Nations, the aid budgets of wealthy nations, and the pockets of generous individuals. With their very survival riding on the acquisition of contracts to lend aid to the war-torn, the NGOs quickly succumb to what the author calls Contract Fever, a particularly repugnant form of exploitation in which NGOs learn of a crisis somewhere in the world, race there to claim it as their cause, and then send up flares to the developed world for funding to give aid to the troubled. Ms. Polman argues that this aid, when it comes, is almost never vetted. Only a handful of crusading journalists ever investigate to find out if roads are paved, bridges built, water distributed, food programs established. Even scarcer are those individuals tasked with measuring the effectiveness of the aid which may well go to services considered essential by the NGOs but secondary to the people they are trying to help.

Around her own experiences watching NGOs in action and investigating their programs, Ms. Polman lays down the 150-year history of humanitarian aid, how it was spawned by the abominable conditions of the Crimean War and then rapidly expanded during the two world wars of the 20th century which devoured so many civilian lives. In this, the author not only takes the reader into war-ravaged Africa, but she beckons him into a philosophy class in which she poses the questions all-too-rarely asked of humanitarian aid. Does it prolong conflicts? The evidence suggests it might. Is it moral to give succor to the perpetrator as well as to the victim in an effort to treat all the afflicted equally as human beings? Though the ICRC may wish it otherwise, perhaps not.

The Crisis Caravan is a well-argued, utterly gripping examination of the folly that surrounds humanitarian aid. From the accounting tricks that allow wealthy western nations like the United States and Canada to claim that they give far more humanitarian aid than they actually do, to the sickeningly corporate and self-serving cultures that have overtaken NGOs around the world, the author spares only the victims of the aid in what is an all-encompassing and ruthless excoriation of aid culture. This is no polemic against generosity. The author never advocates that aid should be withheld from peoples in desperate need. On the contrary, the author claims that Western aid comes at such a cost to the people to whom it is given that it often loses its effectiveness. If the aid was injected directly into the economies of troubled nations, and not into the budgets of NGOs and the pockets of Western businesses promising to do good works in crisis zones, aid would not only help those directly in need, it would come at far more reasonable a pricetag to the nations trying to do good works.

Rarely has more been packed into so few pages. Completely compelling. Ms. Polman may well have a chip on her shoulder when it comes to NGOs, favoring their flaws while downplaying their virtues, but when their flaws are this apparent, this systemic, they deserve to be exposed to the light of truth. This rotten culture is a betrayal of the vbest of human ideals. Not good enough... (5/5 Stars)

Moral Combat by Michael Burleigh

From The Week of September 12, 2011

For the last sixty years, the West has been taught that World War II was a moral War of good versus evil, of freedom versus totalitarianism, of tolerance versus prejudice. And because we are Westerners, because this narrative flatters our sense of superiority, we have endorsed it as truth. After all, not only have the unspeakable sins of despots like Hitler left us with plenty of evidence to support this self-congratulatory retelling, we had to find some way of psychologically and spiritually justifying the immense cost, in lives and resources, the war's prosecution levied upon the world. Certainly, there is truth in this narrative -- the barbarity of the Axis powers staggers the mind --, but it does not automatically follow that the Allied powers that fought them were noble.

In Moral Combat, Mr. Burleigh, a British historian, investigates the extent to which all of the national combatants in World War II neglected their humanity, carrying out a war that cost the lives of 60 million people and forever reshaped our world. From the bombing of Dresden to the rape of Nanking,His chronicle, coming in at some 650 pages, extensively reconstructs both the war's crimes and their social, political, and ethical consequences. Though the spotlight here is often trained on the atrocities committed by the Nazis and their allies, understandably so given their brutality, the extent to which these crimes have been imprinted upon our collective consciousness by past reconstructions saps them of their punch, especially relative to the underreported crimes of the Allies which Mr. Burleigh relentlessly and thoroughly assembles here. For while countless films, books and stories ensure that we will never forget the Holocaust, how many of us remember that, for want of an ally with which to resist the overwhelming might of Nazi Germany, Winston Churchill, that most venerated leader of World War II, joined forces with the most murderous dictator of the 20th century, Joseph Stalin who, by the time of their alliance, already had the blood of millions staining his hands?

Though Moral Combat lacks the focus and intensity of Bloodlands, its lengthy and fairhanded reconstruction of war crimes during the Second World War is both potent and enlightening. It dismisses the popular narrative declaring WWII a war of good versus evil and replaces it with the more realistic notion of a war of clashing ideologies, democracy versus totalitarianism. And though we might wish to believe otherwise, neither side is able to claim the moral high ground. For as many times as the allies might point to the Death Camps as symbols of Nazi depravity, the Nazis could, if they were here, point to Dresden and the rape and bombing of Berlin as moral crimes the victorious Allies never had to answer for. After all, the defeated foe can hardly set up their own Nuremberg, their own Tokyo.

For all that Moral Combat is vigorous and thorough, Mr. Burleigh fails to draw any conclusions from his research. Though he dispenses with the allied claim of moral superiority, he does not speak to any of the broader themes his research uncovered. His chronicle allows the reader to conclude that war crimes are an inevitable outcome of Total War, that a nation cannot practice Total War without inviting the possibility of equally total destruction, but we never learn if these are the author's conclusions. For other than a handful of sarcastic comments, he is silent on what he has learned. Perhaps he meant this to be an academic text from which his readers must draw their own conclusions, but we read great historians as much for the clarity of their insight as we do for the power of their research. Timothy Snyder did not fail his duty as a historian by opining in Bloodlands. After consuming 650 pages of academic writing, a few of the author's own conclusions is the least the reader can expect.

Interesting and at times provocative, but its flaws leave substantial holes in the end product. (3/5 Stars)

The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak

From The Week of August 07, 2011

Torn between east and west, between democracy and authoritarianism, between secularism and Islam, turkey stands at the crossroads of our world. One side lies Europe, a continent of order, peace and prosperity. On the other lies the Middle East, a region of chaos, violence and poverty. How can one nation of 80,000,000 people, forged from the wreckage of the bloody first world war, maintain its cohesion in the face of such lacerating disharmony? Though The Bastard of Istanbul primarily concerns itself with the trials and tribulations of an extended, bifurcated, Turkish family, with branches in Istanbul and the southwestern United States, Ms. Shafak's characters are a delivery system for deeper messages about women, nationalism, freedom and Turkey.

For 19-year-old Asya, life is a series of disappointments and restrictions which, together, have kindled in her twin fires of rage and nihilism. The eponymous bastard, Asya was born, out of wedlock, into a family of difficult women, three aunts, two grandparents and one mother, all of whom, at one point or another, live under the same roof.

This clan of females suffers a curse, chiefly that their menfolk never seem to be able to survive into middle age. The only male who has defied this curse is Mustafa, Asya's uncle, and he may have only been spared by fleeing Istanbul for America where, for the last 20 years, he he's lived with an excitable American woman who came to him a single mother with a half-Armenian daughter. Years on, the daughter Armanoush, or Amy to her American friends, is a bright, articulate and bookish college student who, finding herself gripped by a desire to explore her Armenian roots, secretly travels to Istanbul where, as the step daughter of Mustafa, she is welcomed under the roof of Asya's wild family of women.

It would be difficult for scholarly Armanoush and hedonistic Asya to have less in common, and yet, as Armanoush begins to delve into her Armenian family's tortured history, the two youths bond tightly. Asya has her cynical eyes opened to the Armenian genocide which Turkish society has tried to sweep under the proverbial rug, and Armanoush learns, through her associations with Asya's free-spirited circle, that, counter to the expectations of her anti-Turkish Armenian friends, Turkey and its people, while reluctant to admit the sins of the past, are not hate-filled warmongers. They are people, good and bad, living their lives. And in this, they are no different than anyone else the world over.

The story crescendos when, learning that Armanoush has lied to them about her journey to turkey, Rose and Mustafa hurry across the globe to Istanbul to retrieve her, a fateful decision which will have profound consequences to both branches of this eccentric family.

Though The Bastard of Istanbul opens slowly, indolently laying out its myriad players and their assorted troubles, it rapidly acquires a powerful momentum that impels it to a shattering conclusion. Ms. Shafak's characters shine. Everyone from thoughtful Armanoush and nihilistic Asya to their thorny and zealous relatives have distinct and difficult personalities. But while her living, breathing characters give her work its color, they are also the doorways through which she can explore the challenging questions of Turkish society.

Asya embodies liberal, secularist turkey. Frustrated and angry, she flails to find her roots in a world that is, often, hostile to her existence. Armanoush, meanwhile, represents that part of the Armenian Diaspora that wishes rapprochement with Turkey, an acknowledgement of and a settlement to the butchery of 1915. It's no surprise, then, that both women face such insurmountable lives. After all, the tide is against them, not only in Turkey but in much of the rest of the world which seems increasingly unwilling to enjoin with its enemies on peaceful, common ground.

The Bastard of Istanbul is slow to ignite, but its launch, when actualized around the halfway mark, is spectacular and engrossing. I could have done without Ms. Shafak's occasional digressions into religious mysticism which felt shoehorned into the story to help clue the reader into its central plot point, but the rich history and the vivid world more than made up for this flaw. (4/5 Stars)

Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder

From The Week of May 15, 2011

History has had its bloody periods, episodes of political, religious, and tyrannical conflict which stain our past. The Terror sparked by the French Revolution, the doctrinal slaughter of the Thirty Years War, and the Killing Fields of Pol Pot all immediately come to mind. But though all such conflicts have, directly or indirectly, impacted civilians, never have so many innocents born the brunt of a more widespread and systematic extermination than that which Germany and the Soviet Union enacted in the years between 1933 and 1945. Mr. Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University, meticulously reconstructs these twelve, gory years and, in doing so, sheds light on crimes both familiar and forgotten.

Though their motives and their methods were quite different, Mr. Snyder estimates Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia to have, together, slaughtered 14 million eastern European non-combatants during this period. Though Stalinist Russia got an early start, enacting a series of disastrous economic policies and cruel political reforms which resulted in the mass-starvation of millions of its own people, many of them in the Ukraine, Hitlerian Germany swiftly caught up and surpassed the Soviet total when World War II ignited their plans to exterminate what they considered to be inferior races, particularly the Slavs and the Jews. In a chilling reconstruction of these unimaginable depravities, Mr. Snyder describes a relentless march of organized killing and its peripheral costs. He begins with the near extinguishing of civilization and civilized humanity in an Ukraine forced into cannibalism and, mercilessly, ends with the grotesqueness of Nazi death camps and starvation plans which tormented Poland and the Soviet Union. His conclusion? That these two nihilistic regimes walked similar paths of tyranny. Their policies brought about catastrophes, the blame for which they aimed straight at their enemies. In doing so, they succeeded in creating a kind of feedback loop in which the more things went wrong, the more they could fan the flames of anger for the enemy, further entrenching themselves in the seats of power.

Bloodlands is a valuable but masochistic read. It describes the consequences of state tyranny and articulates how that tyranny perpetuated itself. However, it takes the reader on an implacable tour of some of the grimmest scenes in human history. There seems, at times, no end to the existential slaughter, no reprieve from the cruelty of men who largely escaped the consequences of their terrible actions. But for as challenging as this book can be to the mind and the stomach, it articulates the motives and the processes that drove and allowed these two states, ensorcelled by charismatic tyrants, to commit some of the most grievous crimes in history.

The most valuable contribution here is the filling in of Soviet history which, for numerous reasons, has been played down in the decades since the Second World War. German accountability, coupled with a desire to never again succumb to such savage nationalism, has left behind a vivid record of Nazi atrocities. But the closed nature of Soviet society, succeeded by the prideful, authoritarian governments that have followed its collapse, have, to some degree, kept the lid on Stalinist crimes. In describing these barbarities, Mr. Snyder eloquently expresses what I consider to be Bloodlands' most telling truth about human nature, that Stalin, upon being faced with the calamitous nature of his economic reforms, fixed upon the idea that, as socialism nears its goal, resistance to its implementation increases. In other words, the failures of ones plans can be self-justified on the grounds that somewhere out there someone is working against you, frustrating you, defeating your noble goals, that it's not a fault in your stars but enemy resistance. This idea is the enabler of tyranny. "I'm not wrong!" "It will work if people stop fighting me!" Until we can rid ourselves of the capacity for such justifications, we will always be susceptible to the crimes of such men.

This is a powerful, existential, and sobering read, but its unyieldingly grim view of humanity during this period, while probably deserved, left me flailing for some shred of goodness to hold onto. It offers no reprieves from its repeated, savage blows to the reader's head. And so, even while it informs, it alienates. This is a tricky balance to maintain and Mr. Snyder never quite gets it right. (3/5 Stars)

Simon Wiesenthal by Tom Segev

From The Week of November 07, 2010

History has produced many giants: adventurers like Magellan, philosophers like Spinoza, thinkers like Newton, soldiers like Washington. But most giants have an opportunity to choose their destinies. In fact, most giants seek out greatness, believing that they possess such a spark of brilliance that they deserve to be at the center of events. Not Simon Wiesenthal. He lived a life worthy of the giants, but he did not choose that life. It was imposed upon him by events completely beyond his control, events which will forever scar the 20th century, marking it as the century of social experiments gone horrifically wrong. They are events he endured, events which ought to have broken him but did not, events which stole away his life and replaced it with a purpose that governed the rest of his days. What Nazi could have imagined that one, anonymous Jew, subjected to the unmatched cruelties of their concentration camps, would some day come back to hunt them down and bring them under the force of the law.

Born in Austria, Wiesenthal's early life was shaped by war when World War I claimed the life of his father and forced Wiesenthal and his family to relocate to Vienna where, decades later, he would settle in his new life. But before he would cement himself as one of the greatest Nazi hunters, he spent the 1920s and 1930s between Poland and the Ukraine, helpless as the Nazis rose to power. Arrested in 1941, Wiesenthal was initially forced to work in a rail repair yard before escaping to aid the Polish resistance. But then in 1944, he was re-arrested by the Nazis and relocated to the Mauthausen Concentration Camp. Severely undernourished and with a wounded foot, Wiesenthal nonetheless survived the three months between his arrival and the American liberation of the camp, an event which marked the completion of his crucible.

Upon returning to Vienna and reuniting with his wife, Wiesenthal chose his destiny. Though his resources were at times pathetically scarce, he deployed the threat of the law to first acquire information concerning the whereabouts of Nazis who had fled Europe and then to badger various governments into acting upon his intelligence. A supporter of Israel, he was clearly appalled at the lack of appetite Western governments had for pursuing and prosecuting escaped Nazis. And so he shamed them by collating enough intelligence that he was able to play a significant role in the arrest of numerous high-profile targets, including, most famously, Adolf Eichmann. For decades, he went to work, every day, hearing the accounts of victims, collecting information, tracking targets, and using the statements of his victims to establish proof of guilt for those targets. In this, he devoted his life to the pursuit of justice, forsaking even the wishes of his wife to perform a remarkable service.

What must it be like to realize that ones life has been shattered, that one cannot go back to the way it was, that one has only a choice between forgetting, as so many governments wished to do, or immersing oneself so completely in the ugliness that one becomes the reposatory of remembrance, an instrument capable of forcing others to remember? Simon Wiesenthal surely had his own aspirations -- he clearly had a talent for architectural design --, but he shelved those dreams to commit himself to a path that would have been unnecessary but for European appeasement of Hitler's madness. It is a supreme act of self-sacrifice, but of course it did not come without its benefits: a sense of purpose, a sense of justice, and the knowledge that his enemies would never forget his name or their crimes. Mr. Segev does a wonderful job of conveying the complex life of Simon Wiesenthal. And though there will always be questions left inconveniently unanswered -- Wisenthal did have a complex and sometimes disappointing relationship with the truth --, the author has drawn as clear a portrait of this exceptional person as can be assembled by the available data. We watch Wiesenthal the boy become Wiesenthal the victim, only to resurrect himself as Wiesenthal the hunter, Wiesenthal the justice-maker, and then Wiesenthal the legend. It is a fascinating journey I will not soon forget. (4/5 Stars)

Commander Of The Exodus by Yoram Kaniuk

From The Week of August 29, 2010

Whatever ones views of Israel and its role in the instability of the Middle East, the story of its creation as a modern state is remarkable. Mr. Kaniuk, an Israeli journalist and playwright, has isolated just one of the threads of that creation tapestry and, here, spins it dramatically, revealing in the process a brave mission, commanded by a hero, meant to right a terrible wrong.

In 1947, coming off the unspeakable crime of the Holocaust, and attempting to create a Jewish state in what was then Palestine, a mission was launched by the fledgling state that would come to be known as Israel to gather up Holocaust survivors and to transport them, by boat, from Europe to Israel. The intent was not only to populate a new Jewish state but to protect the persecuted and to attempt to reunite them with what was left of their families. When we think of missions, however, we imagine technical expertise and fast ships and well-armed guerillas making sure the Holocaust survivors were safe. But in 1947, Israel was barely an idea being kicked around by a collection of Jewish settlers squatting on British-controlled Palestine. Even pooling their efforts, they could barely manage to requisition a couple of beaten-down, 20-year-old ships which had to be stripped down to take on as many passengers as possible. They were nothing more than floating refugee columns, drifting across the seas towards Palestine, praying for a miracle.

This new Exodus, this time from Europe, was commanded by Yossi Harel, a brave and dynamic young soldier who, amongst an assortment of dangers, faced down British patrol boats in order to see his refugees safely to their destination. His harrowing exploits are painfully captured by Mr. Kaniuk who describes in vivid detail the acquisition of the boats, the retrieval of the Holocaust survivors, the transportation of the survivors across the seas to Israel and, finally, the heartless conduct of the British soldiers who turned them away at the threshold of freedom. Shameful and heartbreaking. Surely there is no more poignant symbol of Jewish helplessness in the face of the crimes committed against them than this act of dishonorable indifference to their plight. Not that this stopped Harel from trying again, unwilling to give up before his mission was complete.

Mr. Kaniuk has penned a powerful story, one which feels as though it's taken some license with real events in the name of good narrative. But this in no way diminishes Harel's stalwartness or the refugees' desperation, both of which set this tale of woe alight. (3/5 Stars)

Tears In The Desert by Halima Bashir

From The Week of July 04, 2010

The murderous, ethnic conflict in Darfur has been talked about in the news and championed by celebrities, but those of us who live far away from such events struggle sometimes to emotionally connect with disasters we don't understand, events couched in a culture with which we have little or no experience. This is what gives war memoirs so much power. Finding similarities between ourselves and people we will never meet creates a bond that supersedes culture, that goes beyond race, and allows us to imagine ourselves entrenched in a fight against a people trying to end our way of life. Tears In The Desert not only forges this connection, it launches us on a journey we won't soon forget.

Halima Bashir did not have much while she grew up in Darfur, but then no one else did either. A tribal life does not involve itself much in economics, preferring the simpler exchange of bartered goods and inter-family bonds which knit the tribe together in shared action and effort. And so Ms. Bashir does not seemed to have missed Western conveniences as she describes, in the first half of her work, her mostly care-free childhood in a place where possessing even a radio was a luxury. Plenty of characters come to life around Ms. Bashir: her dogged father, her ignorant grandmother, her slightly overwhelmed but diligent mother. Through each of them, we see how a culture perpetuates its customs and its eccentricities, no matter the cost in pain and blood. Ritual has, for thousands of years, bound various people into a collective unit and that's vividly demonstrated here.

The memoirs second half finds Ms. Bashir a woman grown. Having strived to attend university, she is one of the lucky few Darfuri who earn a placement at the University of Khartoum where she experiences, first-hand, the Sudanese government's strides towards violent despotism. Ms. Bashir studies to be a doctor while her country slowly, achingly, falls apart.

The rest is terrifyingly inevitable. War washes over her world, imperiling her family while Ms. Bashir herself is stationed in a village, serving the medical needs of the people there. Death and the worse aspects of man's nature stalk her and her country, shattering her and everyone around her with the powerful fist of ignorance. As such, it is easy to imagine Ms. Bashir as Darfur, for what is done to it is done to her, scattering the pieces of herself so thoroughly, it requires years for her to put them back together. A life overturned and permanently re-directed onto a path no one should have to walk.

Ms. Bashir's story is an inspiring example of both human endurance and the human capacity to heal, physically and mentally. But the greatest tragedy, the one which Ms. Bashir illustrates so well, is that those limits had to be tested at all. Why? For ethnic unity? For profit? For power? What are these things when set against the destruction of someone's way of life, someone's freedom? A hard, dark, and difficult read, but well worth it. We must understand what we are capable of, light and dark. Only then can we maintain the former and use it to burn out the latter. (4/5 Stars)

A Terrible Glory by James Donovan

From The Week of June 06, 2010

Mr. Donovan has assembled here a wonderful biography of a battle, the last, meaningful battle in the most shameful period in US history. The United States considers itself the standardbearer for democracy and freedom in the world. But while they have done some good in the 20th century, critics of our world's most powerful nation have only to turn the calendar back to the 1870s to find a time when that same nation prosecuted a deliberate genocide against the peoples native to North America, the peoples from whom North America was taken by force. Though Mr. Donovan keeps his opinions on this matter largely to himself, the subject matter speaks clearly, as we journey from the halls of power to the plains of the midwest and beyond, following the policies, the rivalries and the histories which finally culminated in the Battle of Little Bighorn.

Though the battle itself was the single, sweeping, significant victory for the native tribes, it also spelled their downfall. For it gave the government of the United States an opportunity to justify war against a people which had, for the most part, steered clear of the Americans. There were raids and skirmishes, many of which Mr. Donovan is careful to note, but these were largely in response to being forced from land owned and settled by the natives, replaced there by telegraph poles and whiskey saloons. The land was changing against the natives. Even the buffalo, that most talismanic of native creatures, was disappearing from the burning grasslands. The natives' time was coming to an end and many of them seemed to know it. Meanwhile, with immigrants to settle and states to found, the federal government had no reason to be sympathetic to the Indian man who had just put into the ground one of the Civil War's most memorable generals. And so an extermination was organized and packaged as a just war against a people with a fraction of the population and a tenth of the armory.

Though Mr. Donovan does a good job capturing the context of Little Bighorn and its aftermath, his book is also a wonderful portrait of the battle's participants. Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull are fleshed out to the extent they'll ever be given the oral nature of their culture, making contemporary accounts of the two native chiefs quite scarce. But it's the oft-discussed Custer who truly comes alive under Mr. Donovan's hand. The flaws in the man are endless, from his strivings for money and status, to the contempt in which his comrades seem to have held him. For all of this, his greatest sin was his thirst for glory, tragically built upon a heroic charge he lead as a young soldier while fighting for Michigan during the Civil War. Mr. Donovan shows how that one, perfect charge spoiled Custer for any other tactic. He would spend the rest of his life attempting to replicate that one moment of glory and never finding it. On the contrary, it cost the man his life in spectacular fashion.

This is a dynamic history of a battle, its participants, and the time in which they fought. But it's also a story about David versus Goliath. It's a story about the abuse of power and how it blinds us to our own atrocities. It is a story about glory and tragedy and the end of a way of life, for both belligerents but especially the natives. It is a story which, in Mr. Donovan's capable hands, is beautifully told. (4/5 Stars)

An Ordinary Man by Paul Rusesabagina

From The Week of January 03, 2010

Later developed into a 2004 Hollywood film starring Don Cheadle, An Ordinary Man is Paul Rusesabagina's recount of his life in Rwanda, from his chaotic youth to his stint as manager of the Diplomate hotel, a popular, prestigious establishment based in the country's capital of Kigali. It was from this position of moderate influence that Mr. Rusesabagina saw the 1994 Rwandan Massacre unfold, a genocide which he summarizes in effective and painful detail here. Though Mr. Rusesabagina is a Hutu, the ethnic majority which instigated and carried out the massacre, he is at pains to debunk the differences between the Hutu and the Tutsi, arguing convincingly that these are little more than conceits ginned up by radicals set on slaughter as the means of righting historical wrongs. This is a tragic fact which both illuminates the massacre and makes it all the more painful to watch unfold.

Mr. Rusesabagina has to essentially tell two stories here, his own history and that of the genocide, and it's a credit to his abilities and his charisma that he manages this remarkably well. Interweaving fables from his youth with scenes of refugees from the massacre hold up in his hotel -- they resorted to using the hotel's pool for drinking water --, he paints a picture of the siege mentality he was forced to adopt during the massacre in which he took in and protected dozens of at-risk Tutsi. Though one is left with the impression that Mr. Rusesabagina is glossing over some of his less pleasant connections to a regime which authorized the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people, there's more than enough painful honesty here to lend his account the weight of authenticity.

Mr. Rusesabagina was an entrepreneur just trying to live his life and raise his family when the world, or fate, intervened and presented him with an opportunity to become an oppressor or a voice for the oppressed. Bravely, Mr. Rusesabagina chose the latter, even though it could have cost him his life. And in that sense, his story is an illustration of the age-old morality problem of speaking out at risk to ones health, or staying quiet in the face of injustice. There's little doubt on which side Mr. Rusesabagina comes down on. (4/5 stars)

The Devil Came On Horseback by Brian Steidle

From The Week of December 13, 2009

This is a devastating account of the war in Darfur which has been called a genocide perpetrated by the Arab Sudanese north against the non-Arab Sudanese south. Here, the conflict is seen through the eyes of Brian Steidle, a one-time American Marine who agreed to be an unarmed observer of the war for the African Union, a war which has displaced more than five million Darfurians, the strain of which probably triggered a civil war in neighboring Chad.

There are three major threads running through Mr. Steidle's powerful recounting. He details the difficulties of being a war-time observer tasked with capturing evidence of atrocities, all the while knowing that he has no weapon with which to defend himself against combatants who have every interest in keeping the atrocities they commit secret. He relates the subsistence level conditions of many of the Darfurians, men and women who live with so little that Mr. Steidle finds re-adjusting to life in America difficult -- our overabundance of stuff overwhelms him. And finally, he covers the war itself, its origins and it's tragedies. Deeply affected by what he has seen, he attempts to draw international attention to the war, speaking with human rights groups and heads of state in hopes of improving the situation.

Though Mr. Steidle's account is tinged with a certain religiosity, that is about the only flaw I can find in a compelling book about a part of the world unfairly and cruelly bathed in blood. All this ruin over territory, and pride, and racism, and a false sense of superiority. This is an excellent and worthwhile read. (4/5 Stars)

We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families by Philip Gourevitch

From The Week of August 09, 2009

This is a shattering recount of Rwanda's 1994 genocide, how it happened and how this tiny, landlocked, African nation is recovering from the mass slaughter of 800,000 of its citizens in a span of two months during that terrible year. The author has clearly spent time in Rwanda, interviewing the villains and... Well, there simply are no heroes in such a story, only survivors. A difficult read, but worthwhile for anyone interested in how these sorts of unconscionable catastrophes occur. (3/5 Stars)