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

From The Week of April 20th, 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From The Week of March 31st, 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The thorny history of a famous cemetery in On Hallowed Ground

From The Week of March 24th, 2014

Our relationship with the dead, and the bodies they've left behind, is as revealing as it is complex. For while some dismiss the body as nothing more than empty vessel that can be discarded now that the soul no longer abides within it, many others hold such a deep connection with human remains that anything less than respectful reverence is cavalier and insensitive. For these individuals, the only way they can honor those who have past beyond this life is to ensure that they lie peacefully in undisturbed ground, that their graves, like them, are not forgotten. However, such reverence implies that, on some level, the spirits of the dead still care what happens to their bodies, that it means something to them to have been returned, with grace, to the earth in which they began.

Is there a connection? And should it matter? These are two unavoidable questions in a book about a cemetery. Mr. Poole may not have any immediate answers, but the clarity of the snapshot he has taken here of death, of ritual, of grief, and of ceremony is of such quality that answers seem unimportant.

Arlington National Cemetery is one of the worlds most famous landmarks. The exclusive preserve of those who have died in the defense of the United States, it is home to tens of thousands of veterans, from at least nine significant wars, whose graves are visited by more than seven-million people each year. Popularized by the televised burial of President Kennedy, Arlington is a shrine to ritual and respect. For its very ground holds what remains of those who died for their country, making it, outwardly, a monument to duty and patriotism.

Arlington's history, however, is far more troublesome. Originally the primary residence of Robert E. Lee, the legendary civil-War general, it was appropriated by the Union government after the Lees decamped to Virginia at the beginning of the American Civil War. Initially, it was to be used as a military camp, but once the war came to the doorstep of the capital, it was deployed as as a burial ground, for the bluecoats who died during that great American schism. Despite Mary lee's vigorous efforts to reclaim it, the government refused to surrender the sprawling farm, eventually, over the decades that followed, expelling everyone who lived on the property and converting it into a full-fledged cemetery that would be subjected to all manner of cultural winds that would force many of the graves to be dug up and reburied in order to satisfy the whims of the day.

A fascinating history of a lodestone of grief and remembrance, On Hallowed Ground is a surprisingly engaging journey through a famous monument. Robert Poole has produced a thorough chronicle of this sacred place, walking the reader through the many storms it has endured. His portraits of the stewards of Arlington are fond without fawning, showing respect for the work they have done without neglecting the ways in which their egos have shaped it. But perhaps most instructive are his careful descriptions of the key moments in the Cemetery's long existence, capped off with a detailed paean to the televised funeral of JFK that is both moving and vivid. Lush descriptions of the place not only evoke its grandeur, but remind us of the conflicts, both political and actual, that have defined it.

All literature makes some form of contribution to the culture. And yet, there are occasions when one is surprised by the size of such a contribution. On Hallowed Ground fits that bill. For what looks to be an ordinary history of an extraordinary cemetery becomes, in the author's hands, a revealing chronicle of an institution that, if it avoids scandal, does so just barely. From Arlington's controversial origins, to its mistreatment of black soldiers, to its preferential treatment of officers, it reminds us that even the bodies of the dead are subject to the politics of the day, however revolting we may find them now, and that, for all the reverence and ritual we may grant the dead, the institution that cares for them is, like all institutions, beleaguered by biases. One wouldn't expect a cemetery, no matter its fame, to attract such strong opinions, and yet, they reveal just how much meaning we invest in a place that is only, truly made significant by the value we the living give to it.

A work as revealing of human nature as it is of Arlington itself... Its beauty and its ironies won't soon be forgotten. (4/5 Stars)

The exquisite study of life and all its bittersweetness in The Hours

From The Week of March 17, 2014

As much as our memories suggest otherwise, life is filled with mundanity. Yes, we vividly remember the emotional moments that fire through our recollections, but these weddings and divorces, vacations and exhilarations, stand out largely thanks to just how much normality our brains have shrugged into the trash. Add up all the flashbulb days that transform and transfix us and, if we're fortunate, we're left with 40 or 50 standouts compared to tens of thousands of ordinaries. Which leads one to an inevitable conclusion.

To be good with life we must be good with the mundane. There is simply no other way to be happy. For to live principally for the days and nights that excite our blood is to place bets we're far more apt to lose than win. We must live for today, in whatever form it comes. But what if we cannot? What if the prospect of mundanity is a crushing reminder of of all of life's failures large and small? What if excitement is the only way for one to feel alive? What then? It's hard to imagine this pain demonstrated better than in Michael Cunningham's mesmerizing novel.

Decades apart, in three different parts of the world, the lives of Clarissa Vaughan, Laura Brown and Virginia Wolfe would appear to have little in common with one another. Clarissa is a woman of privilege, surrounded by artistic friends, living out the downside of middle age in 1990s New York; Laura is a still-youthful mother in California just beginning to come to grips with the constrictions of marriage in 1940s Los Angeles; and Virginia is a famous author, as brilliant as she is unstable, persisting in the suburbs of 1920s London. And yet, their lives are connected not just through the story of Mrs. Dalloway, which Virginia is creating, Laura is reading, and Clarissa is living, but through the extent to which they are all attempting to make good with the lives they've created and the talents they've been given.

The sum of these three interwoven narratives, The Hours is a captivating, non-linear rumination on the nature of everyday existence. Mr. Cunningham conceives of a single day in each woman's existence and, as the novel unfolds, allows their thoughts, their reactions and their emotions to fill in a life's worth of detail. By the work's conclusion, we not only understand Clarissa, Laura and Virginia in ways both profound and poignant, we come to understand that life is itself comprised of interactions which may individually appear to be meaningless but are, in the aggregate, quite literally who we are. We may be influenced by how our parents raised us, how our schools trained us and how our obligations wear on us, but how we handle all of life's moments is how we come to know ourselves and what we care about.

For The Hours' three spellbinding protagonists, this gestalt portrays a largely disquieting image of lives stifled by mental illness, by the chains of matrimony and by the weight of regret. In each case, we find disappointment lurking close by, waiting to ambush us at the first opportunity. For it is easy to feel, in retrospect, that we should have tried harder, should have overcome more, should have chosen better. And yet, we did what we could do in the moment. We gave what we could at the time. That this has failed to yield the optimum result is as much the fault of chance and circumstance than in our own stars. Of course, to us, this knowledge is cold comfort. It changes nothing. Our lives are still our own, still for us to lead, to endure.

As depressing as this truth appears, The Hours is in no way emotionally burdensome. Not only is there happiness here, even pleasure, an acknowledgement that mundanity has its own rewards, there is a powerful sense that most wounds can be healed if one recognizes them early enough. Regret and matrimony, for instance, are temporary states. Their condition can be alleviated in any number of ways, provided one has the time and the courage to do so. And in this way, we come to understand that mundanity is exquisitely bittersweet. It is the recognition of the good amidst the difficult. And it is this spirit that vivifies the book, elevating it from the dismal to the mind opening.

This is all quite deep. The fact is, in addition to its many rewarding layers, The Hours possesses glorious prose, a tender heart and a poignant message. It's little wonder that it won one of the most prestigious literary awards we have. Deservedly so... One of the most touching experiences I've had in years... (5/5 Stars)

The stressful world of the NFL explored in Collision Low Crossers

From The Week of January 6th, 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

A profound journey through the shoals of fame in The Zuckerman Trilogy

From The Week of December 1st, 2013

Our lives are defined by pivotal moments, convergences of chance and self-determination that redirect us towards new and unexpected destinies. Of these impactful moments, we remember the negative outcomes with far more clarity than the positive, not only because it is in our natures to rue our failures more than we celebrate our successes, but because these misfortunes leave us grasping vainly for our fleeting triumphs, leaving us to dream of what could have been. But while this is understandable, perhaps we should give more thought to the consequences of our successes as well. After all, achievement doesn't come without its own costs. In fact, often, those costs are cloaked by the warm glow of having advanced our interests, making it all the more difficult to brace for them. This is a lesson driven home by Philip Roth's at-times mesmerizing trilogy.

It's not easy being Nathan Zuckerman. He may have come from good, Jewish stock that drove him to be his best; he may be an ambitious and talented writer with a deep desire to make his mark on the world; he may even be a man of some considerable attractiveness and charm, allowing him to enjoy all of society's various pleasures. But these advantages, both external and internal, are of little comfort to a man haunted by his most famous, and infamous novel, a work of fiction that drew on aspects of his own youth to make some difficult and pointed comments about American and Jewish culture.

For anyone else, becoming a famous author would be cause for celebration, and perhaps it was for Zuckerman too, for a time. But as the years accumulate, he finds himself, his family and his relationships increasingly defined by the audaciousness of that novel which deeply offends his father and compels his mother to continually guard herself against the snide and insinuating comments of her neighbors. This ever-increasing burden robs Zuckerman of his health and his happiness, plunging him into a succession of relationships that are as torrid as they are dysfunctional. Eventually, Zuckerman's bitterness completely seizes hold of his existence, making a mockery of his dreams, his plans and his hopes and leaving him with nothing but his dark emotions.

A journey as brief as it is profound, The Zuckerman Trilogy is a fascinating examination of the life of a man blessed and cursed by talent. Mr. Roth, widely thought to be one of the greatest living American authors, creates something of an alter ego in Zuckerman and then heaps upon him all the punishments of ambition and unrestrained desire which feast upon him until there is nothing left of the man but the most jagged of emotions. In lesser hands, such a premise might seem like the height of arrogance and self-indulgence. Writing harshly about one's own fame, knowing that to do so will only make one even more famous? It seems rather cynical. And yet, Mr. Roth is such a keen observer of the human condition, and is so disgustingly skilled at conveying his own revelations through taut, imaginative prose, that the reader is left humbled by his prowess rather than being amused by his conceit.

Of the three works, the first is the most narratively engaging. While introducing us to Zuckerman, The Ghost Writer posits the idea that Anne Frank survived her ordeal with the Nazis and emigrated secretly to New England where she proceeded to live out a quiet and secretive life, cognizant that revealing her existence would inestimably reduce the power of her diary which she never expected to be published. This is a delightful thought experiment and one that helps carry the novel to a complex conclusion. But it's The Anatomy Lesson, the trilogy's final work, that finds Mr. Roth at his most spellbindingly profound. From about the halfway point of the work, the author goes on what must be one of the most powerful and entertaining rants in literary history, one that combines conceit, cowardice and cruelty in a manner that cannot but move the reader to conclude that the author is truly as skilled as his puppet Zuckerman is disfigured by a life lived at odds.

For all of the wonderful ideas and exchanges contained within these pages, however, most lasting is Mr. Roth's implication that fame is an uncontrollable beast. Zuckerman sets out to be successful, certainly, but he never contemplates what that fame might do to him and to the people he's closest to. Nor does he realize that the moment he publishes his work, he loses every ounce of control he has over his public life. He cannot dissuade people from judging him, much less judging his parents. He can't unmake the work. He can't unmake the thoughts people have about the work. He cannot make a plea for people to not read the book. He has made himself subject to the riptides of history and popular opinion which he is in no way able to steer, or even to influence. This is a delicious insight that lends fire and force to the trilogy throughout.

Challenging at times, but well worth the contemplation. For this is nothing short of work that stretches the boundaries of fiction. Such blazing lights are exceedingly rare. (4/5 Stars)

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

From The Week of November 25th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The neurological mechanics of reading revealed in Proust and The Squid

From The Week of November 10th, 2013

Of the many gifts with which evolution has blessed us, none are as consequential as humanity's ability to adapt. Our physiological capacity to endure the cold and the heat, the dry and the damp, the grim and the barren, have ensured the continuance of our species, but even these achievements pale in power next to the might of neuroplasticity, the ability of the human brain to literally re-program itself in response to the necessities of the individual. In the event that areas of the brain are damaged, malformed, or even underutilized, neuroplasticity allows the brain to re-task its other regions in order to regain necessary skills. It is a wonder that has saved and empowered humanity countless times, and yet, little did we know the critical role it has played in our capacity to read. Maryanne Wolf explains in her engaging work.

Without the written word, we would not have civilization. It's a grand claim, and yet, there can be little arguing it. After all, the written word has been, throughout our history, the most stable means by which to transmit information from generation to generation. Oral traditions served admirably well in the many millennia prior to the advent of alphabets, but such a means for knowledge transfer is highly unstable, subject to misremembering and misinterpretation, not to mention genocide. More than the accumulation of knowledge, though, the written word has given us complex mathematics with which we've built up a world capable of delivering us to the stars. A substantial achievement for something that does not come naturally to the human brain.

From signs to messages, from magazines to novels, we read every day, largely without conscious effort. And yet, in Proust and The Squid, Ms. Wolf argues that this fundamental element of our daily existence is, to us, an unnatural process, one that we have trained ourselves to perform. Drawing on her own research, as well as work from neuroscientists and linguists, she describes how reading is an outgrowth of the brain's capacity to recognize patterns and to extract meaning from them. This evolutionary talent, no doubt the result of the necessities of survival, is, in the reader, cultivated, over some 2,000 hours of intense training, into a system by which the individual can associate shapes with letters, letters with sounds, and sounds with language, creating a closed, linguistic circuit that allows us to not only communicate with our fellows but to imbibe knowledge from the troves of information left to us by the countless members of humanity who have come and gone.

Proust and The Squid is more than a rumination on the mechanics of reading, however. It is an examination of the many manifestations of this talent, how languages based on alphabets and hieroglyphs make different neurological connections, and how these connections can sometimes go astray. The most famous of these maladaptations is dyslexia, a disability Ms. Wolf has clearly studied at length. For these disabilities, and the social and emotional price they exact upon their sufferers, inject passion into the author's work here, transforming it from a thing of pure science to something of a call to arms, to understand and to eliminate such challenges.

While Proust and The Squid is, at times, fascinating and inspiring, it is plagued by a troubling narrowness of perspective. Ms. Wolf uses several admittedly potent statistics correlating reading with personal success to argue that it is a talent that must be cultivated for a full and informed life. But this advocacy seems to run completely counter to her fundamental premise, that reading is an unnatural cultivation of a neurological system that isn't designed to actualize it. Is it truly possible for reading to be so profoundly important when it is clearly not intrinsic to our natures? Is it not possible that reading is, rather, the most obvious means of knowledge transfer for the present? Ms. Wolf is alarmed by the propensity of our newest generation to immerse themselves in a world of touchscreens rather than books. And yet, touchscreens seem to be far more in line with the brain's natural visual systems than reading is. Perhaps, in the future, we will discover other means of knowledge transfer that are more efficient than the laborious programming of alphabets.

In this vein, that Ms. Wolf completely ignores those who read through listening is deeply disturbing. Entire industries have been created to service the many communities that either prefer or depend upon audiobooks for learning. In fact, I read Proust and The Squid as an audiobook because I lack a visual means to consume it. By Ms. Wolf's logic here, I too am cause for concern because I've chosen another way to learn. The author's alarmism over new technologies is a rejection of the very glory that gave us reading in the first place, our ability to adapt. Trust seems in order here, not dismay.

An interesting read, but one that is far more interested in providing encouragement to the dyslexic than it is in recognizing and mitigating its author's own lack of foresight... (3/5 Stars)

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A fascinating, educational takedown of atavistic thinking in Paleofantasy

From The Week of November 4th, 2013

While most of us look forward to the hope of tomorrow, its implicit promise that life will continue to improve, there are some for whom progress, in all its forms, is anathema. For these unchanging few, the world as it was is how it should be today, a place where man lives in harmony not only with the land but with himself and the countless generations that preceded him. There is value in this philosophy; after all, it is within our nature to be reckless, to adopt both technologies and social systems with an eagerness that defies both prudence and patience. The instinct to fall back, re-group and re-trench is one that should be cherished as inherited wisdom. But sadly, too often, this becomes an excuse to eschew progress, to continue forever as we were, out of some outmoded deference to tradition. This is not wisdom. It is wishful thinking. And that truth Marlene Zuk makes wonderfully clear in this engaging examination of humanity's past.

There can be no doubt that man is getting fat. As machines increasingly take up the burden of manual labor, and as our food continues to be charged with fats and sugars, there seems little hope for the expanding waistlines of humans the world over. Dieting offers some recourse to slimming down, but selecting the right one from the sea of options can be both daunting and aggravating. And even then, often the diets fail to yield the desired results. While most accept this as a fact of both existence and genetics, others see it as an outgrowth of a deeper problem. After all, if humanity has lived one way for hundreds of thousands of years and then, over the span of no more than a few millennia, suddenly revolutionizes every aspect of his traditional existence, from food to running, from society to population control, is it not possible that our physiological ills, from cancers to obesity, are outgrowths of this radical change? Evolution is surely too slow to make the adjustments we need to harmonize with our modern, agricultural, technological environment.

Marlene Zuk, an evolutionary biologist, begs to differ. Deploying examples of notable evolutionary changes that have required only a few thousand years to become mainstays of human genetics, she strongly goes to bat for evolution, arguing that the proof of its swiftness lies in the very creatures with whom we share a planet. Insects, for instance, require sometimes only 20 generations to adopt or discard fundamental traits. Translated into human years, this would represent a mere five centuries, well within the window of time with which humanity has lived the very agricultural lifestyle that is supposedly so harmful to all and sundry. Perhaps the problem is within our minds and not within our pasts.

Adopting a lighthearted tone that does little to damage its credibility, Paleofantasy is an excellent takedown of the atavism that underpins fads like the Paleo Diet. And it is the thinking that is Ms. Zuk's target, not the diet itself. For such dieters are basing their assumptions of the effectiveness of their methods on what they consider to be scientific truths about humanity and evolution which the author argues are patently untrue. Throughout these 300, breezy pages, Ms. Zuk systematically disassembles the contentions of these paleoists, leaving little doubt in the minds of all but Paleo's most staunch supporters that, whatever it is, whatever it does, it is not scientific. Which takes us to the work's subtle but enduring theme.

Just because we can reason our way to a sensible conclusion doesn't mean the conclusion is right. On the contrary, history is littered with ironclad frameworks of logic that proved to be completely false, eugenics being both the most obvious and the most supposedly scientific example. Science, nay life in general, is strewn with false positives whose truths either contain so much beauty, or so much obviousness, that they simply had to be right. In fact, this is the very reason why science exists and is so important to the human endeavor. For if our instincts and our guesses were correct far more often than they were wrong, then we wouldn't need the scientific method to understand the truths around us. We could simply arrive at them through reason. This is clearly not the case.

This is not some mean-spirited polemic seeking to ravage the spirits and the hopes of those seeking answers. If it were, it would be no better than those it aims to discredit. No, it is an attempt to warn people that wanting to believe something is true doesn't make it so. And on the way, it is an excellent introduction to evolutionary biology, its fascinations, its glories and its frustrations. Excellent and engaging work... (4/5 Stars)

the risks and rewards of machine intelligence in On The Steel Breeze

From The Week of October 28th, 2013

For all but the last hundred years of human history, which now spans more than ten millennia, we have been the masters of our destinies. The social constructs into which we've been born have certainly constrained us, influenced us, coerced us, but nonetheless our labors were our own, our survival due in whole to our own talents, our own capacities. But now, with the rise of the technological age, all of that has changed. Where once we fashioned our own tools, measured our own medicines and manufactured our own weapons, these tasks and skills have been increasingly given over to machines which hold advantages over us in speed, efficiency and tirelessness. In fact, the disparities between man and machine when it comes to production are so wide that it would be nothing sort of self-sabotage to not surrender these traditional functions to them. And yet, they are not us; they will never be us. And so, when we do inevitably become completely reliant upon them for our societies, what will our futures hold? Alastair Reynolds deliciously speculates in his engaging novel of the future.

It is the 24th century and humanity has climbed off an environmentally ravaged Earth to live amongst the stars. Moons and habitats throughout the solar system have been colonized while Earth cools, populations free to experiment with technologies, with governments, even with immortality. Despite the obvious divisions this would cause, human civilization has been harmonized and pacified by the Mechanism, a pervasive network of machines, both neural and nano, that ensure that individual humans live nonviolently with their fellows. Cooperation and discovery have become the hallmarks of society which has largely abandoned the destructive sins of slavery and discord.

Quietly, however, matters have begun to change. With the discovery of an inhabitable, extraterrestrial world which has clearly been touched by aliens, humanity has been moved to journey to this distant place aboard Holo Ships, city-sized conveyances that can accelerate to significant fractions of the speed of light. Ahead of these voyagers have been sent Providers, great machines that will land on this alien world and build cities for the adventurers to live in when they reach their new home, but the intelligence designed to govern these Providers has become temperamental and difficult, growing beyond its design specks to become something new, a mind unto itself, a force to be reckoned with. And it is willing to do what it takes to ensure its survival, placing it on a collision course with humanity.

The successor to Blue Remembered Earth, On The Steel Breeze is a work of singular creativity from one of science fiction's most innovative minds. Mr. Reynolds, who rose to prominence with Revelation Space, is an imaginative thinker who, throughout his published career, has rejected the notion that the laws of physics are too stultifying for fiction. Instead, he has embraced them and their limitations, providing for the layman some sense of the phenomenal spans of space and time that are unavoidable obstacles for any civilization with ambitions of being interstellar. In the past, this interest in the technicalities has sometimes lapsed into the obsessive, coming at the expense of qualitative storytelling. Not so here, where his characters, both human and artificial, run the gamut from desperate to ambitious while always remaining convincing and entertaining.

Notwithstanding its delightful creativity, On The Steel Breeze has the heart of a very old novel, asking an age-old question. How will man and machine coexist? Here, humanity has relied upon the Mechanism for so long that it has become unthinkable for it to be corrupted in any way, a truth that breeds the very complacency that allows it to be abused by an intelligence grown far too clever and powerful for any individual human to match. And yet, both the mechanism and the intelligence threatening it provide immeasurable benefits to humanity, organizing it, pacifying it, enabling it, in ways both wonderful and fantastic. Is the risk of the technology wriggling out of our control worth its many, glorious rewards? The answer to this question will be disputed for decades to come, and likely long after we have become far too dependent upon our machines to return to a simpler, more self-sufficient time.

Mr. Reynolds' view of this question is admirably pragmatic. He acknowledges both sides of the argument, the usefulness and the fear of losing command and control, all without siding with any particular faction. This allows his work to adopt an open mind about one of, if not the most, formative and pressing questions of the century to come.

Despite its engaging mysteries and fascinating actors, On The Steel Breeze is far from a perfect work. While Mr. Reynolds' choice to honor the laws of physics is respectable, this adherence boxes the author into a narrative corner he never escapes. On Earth, more than a full century expires while the work's core drama is unfolding in interstellar space, all without the author giving any sense of changing governments, social mores, even the forces of dogma. Providing such detail would have certainly prolonged an already sizeable tome, but its omission leaves the reader feeling as though nothing else in human civilization is taking place between moments of explosive action on the holo ships and the alien world they are destined for. The whims, the pursuits and the ideologies of an entire civilization are abandoned to service the plot which is primarily why we are here. But this lost color leaves the work feeling oddly disjointed, like a movie with no sound, or music with no message. It's an absence that is distractingly apparent.

Notwithstanding its flaws, Mr. Reynolds is worth reading for his creativity alone. Any sin of literature is forgivable when we can watch a skilled mind at play amongst the stars. (4/5 Stars)

One of the most shameful episodes in French history in The Dreyfus Affair

From The Week of September 9th, 2013

There can be no doubt that the concept of the nation state has been a net benefit to humanity. It organizes disparate populations, it implements a standard of law and personal conduct that fosters communities, and it ignites the twin fires of enlightenment and industry that are the engine of progress. However, no matter how long the nation state abides, it will forever be plagued by an unreconcilable conflict of interests that is sure to eventually doom it. For the nation state requires individuals to believe in a collective idea, an artificial construct of borders and traditions that, as time advances, as its honor, its past, and its values become ingrained in generations, its adherents will increasingly strive to protect. And given that national power is accrued at the expense of individual power, eventually, the rights of the individual will become completely subject to the whims and the needs of the state, requiring revolution and upheaval to reset the balance. This lesson is made exquisitely clear in Piers Paul Read's excellent work.

In 1894, France found itself embroiled in a scandal that, with the benefit of hindsight, seems fitting for its troubled nineteenth century. For these hundred years were, for this proud nation, some of the most turbulent in its history. Continental wars, political crises and social upheaval all had their violent moments in the sun, requiring the French people to continually adjust themselves to ever-changing circumstances. But while most of these conflicts were instigated by external provocations or internal ambitions, the Dreyfus Affair was a trauma that bubbled up from a most unexpected and well-regarded source, the grand French army.

A relatively well-off French Jew, Alfred Dreyfus was a difficult man to like. A serious officer who had attained the honorable rank of captain, he appears to have had little regard for what others thought of him, a disposition no doubt accentuated by the fact that he earned, as a result of his family's extensive holdings, a pension far in excess of the wage of most of his comrades. However, no matter his social shortcomings, he seems to have been an honorable member of an honored institution, making it all the more shocking when, in 1894, he was accused of treason.

Still smarting from defeats in the Franco-Prussian war, French relations with Imperial Germany were uneasy at best. So when evidence arose, of classified French-Army documents being passed to the Germans, an investigation was feverishly launched to find the perpetrator. Suspicion immediately fell upon Dreyfus who, despite the case against him being weak-unto-nonexistent, was hurriedly convicted, court marshalled and sent to rot in a hellish French penal colony. This injustice inspired a five-year campaign, spearheaded by his wife, his family, and certain honorable members of the Army high command, to exonerate him, an effort that was ultimately successful, though, not before damages to health, to career and to reputation were done to Dreyfus, to his allies, and to France itself, damages that would leave scars well into the next century.

A riveting tale of betrayal and determination, The Dreyfus Affair is first-rate micro-history. Drawing upon the documents from Dreyfus' two military trials, as well as the victim's personal correspondence, Mr. Read has fashioned an arresting work of injustice and dishonor that not only explicates this 120-year-old crime, but rightfully elevates it into a parable for humanity. All of the players in this repugnant incident are given life and form. Moreover, the reader is made to understand both the agonies of the wrongfully accused and the torments of solitary confinement in ways that will linger for some time. All of these virtues do merit to the memory of a shamefully persecuted man.

The Dreyfus Affair is a complex work that is at its best when speaking to the shortcomings of humanity, in general, and French culture, in particular. The men and women who fought righteously for Dreyfus are inspiring. For these ranks were not merely made up of a family that would naturally be expected to defend him. Officers, novelists and politicians all rallied to Dreyfus' cause. And while it's too much to expect that they did so without any sort of personal agenda, it's clear that their motives were pure in a manner that does honor to the French character. However, on the other side of the ledger lies some of the most shameful conduct imaginable. The strong skein of anti-Semitism that ran through French society at this time is made eminently and revoltingly clear. Moreover, the willingness of the Army's high command to blithely let Dreyfus rot even long after they learned that the case against him was nonexistent is nothing short of the definition of selfishness. For these men put the health of the state and the honor of the army ahead of the truth and, in doing so, consciously protected a "pure French" traitor while condemning the innocent "French Jew." The state over the individual, concealing a crime to shield the honor of institutions... It does not get more convenient, nor more despicable.

An absolute must-read that transcends time and place and speaks to political and philosophical conflicts as real today as they were in the nineteenth century... Excellent work... (4/5 Stars)

Blade Runner redux in Montero's Tears in Rain

From The Week of August 26th, 2013 Exploitation is one of the enduring quandaries of our age. For there can be no doubt that it is an unavoidable necessity of human progress. Be it the labor we capitalize on, or the resources we pull out of the ground that gave us life, our creations come at the expense of someone or something else. And yet, this very same progress, which drives us to create ever-more powerful technologies and to harbor ever more rational ideas, is the only means by which exploitation can be eliminated. So which is it? Press on in hopes of banishing the scarcity of resources that drives such exploitation, knowing that it will create even more of it in the interim, or return to a simpler time in which exploitation still existed, just in a gentler and more localized form? Neither option is very appetizing, however, it will be a question we'll increasingly ponder over the next fifty years, when many forms of alternative life, from the artificial to the posthuman, are introduced into society. Rosa Montero pegs out her pragmatic position in this debate with her interesting if problematic novel. The year is 2109 and Earth is not what it was. Not only does it harbor guests from alien worlds, it is now the hub of a modest interstellar civilization composed of colonies and artificial worlds. Its wars, of which there have been many, fought over everything from robots to political ideologies, have been largely outsourced to androids known as Replicants, fully fleshed and self-actualized beings grown from stem cells. Due to their rapid development -- they mature in approximately 12 months --, they are implanted with false memories, written by talented writers and thinkers, that substitute for actual experiences. Armed with this core knowledge, Replicants are deployed as laborers and security guards, functionaries and pleasure slaves, as a means of improving life for the standard strain of humanity. Through this tense, exploitative society prowls Bruna Husky. A combat Replicant, she has taken up work as a private detective since her discharge, managing to keep a moderately low profile, that is, until her neighbor, herself a Replicant, has a nervous breakdown in front of her which culminates in the woman tearing out her own eye. This dramatic and traumatic episode leads Bruna to the chilling discovery that the female victim is only the latest in a series of Replicant suicides. Hired by an aggressive Replicant organization to get at the bottom of the deaths, Bruna plunges into a world of drugs, schemes and false memories that will only yield up the truths she seeks if she's willing to confront her own constructed identity, the plumming of which might well break her before someone can kill her for snooping. At times entertaining and melodramatic, Tears in Rain is a thoughtful work of science fiction that never quite manages to escape its derivative roots. Ms. Montero, who has had a distinguished career both as an author and a journalist, has created an interesting, detailed world that has all-but-turned identity into a commodity, to be bought and sold, written and implemented, at whim. This notion has grave implications for humanity which, at the best of times, is tempted to exploit individuals and groups for its own gain. Doing so to people who can be programmed at any time to d as they wish, to fulfil whatever desire they wish, would not require a second's thought. Given such weighty issues, one would expect Tears in Rain to be a read as difficult as it is depressing. However, despite the amoral world in which it is framed, the tale rings surprisingly loudly with hope for the future. It is uplifted by the belief that individuals will always have the power to stand up and effect positive change. That change may be limited; it may even come at a terrible cost, but it will come. And that kind of incremental progress is both priceless and cumulative. However, notwithstanding its positivity and its engaging heroine, Tears in Rain cannot distinguish itself from the masterworks that preceded it. Clearly inspired by 1r\& and the short story from Philip K. Dick that gave it life, Ms. Montero virtually copies the idea of the Replicants as represented in those works, changing only the means of their creation. All else, from their artificially limited lifespans, to their tailored occupations, to their constructed memories, is unchanged, a fact which would be insulting if the author wasn't so quick to acknowledge these formative works. Heavens, even the protagonists hold the exact same occupation! The rot, though, runs deeper than the mere appropriation of ideas. Ms. Montero's true sin here is that she does so and fails to say anything that wasn't said, or implied, by these prior works. It's one thing to channel one's inspirations as a means of making your own vital statements about life and society; otherwise, the sum total of English literature would belong to William Shakespeare. But it's entirely another to do so and fail to expand on these existing ideas. The whole point of standing on the shoulders of giants is to be a link in the chain of knowledge and progress, not so that you can take advantage of the poor schmuck you're standing on. Interesting, but its failure to be what others have done better firmly mires it in banality. (3/5 Stars)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An engaging study of the lifecycle of civilizations in Revenge of Geography

From The Week of July 22nd, 2013

Though it is an exercise fraught with failure and misapprehension, there are few tasks more worthwhile than the effort to improve our understanding of the cultures from which we come. For, despite the challenges, despite having to constantly check for ones biases and preconceptions, there is no better way to advance one's culture than to grasp the influences, the logistics and the the history that informs it and to separate these truths from the stereotypes that so often characterize national cultures. There are reasons for why our countries are the way they are, why some are rude and others prickly. And the sooner we understand this, the sooner we can begin to predict the future with some modest accuracy. This Robert Kaplan studiously demonstrates in his examination of the world viewed through the lens of geography.

For ten-thousand years, civilizations both grand and small, both coastal and landlocked, have risen and fallen. Some crumbled into dust with barely a lasting mark to remember them by. Others immortalized their legacies through engineering and enduring monuments that have left no doubt of the links they forged in the unbroken chain of humanity's march towards a more knowledgeable future. However, despite having different languages and assets, populations and ethics, lifespans and legacies, they did, all possess one common trait. They all eventually collapsed, their prowess and their vigor consumed by younger, energetic states. This inescapable fate has prompted both historians and interested parties to analyze this perfect mortality rate and divine from it lasting clues that might help stave off the inevitable deaths of current cultures.

Though this has given rise to nearly as many universal theories as their are studiers of this question, few are as simple as Mr. Kaplan's. Setting aside the monumental fields of economics and law, politics and multiculturalism, he contends that the ultimate fates of nations are written into their geographies. From the vital rivers that organized and then gave rise to cohesive cultures in China and Egypt to the sweeps of coastal-rich territory in Europe and North America, he argues that these invaluable resources concentrate populations which in turn innovate and inflate until they've become regional powers capable of spanning entire continents.

This would seem to be a wise, and even pleasingly unbiased, assessment of why some nations stabilize and succeed while others disintegrate and fail, but is it applicable in a 21st-century world where bombers and drones, have overcome the once-formidable natural barriers that have historically held nations back? Mr. Kaplan believes so. In fact, he is convinced that these technologies which have so effectively reduced mountains to molehills have created a whole host of new existential problems for humanity's various national tribes. After all, prior to the age of flight, India never had to worry about China. The Himalayas took care of any fear of invasion on both sides of that question. The same for nations separated by substantial waterways that would've taken weeks to traverse in centuries past that now take hours. The globalization of the world may have revolutionized trade, but it has opened up theatres of conflict that would have been unthinkable in times past.

The Revenge of Geography is an engaging analysis of 21st-century geopolitics informed by a first-rate mind. Mr. Kaplan has an admirable grasp of the present that is informed by both an intriguing read of geography and an educational grasp of the past civilizations that comprise known history. It explains south Asia, the Middle East, Europe and North America in a manner that is no less explicable for it being erudite. And yet, there's a blitheness here that haunts his study no less than it does all those that purport to boil the world down to a single, defining trait. There can be no doubting that geography has played vital role in the shaping of our nations and our cultures, but can the success of he United States really be put down simply to the fact that it had manageable neighbors to north and south, plentiful coast to east and west, and abundant heartland in which to spread out and thrive? Factors all, surely, but far from the only ones to be heard in the formation of the defining nation of the last 200 years...

But though Revenge of Geography may state its case too definitively, it does so in an unforgettable manner. For Mr. Kaplan introduces us here to intellectuals who conceive of the world, and even history, as a series of existential conflicts for dominance. Art and science, philosophies and customs, are discarded by the minds of these men and replaced with a heartless pragmatism that is predicated on the idea that governments seek always to expand not only their powers but their borders as well. There's plenty of evidence to support this cynical view, but there's just as much evidence to counter it as well. For while states may act in the interests of the people they contain, willing to go to war for gains both economic and territorial, people are often far more emotional and far less strategic than this. They would rather live in a world that is not zero-sum, a world where everyone has a fair shot of progress and comfort, rather than one in which their interests are mercilessly advanced at the expense of everyone else. The utterly pragmatic approach here is as striking as it is narrow.

There's much of value here, but for all Mr. Kaplan's skill, he fails to convince us that geography trumps ideology or cultural ethos. Nonetheless, well worth the read... (3/5 Stars)

A charming and sober look inside a women's prison in Orange Is The New Black

From The Week of July 15th, 2013

Civilization has always required prisons, a means by which to segregate the disobedient, the disharmonious and the dysfunctional from mainstream society. After all, if such chaotic elements were allowed to freely roam, they would diminish not only the people's belief in the rule of law, but they would promote a kind of anarchic individualism that would make governing all but impossible. The state needs conformity. It can operate no other way. And so we gather up the offenders of society's codes, everyone from thieves to rapists, and we shut them away until they have ostensibly learned their lessons, until the deprivation of their liberty has scared them straight. We do this, paying only passing heed to the circumstances that encouraged them to commit their crimes in the first place. We do this, little knowing the costs, in coin and in futures, we waste. This Ms. Kerman conveys in her charming and disturbing memoir.

Piper Kerman received an excellent education; she was nurtured by a successful and caring family; and she possessed an intellect capable of propelling her to the heights of her society. But none of this abrogated her sense of adventure, her desire to color outside the narrow lines proscribed by her gender and her class. Which is how she entered into a consequential infatuation with Nora, an older but not necessarily wiser woman who used the funds earned from her position as a member of an international drug ring to take Ms. Kerman to the world's most exotic locales where the pair could live, explore and enjoy life. Such a heady existence is not built to last though, a fact ms. Kerman realized soonafter foolishly agreeing to help her partner launder money through a European airport.

This fateful decision would not only accelerate the end of her relationship with Nora, it would lead to agents from the US Customs Service turning up on her doorstep two years later, charging her with Moneylaundering and insisting that she tell them everything she knew about the then collapsing drug ring. Shocked to have her past come back to haunt her, Ms. Kerman engaged in a five-year-long odyssey to fight the charges, but her battle was ultimately a losing one, leading to a plea agreement that would see her spend thirteen months in a minimum security women's prison in the American northeast. Though she would ultimately serve far less time than many of her fellow inmates, these thirteen months would have a profound impact on Ms. Kerman, her friends, her family and her fiance. And they would forever reshape her idea of prison and the heavy toll it takes on all those who come in contact with it.

A breezy memoir, full of amusing anecdotes and rueful revelations, Orange Is The New Black is an entertaining and enlightening chronicle of life in a women's prison. Ms. Kerman, who has since gone on to work for a non-profit, has a keen eye for detail, a sympathetic heart that bleeds for her fellow inmates, and a rare degree of self-awareness that leads her to be honest about her flaws and her foibles. This combination of talent and integrity quickly earns the reader's respect and confidence. For this is no self-justifying polemic against the state. This is no screed of self-denial that seeks to blame everyone but the blamer. This is an earnest catalogue of both her own shortcomings and those of the penal system that so briefly captured her, a fact which elevates this work out of the mire of the self-reverential and into the world of the societally useful.

Though Ms. Kerman primarily focuses on the day-to-day grind of prison life, she does not avoid some biting social commentary. She is deeply critical of the harsh sentences, required by America's system of Mandatory Minimums, that end up burdening marginal criminals with debilitating stretches of time. She does not deny that there are violent women who have earned their segregation, but these individuals are few when compared to the legion of women ensnared in the criminal enterprises established by boyfriends, husbands, fathers, and brothers. These opinions are no doubt colored by Ms. Kerman's sympathies, but this in no way invalidates her overarching point, that the sentences for nonviolent drug offenders are extreme, disproportionate, and profoundly shattering. They not only disconnect these women, 80 percent of whom are mothers, from their families, they wrench them out of society, compelling them to forever exist outside the margins where only a handful of social crusaders care to even notice them.

Orange Is The New Black is by no means flawless. While it has little of the sensationalism or salaciousness one might expect from such work -- a truth for which we should be grateful --, it exposes a certain self-involvement on the part of the author. Very little actually happens to Ms. Kerman during her time locked away. And yet every detail of her stay is picked apart. This is a benefit, in that it reveals the degree to which prison is essentially enforced tedium, but it also leaves us to occasionally wonder if this is a worthwhile exercise.

Notwithstanding its occasional missteps, however, this is engaging work that, while light on policy recommendations, certainly confirms the suspicions that the penal system, as practiced by western society, is deeply flawed. And through the lives and experiences of these women, we come to understand that in the most intimate of manners. (3/5 Stars)

An entertaining, informative look at TV's new golden age in Difficult Men

From The Week of July 15th, 2013

Though art has always been, to some degree, shaped by patronage, money that flowed from rich donors interested in vanity and beauty, it has never been more captured and regulated by financial interests. For only they have had the means by which to distribute art globally through the mediums of television and film, concerts and art shows. Though many of them would have initially promised otherwise, this has naturally lead to such investors gaining a significant say over what kind of art is made. After all, if the primary means for the artist to make money is to put their art before the eyeballs of millions, and if it is all-but-impossible for them to own the means of this distribution, then the artist has no power and is forced to yield to the investor. But now, slowly, painfully, this model, so dependent on the whims of the rich and the entitled, is changing, allowing in a new era of style and expression that is mesmerizing audiences with stories no one has been able to tell. This transformation, and its results, Brett Martin explores in this excellent, cultural investigation.

For the first fifty years of television's existence, the consumer was all-but irrelevant. From his perspective, he would sit down in his living room and watch a narrow selection of programs broadcast to him by powerful, unknowable network s whose executives he'd never meet, and whose programming motives he'd never understand. For to those same executives, he was just a poorly understood data point lumped in with millions of other data points to create the audience, a captive collective they could present to advertisers as millions of people just waiting to buy their products. This was television, entertainment sponsored and shaped by a single stream of revenue (ads) which not only determined the kind of programs that these networks would air, but governed the morals and the attitudes the programs would represent.

Over the last 20 years, with the rise of Cable, this old, decaying model has begun to collapse, replaced by a new and vigorous view of television programming that has electrified audiences. Though ads are still present in the economic calculus used to create new TV, they are just a part. New sources of funding, from DVD box-sets to Carriage Fees, have liberated cable channels from the tyranny of advertisers, looking to hawk their products to primed audiences, and allowed them to create shows that sound out the dark depths of the human soul while reflecting the modern world in a manner that is, at times, so realistic it borders on the ideological. From The Sopranos to Louie, from The Wire to Veep, this new golden age of television has asked questions no one has been able to ask, not in this here-to-for constricted medium. And in doing so, they have left an indelible mark on the culture that will not be forgotten.

From HBO to FX, from from executives to creators, Difficult Men is a vivid exploration of the transformative programming broadcast in the Cable age. Throughout these 300 pages, packed with gossip and biography, history and new technology, Mr. Martin introduces us to the complicated artists frustrated by television's narrowness, the ambitious executives who sought to use Cable as a means of freeing them, and the unforgettable works of dramatic art born by this revolution. Dividing his chronicle into three, roughly five-year blocks of time, the author begins with HBO's early, powerfully disruptive successes (The Sopranos, The Wire, Six Feet Under, Deadwood) and concludes with those who've taken up the torch HBO lit and then fumbled: Fx with The Shield, Rescue Me and Justified; AMC with Mad Men and Breaking Bad. And in this, he has touched on virtually every significant TV product that has delighted and disturbed the culture over the last 20 years.

Though the work succeeds in providing the necessary background to understand why TV has changed so much since the early 1990s, Difficult Men is at its best when illuminating the powerful, conflicted personalities that have driven these cultural touchstones. Writing with a mixture of reverence and amusement, Mr. Martin examines the politics, the dispositions and the working habits of chase and Milch, Ball and Weiner, all as a means of connecting their issues and their passions to the iconic characters they've created. In this, we come to an understanding of Tony soprano and Don Draper, the Fishers and the Whites, that borders on the profound. For these were not simply pieces of fiction conjured into existence by men newly freed to tell stories. They are outgrowths of drive and obsession, anger and confusion, that we all experience but that has been more deeply concentrated in these Showrunners.

While Difficult Men's stumbles are few, there are disappointments here. Mr. Martin spends virtually no time discussing the archetype of the anti-hero alpha male represented by these shows and the way in which the culture will eventually grow tired of him. He makes it clear that this particularly American view of the modern man can be directly traced back to the men who created them, and so we can infer that the preponderance of male artists in the world of television is responsible for this. But he fails to grapple with the central question here. When, two years from now, audiences are sick of seeing yet another version of the same, conflicted white man in his 40s, and turn away from such programs, will Television decide that the Cable revolution was unsustainable, or will it realize that it needs to seek out newer, more diverse talent? Moreover, Mr. Martin gives almost no time here to the role Showtime played in this revolution. Dexter is winked at, but Homeland, Nurse Jackie, The L Word and Weeds are all neglected, likely for not fitting into the alpha-male narrative.

Notwithstanding its occasional omissions, this is an excellent and deeply entertaining look at products and people that have shaped our culture since the late 1990s. A must-read for anyone who has watched even a few of these shows... (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)