Everything Is Broken by Emma Larkin

From The Week of June 27, 2010

It does not take long to realize why the author of Everything Is Broken has chosen to publish her book under a nom de plume. After a mere 50 pages spent with the Burmese government, a ruthless junta that has ruled, in various forms, for decades, it's clear that the authorities in that tortured country have grown adept at sniffing out foreign journalists and expelling them, to keep them from speaking truth. The real Emma Larkin visits Burma no doubt under her real name and then returns to her country of origin to publish her accounts of her time there and what shattering accounts they are, of a land tormented by the cruelties of climate and a people forced to bow under the yoke of a government about as enlightened as the crackpots who run North Korea.

Everything Is Broken is an attempt to quantify the damage to Burma from cyclone Nargis which, in 2007, devastated much of the country, driving millions of its people into the kind of chaos and starvation which characterized disasters in nations run by corrupt or despotic regimes. Without a healthy sense of shame, and without a free press to hold it accountable to the dying people it swore to protect, the government is free to make up statistics about people saved, livestock recovered, homes rebuilt, roads re-paved. Meanwhile, millions persist without food even though United Nations planes beg the junta to allow them to land to distribute supplies to the suffering. But so rigid is the control of the junta that they won't even allow aid-workers inside their country. Oh, if the UN wants to leave its supplies anyway, the military will see it distributed, sure, to its own soldiers and to the generals who have been robbing the people blind while putting guns to their heads.

Emma Larkin has used, to devastating effect, cyclone Nargis and the shameful fraud of the junta's response to it as a lens through which to expose us to a tormented nation which has never quite recovered from British, colonial rule. Like many of the Asian colonies of former European empires, Burma flails from strongman to strongman, wanting it to be different, needing it to be different, but knowing, in this world of globalized trade, in an era when juntas can enrich themselves enough to buy guns and bombs and tanks, that there's little hope for better than what they have, which is almost nothing. And yet, such a country, of beauty, of courage, of fortitude in the face of madness. Emma Larkin has lovingly captured a place which most Westerners, as long as they are alive, will never understand. George Orwell, as always, is one of the few exceptions, a man who possessed such an unparalleled grasp of the weaknesses of man that, even 60 years on from the publication of 1984, his vision of authoritarianism, oppression, doublespeak and lies lives on in a nation of 55 million people trying so hard to escape from under the jackboot of their own government. (4/5 Stars)

Spin Control by Chris Moriarty

From The Week of June 27, 2010

Though Spin State was an exciting entrant into the genre of dark science fiction, its followup leaves a lot to be desired. Ms. Moriarty's future Earth is interesting and novel, and the intrigues are just as mind-bendingly intricate, but the characters all come out too flat for my liking.

Spin Control shifts the action from the hinterlands of Compson's World to humanity's capital, Earth, where the shining jewel of the past is no more. The climate is nearing total collapse and anyone who is anyone has left for less polluted horizons, leaving behind the embittered and the penniless. Though Catherine Li, the antihero from the first novel, appears as a player here, our protagonist is a young and naive syndicate, or genetic clone, who has been sent to Earth on a mission to sell a powerful weapon to interested parties. Though the novel is, in the main, taken up with the various factions pitching the clone on why they should be the weapon's recipient, these machinations are less interesting than the background against which they play out, a renewed conflict between Palestine and Israel. No, not even the passage of 500 years has solved for that festering wound. The only difference between now and then lies in the sophistication of the weapons which are so powerful, so complicated, that humans can no longer operate them. They leave that to artificial intelligences who comandeer human volunteers on both sides of the conflict to use them as soldier puppets for its various attacks and retreats.

All the ingredients are here for a thriller just as good as the one which gave it birth. But though the novelty of 26th century Israel still at war is interesting, and while Ms. Moriarty never fails to entertain with her loops inside of loops, it just doesn't animate like it should. Too many tortured souls; too much sociology; too much angst. It may be that this book caught me in a bad mood, but Cohen, the AI attached to Catherine Li, gets an inordinate amount of P.O.V. Time for a lovesick sop who is only a fraction as interesting as his author seems to think he is. Disappointing, but I'll cherish the first novel and hope that, in the event of a third, matters take a turn back for the better. (2/5 Stars)

Spin State by Chris Moriarty

From The Week of June 27, 2010

Excellent, dark, science fiction is about as hard to find as water in the desert and it's just as precious. Ms. Moriarty's Spin books are the closest thing to Richard K. Morgan I've encountered since Richard K. Morgan himself. And though they linger a bit too long over issues of romance in a future dominated by clones and artificial intelligences, they are, on the whole, successful missions into the darkness of man's soul.

Spin State is a long and tangled tale of deception and betrayal. Catherine Li, a misanthropic genetic clone who has successfully forged for herself a false but active career inside UNSEC, a kind of United Nations of the future, lives in fear of discovery every day of her life. Cloning has been banned by future Earth and all its various colonies, an injunction which lead to a split between humans and the posthuman syndicates (clones) who believe that evolution of body and thought and power can only truly come through genetic engineering and not the sloppy, random firings of natural reproduction. But while most syndicates prefer the company of their own kind, something compels Li to fit into human society despite the risks of discovery by her human superiors. Born on a poor, colony world, her escape was UNSEC and a human identity. But now she's being sent on a mission back to her homeworld, to the industrial slums and to the memories she's tried so hard to destroy. She's returned to investigate the murder of a scientist who holds a secret that could change the very future of humanity.

Ms. Moriarty challenges her readers with a constellation of characters, all of whom seem to have done their private deals with the devil. There are no clean skins in this bunch which is what makes Li's investigation so rewarding. She knows they are dirty, and they know she knows. The question is, in this world driven by murderous self-interest, who will win out, the truthseeker or the ones trying to silence her? An excellent, atmospheric, futuristic mystery with a female antihero as dark as they come. Excellent work not just for its mystery and its characters, but for how it confronts the notion of what is human, of what is right, and what is truth. (4/5 Stars)

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

From The Week of June 20, 2010

Walden may not be thought of as a classic of American literature on par with The Great Gatsby or the like, but it is surely the most famous work of Henry David Thoreau, an influential, 19th century, American philosopher who, aside from being a leading transcendentalist, was a proponent of environmentalism, civil resistance and the abolishment of slavery. Though Walden chiefly concerns itself with thoreau's views on the environment, he makes room here to expound upon many of his passions, causing this to be a well-rounded glimpse into a most remarkable man.

Walden is an account of Thoreau's year spent in the wild. Locating a cabin suitable to his needs, he, in an early nod to we guilty liberals from the next century, devotes himself to living off the land during each of the four New England seasons which can be beautiful, challenging, uncomfortable and deadly. The cabin itself is a charitable description for a room that is little more than a monk's cell. It is a single, bare room, uncluttered by anything but a few personal effects and a handful of outdoorsy necessities. Thoreau ruminates upon his days, his food habits, his thoughts, his dreams. He describes his journeys through the forest, the opinions of those in nearby Concord who think him nuts, and the few visits from his friends to his simple home. And in all this, there is a kind of clarity, of mind and of purpose, emanating from this expression of absolute minimalism which reaches out and connects with us all these decades later.

To each their own, but it seems to me that, in all the noise of our 21st century lives, we've neglected the value of just stopping, listening and reaching out to the beyond. I'm not a sentimentalist by disposition -- I'm just as bombarded by the Noise as anyone --, but there is clarity in silence and in nature. There's a way, in that moment, to grasp onto something larger, a gravitas that only the passage of millions of years can create. And though each of us will learn something different from that silence, from that mental connection, we will all learn something. Mr. Thoreau has many lessons to teach about ethics and the rightness of things, but this stillness, this reflection is the truth that will span the centuries and bestow upon him a legacy for ages. (4/5 Stars)

The Ninth by Harvey Sachs

From The Week of June 20, 2010

I am far from a music aficionado, classical or otherwise -- it was for its historical value that I settled on this biography of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and the times in which it was written -- and so it is a credit to Mr. Sachs' learnedness and passion that I come away from the effort in awe of both Beethoven and his music.

Beethoven is clearly a once-in-a-century talent. Mr. Sachs, a biographer of music and its great figures, claims, here, that the legendary, German composer could have settled for producing just a third of his eventual, musical output without jeopardizing his legacy as a demigod of human music. And is that not, in the end, the definition of greatness, the capacity to produce more brilliance than anyone else? And to have lapped the field on his competition, to have his music treasured 200 years after it was composed... But while The Ninth principally concerns Beethoven's latter life, his frustrations, his struggles, his distemper, and his genius, it is equally a book about the 9th Symphony itself, its structure, its themes, and, far as anyone can reconstruct it, its message. Written in the shadows of a Europe convulsed by revolution and war, hostilities that stole the lives of millions without hardly advancing the cause of human liberty, the 9th is an appeal to brotherhood, to a human community strong enough to resist the eviscerations of continental conflict.

Mr. Sachs executes both parts of his novel equally well, trading in the literary exactitude with which he chronicles Beethoven the man for the awe and passion with which he explicates Beethoven's symphony. I've never heard music detailed like this before, tasted, admired, analyzed and ultimately eulogized. It's wonderful and moving work which acknowledges its love without drifting into obsequiousness. A must read for lovers of history, music, or even the story of a man and that moment in time when everything seemed to be slipping away, unfinished, incomplete.

I'd kick myself if I was remiss in pointing out two amazing informational nuggets in Mr. Sachs' book. The first, and most shocking, to me, was the revelation that, in Beethoven's era, there was no such thing as a professional orchestra. The performers of Beethoven's music surely admired the work, but Mr. Sachs argues that Beethoven would have never heard his music performed with the skill and preciseness with which it is regularly performed today. Imagine being a genius fully aware that your work would never be appreciated in your time, that its greatness was being muted by the inadequacy of people you could not control. Astonishing... And secondly, thinking about the giants of history like Napoleon, men who were contemporaries of Beethoven, it is a rich irony that the names of kings and queens, men and women who burned so bright in that time, have come and gone and the German composer lingers on most potently in our cultural memory. In his time, he was just a musician, a nobody next to Czar Alexander, or the Duke of Wellington. But now? They are forgotten and the musician is a god. Such are the vicissitudes of history... (5/5 Stars)

Horatio Nelson by Tom Pocock

From The Week of June 20, 2010

In the waterfall of history, there are some events which, when they descend upon us, make a far larger splash than others, events which change the whole future of our world. If this is true, and it is, then it follows that the men and women who have a hand in these great events stand as close to the nexus points of history as it's possible for anyone to get. These giants make choices and the world shifts:Hitler into Moscow, Julius Caesar across the Rubicon, Churchill deciding that England would fight them on the beaches. Horatio Nelson is absolutely among these legends, a man who changed his century and probably died without even knowing it.

Mr. Pocock's biography of Britain's greatest, naval war hero of the 17th and 18th centuries is more than just a catalogue of the man's great deeds; it's the examination of a life spent in search of dignity and status in an England that was often far from kind to social climbers. Born into a modest home, the great captain struggled for many years to find his proper due. And in fact, his was not a name that caused much remark until, in 1798, he was given the opportunity to catch out and destroy the great French fleet Napoleon was using to invade Egypt. This decisive, English victory brought to him the fame he had always hoped for, but not the fortune. That remained elusive to him for the remainder of his seven years on Earth. But Lord Nelson never concerned himself with frugality. And why should he have? Reveling in fame, he threw off his first wife for the greatest beauty of her day, Emma Hamilton, sparking a scandalous love affair which would set England afire. But the devoted lovers did not seem to care much as they went about building a life together, first in Italy and then later in England which is where we find Lord Nelson frustrated by his inability to penetrate the highest levels of society. And it is here that history comes calling, tapping lord Nelson to lead a fleet of British ships against a new Napoleonic fleet, this time at Trafalgar, in a battle which defined the 19th century. For it was so decisive, it secured Britain's safety from Napoleon. And after Waterloo, well, England practically fell into possession of an empire which, at its apex, spanned the globe. None of that would have been possible without Trafalgar, where Lord Nelson's name was permanently etched in lore.

It's easy enough for a historian to cover off the major events of a famous man's life. It's another thing entirely to capture his hopes and fears, his dreams and nightmares. It's difficult to reach back through centuries of history to tap into the motivation of someone who can only come down to us through letters. And yet Mr. Pocock does an admirable job of painting a portrait of a surprisingly insecure man with far more talent than was expected from one of his class, a man of almost epic ugliness, a man of hunger and passion for greatness. A most complex and fascinating hero who comes alive in the hands of a quality historian. (4/5 Stars)

Animal Farm by George Orwell

From The Week of June 13, 2010

What can I say for Animal Farm that hasn't already been said. Amazing, terrifying, prescient, and perfect... Mr. Orwell's surgical assault on authoritarianism and all its tricks sends chills down the spines of all those familiar with tyranny.

Animal Farm is pure satire comprised of intelligent and self-aware animals who labor on an Englishman's farm. Notwithstanding their abnormal powers to speak and reason, the animals are stereotypes of their species: the plodding but devoted workhorse, the clever and lazy pig, the happy and compliant sheep. Fed up with their unfair working conditions, the animals lead a successful revolt against their human owners, driving them from the farm. Though the human neighbors believe the animals will soon ruin the farm, the revolutionaries make it a going concern, occupying it, defending it, and then turning it into a profitable, cooperative venture where all the needs of every animal are met. They codify the laws of their utopia, writing them on the wall of the barn so that everyone can see them, learn them, comprehend them and follow them. But as time passes, divisions within their unified ranks begin to appear, divisions which, while slight at first, eventually grow in scale and severity until the animal utopia is little more than a remembered dream.

If Mr. Orwell's tale was nothing more than an intellectual exercise, it would be clever and inventive, but that it so perfectly captures the inevitabilities of authoritarian rule transforms a simple short story into a tale of heartbreaking truth about human failing which is this. In order to justify bleeding and dying for a cause, humans have to believe in that cause. No one would volunteer for martyrdom if they did not believe. But while belief in a cause grants humanity an almost supernatural strength, it also removes any capacity they have to view the cause impartially. They must believe. To do else is to allow in doubt. And doubt puts at risk the stability, the purpose, that faith has given them. The leaders of causes understand this weakness well enough to use it to rewrite histories, to reshape the cause's goals, slowly, insidiously, over time. And the believers accept these changes, revising their own memories to do so. And they must do this, they must comply, for to do anything else would be to doubt the leaders,which would mean doubting the cause, which would mean doubting the sacrifices made for the cause, a dissonance they cannot tolerate. It's a perfect encapsulation of how the human failing of the need to believe in something can be harnessed, forged, and then wielded as a mighty weapon by the clever hypocrites who know just how to exploit the exploitable. An absolute must read. And being that it is a scant 110 pages, it won't take long at all to have your mind appropriately blown. (5/5 Stars)

A World On Fire by Amy Chua

From The Week of June 13, 2010

Ms. Chua, a professor of law at Yale Law School, has put forth the argument, in A World On Fire that the American policy of exporting both democracy and the free market to the developing world accentuates ethnic hatred in the numerous nations in which wealthy elites, from the ethnic minority, dominate politically and economically over impoverished commoners, from the ethnic majority. While Ms. Chua's presents a persuasive case, she has failed to convince me that she has put her finger on the cause of the instability in the nations in question.

Depressingly, the list of nations plagued by Ms. Chua's form of ethnic inequity are numerous. The most familiar for North Americans is Mexico which, like many other Latin countries, is overseen by white, Spanish Europeans descended from the time of Spain's imperial conquest. And yet these powerful holdovers from a forgotten time are a tiny percentage of the overall population of powerless, darker-skinned Mexicans who are descended from that country's native population. While this is an example of a cultural legacy gone horribly wrong, she also points to countries like Burma whose ruling junta uses trade with resource-hungry, morally-ambivalent China as a means to amass enough wealth to maintain the ruthless suppression of its own people. These are but two examples in a carefully compiled list which seems to run into the dozens, nations made unstable by ethnic and economic inequities so entrenched in the culture that, in all likelihood, only revolution will rectify them. Part of the responsibility for this entrenchment falls to the developed world which has cynically traded with these corrupted nations, content to look the other way so long as trade is productive. This policy, of course, only serves to further enrich Ms. Chua's elites, a reality which only fuels the anger of the impoverished majorities, which only destabilizes already precarious regimes.

This is wonderfully researched and thoroughly exemplified work, but I wonder if Ms. Chua is not reaching too far afield for a cause for her inequity. Rather than blaming free market democracy, why not blame the conceptually flawed nation state which, in all its alluring power, attracts corruption like a corpse does flies? Humanity has repeatedly demonstrated a desire for dominance. We are driven by self-interest and self-interest motivates us to find an advantage over our competitors. And the way we gain advantage is by finding and exploiting weaknesses. This is who we are. It stinks, but that does not make it untrue. And if everyone behaves this way, it becomes absurd to filter our trading practices through the sieve of our morality. There are no clean skins. And if we can only trade with clean skins, then there's no one left to trade with.

Economic prosperity brings about political freedom. This has been demonstrated far too many times for it to be a coincidence. Given that we, the developed world, can't interfere in the affairs of every nation in order to set things right, as we see it, isn't it better to trade with them in hopes that, eventually, enough of the wealth created by trade will filter down to the poor, that the poor will eventually be able to send their kids to school, and that those kids will break through the glass ceilings in their nations and make, for themselves, a better future? It seems the only option other than, perhaps, building schools in all these troubled nations and hoping that educating the people will solve the problem. In any event, I hardly see the point in focusing on the free market, the best tool for spreading political freedom in the world, for not being perfect and mending society's grievous ills. That's down to us being better human beings, not to our economics which, while flawed, is the best that we have.

Well-argued, but an unconvincing conclusion saps it from its strength. (3/5 Stars)

Cod by Mark Kurlansky

From The Week of June 13, 2010

There are books that make you cry, books that make you laugh, and books that change your life. And then there's Cod by Mark Kurlansky, a book that made me want to curl up and die from shame. Liberal guilt? Perhaps. But I wager you will feel it too when you sink your teeth into this biography of the fish that changed the world, the fish we've trawled nearly to extinction.

Before there was the Internet, and cellphones, and automobiles and airplanes, there were ships made of saltstained wood, ships manned by brave sailors who, armed with their gods and their superstitions, explored the medieval world. And the only way for many of them to feed themselves was Cod. As such, the ships often followed the waterways which suited Cod best, waterways which lead the Vikings and then the Spanish to discover the east coast of North America. Poor Christopher Columbus. Once heralded as the discoverer of this grand continent and now reduced to being the last of its many discoverers...

But while the history of Cod is a worthy component of this book, it's Mr. Kurlansky's chronicle of what we've done since to Cod hat startles and appalls. He does a wonderful job capturing the sheer, human stupidity of 19th and 20th century claims that Cod was as plentiful as any food source on Earth, that it couldn't possibly be a diminishing resource because of how many eggs the Cod lays each cycle. These colossal overestimations of Cod's reproductive powers lead to a policy of overfishing which nearly drove the North American supply into extinction. Mr. Kurlansky's recount of the short-sighted politics involved in disputes over Cod here and in Europe is a punch to the gut of anyone still possessing some shred of a belief in the goodness of government. And it should stand as a warning to us all of the damage humanity is capable of doing when self-interest is at stake.

Mr. Kurlansky has a keen eye for eccentric topics that demand to be captured by a historian's pen. That eye does not fail him with what is, for me, his most devastating work yet. Well-researched and well-argued. If we ever needed a reminder that we are not yet civilized, for all our boastful claims to the contrary, Cod is it. (4/5 Stars)

Food Of A Younger Land by Mark Kurlansky

From The Week of June 13, 2010

Mr. Kurlansky, who has taken it upon himself to be the biographer of all things micro-history, points out , in Food Of A Younger Land, that, for the longest time, the United States never bothered to codify or define its own culture. There were no travel books, culture guides, or cook books that attempted to define the country. One imagines this to be a natural byproduct of the US' history as a nation of immigrants; after all, how can a culture be defined when most of its citizens hail from somewhere else? In any event, Mr. Kurlansky sets about describing one of the great, unfinished projects of the Roosevelt WPA, to sum up the traditional dishes endemic to America's various regions and to put them all in a cook book for everyone to enjoy.

Though the project was never completed, a treasure trove of information was acquired, compiled and then narrated by the project's scribes, many of whom were out-of-work authors or newspapermen. From the varieties of Vermont maple sirup to the astounding Arkansan squirrel soup, the staples of American cuisine are defined and catalogued complete with recipes. Mr. Kurlansky re-traces both the project's history and its final product, causing Food Of A Younger Land to be both a history of the effort and a coda to what is essentially an unpublished cook book from the 1930s. It shouldn't work.

But it does. Oh, Mr. Kurlansky relies too heavily on the project's accumulation of recipes, stepping aside far too often for the book's original material, but it's easy to imagine why he made this decision. The recipes and the essays that were meant to accompany them are charming glimpses of a time remembered far more for the smashing of tanks and the roar of guns, than it was for the simple times, the perfection of a well-cooked meal. Mr. Kurlansky could have bettered this account by contrasting the past with the present and shedding some light on how eating habits have changed since the 1930s, but otherwise this is an amusing and sometimes stomach-churning cook book and cultural history unlike, well, any other I know. (3/5 Stars)

Towelhead by Alicia Erian

From The Week of June 13, 2010

Ms. Erian, an author and an educator who taught for a time at Wellesley college, has penned, here, a perfectly disturbing and achingly believable tale of growing up foreign in a United States with a bad case of war fever. I'm not usually one for coming-of-age novels -- they always seem caught between either pointless nostalgia or self-indulgent regret --, but this piece, recommended to me by a friend, escapes all of that by challenging both our sensibilities and our prejudices.

The problematic product of an American mother and a Lebanese father, Jasira, an attractive and developed 13-year-old girl, is banished from her mother's home in New York and sent to live with her father in Texas after it's discovered that her mother's boyfriend is just a bit too interested in touching the younger kind. Jasira, who is blamed by her mother for this disturbance in her life, is forced to make a harsh transition from the American home she knows so well into the strict, middle-eastern home of her father for which she's not at all prepared. Episodes of harsh and sometimes abusive paternalism frighten and then alienate Jasira who passively enters into an inappropriate relationship with her father's neighbor. Backdropped against the 1991 Gulf War, Jasira's struggle to find her feet in an uncertain world is a poignant and perfect analogy for the broader conflict between America and Iraq which is also based on misapprehensions and a total lack of common, cultural ground.

There are so many layers to this novel and all of them work so well: The reflexive patriotism during wartime, the prejudice that is born out of ignorance, the vastly different behavioral norms that exist between cultures. But it's Jasira who carries the day. Ms. Erian could not have done a better job animating her protagonist. Jasira's girlish awkwardness juxtaposed by her womanly body is a poignant illustration of why we have laws against underaged sex. She's so clearly a child even though the men around her treat her like she's so much more. A novel has rarely ever made me root for characters, but Jasira and two of her father's neighbors won my blackened heart. This book should be added to English Lit classes the continent over. (4/5 Stars)

A Terrible Glory by James Donovan

From The Week of June 06, 2010

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

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

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

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

Dread by Philip Alcabes

From The Week of June 06, 2010

Though Dread serves well enough as a history of infectious disease and the terror it inspires in humanity, Mr. Alcabes, an expert in public health, goes beyond the presentation of his research to lecture us and the media on what should and should not be considered an epidemic. And while specificity of language is an important aspect to public life, it's hardly relevant to a book about the human response to contagion.

From the Black Plague to Cholera, Mr. Alcabes does an admirable job enlightening the reader on the origins and the symptoms of the great afflictions that have hounded humanity over the last millennia. I found particularly harrowing his account of the rise of industrialism as a cause for major diseases. Industrialism requires urban areas to properly function. The one constant of urban areas is people, lots of people, crammed into apartment buildings, office towers, factories. Many diseases require substantial populations in order to become major menaces, hence the rise of Cholera which, prior to the modern world, was localized to various waterways, away from which it was relatively easy for human populations to move when some among them fell ill. Ironically, though city-dwelling may inflame disease, it also concentrates the people necessary to solve for the inflammation, a delightful example of how the disease almost creates the conditions for its own cure.

This is all quite interesting and edifying, but it's Mr. Alcabes second, narrative thread that turns Dread into an irritant. Though he touches on the psychological affects of infectious disease, much of this portion of the book is disappointingly consumed by a hectoring tone adopted towards the media, scientists and, to some extent, the public. Mr. Alcabes believes that, thanks to various bits of mental programming, historical leftovers of genetics and culture, we constantly over-inflate the danger from the contagions that spring up in our world. He argues that this overreaction to the danger reveals itself in the nomenclature, "society is suffering from the obesity epidemic," which is clearly not a contagion. But while this is a fair enough criticism to level at the media, blaming scientists misses the completely obvious. Mr. Alcabes argues that the flus, Avian and swine, that have recently plagued us have proven to be much to do about nothing. But scientists don't just worry about what the contagion can do now; they worry about what it can morph into, in the future, if not dealt with. For instance, it is difficult for a human to contract Avian flu. One has to almost handle the infected bird to get it and even then it's not a certain thing. But if Avian flu mutates from a bird-to-human contagion into a human-to-human contagion, then Avian flu becomes a massive, human problem for which there isn't a cure. That is why efforts are made by scientists to stomp it out and by governments to warn the public. It's not just psychological, it's practical.

This is a good book which presents both a history an argument. The former is tight and compelling. The latter is monotonous and insufficient. (2/5 Stars)

The Name Of The Wind: The Kingkiller Chronicles 01 by Patrick Rothfuss

From The Week of June 06, 2010

Mr. Rothfuss wastes little time in convincing us that his is an uncommon talent. The sheer dynamic range of this, the first novel of a trilogy, challenges the mind to define it: part coming-of-age tale, part dark fantasy, part redemption epic. However one might wish to categorize it, good, inventive fiction will suffice for me.

The Name of The Wind is, in the main, a chronicle of a great man's life. Kvothe, a hero of his world, has cloaked himself in anonymity and installed himself as the manager of an inn far from the seats of power. Beaten down emotionally, he's a tragic figure, a man who, it seems, events have reduced to a shadow of his former self. But when a chronicler, a recorder of history, comes to the inn, Kvothe is enticed to recount his life story to him, an epic which will take three days to tell. Mr. Rothfuss is not the first author to use his main character as the narrator of his own story, but it's handled here with rare deftness as the tortured Kvothe recedes into his own past to describe his gypsy childhood and, the difficult and penniless years of his adolescence, and his arrival at the great university where he excels upon the imaginings of his teachers. Throughout, we switch back and forth between the past of Kvothe's story and the present in the inn which seems to be plagued by various demons with which Kvothe is all-too familiar. Yes, this is a world with monsters and magic, but Mr. Rothfuss doesn't overuse or abuse them, a self-restraint which escapes most authors of fantasy fiction.

Mr. Rothfuss is, here, a bit self-indulgent at times. There are some rather spectacular events later on in the piece which seemed out-of-step with the realistic, gritty, fantasy tone he was at such great pains to establish. But these off notes don't ruin what is a clever, inventive and entertaining tale, its wonderful darkness tinged by moments of beautiful light. I am definitely anticipating the second installment. (4/5 Stars)

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

From The Week of May 30, 2010

No one book has ever had a more profound impact upon my daily life than The Omnivore's Dilemma. If that makes me an insufferable snob, well, fine. I'll plead guilty to the charge and happily serve my sentence. But I challenge anyone to read this book and come away unmoved, not only by the awful plight of the animals ground up by Big Agro, but by the lengths to which modern, processed food has been debased almost to the level of trash. But with all this said, the greatest virtue of Mr. Pollan's revelatory book is the attitude with which he approaches his controversial subject. It's clear that, to the extent anyone can, he has not ventured out with intellectual blinders on. In fact, though he arrives at many harsh conclusions about the state of modern food, he does not have a ready solution to the problem. There's an honesty here, the honesty of a researcher, not a proselytizer, and it is this which allows us all to take Mr. Pollan's work seriously and not dismiss it as just another flailing, wailing piece about modern food and its state of disrepute.

Like The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore's Dilemma is organized around a core principle, in this case, the creation of a home-grown, home-cooked meal. Mr. Pollan goes to admirable, and sometimes disturbing lengths, to trace the supply chain of each food in his meal back to its source. And it is these journeys with which The Omnivore's Dilemma is principally concerned. Though other foods are touched on, Mr. Pollan devotes a majority of his time to the consequences of corn which has, in the form of various sirups and compounds, found its way into almost every kind of processed food thanks to a massive overabundance of corn emerging from the American midwest. America has traditionally grown so much corn that it has been necessary for various presidential administrations to pay farmers to grow other crops, and to create for them a kind of grain exchange to help keep prices from crashing. When these forms of compensation collapsed in the 1970s, farmers were locked into a ruinous cycle in which they had to produce corn to financially survive. And that corn went to big Agro which gave it to scientists to create new sugars to sweeten the next generation of packaged foods and juices.

Cows too are impacted by the overabundance of corn. When a cow is fed corn, the cow fattens, increasing the yield of beef per beast. All this without any consideration for how unnatural a food product corn is for a cow, or how damaging it is to humans to consume so much saturated fat.

So what's the solution? Mr. Pollan endeavors to find out. He interviews indebted farmers who argue that the government should financially encourage them to grow crops other than corn. He travels to, and even works on, self-sufficient animal farms where nothing is wasted and each animal is killed by a human being and not a machine. But after all the legwork, it's unclear as to whether or not there's a workable solution to processed food, or whether this is nothing more than a liberal's hand-wringing over an unavoidable consequence of living in a world that has to feed seven billion people.

I cannot more highly recommend this book to anyone interested in food and its composition. The Omnivore's Dilemma is, at times, sobering, scary and disgusting, but before we can change any of our habits, we must recognize just what it is we are eating. We must experience the reprehensible nature of how the food is made. We must admit that we have not been diligent in maintaining our connection to the food we consume. Only when we've faced up to this can can we make changes for the better, not only for the health of our bodies but for the health of our souls. For yes, processed food carries a moral cost as well, a cost born in the lives of all the animals coldly and anonymously beefed up and slaughtered for our sustenance and for the profit of big Agro. (5/5 Stars)

The Botany Of Desire by Michael Pollan

From The Week of May 30, 2010

It is inarguable that the foodie movement is a consequence of wealth. People striving merely to survive don't have the time necessary to indulge themselves in figuring out what their food is composed of, much less where it comes from. And yet, while acknowledging that Mr. Pollan's journey in The Botany of Desire is tinged with both decadence and pompousness, its cleverness, its earnestness, and its insightfulness overwhelm its flaws.

Mr. Pollan, a professor of journalism at UC Berkeley, has, here, set himself the task of tracing the histories of four plants: the apple, the tulip, marijuana and the potato. Cleverly, to aid in the telling of each plant's story, Mr. Pollan has framed each history with a human desire: sweetness, beauty, pleasure and sustenance respectively. And so, as much as Mr. Pollan is investigating botany, he's examining the human relationship with botany which, according to Mr. Pollan, has a lot more of symbiosis about it than we might think. All four plants have their origin stories told alongside their legends, such as when the tulip caused an economic crash, or how the apple came to America. But while all this is interesting enough, it's the impact humanity has had on these crops that startles and captivates. Mr. Pollan exposes how modern science has supercharged the performance of each crop, through the tweaking of its genome, in the case of the potato, or by maximizing its food, in the case of artificial light for the marijuana plant. All these threads combine to weave a tapestry worthy of the praise The Botany of Desire has received, educating and entertaining in equal measure.

Though Mr. Pollan never stoops to preaching, there's an undercurrent of uneasiness which runs through his book. The exploitation of these crops in order to boost performance has lead consumers down a dangerous and unexplored road. Soon, we may only be able to buy potatoes that have been genetically modified, that the natural form of the crop will be a thing of the past. But while this serves the agricultural business quite well -- most of the modifications are efforts to improve yields and repel pests --, the health impact that these changes will have on us is totally unclear. In this way, Mr. Pollan's book is as much a warning, that we are entering uncharted waters, as it is a history in four crops.

A delightful read. Mr. Pollan invests himself in his work, growing each crop, sometimes multiple varieties of each crop, to test and examine their performance. Throughout, the air of simple, innocent, human curiosity is charming, a welcome departure from the high-handedness of some foodie literature. Having the time to pursue the subject as he does is self-indulgent, true, but I believe we are the better for it. The rigor with which Mr. Pollan attacks this subject leaves little doubt in my mind that, insofar as the issues with modern food can be encapsulated, he has done the job. (3/5 Stars)

Super Freakonomics by Stephen Dubner And Steven Levitt

From The Week of May 30, 2010

It's fun to play with numbers. Most of us learn this early on in life when we make our first attempts to assess the value of things. But numbers can deceive us as easily as help us. How? Because the conclusion that one draws from statistics is only valid if those statistics are valid. And while we can write numbers on a board, without connecting them to anything in the real world, and know, for certain, that our numbers are correct -- they are, after all, our numbers --, this kind of logic cannot be extended out into the real world. It's impossible to account for every variable, every piece of data, when sizing up a social issue like, say, prostitution in Chicago which is covered in this book. And without all the numbers, how can a proper conclusion be drawn from them? Mr. Dubner, a journalist, and Mr. Levitt, an economist, have teamed up to publish two, extraordinarily successful novels about economics which tackle everything from human behavior to Climate Change. But while they excite, and while their narratives are compelling, I'm left wondering if they are merely as blind as every other economist is when it comes to drawing conclusions from data.

superfreakonomics is, at root, an admirable attempt to swim against the tide of popular thinking. As the authors explore issues like prostitution, technological innovation, and the unintended consequences of various government policies, they use a number of entertaining case studies to exemplify how our world's problems often seem insurmountable until a shift in the paradigm occurs -- doctors washing their hands before handling babies, automobiles replacing horse-drawn buggies --, eliminating what seem, at the time, problems of apocalyptic importance. Sprinkled throughout are studies in behavioral economics and the inventive men and women conducting them, attempts to quantify human behavior and distill morality down into a formula that can then be applied to the world. But this is where Superfreakonomics starts to run aground.

The book's entire argument is that innovative, against-the-grain thinking will change and even save our planet. The book's final section on Climate Change is a perfect example of this. It makes the contention that Climate Change can be solved by mimicking a volcanic eruption. Sulfur is rocketed up into the atmosphere and, because particulates of sulfur reflect sunlight, Earth's temperature would cool because less sunlight would be making it through the shield of sulfur. Makes sense, right? Just one problem. Without a corresponding effort to lower CO2 levels in the atmosphere, the sulfur is a stopgap which means more and more sulfur has to be extracted and sent into the atmosphere, creating a new dependency, not to mention further acidifying our oceans when that sulfur inevitably falls back to Earth and onto a planet that's 75 percent water. Without a single test run of the theory, Mr. Dubner and Mr. Levitt seem incredulous that this relatively cheap effort to geo-engineer the planet hasn't been adopted as the main weapon in our arsenal fighting Climate Change.

Numbers aren't everything. We can study human behavior all we like; we'll probably never know quite why we do what we do, or how we decide what we decide. We can make educated guesses, sure, but know every detail, every step along the way? Understand every firing neuron? Not in the near future. There are times that paradigm shifts do happen and change our world completely, but they aren't the norm. And we can bet that they were tested out before they were executed, and that their efficacy was based on concrete knowledge, not statistical modelling.

I admire the effort and the work. I like out-of-the-box thinking as much as, it seems, Mr. Dubner and Mr. Levitt do, but drawing conclusions from those numbers is a dangerous game. Trying to effect change based on those conclusions is, at best, dubious and, at worst, irresponsible. It appeals to the human desire for quick fixes and eureka moments and the world, as I understand it, simply does not work that way. Change is hard and it is almost always unanticipated. For Mr. Dubner and Mr. Levitt to act as though it's otherwise disturbs me. 4/5 Stars for the narrative, 2/5 for the science. (3/5 Stars)

The Bedwetter by Sarah Silverman

From The Week of May 30, 2010

I admit it! I confess! The title got me. Only peripherally aware of Ms. Silverman's career as a comedienne, I scooped up The Bedwetter and was not disappointed. Her humor is as raunchy as it is blue, so fair warning to those inviting themselves cold into her smutty world of whacky relatives, drug-fuelled late nights, and the crazy screwups endemic to comedy.

Inevitably, there's plenty of massaging in comedy memoirs, time to punch up ones material, trim some unnecessary fat from a story, or add a few embellishments to tighten it up. And yet, while Ms. Silverman brings her talent to bear on her readers, the essence of the real woman peeks through. Humorists the world over seem to have one thing in common, an insane childhood and Ms. Silverman was no exception. Her depiction of her nutty father absolutely steals the show, making it clear that at least some of her talent was arrived at naturally. Ms. Silverman traces her life in humor, from expletive-laden rants as a child, to mainstream success, accomplishing this without descending into narcissistic self-indulgence which is harder than it might seem. We're left with the impression of a woman fully living an unconventional life, a woman who has fun playing with the skeletons in her closet. Charm is surely a key aspect to comedy and it's clear that, in her own singular way, Ms. Silverman has it in spades.

Short, enjoyable funny and dirty. Don't we all like it that way? (3/5 Stars)