China's flailing birth into modernity in Age of Ambition

From the week of June 9th, 2014

China has forever been a mystery to the West. With a vast cultural history whose longevity is rivaled only by the Egyptians, its philosophers, its artists and even its rulers have enriched the world with their teachings, their creations and their approaches to public works. And yet, for all of this cultural wealth, China has remained an enigma to outsiders, a gem that cannot be valued. For not only have the countless generations endowed its people with a sense of superiority over younger, more ignorant nations, its leaders have often indulged in noteworthy strains of xenophobia that have frequently kept out foreigners.

Western economic advancements in the 20th century, however, have put an end to that isolation. For they, coupled with the disastrous Great Leap Forward, threatened to leave China sprawling amidst history's dust, an impoverished and forgotten nation. No longer. Internal reforms have not only opened China up to the world, they have lifted millions out of abject poverty and started China on the march towards a starring role in the 21st century. And it is of this emerging nation that Mr. Osnos takes his enduring snapshot.

China is at a crossroads. Having emerged from the self-imposed annihilation of the Maoist era, it has undergone a political and economic revolution to become something new in our world, an authoritarian capitalist state that, nonetheless, pretends to hold to its communist beginnings. From the Free Economic Zones in the 1990s to the factory cities of the aughts, it has managed to adopt many western values, consumption, brand identification, and affordable exports, all without relinquishing the one-party system that has governed the country since the 1940s. It has tried, with some success, to incentivize and empower a prosperous business class, to help it compete with the west, without allowing its increasingly wealthy and educated citizens to mire the nation in the democracy's bureaucratic quagmire.

But as much as this streamlined form of capitalism has elevated China into the class of advanced nations, it has lead to widespread sociopolitical problems that will plague it for years to come. For while, to some degree, the tide of the Chinese Miracle has lifted all boats, its blessings have been selfishly accrued by a small class of political and economic elites who have used their wealth to not only isolate themselves from China proper, but also from any repercussions from the Chinese state. This ruling class, combined with a strong sense of pervasive corruption within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), has lead many to think that they are but exploited cogs in an unfathomably large machine, unheeded and unheard.

The voice of these voiceless, Age of Ambition is a fascinating glimpse of a society undergoing tumultuous change. Evan Osnos, an American journalist who has recently returned to the west after eight years living and working in China, lays before the reader a cast of individuals, the everyday and the extraordinary, in an attempt to convey not only the existential struggles, but the daily rhythms of Chinese life. In this, his entertaining and eminently readable chronicle oscillates between fixating on political corruption, its ubiquitousness and its exposure, and the lives of the Chinese people who must negotiate two distinct and equally challenging obstacle courses: the trials and tribulations of life in the 21st century and the ever-changing collection of human rights they may or may not be afforded depending upon the whimsy of the all-power state.

Individually, none of Mr. Osnos' idiosyncratic case studies are particularly interesting. Some, like the man who yearns to teach English, activate our empathy while others, like the author turned race-car driver and sometimes political dissident, are engagingly amusing. But none rise above the threshold of simply holding our attention. However, their power, here, comes in the aggregate. The gestalt of all these lives, troubled by the state's fickleness and fears, by a pervasive willingness to exploit their fellows, and by a makeshift, unevenly applied system of justice that evokes memories of the Wild West, leads us to the realization that the CCP has only adopted the convenient aspects of capitalism and not the ethical framework required to sustain it. They have appropriated the engine of economic progress without bothering to assemble the car around it. And given that capitalism is, at the best of times, heartless, adopting only its underpinnings, and not the two centuries of moral customs that developed around it, is bound to start a fire of outrage in the hearts of the Chinese people that will eventually burn away the cynical system that seeks to run their lives.

But while Age of Ambition is both valuable and often powerful, its focus leaves much to be desired. Mr. Osnos, atimes, appears to be writing a polemic against the Chinese state, detailing the various scandals in which it has been captured during his time there. At other times, he chooses, instead, to focus on the struggles of everyday Chinese who have no connection to the government at all. Which leaves this reader with the sense that the author was sufficiently moved by the plights of the men and women he met to include their trials in his chronicle, but he could not find a common thread that would connect them to the broader, political narrative. This is hardly a grievous blow to the work, but one is left wondering if the work would have been improved by deciding to focus on one or the other.

On the whole, an excellent and enlightening journey through a fascinating country that it would take lifetimes to understand. (4/5 Stars)

the fascinating and disturbing Economy of Prestige

From The Week of October 15th, 2013

Though we should all be wise enough to accurately and appropriately value artistic contributions to our various cultures, one glance at the ubiquity, and the absurdity, of awards, and award shows, for entertainment and science, peace and philanthropy, disabuses us of this notion. For not only do these programs capture the public's interest, a wave they often ride to the top of TV ratings, they seize the minds, and the passions, of our artists and our cultural curators as well, ensuring that everyone who consumes such content will be aware of the extent to which it has been adorned and celebrated. This is a shame because it conveys power over the culture into the hands of the elites at the expense of the consumers who allow their faith in their own tastes to wane in favor of their more famous and favored critics. This is a point wonderfully illustrated by James English's excellent cultural study.

Launched by the inauguration of the Nobel prize in 1901, the modern-day notion of the award show has gone viral, spreading to every corner of human culture. From the Oscars to the Tonys, from the Peace Prize to the Orange Prize, everything we read and watch, every measure of science and every tool of industry, has been hailed by some body, some organ, as the thing to do, or have, or know. While some understandably rebel against such curated conceptions of quality, most respond by participating in it by either vehemently agreeing or passionately dissenting, neither of which hurt the award in question. For agreement is merely another brick in the wall of its power while disagreement merely fuels the desire to create another award, one that more accurately represents an unmeasurable standard.

This world of glitz and self-congratulation, of power and taste, is vividly characterized in Economy of Prestige. Mr. English, an author and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, approaches his subject with admirable efficiency, laying out the anatomy of the award, revealing its costs, which are exorbitant; its mimicry, which is considerable; its power, which is immeasurable; and its popularity, which is indisputable. And in this, we learn not only fun facts -- Michael Jackson received 240 awards in his lifetime --, but we come to understand that, at almost every turn, we are being influenced by this world of agents and publicists, movie studios and book publishers, each of whom want both the ego boosts and the profits from award-winning products. Their hunger supplies the energy and the competition that awards and award shows thrive on which in turn become commercial vehicles for advertising disguised as product, all of it hitched to the notion that the gods of culture are letting the consumer in on what is good.

There is a problem with this, of course. Good cannot be objectively measured. It cannot be generalized, distilled, or agreed upon. In fact, good defies such standardization. For there are simply far too many personal factors, from mood to taste, that contribute to the manner in which a product lands on the consumer. Yes, we can agree that some products are more remarkable than others, that, thanks to a preponderance of appreciable consumers, they withstand the test of time to remain relevant long after their creators are gone, but this does not make them good, or laudatory. It simply makes them good in the eyes of some. But of course, such truth is inconvenient for awards which are only meaningful in a world where art is objective, where their seal of approval means something. But if that were the case, awarding bodies would never err in their selections. And were we to categorize their mistakes,such a list would be far longer than this review.

Perhaps the most revelatory note played here, however, is Mr. English's well-argued contention that antipathy towards awards and their selections drives the industry. For this passionate disagreement encourages the disagreers to create their own standard of good which invariably ends up mirroring the standard of those with whom they were in opposition. This, along with revealing how artists themselves campaign for their own works to win awards, leaves little doubt that we are far more obsessed with validating our tastes than we are with actually enjoying artistic works, confident in the strength of our own tastes.

This is engaging work that is both scholarly and fascinating. However, it leaves little room to feel positively about our culture and about the rights of individuals to choose and to stick with their choices in the face of cultural consensus. It is difficult to read this fine study without coming away with the impression that we are all damaged and diminished by the culture of prestige. (4/5 Stars)

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

From The Week of July 29th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

Faith, justice and innocence all go missing in Redrum The Innocent

From The Week of June 17th, 2013

As much as we plan and dream, organize and hope, our lives are beyond our control. We live in a world of billions, a world in which, every day, countless people make decisions that have an impact on both our present and our future. We can't resist that. We lack the knowledge and the power to turn back that flood. And so we ignore it, concentrating on what we can change, on what we can see affecting us in the moment. This is a much more palatable existence, one that gives us the illusion of command. But what happens when that illusion is shattered? What happens when our lives are turned upside down by events we could no more predict than we could accept? What are we then? And how do we survive? Kirk Makin ruminates in his sprawling work of non-fiction.

On October 3rd, 1984, Christine Jessop, a playful, adventurous, nine-year-old girl living in Queensville, Ontario, vanished without a trace from her quiet, suburban home, shocking a community unfamiliar with such terrible events. Over the next three months, fuelled by her mother's hope for the girl's safe return, the police and the public would undertake a regional search for little Christine, one that would end in tears when her broken body was found some 50 miles from her home, in woods frozen by winter. With only a few suspects and even less evidence, investigators soon locked in on Guy Paul Morin, the Jessops' eccentric, 24-year-old neighbor who, though lacking any sort of motive, much less a criminal history, was extensively questioned by cops increasingly eager to find their man. Their suspicions were only strengthened when they learned that Morin declined to join the extensive, public search for Christine, in the desperate days just after her disappearance.

Using hair and fiber samples taken from Morin and his car, police would eventually arrest Morin, charging him with Christine's murder. Fixated by his social awkwardness, they would spend the next year largely ignoring other suspects, SHAPING what few pieces of evidence they had into a case against Morin that would lead to two controversial and contentious trials, the second of which would finally convict him of a crime he did not commit. This truth, however, would only come to light in 1995, 14 months after his conviction, when newly developed DNA techniques would rule out his involvement with Christine. This shameful miscarriage of justice would conclude with a 1997 inquiry which excoriated the police and the judiciary, accusing the former of leaping to unsupported conclusions and recommending that the latter change its prejudicial procedures. But none of this would help Guy Paul Morin regain his life. Nor would it return Christine to a Jessop family shattered by her disappearance.

As shattering as it is revelatory, Redrum The Innocent is Mr. Makin's extensive chronicle of both the murder of Christine Jessop and the judicial farce that would attempt to identify and punish her killer. Drawing on dozens of interviews with the principals and countless hours spent observing Morin's two trials, the author masterfully weaves together the personal and the professional, painting intimate portraits of the prime movers while methodically laying out the dubious evidence used to first hound and then to imprison an innocent man. Between, Mr. Makin systematically savages the case against Morin, not only revealing its shoddy construction, but detailing the unforgivable extent to which police fixated on Morin, contorting the facts to better fit their assumptions of his guilt. His efforts here are so thorough, so overwhelming, that they leave the reader's faith in the judicial system deeply shaken.

There is no doubt that Redrum The Innocent is at its most potent when describing the ways in which the police bungled the investigation of Christine Jessop's murder. In fairness, the cops in question were neither trained nor prepared to handle such a complex and difficult case. None of their rural charm, or good ol' boy instincts would help them find their man. For the degree to which they were overwhelmed by what unfolded, we can have sympathy. However, what we cannot tolerate, much less accept, is the degree to which the police refused to acknowledge their own inadequacy. Instead of welcoming outside assistance, they fell back on interdivisional rivalries out of the selfish desire to claim the glory of finding Christine's killer. This hunger would lead them to not only manipulate evidence and coach witnesses as a means of firming up the case against Morin, it would cause them to unforgivably dismiss the leads that might have lead to Christine's killer. As a consequence of hurling all their energies at an innocent man, the killer was never found, a fact which has left the Jessop family in ruins.

If this is the work's travesty, its tragedy is saved for the Morins and the Jessops, two families smashed by this ordeal. As a result of the harsh light of the investigation, secrets and lies are forced out of the shadows, truths nearly as cruel as the murder itself. This endless, grinding process of lurching towards something like justice leaves the reader hollowed out, hoping for some measure of peace, of justice, that never comes. We should be better than this. It should be easier than this. Alas...

Redrum The Innocent could have used an edit trim some of its 750 pages. Nonetheless, it is, in every other respect, a mesmerizing read that withstands the test of time. For though its subject is primarily the murder of a young girl, the ways in which it branches out to speak about the law, society and human nature is timeless. A must-read... (4/5 Stars)

Honor killings, multiculturalism and a horrific murder in Honour on Trial

From The Week of June 17th, 2013

Multiculturalism has, and will likely always be, problematic. For though many of the world's countries pride themselves on open borders and hospitable populations founded on notions of generosity and the will to be free, humanity has spent the bulk of its history as a species in homogeneous environments, ensconced in tribes and lands where everyone walked and talked like everyone else. Certainly, there were exceptions, particularly in the most recent millennia in which technologies that allowed for large empires were deployed to conquer other lands, but these centuries are but the tip of the iceberg poking out of the waters of our evolutionary past.

As a consequence, human beings living in multicultural environments experience a quiet tension, one that pits the wisdom of their cultural enlightenment against the suspicion of their genetic makeup. While times are good, with crime low and jobs plentiful, wisdom wins out. But when times are difficult and money scarce, like for like takes the day, causing suspicion of the unknown to override judgement and for cynicism to replace kindness, a matter made all the worse when this multiculture is forced to grapple with crimes it cannot imagine, emanating from backgrounds with which it has only a passing knowledge. This is a truth chillingly rendered in Paul Schliesmann's brisk work of true crime.

For Canada, a country that has never experienced a high rate of crime, relative to much of the world, the Shafia Family murders came as a severe shock. An honor killing that claimed the lives of three teenaged daughters of a successful, immigrant family from Afghanistan, then living in Montreal, it would launch a three year odyssey beginning with a lengthy police investigation and concluding with a high-profile trial in which Mohammad Shafia, the family patriarch, Hamed, his son, and Tooba, his second wife, would stand accused of executing a cruel plot to drown the three young women, along with Rona, Mohammad's first wife, in a Kingston Mills Lock. It would take time for a motive to emerge for such a terrible and senseless crime, but eventually an chilling image of the family would take shape, one colored by tribal customs transported to the new world, customs that endow females with family honor to such a degree that any significant act of disobedience brings a stain upon the family that can only be cleansed with blood. This would prove to be true of the three Shafia daughters who, having once agreed not to date boys, broke with their eastern customs to embrace the western culture in which they were immersed. For this, they died in the cold and the darkness.

A thorough primer of the Shafia murders and the complex trial that would follow on from them, Honour on Trial is a read as swift as it is informative. Mr. Schliesmann, a Canadian journalist, possesses a newsman's prose, pages stripped of any sense of excess or flair. In its place, cold, hard facts which paint a portrait of events that are as clear as they are difficult to stomach. In this vein, the author makes no judgement calls about the Shafia family, leaving such editorializing to others. Instead, he uses established truths to depict the tragic, senseless course of events with heart-sinking deliberation, leaving little room for doubt.

For those looking for a simple chronicle of events, Honour on Trial serves admirably, but the Shafia case demand more than this. This was not only a murder. This was the premeditated killing of four women for reasons that are inescapably barbaric. Yes, we must be sensitive to the customs of other cultures, to embrace them and weave them into the fabric of who we are. But we must test those customs against not only our ethics, but the widely acknowledged human rights that should exist for all individuals. Any customs that fail that test, that violate the rights to be free for which countless people have fought, then those are customs we can all rightfully reject, leaving them in the dust of history along with every other unenlightened, self-serving notion that we've evolved out of. But for a brief section describing honor killings and the causes that give rise to them, Mr. Schliesmann fails to articulate this important point.

Every day, innocence is lost because of ignorance, because of customs that are not knocked down by exposure to other cultures. This is multiculturalism's value, a test of who we are against the values of others, a crucible from which reasoned truth can emerge. If only such enlightenment did not have to come at such a terrible cost... (3/5 Stars)

Seasons In The Sun by Dominic Sandbrook

From The Week of November 19, 2012
In spite of every human effort to avoid it, life appears to be subject to eternal cycles, disruptive ups and downs which excites creation as much as it energizes destruction. From the climate that shapes our planet to the fads that define our culture, these cycles are as ubiquitous as they are influential, leaving humanity no choice but to adapt in the face of constant change. But while, for the most part, we have done well to incorporate these cycles into our daily lives, some have proven to be so profoundly devastating to our way of life that men and women have devoted their careers to ameliorating them, simply in the hope that some measure of suffering can be mitigated.

The most obvious case of this self-made category is the Business Cycle, that here-to-for unsolved byproduct of the modern economy that churns relentlessly onward, aiding the fortunate while drowning the blindsided. And where economics resides so human government dares to tread, hoping in its half-formed wisdom to make for its people a square deal out of the unknowable morass that is the national economy. Mr. Sandbrook captures just such an episode in Seasons in The Sun. Its effects are as consequential as his account is thorough.

Though much of the world has advanced considerably since the 1970s, few countries have undergone a socioeconomical facelift as profound as the United Kingdom. Less than 40 years ago, during the heyday of the Rolling Stones, Britain was a country ravaged by colossal gaps in everything from income inequality to equal opportunity. Lacking even basic necessities like toilets in a significant percentage of its homes, england had emerged from the Second World War a scarred but victorious nation. However, despite its triumph in that most consequential conflict, it enjoyed few economic successes. In fact, it lagged considerably behind its vanquished foes in West Germany and Japan, both of which benefited from finely tuned workforces, economic aid and industrial-based economies.

Meanwhile, england, which was once the world's workshop, a nation that once claimed to be at the throbbing heart of an empire upon which the sun never set, found itself burdened by absurdly high taxes, a highly unionized labor force, and cruelly misguided monetary policy which eventually culminated in the IMF having to extent England a line of credit. The British Empire, with its hand out... This was a humiliation few could bear, least of all the Conservatives who, after more than a decade of Labour-party rule, finally seized power in 1979 and, under their Iron lady, implemented sweeping changes that transformed the country forever.

But before that renaissance, there was Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan, punk rock and the IRA, labor disputes and institutional corruption, all of which would be summed up in a single, suggestive phrase, the winter of discontent. This is the history of those tumultuous years, before Thatcherism, when the final dreams of empire were relinquished to others.

Though it comes in at a staggering 990 pages, Season of The Sun is a tome as moving as it is lengthy. While it primarily concerns itself with British politics from 1974 to 1979, and the events that shaped it, it sinks its many, inquisitive tentacles into most aspects of British society, recounting the major theatrical, comical, controversial and even salacious events of the decade. Mr. Sandbrook masterfully collects the full expanse of this material, deploying it in the furtherance of a single, subtle argument, that most aspects of British society, at the time, were influenced by the calamities spilling out of whitehall. This assessment, though difficult to prove, seems all but certain given the degree to which the ruling Labor government bungled the administration of national affairs, preoccupied as it was by internal politics and fear of the country's powerful unions.

Yes, Seasons in The Sun might well have done better to surrender some of its political focus and turn its eye more thoroughly to art and music; after all, the politicians here are rendered in near excruciating detail. However, in every other respect, this is marvelous work. On any number of occasions, it could have slipped into the dryness of self-absorbed academia. And yet, astonishingly, Mr. Sandbrook not only avoids such a fate, he injects his colossus with consequence and pathos, energy and argumentation, making it easily the most accessible scholarly work I've read to date, an absolute credit to its dogged creator. Excluding fiction, I doubt the activities of the IRA, nor the desperation brought on by labor unrest, nor the perfidy of politicians, nor the riotousness of the Sex Pistols, have been more vividly rendered.

For all its ponderousness, a wonderful book. Highly recommended for anyone even mildly interested in cultural histories, economics, politics and fate. (5/5 Stars)

The War At The Wall Street Journal by Sarah Ellison

From The Week of September 24, 2012 The ego is a powerful and complicated force. That inimitable sense of self that convinces all of us, to some degree, that we stand at the center of events, ego can propel us to extraordinary achievements by deceiving us into thinking, particularly in times of stress and turmoil, that we are immortal, that we are invincible, and that we are special. These attributes enable us to survive the unsurvivable, to weather the unimaginable, to never surrender before the undefeatable. And yet these same virtues that so empower the ego, and by extension us, are equally capable of driving us into ruin by narrowing our mental focus, by blinding us to sobering realities, and by placing us above the petty concern of others. We are in control. We are in command, not those around us. Power at the expense of justice, ambition at the expense of community... This is ego's tangled legacy, a truth demonstrated superbly in Ms. Ellison's compact history of the sale of one of the world's most influential newspapers.

Having earned its reputation as one of the most respected business papers in the world, The Wall Street Journal, for most of its life, relied upon its legendary independence to pursue the stories it considered important in the manner it deemed proper. For the better part of a century, this marriage of family ownership and unorthodox reportage helped elevate the newspaper to the top of the world of journalism. Its unwillingness to sell any part of its soul to an ever-more sensationalist public, much less to kowtow to the whims of the powers of the day, were values it held dear.

But as time advanced, the Journal's fragmented ownership began to jeopardize its future. For by the millennium, it had been at least twenty years since the family that owned both the paper and its publisher had taken a deep interest in its workings. In fact, the decades since the deaths of the Journal's creators had seen its ownership stakes increasingly divided up amongst an ever-more quarrelsome clan of men and women, most of whom were accustomed to lives of privilege. Thus, when the arrival of the Internet put at risk the entire financial model upon which the newspaper business had been based for more than a hundred years, the desire, perhaps even the need, to sell became increasingly appealing. Enter Rupert Murdoch, the largely self-made media titan who had, many times, expressed a powerful desire to own the paper and the stage was set for an epic confrontation between competing interests. Sell or hold? Independence and unimpeachability or mogul ownership and compromised ethics? And at the heart of the question one of the brightest diamonds in the crown of journalism...

The War at The Wall Street Journal is a swift and consequential examination of the sale of this venerable paper. Drawing upon both interviews and her own personal experience working at the Journal, Ms. Ellison narrates events with admirable objectivity, removing herself and her opinions from her chronicle and, thus, allowing her readers to draw their own conclusions about the eccentric players in this particularly high-stakes game. As the drama unfolds, we watch as people who care deeply about the paper try their best to steer both it and them to a best-case outcome. And yet this is precisely what does the most damage. For these individuals have competing visions of what's best for the Journal, a reality that places the paper at the heart of a monumental game of tug-of-war, a game it cannot escape without being sundered.

But while Ms. Ellison wonderfully captures both the major events and the personalities of the men and women who participated in them, The War at The Wall Street Journal is hobbled by a deeper truth only hinted at in its 250 pages. The newspaper industry is in the midst of an existential crisis. Not only is its business model broken, readership of most papers is at an all-time low, facts which sap at the power and the influence of the papers in question. As a result, while Ms. Ellison and her players appear to consider the sale of this ornament of American journalism to be an event of significance, it smacks to a reader unaffiliated with the paper as navel-gazing, as an extension of precisely the same self-importance that compels men like Rupert Murdoch to buy papers in the first place.

Newspapers were never designed to be bastions of truth and justice. and yet, at some point, this became the ethical standard journalists were meant to aspire to. This has caused them to imbue their media pulpits with more consequence than they possess in a 21st century world dominated by the Internet and its various channels of information distribution.

This is fascinating reading. Readers are given a first-class look at the quirkiness of wealthy families while watching a formerly monumental institution struggle to come to grips with the modern world. But its own self-regard causes it to stumble now and again. (3/5 Stars)

A Safeway In Arizona by Tom Zoelner

From The Week of September 03, 2012 Blame is a senseless exercise. As much as it may satisfy our anger to indulge in it, it solves nothing. For to blame is to suppose that we possess all the information necessary to properly apportion it which is almost never the case. In fact, blame actually harms our efforts to divine the truth. Not only is it used by the guilty as a shield against the slings and arrows of the righteous, it cautions wary bystanders that any slip, any misjudgement, any disaster on their watch is bound to bring opprobrium down on their heads. And if that is inevitable, then why not lie and obfuscate? Why not block and evade as a means of self-preservation? If truth means anything to us, then blame must be relinquished as a weapon. For it is only in a full understanding of a catastrophe that we can know how to fairly dish it out. Mr. Zoelner conveys this vital lesson with tragic clarity in this masterful memoir.

Gabriele Giffords was one of the good ones. The daughter of a prosperous, Arizona family, she grew up curious and passionate in a world all-too-often gripped by narrow minds and fixed opinions. Dedicated to the notion of bettering her community, she devoted years of her life to public service, first as a state senator and then as a Congresswoman, spending thousands of hours listening to the wishes and the complaints of her constituents and trying to square those needs with the dictates of her party. And though her efforts sometimes failed to satisfy, they earned her widespread respect in a deeply partisan world.

On January 8th, 2011, Jared Lee Loughner, a 22-year-old college dropout, walked into a Safeway in Tucson, Arizona, where Ms. Giffords was holding a public event, and did his best to destroy all of this promise. Firing once, at close range, he sent a bullet into the Congresswoman's brain that would have killed her but for the quick thinking of those nearby and the medical expertise of the surgeons who saved her life. Six other souls were not so lucky, cut down by the fire of a young man enthralled to a case of paranoid schizophrenia which prompted him to execute his terrible and senseless plan. The shooting would not only change the lives of those who survived the attack, it would not only burden the spirits of the families who lost loved ones in the violence, it would shine a powerful spotlight on public discourse in the United States, igniting a brief but potent backlash against incivility and harshness in political speech considered to be marring the nation.

For Mr. Zoelner, however, the wounds would go far deeper and say far more about Arizona than it would the country to which it belongs. A son of the same Tucson community that shaped Ms. Giffords, Mr. Zoelner, an American journalist, uses the terrible shooting as a launch point for an investigation into Arizonan society. In chronicling its history, particularly after the onset of air conditioning which fuelled an explosive expansion in the state's population, he describes Arizona as a community of transplanted souls, people who have chosen to make a new beginning in this expanse of sun-drenched desert. This polyglot of elseness, combined with the oppressive heat that plagues the state during the year's warmer months, prevents, he argues, any natural links from being forged in the prefab communities that spring up around the waves of immigrants. Instead, families stick to themselves, in their temperature-controlled homes, their problems sealed away behind doors that rarely open for idle conversation.

This isolation, coupled with criminally lax gun laws and Ms. Giffords' contentious 2010 reelection to Congress, created, Mr. Zoelner persuasively contends, the perfect target for Jared Loughner who, acting upon conspiracies drummed up by his illness, committed an act of terrorism that caused much soul-searching throughout the nation. It also prompted Mr. Zoelner to write this powerful memoir which emotionally captures not only the pain of Loughner's victims, but the charisma of Gabriele Giffords about whom Mr. Zoelner is clearly and deeply fond. His distress is palpable throughout, bestowing upon the work a kind of aching vitality that is profoundly moving.

Mr. Zoelner is careful to caution his readers that he is less than unbiased about the events of January 8th, 2011. And though we can appreciate his openness about his connections to Ms. Giffords and her politics, he quietly demonstrates, throughout his work, that he is a man possess of an opened and powerful mind. For unlike many others who jumped to conclusions about Loughner and the shooting, eagerly fitting black hats upon those who best fit their prejudices, the author does nothing of the sort. Rather, he casts the widest net possible for those responsible, finding that, instead of catching individuals, he has hooked a confluence of broader trends that combined to harm Gabriele Giffords on that fateful day and will continue to harm others in the future if not arrested and reversed. For the mentally ill cannot be so blithely ignored, nor guns so loosely monitored, nor community links so easily cut without consequences, without numbness and despair and violence setting in.

This is exquisite work which, while hardly objective, is fodder for the thoughtful mind. (5/5 Stars)

A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

From The Week of July 02, 2012

For those of us blessed by fortune to have long lives, we will greet the dawn tens of thousands of times. We will wake from dreams and perform our jobs. We will consume our favorite foods and our favorite entertainment. We will ponder what's ahead while reflecting on what we've long since left behind. And in the midst of all of this thought, this life, we will try to understand our essential selves, to separate hype from truth, socially inspired flattery from real identity, to tease out that one fundamental kernel of personality that governs our actions.

Who are we truly? And which version of ourselves is the truest version? And if we're lucky enough to recognize that version, to understand it, to seize it, how can we hold onto it when the merciless abrasions of time are so good at wearing us down until we've released what we know into the chaos of the world beyond us? Ms. Egan considers in her ephemeral novel.

Though time stands still for no one, it has moved with particularly cruel speed in the world of rock music. From the exceptionally creative heights of the 1960s and 1970s to the soulless, corporate control of the more recent past, it has known the sweetest highs and the most decrepit lows in its journey to speak to the people about their lives and how they plug into the broader, complex world. It has endured deaths and drugs, breakups and lawsuits, file-digitizing and file-sharing, but though it lives on, is it relevant? Is it meaningful?

To a loosely connected circle of people who, at one time or another, live and work in New York City, the answer is ambiguous. For instance, Benny and Scott, once best friends and bandmates who fell out over a girl, hold opposite views. The former is now a powerful rock producer, president of his own company and a force listened to. Scott, meanwhile, is a vagabond, an aimless, damaged soul whose talent sparked up and died out in one chaotic night of rock glory now decades in the past. And yet Benny is the man struggling with his disenchantment while Scott lives free of such doubt. All around them, meanwhile, spin the lives of their friends and wives, assistants and children, orbits uniting and separating, merging and clashing as they too try to come to grips with the devastation of growing old in a world obsessed with the young and the new.

A rumination on the nature of time and lost selves, A Visit From The Goon Squad is a fascinating if insubstantial novel that manifests as quickly as it evaporates. A collection of formative experiences that span nearly as many decades as characters, it speaks to the nature of fame and relationships, notoriety and war, as a means of divining some measure of understanding about a life which is increasingly bombarded by false sentiments, false transcendence, false fame. In depicting the cutting betrayals and the life-altering bustups, the moments of painful truth and the moments of absolute fear, it directs us to hold on more preciously to the days and hours that pass us, to treasure them as dearly as we do our loved ones. For soon, they will only exist as phantoms in our memories which will grow increasingly unreliable as we decay into old age.

More interesting than the novel's plot, which at times borders on the brink of non-existence, is its structure. A Visit From The Goon Squad is comprised of shortstories that, while interconnected, could easily stand on their own as individually packaged set pieces. Consequently, Ms. Egan has permitted her novel's structure to hang so loose that the ordinary governors of plot, a notionally linear progression of time and events, are overturned, discarded in favor of a narrative that is unstuck in both time and perspective. This ambitious play largely pays off thanks to a cast of embittered characters who each entertain the reader with their quirky and self-destructive takes on a life that permits us very little by way of control.

However, though the structure largely succeeds in re-enforcing the themes of fame and decay that pervade the work, it fails when its characters fail. Ms. Egan has winningly rendered the divergent paths of Benny the sellout and Scott the authentic musician, but some of the peripheral players who have been touched by them never take flight. Rather than exposing us to their problems and their burdens, they merely delay a return to the work's centerpieces. Some readers are bound to have affinities for most of these actors, but rare will be the reader who has affinity for all, obligating us to wade through unenlightening segments for a very minimal payoff.

A Visit From The Goon Squad is a piece of literary art, an experiment in style, and a rumination on cultural trends. In this, it is pleasingly done. But the intentional weakness of the work's plot prevents it from making any lasting impressions. For an award-winning novel, it feels exceedingly forgettable. (3/5 Stars)

I Am America And So Can You by Stephen Colbert

From The Week of July 02, 2012

Satire is a powerful tool. By mocking that which is ridiculous, it can entertain while highlighting the many discordant notes that dominate the symphony of society. But whereas straight criticism can be, at times, pompous and strident, factious and political, satire nudges gently. With a wink, it teases us into a deeper examination of the absurdism that pervades our civilization. It's a craft well-harnessed by Mr. Colbert.

Originally a cast member of The Daily Show, Stephen Colbert has risen, in the last decade, to be one of the world's most influential comedians. His program, The Colbert Report, which was spun off from his appearances on The Daily Show, adopts the trappings of conservative punditry to give form to the absurdity of such media products as The O'Reilly Factor, making fun by adopting extremist positions that rely largely on illogical constructs. I Am America and So Can You brings Colbert's cult of personality to literature, summoning his bombastic and unapologetic facade to harpoon all the creatures of the left. Everyone from hipsters to gays, atheists to Hispanics, feel the sting of his comic arrows which, in hitting home, bring to life the nonsensical and even hurtful rationale upon which they are based.

Clocking in at a brisk 100-odd pages, I Am America And So Can You is an amusing romp through the cultural trappings of American life. From religion to the military, entertainment to the economy, Mr. Colbert lays out his unrestrained vision of the future which is, of course, dominated by the whimsical and inexplicable use of American power in every conceivable arena at home and abroad. But for as humorous as Mr. Colbert makes such absurdity, the kernel of truth upon which all good satire is based remains, reminding his readers that versions of these truths, obviously less varnished in humor, are out there, percolating through the world, spreading dismay and destruction with every impact on a soft target. And though Undermining these damaging arguments with comedy may well be the best means by which to drain the poison from such extremism, it remains a bellicose force that should concern us all.

This is an entertaining distraction, a charming reprieve from a world not glossed in such harmless absurdity. Were that all pundits as hapless as the hapless Stephen Colbert of Colbert Report fame. (3/5 Stars)

Dancing In The Dark by Morris Dickstein

From The Week of July 02, 2012

For all that it degrades and demeans, debilitates and destroys, deprivation does have one virtue. For while it rips apart those too weak of character to hold together under its stresses, it strengthens the wills of the resilient to go on, transforming them into spiritually hardened warriors able to endure any challenge. It provokes the resourceful to generate new methods and alternatives, new standards and practices, that will keep churning the wheels of society in the hope of a better tomorrow. In no aspect of our culture is this more apparent than in the arts which have always been utterly recast and refocused by hard dips in the fortunes of civilization. This point is vividly demonstrated in Mr. Dickstein's cultural history of the Great Depression.

From the stock crash of 1929 to the dawn of World War II, human civilization was convulsed by one of the worst economic downturns in its history. Triggered by a series of catastrophic decisions by both government and enterprise, this severe recession, later to be termed the Great Depression, not only erased the life-savings of millions of individuals, its toxicity directly contributed to the rise of Nazi Germany and the onset of what remains, 70 years on, the costliest war in the history of man. Though economists are divided on precisely what extricated the world economy from this depression, they agree on this much. It was a devastating shock to the capitalist system which, by empowering its critics, altered the course of human events while leaving its mark upon all those it touched.

But while the most obvious externality of this economic crash (WWII) has been exhaustively covered by every form of media, less known is the degree to which it impacted the culture of this tumultuous era. From Michael Gold to Frank Capra, from John Steinbeck to Astaire and Rogers, Mr. Dickstein, a cultural historian and professor of English and Theatre, delves into the literature, the cinema and the stageplays of these twelve tortured years to create a captivatingly bleak portrait of an unimaginable time. He demonstrates how the Depression created room for eviscerating critiques of capitalism, thunderous condemnations of cold corporate giants, and sweeping works of cultural and societal reform which, in the united States, helped catalyzed a remarkable shift towards modernization in all aspects of civilization. It's little wonder, then, that this remains, at least for Americans, the golden age of literature and film.

Though hampered at times by the sprawling nature of its subject, Dancing In The Dark largely succeeds in realizing its grand ambitions. In bringing together artists both treasured and ignored by history, he summons the era's loudest critics and unleashes their words upon the reader at a time when the world is feeling the aftershocks of its own contemporary financial crisis. This point of unfortunate synergy causes the artistic voices vivified here to take on prophetic tones that have the power to both chill and enchant.

By and large, Dancing In The Dark reads like an exceptionally long review, in this case, of a culture and how it performed while being battered by a tempest the likes of which its victims had never seen. Mr. Dickstein's thorough understanding of the politicized tracts that shaped the era leaves the reader with the strong impression that the author has spent years toiling in the basements of uncounted libraries, unearthing the gems that are winningly recounted here. This vision, coupled with strong prose that never loses its sense of flow, makes digestible this 600-plus-page read which would have otherwise been both interminable and uninteresting.

However, for all its thoroughness, for all that we are made aware of the dominance of Bing Crosby and Cary Grant, George Gershwin and Katherine Hepburn, his account devotes too much time to the period's literary history. While the socially charged texts of a dozen authors are cleverly and expansively picked apart, we learn almost nothing about the theatre during a time when, prior to television, it was culturally dominant. Music, too, receives fairly short shrift, shoved aside for yet more books, some of which appear to have been ignored in their own times, much less in ours. It is difficult to blame Mr. Dickstein for this decision when the written word is clearly the most expeditious vehicle for social criticism. And yet I can't help but think that some brilliant plays were unfairly dropped from what is otherwise a pleasingly thorough chronicle.

This is a difficult but rewarding work with the power to leave the reader both amazed and depressed, humbled and disheartened. For it clearly communicates the reality that our socioeconomic problems have happened before and will happen again, a challenging thought to come to grips with considering that it leaves us largely helpless to permanently repair what is so eminently breakable. But while it is delivering this proverbial gutpunch, it is encouraging us with the universal notion that the human spirit is not so easily cowed. In fact, it is safe to say that it may well be our greatest and most enduring strength. (3/5 Stars)

Mastermind by Richard Miniter

From The Week of April 02, 2012

As much as history has been shaped by pivotal moments in time, nexuses of people and events that have together written the future, individual humans have also had the power to reorder our world. Through will and happenstance, power and timing, men and women, properly positioned, have redefined the destinies of nation: Henry VIII with England, Napoleon with France, Hitler with Germany. Even a moment's thought causes a dozen examples to tumble out of the past. But what of the present? Has the world grown too large, too diverse, for individuals to set the policies of nations, or can even the wisest heads be lost over the provocations of the few? In this troubling and troubled biography of a terrorist mastermind, Mr. Miniter argues that, far from dead, the Great Man theory of history is alive and well in the 21st century. Only, in this case, the subject has more in common with darkness than he does with greatness.

From the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center to 9/11, from the reprehensible East African Embassy bombings to the grotesque execution of Daniel Pearl, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has been the author of a dozen murderous plots against the United States which, together, have taken the lives of thousands. Initially operating on his own, as much for glory as for ideology, KSM, as he is known in the intelligence community, graduated in the late 1990s to the top ranks of Al-Qaeda where, for the next six years, he directed that organizations most effective operations against the West. Since his capture in 2003, Al-Qaeda has been more bark than bite, leading Mr. Miniter, along with many other intelligence agencies, to conclude that KSM's intelligence and cunning fuelled Al-Qaeda, a reconfiguration that shifts Osama Bin Laden from mastermind to figurehead and spiritual leader.

But who is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? What propelled him to take up such a destructive profession? How could a young man educated in Virginia grow to so despise the country that gave him safe harbor? Mr. Miniter explores these issues and more in this confrontational biography of the Al-Qaeda operative and key strategist. Drawing on interviews with some of KSM's teachers and interrogators, the author reconstructs Mohammed's life, from his impoverished childhood in the Middle East and Asia, through his adolescent years in the united States, to his adult life as a masterful weaver of schemes and plots which, the author argues, were motivated by the furtherance of KSM's own fame and glory more than any ideological purpose. He was a mass-murderer born into a most profitable time for his kind. Until his 2003 arrest in Pakistan, he was at the top of his field, much to the cost of his victims.

Mastermind is a fascinating read that struggles to overcome its flaws. Mr. Miniter has rendered a captivating portrait of one of the 21st century's most murderous non-state actors. His depiction of KSM as a seeker of glory over ideology appears to fit nicely with KSM's arrogant behavior during his detainment in Guantanamo Bay prison. More over, the author's investigative efforts, to uncover KSM's history, both in the United States and abroad, are commendably thorough, provoking as many thoughtful questions about KSM as the laws and the ethics of the country that, for a time, generously welcomed him onto its shores.

However, as much as Mr. Miniter succeeds in capturing his subject, both the author's politics and the extent to which he allows them to color this work condemn it. Mr. Miniter is not only an advocate for torture as a weapon in the arsenal of the United States against its enemies, he is an avid believer in seemingly all of KSM's many lies and taunts, threats and claims. This despite depicting the man as an avid schemer and self-aggrandiser... These, along with his criticism of the press' coverage of KSM's legal maneuverings, are suggestive of a deep cynicism on the part of the author that leaves the work feeling far more polemical than biographical. One gets the sense that the author is more interested in bearing his grudges than he is the truths his investigative efforts have uncovered.

A solid biography permanently damaged by the author's facile attacks on the positions of those who disagree with him. Mr. Miniter should have saved his criticisms, valid and otherwise, for another, more partisan forum than this, an important biography of a pivotal figure in our recent history. (2/5 Stars)

Hotel Heaven by Matthew Brace

From The Week of November 21, 2011

Though human personalities are often too individualized to be easily and accurately captured by generalizations, there is plenty of evidence to indicate that luxury is an indulgence that polarizes humans. Epicures, those who derive pleasure from delighting their senses, embrace luxury. After all, life is not only short, it is often punctuated by episodes of pain or boredom. Immersing oneself in aesthetic pleasures is one sure way of avoiding, or softening, life's uglier moments. Stoics, meanwhile, while not principally opposed to luxury, resist extravagance on the grounds that it is not only excessive but indulgent. The Good Life does not arise from intemperance; it flows from the satisfaction gleaned from hard work done well. Perhaps neither camp has the right of it. Maybe the answer lies somewhere in-between. If so, it will elude Mr. Brace for in this, his paean to life's luxuries, he leaves little doubt of which side of the question he favors.

From the historic to the opulent, from the scandalous to the futuristic, Hotel Heaven is a whirlwind tour of Earth's grandest hotels. After confessing an addiction to these palaces of luxury,Mr. Brace, a journalist and travel writer, eagerly recounts his many stays in the world's various five-star accommodations, reconstructing their grandeur with respect bordering on awe. But then it does not take the reader long to see why the author is so enamored with his pleasure palaces. For if he is not enjoying patronizing a middle-eastern hotel fit for a sheikh, he's soaking up the nostalgia of the Chelsea, the culture of the Savoy, or the fiery delights of Heaven in Fiji. There is no destination too outlandish, no delight too exquisite, no experience too seductive for this chronicler of luxury.

On the surface, Hotel Heaven is a piece of cultural fluff, an indulgent journey through exotic locales most of its readers will never see. In this, it is a successful work; for Mr. Brace has deployed the written word to wonderful advantage, conjuring up images of places of such sensory beauty that it makes the surroundings of ones ordinary life seem gray and drab by comparison. However, Mr. Brace, to his credit, does reach for something deeper than superficial hedonism. In reconstructing the history of the modern five-star hotel, he has introduced his readers to a story about innovation. After all, the desire of powerful and intelligent people to build, for their customers, shrines to elegance and pleasure have driven them to seek an efficiency of service, a thoroughness of detail, and a uniqueness of experience that their patrons will remember for always. This, along with the history lesson Mr. Brace conducts on each of his memorable hotels leaves the reader as enticed as he is educated.

Hotel Heaven does throw up some uncomfortable moments. There can be no doubt that, behind the facade of each of these magnificent locales, lie tales of exploited workers and polluted land. What's more, there is something eminently distasteful about the lavishness Mr. Brace celebrates here. Wealth is not a zero-sum game. Just because some have it and others don't doesn't automatically mean that the haves greedily took the fair shares that belonged to the have-nots. Wealth can be expanded, grown. However, Hotel Heaven does serve to remind us that there is an unimaginable gulf of privilege that exists between the rich and the poor. And while this may not be the fault of any one person involved in this tale, it does prompt one to wonder at what gruelling tasks others have to perform in order to make perfect the experiences of the insanely well-off.

A fun read. For epicures, an inspiration to visit some of these legendary locales. For stoics, some sobering food for thought about the nature of indulgence. Regardless of your affiliation, entertaining... (3/5 Stars)

Among The Truthers by Jonathan Kay

From The Week of July 24, 2011

Though those of us who are rationalists wish it otherwise, our world is shaped by popular opinion. It does not matter if said opinion is based on logic or reason. What matters is the extent to which said opinion can issue forth from an individual and find traction in a broader world yearning for an easy explanation. When we garnered our news from journalistic sources, popular opinion was, to an extent, safely harbored from extremism because it was in the best interests of journalistic publications to get the story right. But as Mr. Kay argues in Among The Truthers, with the rise of the Internet, control over popular opinion has all-but-entirely slipped out of the hands of the moderating media and fallen into the newly empowered grasp of conspiracy theorists and grudge-mongers who use their expanded platforms to pedal their narrow ideologies. Exit Walter Cronkite; enter The Blaze, or any of a thousand sites of its conspiracist kind.

So just who are these conspiracists? Who are the new shapers of popular opinion? And just how much do we believe them?

From the 9/11 Truthers to the Obama Birthers, from false flaggers to anti-Zionists, Mr. Kay, a decorated journalist for the National Post, throws himself headlong into the modern conspiracy movement. From its leaders to its adherents, he vividly describes their belief systems and their pathologies and, in doing so, quickly generates a fairly consistent portrait of a modern conspiracist. He is invariably male, dogged in the pursuit of truth, distrustful of authority, and perfectly willing to devote his life to his cause. In fact, the cause is what lends meaning to his damaged life. Though the personalities of the men Mr. Kay meets are markedly different, these commonalities connect them across the new conspiracy market which Kay describes as a series of islanded fringe thinkers who have been networked into a community by the interconnectivity of the Internet, a system which has both homogenized and supersized conspiracism.

In Among The Truthers, Mr. Kay mounts a two pronged effort to enlighten the reader about the major conspiracies floating through the Western world and to explain the pathologies of their adherents. Though he is pleasingly successful with the former, it's the later, the fascinating profile he generates of those who worship at conspiracism's altar, that elevates his work from engaging to outstanding. The damaged survivor, the fail historian, the endurer of the midlife crisis... Their backgrounds can be wildly divergent, but in these highly intelligent and endlessly opportunistic few, the outcome seems depressingly similar. The essential aspect of reasonableness that most humans enjoy collapses under the weight of their pain, plunging them into a distorted reality in which they have been victimized, their potential guttered by omnipotent forces beyond their control. It becomes their destiny to spread this revelation to the world and now, with the Internet to fuel them, they've never had a bigger pulpit.

This is easily in my top five reads this year. Engrossing and enlightening in equal measure. This is not a polemic against conspiracism; there is no rancor here. There is only a need to understand and to explain, a desire Mr. Kay ironically shares with his captivating subjects. (5/5 Stars)

Bossypants by Tina Fey

From The Week of April 17, 2011

Ms. Fey may not have any novel contributions to make to the memoir genre. Nonetheless, her playful, mocking wit and her self-deprecating mien combine to imbue this account of her life with an affectionate, enduring charm.

A native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Ms. Fey has devoted her life to comedy. After all, nothing less than love for ones art could cause someone to push through the doubts, the setbacks and the crappy odds of success to realize their dream. From her formative experiences at summer theatre camp and the Second City comedy troop, to her arrival on the public stage with Saturday Night Live and the creation of her own television show, she recounts, here, the milestones of her challenging journey to the top of her profession, all while lighting up her tale with a constellation of boisterous friends, commanding parents and hilarious colleagues. It would have been easy for Ms. Fey to gloss over her life pre-fame, minimizing it in favor of celebrity exploits that sell books and draw in new fans. But, winningly, Bossypants lavishes as much attention on the foibles and the humiliations characteristic of her early life as it does to the triumphant stardom of her current, successful chapter. This, more than anything else, demonstrates the core decency of one of the most widely known people in contemporary comedy.

It's not hard for memoirs to slide into insufferable navel-gazing. After all, they are often several-hundred-page paeans written about the author by the author. Yet I could not find a single self-reverential page in this breezy, funny and telling autobiography. Ms. Fey has a lot to say, about her profession, the state of American life, the difficulties of rising to the top and the exhausting challenge to remain there. She imparts this wisdom with the kind of grace and good humor that make her, I imagine, an irresistible personality. (3/5 Stars)

Too Far From Home by Chris Jones

From The Week of August 15, 2010

Having been suffering an occasional bout of insomnia, I was reluctantly awake early on the morning of February 1st, 2003, when Columbia, one of NASA's four space shuttles, broke up upon re-entry into Earth's atmosphere. I was four years old when Challenger met an equally horrific fate. And so, watching Columbia's end play out on CNN, I couldn't believe what I was witnessing. Even if the cause of the disaster wasn't immediately clear, its ramifications were.

This spectacular catastrophe, occurring in an era of 24/7 media saturation, would have dire consequences for not only the shuttle program but NASA itself. Mr. Jones, a writer and editor at Esquire, captures Columbia's last flight, its mechanics and its fallout for the American space program. But while his book does credit to these weighty issues, it is inarguably at its best as it chronicles the harrowing return to Earth for the astronauts who, as a consequence of NASA grounding the shuttle fleet in the wake of the disaster, were stranded on the International Space Station. NASA's parallel efforts to bring the astronauts home, ultimately with Russian aid, and to discover the fatal flaw that provoked Columbia's doom is woven nicely into the broader public-relations implications of the disaster. Politically and philosophically, Columbia changed NASA's behavior, igniting a conversation about not only manned exploration of space but the cost-benefit analysis of that exploration using shuttles that were then 25 years old.

This is a tale with many players, almost all of whom equivocate as a result of what they have to lose politically, fiscally or socially. Mr. Jones does a credible if unspectacular job with the broader picture. Where he excels is with the stranded astronauts who remained on the ISS far longer than planned and returned home in what was, to say the least, the most unorthodox of ways. This is good work and it tells a story worth telling. (3/5 Stars)

The Men Who Stare At Goats by Jon Ronson

From The Week of March 14, 2010

There are some tales so bizarre, so firmly planted on the extremest fringe, that they become difficult to define. Is this a genuine attempt at uncovering the whackjobs who occupy our world, or are we in the hands of an author who is just as whacky as the whackjobs he seeks to expose? The blurred line is, if intentional, a credit to Mr. Ronson's distinctly British humor which delights in each of the interviews included in this piece of rewarding, laugh-out-loud journalism.

Chiefly, The Men Who Stare At Goats concerns Mr. Ronson's investigation into an US military program's attempts to channel the controversial powers of the paranormal into a stable, coherent, tangible doctrine which would allow the paranormal's various disciplines to be used as weapons against America's enemies. This investigation takes Mr. Ronson from California to Ohio, to Washington D.C., where army generals, cult leaders and hermit mystics are interviewed and their knowledge digested. Mr. Ronson deliberately withholds judgement on his subjects which is a wonderful choice. It allows the insanity to hang out there, alone, naked to the world.

Though it's fairly safe to conclude that the paranormal won't be troubling us in the near future, a disturbing trend emerges in Mr. Ronson's tale, the power that belief in the supernatural has over American society. He chronicles a popular, overnight talk show, Coast to Coast AM which regularly entertains notion of the weird and has, at times in the past, done harm as a result of not shooting down the theories of its guests, theories which, when disseminated, do real damage to real people. It's a strange thing to read a book about figures on the fringe, only to discover that the millions of people who believe them must also be fringe. At this point, can the fringe be considered fringe? It seems unlikely.

The Men Who Stare At Goats is a concise and laugh-filled riot which, unless you are on that growing fringe, is sure to entertain. (3/5 Stars)

All Tomorrow's Parties: The Bridge Trilogy 03 by William Gibson

From The Week of March 14, 2010

Though this final installment of The Bridge Trilogy brings the bifurcated characters of the first two novels together to pay off the series, All Tomorrow's Parties sags heavily under the weight of what it is forced to carry. Mr. Gibson is at his best when he welds the superficial onto the important, exemplified by Chia (a school girl) being introduced to the Assembler, a technology that will forever change her world. But whereas the superficial was well-refined in the first two novels, here it is set aside for expediency, that is, the culmination of what this whole trilogy is about. He who can anticipate the future can control information. He who controls information can manipulate it to their advantage and to the detriment of others. This, in a nutshell, is the lesson of the trilogy. This is where we've been headed since we first met Berry Rydell. But while this lesson is philosophically satisfying, the enjoyableness of the first two novels has been the characters and they seem to suffer, here, for being more obviously puppets for the thrust of Mr. Gibson's brand of technological theology.

Laney's deterioration into what he feared most is heartbreaking to watch, while the re-introduction of Berry and Chevette is welcome and amusing. Yet, having the two casts together somehow doesn't amalgamate into something greater than its parts. This may be a reach to explain why I enjoyed this conclusion less than Virtual Light and Idoru, but it just doesn't come alive as it should.

Nonetheless, this is rare fiction, the likes of which comes along only once every few years. Mr. Gibson has a gift and the reader is unquestionably blessed to watch that gift at work. (3/5 Stars)

Idoru: The Bridge Trilogy 02 by William Gibson

From The Week of March 14, 2010

Though Idoru exists in the same world, at roughly the same time, as Virtual Light, its progenitor, the reader is introduced to a cast of new characters and settings. While this frees the reader up to read Idoru as a stand-alone work of fiction, and while I believe this to be the best book of the trilogy, excising Berry, Chevette and the rest of Virtual Light's characters so completely from the story is jarring.

We shift our focus from disunited California to Tokyo where Colin Laney, a productive but brain-damaged American, is hired on by the loyal lieutenant of an aging rock star. Laney is ordered to turn his special talents -- Laney's disability seems to have given him unusual powers for intuiting bits of critically important data out of a sea of mundane information -- towards finding out if the rock star (Rez) is being manipulated by his enemies into marrying an artificial intelligence. Laney's world eventually collides with Idoru's second main character, Chia, a disaffected schoolgirl from Seattle who is designated by her chapter of the Lo/Rez fan club to travel on her own to Tokyo in hopes of finding out if Rez is serious about marrying the eponymous Idoru.

Though the story here seems superficial, Mr. Gibson uses the characters in Idoru to speak to a broader movement in his trilogy, chiefly that information has become the most valuable commodity. This truth not only makes the holders of information important, it makes the finders of information extraordinarily valuable. Though a story about the importance of information is hardly novel, Mr. Gibson's approach interweaves this notion with the excitement and risk of new, revolutionary technologies and comes out with a finished product which delights both intellectually and superficially.

Finally, a word on Idoru's characters. Laney is exquisitely tortured by his disability which hangs over him like the
sword of Damocles, while Chia is so naive that she can't even seem to conceive of how much danger she's in. But as good as the mains service the story, Mr. Gibson's supporting characters burn even brighter. Rez's search for love in any form as he descends from the zenith of fame is poignant, as is the undying loyalty of Blackwell, his chief of security. Most potent, for me, is Laney's domineering ex-boss at Slitscan which is a sort of futuristic
Entertainment Tonight on steroids. Kathy is wonderfully repugnant and, to the extent that she is in the novel, is a treasure. They all bring life to the best of the Bridge books. (4/5 Stars)