A profoundly disturbing look at a disintegrating American city in Detroit

From The Week of July 29th, 2013

Urban decay is a scourge on the modern world. The natural outgrowth of economic systems that discourage centralized planning, they are unsightly and unsafe. But for as much as abandoned blocks and decrepit buildings may offend our sense of aesthetics, the extent to which they degrade the spirits of those exposed to them, draining them of hope and passion, is their truest and profoundest sin. For this cancer, once rooted in the hearts and minds of people who feel as abandoned by society as their neighborhoods are of people, cannot easily be taken out. It must be bulldozed and paved over, in the hope that the new will make everyone forget the old. And yet, that damage is generational, ensuring that it will linger as long as there's anyone around to remember. This is a lesson taught with chilling effect by this mesmerizing volume from Charlie LeDuff.

Once a thriving hub of industry and wealth, Detroit, Michigan has reached rock bottom. Forty years of White Flight, corrupt politicians and automotive decline have reduced its population by half, made a sham of its city government and exposed its remaining citizens, 82 percent of whom are African American, to the kind of impoverished, urban decay more in line with the Third World than the First. This rot is most consequentially reflected in the city's emergency services which are slow, inadequate and profoundly underfunded, resulting in obscene waiting times for 911 calls that would trigger hearings in other cities. But it's most obviously represented in the city's vacancy rate which experts peg at somewhere between 25 and 40 percent, meaning that, at best, an entire quarter of Detroit has been completely abandoned by citizens looking for hope under other lights.

Charlie LeDuff knows this all too well. Having grown up in the midst of this long, devastating collapse, he moved away to pursue a career in journalism before Detroit's siren song called him home to a position at the Detroit News where he began to document the city's decomposition. From this post, he spent several years wading through government corruption and civic crime, all while ruminating on the ways in which Detroit devoured him and his family, claiming the life of his sister, the joy of his mother and the self-respect of his brother. These observations, alongside his own failings, leave little doubt of just how monumental Detroit's fall from grace has been.

Detroit is a shattering piece of gonzo journalism. Comprised of Mr. LeDuff's experiences while working at the Detroit News, its narrative is explosively propelled by the author's disgust with his and the city's failings which are entwined to wonderful and shocking effect. The reader is exposed to abandoned neighborhoods and decaying courthouses, beleaguered firemen and crooked judges, their collective stories weaving a tapestry of life in the heartland of American decline. One would naturally expect this to be a difficult and challenging experience, but such is Mr. LeDuff's skill, and such is the overpowering nature of his subject, that the reader is often left gobsmacked by the depths to which this poor place has sunk.

Though the personal nature of this account is its greatest virtue, compelling the rubbernecking reader to look past the atavistic excitement of a train wreck and to the real damage that's eventuated as a result of unchecked corruption and decay, its most memorable punches are saved for some of the local customs. Mr. LeDuff contends that Detroiters will buy cans of gasoline which they use to set vacant houses on fire, entertainment for the whole family for less than the cost of a movie ticket. Such anecdotes, which one expects to only find in dystopian novels, do more in one sentence than thousand-page reports to convey the unfathomable degree to which Detroiters have been altered by their environment. Gentrification and urban planning need no other advertisement than this.

Detroit is not without flaws. One senses that Mr. LeDuff enjoys a good story. And given the appalling disposition of his subject, it's easy to imagine that some of the details here have been exaggerated. For instance, every poignant episode seems to conveniently include an appropriately profound quote from one bystander or another. Perhaps the author is merely lucky to be have been in the right place at the right time, but the frequency of these lucky moments seems a bit too high for comfort. That said, this is also part of gonzo journalism's appeal, an intense subjectivity that draws us into the world at the expense of objective truth. So it's not as though exaggerations aren't expected.

A profound experience. It would be a hard heart that remained unmoved for the having of it. One of my best reads this year... (4/5 Stars)

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

From The Week of July 15th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Battle of Tora Bora vividly catalogued in Kill Bin Laden

From The Week of July 1st, 2013

Humanity puts great stock in symbols, images and individuals who can either inspire us to achieve our wildest dreams or remind us of the darkness that lies within us all. They can drive civilization forward on the back of all they've sacrificed to give us peace and stability, or seize us in selfish hatreds that harden our hearts and narrow our minds. But for all their historical and rhetorical power, symbols are only what we invest in them. After all, our symbols would be meaningless to someone who lived a thousand years ago, much less a thousand years from now. And yet, in the heat of moments of pain and confusion, this lesson is forgotten, neglected for the pleasures of exorcising them, a lesson taught quite well in Dalton Fury's adrenaline-fuelled memoir.

Though the September 11 Attacks sent powerful shockwaves of emotions through much of the world, they, in their audacity and their horror, also formally introduced the general public to Usama Bin Laden, the Saudi-born jihadist who had spent most of the previous 20 years funding and engineering acts of rebellion and terrorism. His crimes, even prior to 9/11, were legendary within international circles, but after this bold and heinous strike at monuments of American economic power, he became legendary, a creature of near-mythical powers who could direct devastating assaults against the world's most powerful nation, all from the relative comfort of the remote, tribal Hindu Kush.

This mountainous, central Asian region shared by Afghanistan and Pakistan had already proven, in the 1980s, to be a successful base of operations from which Afghan guerillas, supported by Arabian jihadists, attacked and disrupted the Soviet occupation of their country, eventually leading to the USSR's withdrawal from the unruly nation. Now it would perform a similar function for Usama Bin Laden who hoped to use his attacks against America to provoke his enemy into a ruinous war in the mountains he knew so well. Here, on familiar ground, he could watch America's might break against his winter stronghold and, in doing so, reveal to the world the extent of American weakness.

Instead of committing to such a war, the United States sent special operatives to Afghanistan, teams of Rangers, Deltas, SBS operatives and CIA agents armed for battle and packing the millions of dollars necessary to purchase the loyalty of local warlords who would execute the American-backed assaults against both the Taliban and al-Qaeda. This campaign would culminate in the Battle of Tora Bora, a series of skirmishes that would eventually smash Al-Qaeda, sending its key men into hiding and largely ending it as an organized force.

The commander's eye view of this most consequential battle, Kill Bin Laden is an arresting narrative of a hunt that narrowly missed capturing the world's most famous terrorist. Dalton Fury, the pseudonym for the Delta commander in charge of this mission, draws from his journal of those difficult few months to paint a thorough, if nationalistic, view of the battle, its protagonists, antagonists and the circumstances that lead to them clashing in this most remote mountain range. Supplementing his account with colorful anecdotes of life as a special operative, and detailing the absolute extremity of the training these soldiers endure to join such elite companies, Fury succeeds in conveying a sense of what it's like to be a member of the world's supreme fighting force, both its rewards and its disappointments. In this, he leaves little doubt of just how far these men have deviated from the normal life and the price they pay for living so far outside this most customary box.

However much Kill Bin Laden educates us about the lives and the demands of special forces, it stumbles when attempting to carry out its primary mission, to provide an unbiased account of the Battle of Tora Bora. Fury certainly reconstructs the combat, and the chain of events that lead to it, but these details are drowned out by his incessant need to denigrate the Afghans with whom he operated. In light of the fact that these warlords and their armies required American cash as motivation to fight, it seems reasonable to conclude that Fury is right to criticize their reluctance to fully engage with a fundamentalist enemy ravaging their homeland. But his tone so often devolves into outright scorn that his contempt for these men and their ways creates a great deal of room for doubt as to whether or not he's given them a fair hearing here.

That said, one gets the sense from these pages that Fury is not a man interested in outside criticisms, that he'd no more be interested in disguising or shading truths than he would be in retreating from a battle. And so, though we may harbor some doubts as to his fairness, the author has absolutely succeeded in his attempt to communicate his own personality and the ethos of the Deltas, facts which, alone, make this a worthwhile read.

History shifts on pivotal moments like these. Had Bin laden died at Tora Bora, it seems likely that the pretext for the War in Iraq would have been too weak for it to eventuate. The history of the 21st century's first decade would have unfolded far differently in the wake of such a monumental change. To see such a moment play out is a gripping experience no matter how prejudicial the execution. (3/5 Stars)

A thoughtful, quiet journey To a Mountain in Tibet

From The Week of May 27, 2013 Grief is a complex and exquisite emotion. For though it wracks our minds and torments our hearts with its dark and vicious throbbing, constantly and acutely reminding us of what we've lost, it also provides an avenue through which we can explore not only our place in the world, but the very meaning of existence and the good life. It takes us out of our day-to-day existence and compels us to contemplate our lives, our virtues and our sins, our merits and our flaws. And finally, it serves as a kind of memorium for the fallen, a means of acknowledging to them, and to ourselves, the depth of our emotions. Without it, introspection would be a meager force, a tool rarely brought to hand. This Colin Thubron captures well in his cinematic exploration of the Himalayas. After losing his sister to a mountain accident and his parents to old age, Mr. Thubron was a man adrift. But for an Italian girlfriend living in his native England, he possessed no ties to the world, nothing with which to link him to life. And so, as a means of revisiting his father's past, his sister's death and his own belief system, he conceived of a journey to Tibet where he would make himself intimately familiar with Mount Kailash, a 27,000-foot colossus of beautiful lakes and pitiless stone that is sacred to four of the world's prominent faiths. Here, he encounters a people eking out a hard existence at the heart of the world, a people who, despite being rich of faith, have been reduced to life's essentials. Despite their poverty and their scarce resources, these natives persist in this hard land, making pilgrimages to Mount Kailash's most holy sites, many of which are not easily accessed by the young and the fit let alone the aging and the undernourished. Determined to find something here to sooth his soul, Mr. Thubron pushes past the pain and the deprivation to absorb this sacred place and all that it has to offer. Though it has all the hallmarks of another chronicle of an ambitious mountaineer and his adventures conquering the world's peaks, To a Mountain in Tibet is an introspective work of nonfiction that equally captures the beauty and the desolation of the Himalayas. Largely setting aside the tangled politics of the region, Mr. Thubron bears his wounded soul to the reader, inviting him on a journey of self-discovery into a formidable place that most of us will never see. On the way, we learn about the author's father's military service in the area, his childhood in a war-torn Britain and his desire to find some measure of solace for a savaged spirit. But while these emotions are never far from the surface, they are overshadowed by the sheer grandeur of Mount Kailash, a sacred and unsummited mountain that is brought brilliantly to life by Mr. Thubron's descriptions of its walks and its lakes, its rocks and its shrines, all of which convey a profound sense of timeless majesty unimaginable to those of us who live in blander climes. Consequently, Kailash becomes the work's central character, the hub around which the work rotates, its secrets as profound as its claws are sharp. This is not a flawless work. Though Mr. Thubron wields an eloquent pen, his account seems to float largely out of time, existing in a place beyond culture and politics. This may well have been deliberate, an attempt to make the work enduring to the generations who might find solace in it, but it seems as likely to be a simple unwillingness to grapple with such difficult subjects. Moreover, Mr. Thubron teases us with details of his family that he never quite reveals with any specificity. Naturally, it is his prerogative to keep private his own history, but it seems strange to raise the specter of such figures and then to not fill them in. Nonetheless, this is an excellent and emotional trek through icy desolation to find beauty at the heart of the world. It is executed with quiet grace and enduring sensitivity. (3/5 Stars)

A beautifully written snapshot of a global city and its history in Istanbul

From The Week of April 15, 2013

Do cities have personalities? They are old and young, big and small, dirty and clean. They come in nearly as many varieties as their human builders and occupiers, but are they alive? Logic would say no, that they are nothing more than an accumulation of glass and concrete anthropomorphized into existence by humans who wish it so. And yet, if they are not alive, how else can we explain their attitudes, their dispositions, their moods? How else can we account for the seemingly obvious reality that generations hand down a city's character like a badge of honor or a cross to bear? Orhan Pamuk, arguably turkey's most famous, living writer, seems to have no doubt that cities have personalities. For he was raised in one of the most glorious of them all.

For nearly 1,600 years, Istanbul has been an ornament of the world. Christened by an emperor of Rome, it has been home to Byzantines and Arabs, ottomans and turks, civilizations which have, over the centuries, bequeathed this great city with gifts of culture and history, some of which stand to this day, defying disasters, both man-made and natural, to sunder them. It is home to great temples and even greater legends. But beyond its bizarres and its attractions, it is a city that straddles Europe and Africa, west and east, Christianity and Islam. It is a city of millions of souls seeking enlightenment and enrichment, culture and advancement, at the nexus of the world.

The son of one of its once-proud families, Mr. Pamuk grew up on these busy streets. He explored Istanbul's neighborhoods and matriculated through its schools. He dated its women and tested its limits, all while attempting, with his artist's heart, to capture Istanbul in all her glory. Imagining himself a painter, he tried countless times to represent the essence of the place on canvas, to distill its essence into something tangible the world could understand. But these talents eventually shifted to pen and paper, a medium in which he is an undeniable master.

Interweaving his personal history with that of his beloved city, Mr. Pamuk has created, in Istanbul, a moving and unflinching portrait of a life at the crux of the world. As critical of his own failings as he is of Istanbul's, he nonetheless manages to convey, over his many, long walks through this city of ten million, a sense of fog and mystery, of western thought and eastern passion, that fills the reader's senses with the sights and sounds of an unforgettable place. But more than simply describing it to us, he reveals the minds it has shaped and who have shaped it, past giants of literature whose melancholia not only captured the imagination of the author, but so clearly permeates the place. This, along with Mr. Pamuk's willingness to share so much of himself, his struggles and his fears, makes this an irresistible read.

For all of the splendor of Mr. Pamuk's prose, Istanbul could have benefited from more history. The author reaches into Istanbul's past only to conjure forth the great minds it has helped to nourish. Otherwise, he makes no attempt to describe, or to elucidate, the civilizations and the societies that have claimed it over the centuries. A pity, really. For the work does so much to reveal the gloominess and quirkiness of the place, to imbue its streets with meaning, that one can only imagine how Istanbul would have come alive if the reader was endowed with the context of its glorious and violent past.

This is mesmerizing work. Even if one has no time for the topic, the pleasure of watching Mr. Pamuk at work is sufficient to make this a memorable and rewarding experience. (4/5 Stars)

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

From The Week of April 15, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

Words of wisdom and prophecy from a magnificent mind in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

From The Week of March 18, 2013

True genius is a rare and precious thing. For its scarcity stands out like a diamond amongst the rough, allowing its light, in the form of its opinions, its theories, and its understanding, to be taken seriously by a world that largely believes in authority and that holds a deep admiration for exceptional people. Yes, there is certainly great wisdom in the thoughts and beliefs of ordinary folks, but these notions have no platform, no popular basis from which to spread through the culture. This is not a problem for geniuses who, in their celebration, are given a soapbox from which to speak to the world of what they hold dear. Though just such a soapbox was used sparingly and with humility by Mr. Feynman, it was also used powerfully and effectively by one of the 20th century's most extraordinary minds, a truth revealed repeatedly in this collection of his essays.

The son of a uniform salesman who passed on a life-long curiosity for the world and its many, mysterious systems, Richard Feynman was a key physicist in his discipline's formative century. One of the many minds to follow on from the golden generation of Einstein and Bohr, Heisenberg and Wheeler, he left school to work on the Manhattan Project -- holding the distinction of being one of the few scientists to witness the first Trinity test with the unguarded eye -- before going on to win the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965 for his contributions to the advancement of Quantum Electrodynamics. Between these remarkable milestones, he made singular contributions to a dozen aspects of theoretical physics. Today, however, he is remembered best for envisioning and conceptualizing nanotechnology, imagining a world where computers, both quantum and conventional, would facilitate an immeasurable leap forward in human society.

A legendary talker, notable for his unusual deployment of English, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out collects a series of speeches and interviews Mr. Feynman gave over the span of his career. From Japan to Italy, from anecdote to commencement address, he expounds upon not only the moments and insights that brought him renown, but the life experience's that reveal him to be a man of brilliance and humility. From the hilarious absurdities of government censorship during the Manhattan Project to the passionate exhortation for nanotechnology, Mr. Feynman manifests, here, as an exceptional, ordinary man, a profoundly human creature with an otherworldly understanding of the universe.

For all of Mr. Feynman's physics, though, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out is most evocative when it speaks to the great man's philosophy. Holding up doubt as the key virtue of the scientific mind, he laments the thoughtlessness of religious believers who accept as truth something they haven't tested. Nor do they wish to test it. Theirs is literally a senseless belief, one that manifests from a mind unschooled in the scientific method. In this vein, Mr. Feynman exhorts his fellow man to doubt everything. For it is only through testing those doubts that one can find truth. Nothing, no theory, no notion, no matter how farfetched, should be dismissed out of hand. For to dismiss anything without testing its veracity is to be no better than those who believe thoughtlessly in dogma. It is to trust what one feels, not what one knows to be true.

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out is not without its darker moments. Mr. Feynman's anecdotes, playful though they may be, expose the powerful skein of sexism that ran through academia for all but the final few years of the 20th century. He manages, even here, to be charming. Even so, he is representative of the paternalism of his time, a white man in a world that, by and large, only recognized and appreciated the contributions of white men. This is a sin that should not be forgotten, a sense of personal entitlement that not only runs counter to the core philosophies detailed here, but that destructively ignored the talents of millions of women and and individuals from other ethnicities that could have made exceptional contributions to the advancement of science.

This is mesmerizing work, not only for its pleasing voice but for what it teaches us about science, philosophy and the Good Life Outstanding in spite of its occasional missteps. (4/5 Stars)

Temple Grandin's exquisite, moving examination of Animals in Translation

From The Week of February 25, 2013
Humans trust most what they can see, touch and taste. For ones senses not only provide a means by which reality can be verified, they grant us the opportunity to distinguish the advantageous from the punitive, the pleasing from the painful. They are the filters by which we come to understand our world. Sadly, though, like any useful tool, relying too much on our senses can be dangerous, welcoming us into a kind of dependence that causes us to discard any piece of information we do not comprehend. We hear birdsong, but do we understand that it conveys information? We see pollution clouding our skies, but do we investigate the damage it causes? We re-shape the earth, but do we consider the domino effect this has on the climate and the species who share it with us? No. We blunder forth, our reliance on our senses having programmed into us an arrogance that all-too-often leads us to our doom. Rarely has this ignorance been so winningly demonstrated than in Ms. Grandin's charming and fascinating examination of animal behavior.

Autistic long before the condition was even notionally understood, Temple Grandin grew up in a world she did not understand. The world that we take for granted, the world that seems so orderly and obvious to us, was, to her abnormal brain, a chaotic mess of stimuli and distraction which not only made little sense, but kept her from maturing alongside her peers. However, what Ms. Grandin lacked in sociability with humans she more than made up for with animals, creatures whose motives and actions seemed comprehensible to her in a way that the rest of us either dismissed or took for granted.

Harnessing this fondness, Ms. Grandin embarked upon a career working with animals of all stripes. From healing to killing, she has spent 30 years watching their behaviors, experiencing their emotions and sussing out the bent of their thoughts. And in this she has made some wonderful discoveries about what triggers their rages, what sooths their spirits, and what defines their desires. These personal experiences, along with her extensive research into the creatures she's devoted her life to, are gathered together to reveal an animal world that is hardly the two-dimensional game of predator and prey that we see, but a universe of emotions, experiences and talents that are not only beyond human ken, but human capacity as well. This is a world of dogs and horses, cows and cats, that seems all-the-more obvious for this journey.

animals in Translation is mesmerizing work. Peppering her chronicle with facts about the creatures most familiar to us, Ms. Grandin needs only 300 pages to convince the reader that the animal kingdom is a rich and diverse world defined as much by motive as genetics. From the subsonic vibrations of elephant communication to the complex emotions of horses, from the sexual violence of roosters to the brutality of dolphins, she captures an environment of routine and mystery, of power and death, that is as far from the fluffy and the cartoonish as it's possible to get. Though she devotes considerable time to numerous other creatures, dogs feature here most prominently. From their bites to their mysterious abilities to sniff out our seizures and our cancers, Ms. Grandin uses their minds and their attitudes to reveal to us a world that has to be studied without biases, without blinders, to be properly understood.

The work is not without its flaws. To someone who has not experienced autism, the validity of Ms. Grandin's theory, that this condition helps the human to think more like an animal, is unclear. The author provides examples of how animal and autistic behaviors overlap, experiments whose results are admittedly quite striking, but these conclusions are largely drawn from anecdotal data. This is a problem also apparent in the parts of the work that concern animal behavior. Here, Ms. Grandin uses personal experiences, along with those of her acquaintances, to exemplify her contentions about the work-ings of the animal mind. It may well be that anecdote is the easiest means by which the author can convey her decades of accumulated knowledge to the reader. If so, it is certainly successful. But it does leave some doubt as to the scientific veracity underpinning her conclusions.

Notwithstanding its personal nature, Animals in Translation is a captivating adventure through the minds of creatures who, for some of us, are not only our friends but our sustenance. In this, it is as revelatory as it is enlightening. The animal mind will never be thought of the same way again. )& # ((4/5 Stars)

Tiger, Tiger, a chronicle of innocence lost

From The Week of December 31, 2012
Our lives pivot on formative moments, tiny slices of time in which chaos collides us with people we do not know and events we cannot predict. Leave the house five minutes early and meet our soulmate on a train we would normally never take; leave five minutes late and get hit by a car that would have been miles away if we'd left on time. And in this, we come to understand that fortune, or fate, or whatever face we bestow upon random chance, is something we can never anticipate. More's the pity. For while some of us are positively impacted by these collisions, others are utterly transformed by them in ways that leave behind very little of what we once were. Few individuals are more familiar with this than Ms. Fragoso. She demonstrates in her vivid and jagged memoir.

An urban child of the 1980s, Ms. Fragoso was born into a fractious family. Her American mother's psychological instability and her Latin father's searing resentments not only deprived her of a supportive homelife upon which she could build her future, their contentiousness drove her out into ther New-Jersey neighborhood to find there a measure of attention and affection not forthcoming at home. Notionally monitored by her mother, Ms. Fragoso, after encountering various characters, tumbles into the orbit of Peter, a Vietnam veteran who, 44 years her senior, is a creature of paternal gentleness. A twice-married man facing a long and difficult decline into agedness, Peter makes Margaux into a shield against decrepitude, giving to her the attention and play she so craves while extracting from her, in turn, a child's innocence.

As the years pass, Margaux and Peter embark upon a journey of mutual devastation. Their relationship, consummated when Margaux is seven years old, lasts until she is 22, but the intervening fifteen years are far from happy. For what began in affection, albeit manipulated, is increasingly marked by jealousy, discord, envy and emotional abuse. Their interactions, stained by what has past between them, become increasingly toxic until selfishness and despair finally sunder their strange and mutually dependent union, leaving Margaux alone in a world she has not been prepared to confront.

As creepy as it is moving, Tiger, Tiger is a 330-page explanation of why we protect our young from sex and relationships. For while peter is undoubtedly a molester of children, he is also someone Ms. Fragoso loves. She is tortured by that love, but it is still love that she feels, love for a man who took her into the basement of his home and changed her young life forever. She was utterly ill-equipped to recognize Peter's self-important excuses, his self-serving justifications, his self-pleasing manipulations. She, like anyone her age, saw only a man who gave her what her parents did not, love without limits or conditions. She could not recognize his martyrdom, his selfishness, his lack of self-control. And so she allowed herself to be grafted onto him. She allowed herself to be sustenance for a vampire who just happened to enjoy innocence more than blood. She allowed herself to be built up into a fantasy frozen in time because she could not imagine her life holding anything else.

There are drawbacks here. Ms. Fragoso reconstructs long and detailed conversations from her childhood without making any attempt to explain how she accomplished this feat. Moreover, she gives us no sense of perspective, no sense of events that followed Peter's departure from her life. Notwithstanding these small flaws, though, Tiger, Tiger is a vehicle for Ms. Fragoso's keen mind, for her lyrical pen and for her wounded heart, all of which combine to lend the work punch and consequence.

This is no savage, overwrought evisceration of child molesters; popular culture has done that for Ms. Fragoso. No, this is a quieter contemplation of the darker side of love: how much we need it, how we can be fooled into it, and how it can keep us enchained despite our best attempts at freedom. In this, Tiger, Tiger is more than worthy of its grave topic. (4/5 Stars)

Lives of every-day Iranians detailed in Alison Wearing's Honeymoon in Purda

From The Week of December 3, 2012
As much as the connections between humanity's various societies have been deepened by the Internet, in both its capacity to expose and unite, life beyond our customary borders is still foreign to us. For there is no land like the one that reared us. We know its rhythms and its eccentricities, the beauty of its trees and the sweetness of its air. We speak its language with a fluidity that we shall never lose. And so everything we encounter outside that bubble is filtered through the lens of our native land. It is not simply accepted as is, or how it should be. It is compared and contrasted by minds seeking always to find the right way of things when there is no such way. There is only what is. And the sooner we understand that, the easier it will be for us to accept the unknown and the foreign. This is a lesson wonderfully illustrated in Ms. Wearing's travel log which is no less relevant for its age.

For most of us in the West, Iran is a fascinating enigma, a proud nation about which very little is concretely known. We hear about its faiths and its leaders, its oil and its revolution, but we know next to nothing about its ordinary citizens, their lives, their customs, their pasttimes. To those uninterested in politics, this is incomprehensible. After all, as one of the oldest inhabited territories in the world, Iran occupies a unique place in human history, one that has not only captivated scholars but engrossed anthropologists attempting to trace the history of our species. But to those who do wrap themselves in current events, the answer to this dearth of knowledge is all-too-depressingly obvious. For as a consequence of western colonialism and general interference in its government and its resources, Iran is an intensely closed society, commanded by a government highly suspicious of Greeks bearing gifts.

Heedless of this impediment and eager to see the world, two youthful Canadians set out to explore this mysterious nation. Masquerading as husband and wife in order to smooth their passage through a more rigid culture, Ms. Wearing and Ian, her gay companion devote five months of the year 2000 to traveling through Iran's cities and villages, its mountains and its deserts, its snows and its sweltering heat. And even though Ms. Wearing spends much of the journey enshrouded in conservative, Islamic garb, in deference to the sensitivities of the people they encounter, she is able to experience this distant country with the intensity of an artist, and through the eyes of a woman for whom everything she sees is foreign. Her experiences are unforgettable.

Writing with the passion of a painter and the literary flair of a diarist, Ms. Wearing's Honeymoon in Purda is an oddly affecting work of non-fiction that touches on the philosophical as much as it does the practical. Unapologetic of her open, western sensibilities, the author is simultaneously respectful of the traditions of the land she's chosen to explore, immersing herself, for better or worse, in the habits and the rituals of a very foreign place. This cultural awareness not only prevents her work here from drifting into smugness or self-involvement, it exposes her to people who, despite holding very different political and cultural views, are ready and willing to engage with her. Honeymoon in Purda makes it clear that we are imbibing the thoughts of a rare mind, unencumbered by the narrowness of age and or prejudice.

Naturally, there are moments when Alison and Ian grate upon the reader. However, this is as much a credit to them as a curse to the work. For it is a consequence of their willingness to be seen at their worst, not a result of a failing of character. And in any event, the extent to which they expose us to Christians and Mexicans, to drug-dealers and beleaguered wives, to eager shopkeepers and hospitable soldiers, more than makes up for any frustrations one might have for the pair's foibles. This is Iran as it has rarely been seen, Iran as it may not be seen again for some time, more's the pity.

Honeymoon in Purda is a lovely chronicle of a life-altering journey that is elevated above the fray by its characters, both exhilarating and depressing. Some literary license has to have been taken, to have so accurately transcribed so many of the conversations that take place here, but this is a flaw that does nothing to reduce my appreciation. (4/5 Stars)

Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal by Jeanette Winterson

From The Week of November 12, 2012 As much as our lives, and thus our personalities, are shaped by a million unpredictable incidents, spanning decades, which are as uncontrollable as they are unavoidable, our parents define our existences. For when we are but blank slates, unformed in childhood, they are there to impart upon us codes of morality and conduct that we cannot reject. To do so would compel us to reject our parents as well and we are ill-equipped, at such an age, to be on our own. Thus, we conform. For good or ill, we learn at their feet, uplifted by their generosity, degraded by their abuse. We are encoded by them in ways we will never escape. No one knows this better than Ms. Winterson, much to her cost.

One of Britain's more famous, contemporary authors, Jeanette Winterson rose to prominence in 1985 when, at the age of 26, she published her first and to-date most successful novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. This coming-of-age tale of a young lesbian suffering the stones and arrows of her narrowminded, fundamentalist mother was as raw as it was vivid, capturing, in its two main characters, both the profound, generational divide that separates postwar parents from their Gen-X children -- repression versus freedom, authoritarianism versus individualism --, and the degrees to which these differences, born of time and circumstance, prevented anything like understanding from forming between the two disconnected groups.

At the time, Ms. Winterson acknowledged that this work was inspired by her own history. However, Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal makes clear just how much, introducing the reader to the author's tortured childhood in which her exquisitely miserable adopted mother heaped upon her atypical but talented daughter the sins and the disappointments of her own repressed existence. Obsessed with sin, the elder Winterson could not see past her disapproval to recognize that her daughter possessed an unusual love of literature and poetry, a passion that would carry her to the heights of Oxford and beyond, leaving behind the gray and narrow world in which her mother had boxed herself. From painful, childhood episodes to the search for her biological mother, Ms. Winterson recounts her life, leaping as freely through time as she does from prose to verse, forever exposing the scars of a broken relationship that will never have the chance to heal.

Why Be Happy If You Can Be Normal is a fascinating read. While it is burdened by episodes of distasteful self-indulgence, it is, in every other respect, a revealing portrayal of a damaged person's most private pains. Enchained by her mother's scorn and the secrets of her own origins, Ms. Winterson spends much of her life plagued by an abusive circuit that she cannot break. For as much as she possesses the mental powers to reason her way clear of the wounds her mother burned into her soul, she cannot teach herself how to love. For all her powers, for all her success, this is beyond her talent. It is beyond anyone's talent. For allowing oneself to be loved is something that has to be nurtured in the young, cherished until it can grow armor against life's thorns. It cannot be imposed later on. For the scar tissue has already formed. And this is far from fertile soil in which to plant the seeds of trust and tenderness.

This is a commendable autobiography. For it is as raw as Ms. Winterson's most laudatory work. It is nothing less than the expose of the frailties of one person's mind and soul. And yet, this is also its most grievous flaw. For this is almost too personal, too acute. I feel like a voyeur, like I have been witnessed to something not meant for me. Still, to the degree to which it may help those who have suffered the same or similar dignities from those they trusted most, to make them feel less alone it is worthwhile.

As honest as it is sad... (3/5 Stars)

The Signal And The Noise by Nate Silver

From The Week of November 5, 2012

Though human progress relies on several critical pillars in order to function, none are more vital to the survival of the species than predicting the future. For it's only through the reasonably accurate anticipation of what's coming that we have any notion of how to act. The world around us is rife with data: dark clouds that presage rain, the approaching roar that announces an oncoming car, the rot that decays our food. If we were suddenly unable to use these data to draw logical conclusions based on past experience, we'd be dead in short order, felled by an inability to understand, to know, to make an educated guess. It's not a quality often valorized; we're rarely stripped of our predictive powers, a reality that leads us to take its virtues for granted. But this blindness has not stopped Mr. Silver from properly identifying it as a key aspect of progress and change. He explains in his captivating treatise.

From meteorology to poker, from elections to personal relationships, our world runs on guesswork. There are simply too many unknowable variables involved in the interaction of an ecosystem with the seven billion souls it shelters. There is no way for us to possess all of the information necessary to understand all. Thus, ever since we've been endowed with the powers of intellect, we've used a clumsy combination of guesswork and past experience to anticipate the future. But this is a deeply flawed model of deciding how to act. For we are, all of us, profoundly ill-equipped to be objective about ourselves and our world. We place far too much emphasis on our own actions, our own positions in the world, for our memories and our predictions to be trustworthy. But what if we could harness the understanding of the masses? What if we could eliminate errors of bias by using the average of the many to correct for the skewed and skewable beliefs of the few? Could we then have a reasonable expectation of a true future?

Perhaps, but correcting for bias is only half of the equation of understanding. The rest is rooted in the reality that, though we cannot know all the variables, we can grasp some of them. We can tease out of our world statistics that reveal some of the laws that underpin our actions in the micro and the universe in the macro. And we can use these statistics, along with what we know of ourselves and our fellows, to build models that can finally begin to conceive of our we act as a whole.

Mr. Silver understands this truth. A self-described math geek and a lover of baseball and poker, his youth was marinated in stats, stats that, if they could only be plugged into a broader matrix, could be made to reveal knowledge of how certain systems function. Armed with such information, one could reasonably maximize one's opportunity to win at all manner of endeavors, from trivial games to consequential bargaining sessions. For one would not need to waste time with bad strategies shaped by desperation and ego masquerading as intuition. One could simply possess a superior comprehension of the game and play within that framework, never descending to the muddy realm of unquantifiable speculation. After dabbling in the numbers of baseball and poker, Mr. Silver applied precisely this logic to the prediction of American elections. The result? A nearly flawless scorecard in the last two presidential races, an astounding level of accuracy that flirts with the magical until one absorbs the lessons in his wonderful book.

From sportsbetting to weather prediction, The Signal And The Noise walks readers through the worlds of statistics and of predictive modelling, illuminating the revelations of all manner of far-flung disciplines that all of us rely upon but few of us respect. But though it bestows upon us a welcome understanding of how parts of the world function, its truths are far more profound. For this is nothing less than a tome on how humans think and act, on how we can harness that data to our individual and societal advantage, and how we ought to couple that data with our scientific understanding of the universe to see more clearly where we are going. But in order to do this, we must relinquish our biases, all of them. We must reject the pretty fictions we cling to in order to ground ourselves in this shared reality. For to do anything less is to give up the exercise entirely. It's to reject the objective world for a subjective one, one in which there are no universal truths, one in which story supplants hard data. And though this might have been acceptable a century ago, when we lacked the tools to gather these data, we no longer have any excuses. Understanding is out there. We've merely to embrace it in all its definable glory.

For the degree to which it educates and philosophizes, illuminates and ruminates, this is one of the year's best reads and arguably one of the humblest books I've ever read. As profound as it is exquisite.. (5/5 Stars)

Dragon Sea by Frank Pope

From The Week of November 5, 2012

Though many would argue otherwise, there are few among us who can resist the lure of the glorious score, that incredible, transformative moment in which one's life fortunes are completely changed, vaulting them into the stratosphere of wealth and status. In our classist world, the rewards are simply too rich, too plentiful, for anyone short of a saint to turn down the opportunity to abandon drudgery for the soft lap of luxury. However, such moments rarely just arrive on one's doorstep. They have to be sought out and pursued, wooed with a mixture of prudence and persistence. They have to be planned for, every detail anticipated, if success it to be achieved. And even then, Lady Luck has her say. Thus are the many fortune-seekers weeded out, the soft bark falling away to reveal the hardness within. What kind of mind does such a treasure-hunter possess? And is all the planning and the yearning worth it? Mr. Pope is deeply qualified to answer this question. He does so with thoughtful skill in Dragon Sea.

Packed to the gills with Vietnamese pottery, the Hoi An was a 15th-century merchant vessel that plied the warm seas of Southeast Asia. Sunk before it could deliver its payload, the wreck spent 500 years entombed under more than 200 feet of water, just 22 miles off the coast of Vietnam, until it was chanced upon by fishermen in the 1990s. The discovery was a fateful one for the Hoi an and its long-dead crew. For its re-emergence caused it to tumble onto the radars of treasure-hunters and archaeologists, pragmatists and idealists, each of whom wanted nothing more than to get their hands on this ancient prize. But recovering artifacts from a 500-year-old wreck, half-buried in the ocean floor is no simple feat.

Enter Ong Soo Hin, a Malaysian businessman with a hunger for profit and mastery. Enchanted by both the retrieval of the wreck, and all that it would earn him, Hin sought out and received the blessing of the Vietnam government, assembled a diving team, chartered a pricy boat as his base of operations and, with collaborations from archaeologists and conservationists, began to pull up what had lain buried for so long. But no sooner was the pottery rising to the surface then problems began to plague the mission, a series of calamities that not only sapped the morale of the expedition's members, but culminated in profound disharmonies between Hin and the mission's lead archaeologist which would eventually leave both men feeling as though they'd been betrayed by the other. An appropriately Shakespearian end to a tragic enterprise...

From its re-discovery to the epic calamity of the sale of its goods, Dragon Sea is an engrossing journey into the world of treasure-hunting. Something of an understudy to the expedition's archaeologist, Mr. Pope is by no means an objective narrator. For he spent months with the international dive team that retrieved the Vietnamese pottery, helping to catalogue it all while being sheltered by the very man (Hin) who was trying to sell it. However, for all that we must take Mr. Pope's account of events with a grain of salt, his detailed description of the treasure-hunter's life is as vivid as it is enlightening. In the course of his tale, the author not only elucidates the history of diving and the saturation system that allowed Hin's team to retrieve valuables under conditions that would kill an unprotected human, he generates dynamic profiles of the divers and academics, the businessmen and the thrill-seekers, who made up the expedition's roster. In this, he admirably entwines edification with entertainment to create an excellent product.

For all this, Dragon Sea is not without its blindspots. Though Mr. Pope touches on the moral dilemmas inherent in allowing treasure-seekers to claim salvage of cultural relics, selling off substantial amounts of invaluable art to pay for their expenses en-route to filling their pockets with profit, he fails to touch on the degree to which looting shipwrecks is, for all intents and purposes, graverobbing. People died on the Hoi An. Some were even buried with it. And yet no one, from the moneymen to the academics hesitate for even a moment to consider that, were this graveyard on land, no one would allow them to sell off grave goods to the highest bidder, on Ebay of all places. Instead, it's simply accepted that, because treasures at sea are harder to get to, and consequently more expensive to fetch, a compromise has to be made; some loot is given to the expeditions' backers to sell and other pieces go to the academics and the museums to study and display. This is not only insensitive, it's narrowminded. Even If we assume, for a moment, that it's morally acceptable to loot the wreck, then ban all public sales of the relics. Compel museums to contract with treasure-hunters to retrieve the loot and hand it on to the museums. The excuse that museums cannot fund such projects seems incompatible with a world in which substantial sums are frequently raised for all manner of projects consequential and otherwise.

This is quality work. Mr. Pope pulls back the curtain on a dark and sleazy world we'd do well to familiarize ourselves with. For perhaps then its practices would be all the cleaner for the scrutiny. (3/5 Stars)

Making An Exit by Sarah Murray

From The Week of September 24, 2012 Death is a merciless disease. Infecting every living organism that has ever called Earth home, it burrows its necrotic tentacles into every cell, every system, every piece of tissue, insisting that, at some future point, its grave price be paid. It plays no favorites. It offers no cures. It requires only obedience, only acceptance of the ultimate fate of every thing and every one that has ever lived, cessation. Unsurprisingly, this particularly grim condition has woven itself deeply into all of Earth's cultures, authoring rites and reflections that honor the dead while passing onto the young the traditions of the ancients. But just how have these cultures decided to cope with death? What do they imagine happens to those they must farewell from this mortal coil? Ms. Murray explores in her examination of this most unavoidable affliction.

From funerals to wakes, from coffins to urns, from spiritualism to pragmatism, humanity's desire to cope with the inevitability of death has manifested in thousands of ways that range from the practical to the incomprehensible. While some cultures consider death a time of celebration, others submerge themselves in shrouds of mourning, releasing their hold on their loved ones with a searing mixture of reluctance and grief. Equally substantial divides exist amongst those who hold opinions on what comes after death. Is it the rapturous reward promised by the Christians to the righteous, is it the nothingness that the atheists conjure up from their rationalist souls, or is it something in-between, a doorway through which the soul wanders into the next life?

In an attempt to chronicle the traditions that have been shaped by these questions, Ms. Murray travels the world, delving into the customs of dozens of cultures to seek out our truths about death. While her journeys often find her hip deep in the macabre and the bizarre, they also shed light upon beautiful and warm celebrations of life that have been performed for thousands of years. From the funeral industry to the ethics of honoring the wishes of the newly departed, she ponders the existential while gaping at the gaudy, finding that, the more one contemplates the practicalities that lie beneath our deathly traditions, one finds them exceedingly disturbing.

And yet, for all that Making an Exit can sometimes leave the reader chilled by its subject and bewildered by the many responses to it, the work's abiding humor suffuses it with an enduring glow that cannot but charm. Ms. Murray's level-headed and open-minded approach to the examination of death finds not the cold shoulder of an inevitable ending, but the cheerful acceptance of what must be. Whatever may lie beyond death's doorway, there is no way but through. And for as different as our response to death might be, there is one commonality across our cultures, that to die loved and cherished is to leave a consequential mark upon the world.

Reflective and expansive, this is a surprisingly entertaining read for a subject so lifeless. Ms. Murray could not be a more engaging guide. (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)

Emergency by - Neil Strauss

From The Week of July 30, 2012
As much as we strive to be rational beings, as much as the dawn of our modern, technological world has nurtured in us the virtues of reason and patience, fear yet rules us all. With every twist of fate, with every consequential choice, with every random act from a chaotic world, fear hounds us, lurking in the darkness at the edge of our intellectual campfire, just waiting for panic to give it a path through our defenses where it will paralyze us, cripple us and deprive us of the joys of a bold life. Worse yet, fear is a subtle foe, sneaking so stealthily into our hearts that it is often influencing our actions long before we are aware of its debilitating presence.

So what do we do with fear? Do we reject it and live loudly, free of its constraints? Or do we welcome it close, allowing its anxiety to influence our actions but only to a limited degree? Is it an enemy to be conquered, or a seduction to be carefully heeded? Mr. Strauss' funny, charming, disturbing and riotous effort is a long and successful rumination on this question.

Though the aughts was a decade of political change and technological promise, it was also witness to some dark developments which augur grimly for the years ahead. Islamic terrorism and economic turmoil marred most of the decade, leaving behind deep scars unimaginable to the optimistic multitudes who, way back in the halcyon days of the 1990s, imagined clear skies to an unfathomably bright future. But more than wound the decade's reputation and the political parties that ruled during its zenith, this toxic brew of religious nihilism and monetary greed injured, psychologically and otherwise, the countless millions who lived through it. By eating away at their sense of safety, and by diminishing their trust in the national institutions who promised to nurture that safety, it created the perfect breeding ground for the fearful to indulge their trepidations. It enticed them to view differently the signs around them, finding in them not the promise they had seen before but the herald of the apocalypse conveniently interpreted from their books of faith. It prompted them to turn away from trust and hope and to embrace a new, more cynical view of the days ahead.

Mr. Strauss volunteers himself as a classic case of this conversion. Riding high just prior to the millennium, he finds himself increasingly disenchanted by the political trend of his home country, the United States. He sees an election stolen, a terrorist attack 1r\&
, a war on terror launched and an economic system nearly brought to its knees. And with each successive catastrophe, he becomes increasing convinced that the best has come and gone and that the future holds only the promise of disappointment. Thus, he begins a long and winding quest to prepare himself for the dark days ahead. Over nearly ten years, he solicits advice from billionaires and separatists, EMTs and survivalists, all in an attempt to transform himself from an intelligent but physically incompetent citydweller into a well-prepared and hardened soldier of non-civilization, capable of living without power, off the land, in a world that prides itself on skills, on knowledge and on readiness for anything that comes. This is his journey...

Though it deals with the decidedly grim subject matter of the potentially final act of human civilization, Emergency is, shockingly, both funny and warm. Characterized by its author's unequivocal commitment to the subject, and blended with his rank incompetence at anything remotely rural, it serves up a hilarious stew of missteps and mishaps that impact on the bumbling Mr. Strauss. However, despite the severity and humorousness of these largely self-inflicted wounds, the author continuously manages to pick himself up off the ground, dust himself off, learn from his obstinacy and progress to the next challenge, the next achievement, knowing all the while that he is that much closer to realizing an independence the rest of us can only dream about.

There can be little doubt that some of the more extreme behaviors depicted here are influenced by the nature of Mr. Strauss' experiment. He would have known, full well, that theatrics would serve his book far better than blandness. Thus, some of the stunts and the scenarios must be taken with a healthy measure of salt. However, the author's efforts here also reflect the many millions of people who, like him, are, to varying degrees, traumatized by instability. In their fear, they turn away from dependency in order to nurture in themselves a self-sufficiency that will carry them through the imagined dark times ahead. There's wisdom here. After all, these individuals are bound to be better off if civilization does stumble. But they seem to overlook two key points that trouble their argument, firstly, that preparing for the apocalypse, in many cases, seems to lead them down a road to wishing that it would come so that they might get to use their new-found skills and, secondly, that the world they imagine would be so grim, would have lost so much of its light, that surviving the transition into it would not be worthwhile. After all, having gloried in the light of civilization, what would be the point of grubbing out a difficult, daily existence in the darkness and the dirt?

This is a wonderful and amusing journey through the strange and the macabre that is made eminently livable by Mr. Strauss' self-deprecating humor. Surprisingly uplifting for all the anxiety bedded down in its pages... (4/5 Stars)

Sisters In War by Christina Asquith

From The Week of July 16, 2012

There can be no doubt that war is the most chaotic activity in which humanity has taken part. Its capacity to blight the land, annihilate industry, devastate families and cripple public services is spectacular and sobering, certainly sufficient the wreck once proud civilizations. It is understandable then that, notwithstanding the degree to which it advances certain technologies and philosophies, it must be a tool of last resort, a means by which the desperate and the wronged, the provoked and the beleaguered, re-adjust their circumstances. For to engage it for any less significant a purpose is to sell the innocent into a kind of unending nightmare from which their lives will never completely recover. After all, displacement and disease, joblessness and homelessness, are antithetical to a stable existence. Ms. Asquith vividly demonstrates these potent truths in this captivating work.

Helmed by an infamous despot who had famously resisted a previous effort to be ousted by the united States, Saddam Hussein's Iraq was the perfect target for a wounded America needing a victory and a purpose in the post-9/11 world. Having suffered for more than a decade under stifling sanctions that plunged most of its millions of citizens into poverty, Iraq's bark had far outstripped its bite, as the Americans demonstrated when, in 2003, they invaded the oil-rich country and conquered its ruling regime in a matter of weeks. But rather than spark widespread hopes for a new, democratic Iraq, free of the burdensome shadow of Saddam Hussein's four decades of autocratic rule, this swift victory galvanized an organized and vicious insurgency which ignited a campaign of indiscriminate slaughter in hopes of sapping the will of the Coalition to fully realize their goals in the beleaguered country. For four long years, this Al-Qaeda-supported insurgency flourished, using suicide bombings to kill thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Coalition soldiers, reducing large swaths of Iraq to armed camps plagued by fear and distrust.

However much the insurgency may have been effective against the Coalition it sought to remove, it was infinitely more effective at destroying both the lives and the sense of normalcy of everyday Iraqis. As pitiless bomb attacks are paired with gruesome beheadings of aidworkers and journalists, as Iraqis cooperating with the Coalition are identified, labelled as traitors and threatened with death, Iraqi society disintegrates. Jobs are lost, families are scattered, schools are shut down and neighborhoods surrendered to extremists, realities which lead many Iraqis to depressingly conclude that they are worse off under the Coalition than they were under the cruel dictator who tortured and disenfranchised them. For the good and the bad, the earnest and the passive, the brave and the cowardly, life will never be the same.

Through the eyes of an American-Palestinian aidworker, an Iraqi journalist and an American soldier, Sisters in War allows us to watch the disaster of postwar Iraq unfold in terrifying slow motion. Imbued with the wisdom of hindsight, Ms. Asquith relates the tragic efforts of three courageous women, from entirely different backgrounds, in entirely different circumstances, to make something lastingly good come from a shattering conflict. But though armed with Coalition funds and passionate desires to make positive change, their various projects -- creating womens centers, providing basic services to Iraqi citizens, and reporting on the real news in a country newly liberated from tyranny -- self-destruct. For in this new Iraq, money and will are insufficient to overcome both the nihilism of the insurgency and the immobility of the American bureaucracy which governed the country until 2005. As a result, their goodwill, thought to be depthless, is exhausted, their spirits deflated by ignorance and inertia; truly a toxic brew.

Ms. Asquith is a talented narrative journalist. Surrendering her voice entirely to her three compelling subjects, she taps into the power of the memoir without sacrificing the journalistic framework that allows her to communicate the broad strokes of those early postwar years, covering off the key incidents for those who are less familiar with the transitional period. The resulting product is both informative and emotionally engaging. For our eyes are invariably trained on the only place that matters, the ground floor of this 21st century war and all the social decay it is responsible for.

None of this would be possible, though, without Ms. Asquith's three subjects, each of whom possess wills in proportion to their courage. Their desire to forge ahead despite having the deck stacked so heavily against them is as inspiring as the insurgency is deflating. Their hardened innocence juxtaposed with the irredeemable barbarity of the terrorists leaves the reader with a powerful portrait of war's inevitable fallout.

Masterful work... The best and worst of humanity lives in these pages. (5/5 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)

Full Body Burden by Kristen Iversen

From The Week of June 25, 2012

While, yes, we are awash in axioms about power, its virtues, its drawbacks and its responsibilities, there can be no doubt that they are, from the witty to the corny, all profoundly true. For power does attract the avaricious, and it does corrupt the young, and it does burden the few with the problems of the many. Which is why, above all other things, it must be both feared and respected. It's tendency to corrupt must be recognized; it's eagerness to be wielded must be checked; and its willingness to be used as a shield against numerous grievous sins mustn't be ignored. For to do so is to acknowledge, to everyone, that we are ruled by power and, as a result, by those who wield power. And yielding ground, both moral and societal, to them is to consign ourselves to lives in which we are deceived, dissembled and dismissed by the authorities who claim to act in our interests. This is a point movingly made in Ms. Iversen's captivating memoir.

For nearly four decades, the Rocky Flats nuclear facility operated less than fifty miles from Denver, Colorado, one of America's most populous metropolitan areas. A manufacturer of Plutonium triggers for the nations' arsenal of nuclear bombs, it was a privately operated, government-funded site whose true purpose was concealed from the public on the grounds of national security. It harbored hundreds of employees drawn from nearby towns to work its cafeterias, fill out its first-responder teams, staff its cleaning services and guard its premises, all in the name of securing the national defense. And yet, for much of the 30-plus years it was operational, it burned, spilled, dumped and discharged, into the environment, some of the deadliest particles known to science.

Ms. Iversen was raised in the shadow of Rocky Flats. She drank water in adjacent streams, rode her horse through nearby fields, and suffered in her neighboring house the dignities and the sorrows of growing up in a home fractured by alcoholism and broken dreams. While she went to school and attended parties, learn to ride and kissed boys, Rocky Flats was being grossly mismanaged, enduring two massive fires, first in the 1960s and then later in the 1980s, either of which could have resulted in Chernobyl-level contamination to the surrounding area. The 1969 fire
was particularly bad and could have easily rendered the greater Denver area uninhabitable were it not for the bravery of the firefighters who battled the blaze and the good fortune of a few random events that kept it from raging out of control. Later, when Ms. Iversen moved away, to attend school, marry, have children and live her life, many of her childhood acquaintances, along with employees at the facility, would suffer cancer and worse. And though no official investigation would ever be launched, by the government or otherwise, it seems likely that at least some of these cancers were caused by the criminal laxness that was standard policy at this most secret institution.

Though at times plagued by awkward framing, Full Body Burden is an emotive document that demonstrates the extent to which the intersection of power and complicity can give rise to extraordinary crimes. Ms. Iversen, an author of non-fiction and a professor of literature, draws upon interviews with numerous key men at the heart of Rocky Flats' many disasters to describe, in chilling detail, how the government's desire to create a ridiculous number of nuclear bombs lead to the passage of a law that inoculated the companies contracted to make said bombs from any responsibility for the environmental damage that resulted from their processes. The natural result of this cart-blanch protection was mass-negligence on the part of the facility's operators, negligence that lead to the secret mass-dumping of highly hazardous materials into an inhabited environment. Despite an FBI raid that caught the facility red-handed, no prosecution of the facility's operators has yet stood, allowing them to escape entirely from a noose they, in all their blithe ignorance, happily fitted about the necks of unsuspecting victims.

Ms. Iversen juxtaposes her emotionally charged childhood with a surgically cold history of Rocky Flats to create a rare fusion of history and memoir that is both effective and moving. But though her walk through the facility's history is profoundly instructive, documenting the fires, the raids, the grand juries and the cleanups, her decision to weave herself into this tale is, at times, problematic. There's no doubt that the aching humanity of her difficult adolescence serves to lend a human face to what would otherwise be a cold story about a corrupt institution at a monolithic remove from the people it harmed. But after Ms. Iversen leaves home to go to college, her half of the story falls away for some fifteen years, leaving the formerly bipedal narrative to limp along on one leg for a considerable portion of the work. Ms. Iversen is welcome to her own privacy, of course, but having included what seemed like every detail of her life up to the age of 20 and then to essentially return to us in her mid-thirties is unavoidably jarring.

Notwithstanding its rough edges, Full Body Burden is, at times, mesmerizing and eviscerating, a captivating demonstration of how men and women, companies and governments, are willing to stoop to any level in order to cover up their sins. This is going to linger with me for some time. (4/5 Stars)

In The Middle of Nowhere by Terry Underwood

From The Week of June 18, 2012

As much as our lives are shaped by the circumstances, both national and parental, into which we were born, we remain the choosers of our own destinies. After all, even those from the most meager backgrounds can wind up in positions of power. They invariably work much harder to realize their ambitions than do those from greater privilege, but their goals are nonetheless achievable, provided that, like all of us, they are blessed with both luck and dogged determination. Our choices are our own. They reflect who we are and what we desire. And it is this truth that grants memoirs their power. For even while the memoirist is relating the tale of their experiences, we are analyzing her choices, her desires, her fascinations, her biases. Few memoirs demonstrate this truth more clearly than this tale of family and isolation from Ms. Underwood.

In 1963, while working as a nurse in a Sydney hospital, Terry Underwood would meet a man who would forever change her life. A daughter of the Australian countryside working in the nation's largest city, she would aid and befriend John, a cattleman from the Outback recovering from the first of many serious wounds he would accumulate in a life devoted to this most gruelling of occupations. Enchanted by his charm and resilience, the young nurse would stay in contact with the cattleman after his release, entering into a relationship of letters with a man whose lonely world could not be more different than the hyper-urban existence Terry inhabited. And yet, should this otherness be a bar to her happiness?

As friendship kindles into passion, Ms. Underwood accepts two proposals from her future husband, one of marriage and one of life with him, on some of the most remote territory claimed by man. Full of sizeable spiders and venomous snakes, gruelling temperatures and horrific storms, the Northern Territory of Australia is thousands upon thousands of miles of red rock and dry riverbeds, vast plains and scraggly bush. Close enough to the equator that its seasons are differentiated by precipitation rather than temperature, it is some of the most forbidding land on Earth. And yet, it is the home of John Underwood and his kind, a hardened band of Australian homesteaders who'd sooner die than live in the soft lap of civilization. Here, Ms. Underwood helps her man build a home, raise numerous children, cultivate a healthy herd of livestock and create a home full of family and godliness, far away from the distractions of urban life. For this is the bushman's world, one in which there are no higher virtues than honor and self-sufficiency.

Though In The Middle of Nowhere purports to be an account of the trials and tribulations of living in the Australian Outback, Ms. Underwood quickly hijacks her own narrative, refocusing it upon the highs and lows of her family's existence at Riverrun. Rather than dedicating herself to the education of her readers on all matters Bush, its creatures and landscapes, its hazards and its glories, the author describes, in obsequious detail, her love for her husband, her admiration for his trade, and her unshakable faith that, together, they have been blessed by god to perpetuate his grace. Long passages are devoted to the detailing of the Underwood clan and all the wonderful gifts John and Terry have given to them by raising them to be creatures of the bush in the mold of their father. Consequently, the most instructive elements of Ms. Underwood's chronicle are neglectfully abandoned and given only passing reference. What are they, after all, next to the glory of god's little masterpieces, her children?

There is value here. While Ms. Underwood lacks anything like a lyrical pen -- her prose is so linear, it might've been constructed by a child --, she manages to convey a sense of the immensity of the Outback. Moreover, she succeeds in portraying its hardship and the extent to which this challenging terrain tests its human occupiers to their limits, requiring them to endure more than any citydweller could imagine. And yet, tragically, these virtues are almost entirely lost in the thunder of Ms. Underwood patting herself on the back for being such a fine Christian woman. Yes, some measure of this self-aggrandizement is bound to occur in every memoir, but this author does an especially poor job of disguising it.

In The Middle of Nowhere could have been a wonderful journey through life in the Outback. Unfortunately, instead, it is a self-congratulatory primer on how to raise a family in total isolation. The scope is damningly narrow and more than a little conceited. (2/5 Stars)