The war for the ownership of the smartphone in Dogfight

From the week of June 9th, 2014

For humans, competition is a wickedly sharp double-edged sword. It has driven us to rise up out of the muck of subsistence to build a diverse, technological, multifaceted civilization that is forever improving upon itself. And yet, it has also fostered, and empowered, individuals who possessively lay claim to their little contribution to that societal progress, jealously guarding it as though it alone was the key to all else. Wanting credit for one's work is nothing new. After all, in a world where rewards often only flow to those who receive credit, it's hard not to want to promote one's contribution to the whole. But when guarding that contribution grows into wanting to deny it to others unless they pay for the privilege, then we have all, in some sense, lost. This is the difficulty that lies at the hard of Mr. Vogelstein's excellent document of one of Silicon Valley's most recent and consequential wars.

Though modern computing has existed as an industry for the better part of a century, it wasn't until the introduction of the iPhone that computing became a global phenomenon. After decades of clunky desktop towers, underpowered netbooks, battery-sucking laptops and chunky cellphones, the iPhone crammed everything one could reasonably expect from a personal device into a sleek package that apple, its creator, was able to market to brilliant effect. No more expensive infrastructure, no more cluttered desks, no more tangled nest of cables... Just a simple versatile, wireless device that could exist happily in one's pocket.

For this triumph, Apple understandably wanted credit, not only in the social arena but in the technological as well. It filed numerous patents to protect what it considered to be their crowning glory. And yet, there was no individual aspect, or component, of the iPhone that was innovative or new. Rather, Apple's genius was in assembling those various components into an attractive, functional package that put Apple on the road to being the most powerful brand in the world.

Understandably, Apple would disagree with this view. They would argue that, over years of toil, secrecy and countless man-hours, they invented the modern smartphone. And that, for this singular achievement, they should be rewarded. This position has not only set Apple on a path to litigation, against other smartphone makers, it has permanently damaged its relationship with Google, a once-close ally in the creation of a new, post-Microsoft world. Amongst billion-dollar lawsuits and hyperbolic threats of corporate warfare, the world's largest companies busted up over who gets the credit.

This and more Fred Vogelstein argues in his engrossing Dogfight From the Sidekick to the iPhone, from the early days of Apple and Google against the world to the bitter falling out that has seen the companies abandon friendship for rivalry, the author blends opinion with fact to create an entertaining micro-history of the smartphone that takes few prisoners. Though he clearly admires the innovative spirit and entrepreneurial cultures of both companies, Mr. Vogelstein also properly upbraids them for the arrogant attitudes that cause both to believe that the world would be immeasurably worse without them in it. And yet, it's the extent to which these jealousies and insecurities have dictated their actions that the true damage can be found.

For most of the world, the smartphone is synonymous with iPhone. This isn't true because Apple is litigious. Nor is it true because Apple holds patents for various components within the iPhone. It's true because the iPhone was new, innovative and powerful. It's true because people loved it to such a degree that it transformed a luxury item into a household toy. This didn't happen because Apple got its proper credit. It happened because Apple created a good product. And yet, when faced with competition from companies like Sam-sung and Google, Apple, rather than trust in their own success, rather than capitalize on their clear advantage over everyone else to stay ahead, talked about betrayal, of copycatting, of "thermonuclear war," as though theirs was the only touch-enabled hand-held device with wireless radios allowed to exist. But of course, if that were true, then the iPhone would have never existed at all.

And this is Dogfight's central revelation. There is nothing in the technological world that is truly new. Everything that we have now, and will have in the near future, is a refinement of an older, less successful idea. Attempting to take credit for that idea is not only disingenuous, it is a betrayal of the very spirit of competition that these companies claim to treasure. Worst of all, though, it exposes the truth that these companies don't genuinely believe that a better product will win the day. They believe that hobbling their rivals' ability to compete is the path to victory. That is not only cynical, it's depressing.

A delightful and sobering look at the pitfalls of competition and at the extent to which the powerful fool themselves into thinking they are indispensable... (4/5 Stars)

The life of one of our century's most gifted designers in Jony Ive

From The Week of January 13th, 2014

Humans have a complex relationship with objects of their own creation. Built to express needs ranging from the pleasurable to the essential, their utility ought to be far more important than their beauty. After all, valuable resources must be gathered and precious time expended to manufacture them, making it foolhardy for form to trump function. And yet, a simple glance at the clothes and phones, the houses and the vehicles, present in our world tells us that the opposite is true, that beauty overpowers utility at every turn. Why this is so remains unclear. Certainly, peer pressure plays a role; humans signalling to their fellows that they have taste. No doubt aesthetics also has its say, precision of design pleasing our powerful sense of geometric rightness. But no sense of fashion, no matter how strong, should have the power to overcome an object's utility, a truth most thoroughly pummeled in Leander Kahney's fabulous biography of Apple Inc. Visionary designer.

Coming of age in England's Winter of Discontent, an era of political discord, economic stagnation and social upheaval, Jonathan Ive has become the world's foremost designer. Raised by a celebrated educator who challenged and encouraged him, he won awards for school projects in his teens, was a partner at a designed firm at 23, and, at 25, had moved to California to begin work at Apple during the lost years between Steve Jobs' controversial departure and his triumphant return. Since then, he has gone on to shape the industrial design of virtually all of Apple's successful products which, since the introduction of the first iPod in 2003, have revolutionized technology, transforming it from the quirky fascination of geeks and hobbyists into a hundred-billion-dollar industry that lives in the pockets, on the desks, and in the hands of consumers the world over.

Chronicling these two transformative decades, Jony Ive is a spellbinding journey through the life of a brilliant designer at a fabled company. Mr. Kahney, a long-time technology journalist, has largely overcome the legendary secrecy of Apple and its chief designer to construct a fairly thorough portrait of both company and visionary. After dispensing with Mr. Ive's early life, the author marches us through apple's string of celebrated products, from the iPod to the iPhone, vividly capturing not only their aesthetics, but the innovations of design and manufacturing that made them possible. Consequently, the reader becomes fairly fluent with the modern mysteries of manufacturing, processes so exquisitely intricate that they have brought about the age of mass-produced products of exactingly high standards.

But while Jony Ive opens the door on the nature of 21st-century manufacturing, it is, at root, the depiction of one man's talent and how that talent has re-shaped an industry. Steve Jobs has been rightfully hailed for his vision and his marketing prowess; no one else has had the will to turn computing into a high-end commodity capable of compelling a substantial percentage of the world's population to buy what are fundamentally expensive toys. But perhaps his wisest, and bravest, decision was to redesign his own company, elevating Jony Ive and his industrial-design team above the Apple engineers who would bring their products to life. This decision has understandably created tensions within the company, jealousies that have seen engineers leave for other firms like Google where engineering is both paramount and sacrosanct. But however many of these battles apple has lost, it has, over the last fifteen years, won the war. By recognizing Mr. Ive's singular abilities, and by giving him and his design team the keys to its princely kingdom, it has inaugurated an age of beautiful computing that no one else has come close to matching.

As much as Jony Ive succeeds in conveying the visionary nature of company and designer, it is necessarily limited by Apple's famously tight lips. Apple considers virtually everything that goes on within its walls a trade secret, refusing to divulge even trivial details about its processes or its people. This philosophy extends to its manufacturing partners as well, Asian corporations too afraid of losing Apple's business to speak out about their own innovations. This is a pity. For there is no doubt that this is a royal marriage of design and process, of form and function, one that has shaped the early years of our century. And to have the vital moments of that marriage obscured by a silence bordering on the petty is as sad as it is neurotic. Consequently, Mr. Kahney is forced to unearth the broken pieces of a complex whole, doing what he can to fit the pieces together in hopes of getting some sense of the bigger picture. That he succeeds at all is a credit to his diligence.

For anyone interested in the intricacies of industrial design and the almost magical powers of modern manufacturing, an absolute must read. Jony Ive leaves no doubt that we live on the brink of a fascinating future, a future substantially stewarded by a soft-spoken Englishman with a rare gift. (5/5 Stars)

The stressful world of the NFL explored in Collision Low Crossers

From The Week of January 6th, 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

the fascinating and disturbing Economy of Prestige

From The Week of October 15th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is beautiful, exquisite irony

From The Week of August 19th, 2013

What is a hero? The people admire them, our cultures celebrate them and our literature elevates them to immortality. So it is safe to say that we know a hero when we see one. But if pressed to define the criteria for becoming one, we might offer up very different answers. Some of us might value the unsung heroes who toil quietly at thankless jobs that ensure our safety on a daily basis. Others, meanwhile, might emphasize self-sacrifice, believing that a hero is only a hero if we know of, and are inspired by, his or her actions.

But as difficult as it might be to define a hero, it is even harder to unknot the complex relationship between heroes and the societies that harbor them. For while society hails them, upholds them as objects of valor and achievement, it also devours them, reducing them from human beings, with flaws and tempers, to useful paragons that further society's ends. This is no way to treat anyone, let alone those for whom we have the deepest respect. This Ben Fountain captures in his outstanding novel.

For the men of Bravo Squad, they were just doing their jobs, doing what they were trained to do. But for everyone back in America, the ambush at the Al-Ansakar Canal is a defining moment of the Iraq War. Captured on film and replayed for all to see, this four-minute-long engagement, in which Bravo Squad risks their lives to rescue a convoy trapped by insurgents, is a re-affirmation of what they already know, that American soldiers are the bravest and best the world has to offer. And so, it seems only fitting that the survivors of the ambush, while being patched up, and while grieving for the men they've lost, be flown back to America for a thank-you tour, a whirlwind, whistle-stop affair that sees them shaking hands and smiling for photographs in a dozen major US cities before concluding at that most enduring of American rituals, an NFL game at Texas Stadium where they will be honored at Halftime.

For Billy Lynn, the star of the footage which caught him trying to save the life of his dying friend while continuing to kill the enemy, this is a completely disconcerting experience. A 19-year-old boy from a small, Texas oiltown, he is utterly unprepared to be the center of anyone's attention.. And now there are 70,000 people who want to congratulate him, to tell him what they think about the war, and hail him as the bravest of the brave. He must interact with the rich and the poor, the kind and the venomous, all without doing dishonor to the army that has put him here. Over these few hours, he has to be what America needs him to be, but can he be that when he doesn't even know himself? Cheerleaders and millionaires, footballers and fans and at the end of it a war he must go back to, a war that might never end...

As winningly poignant as it is sharply satirical, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is fiction at its best. Juxtaposing the small lives of the men of Bravo squad against the enormity of the spectacle of an NFL game, Mr. Fountain beautifully captures America's tortured relationship with its heroes, with its superficiality and with its founding mythology. For this is a country built on the idea of freedom, constructed to be welcoming to all those who wish to escape tyranny, that is, nonetheless, engaging in two savage and costly wars that have claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Rather than deal directly with such a difficult truth, however, the people wrap themselves in the sanctity of their flag, focusing on the deeds of heroic men in order to avoid looking at the price they are all paying in a place that few of them could even find on a map. Never in history have so few been asked to bear the weight of so much for so many and this cultural, economic and experiential divide could not be better represented than it is here.

Beyond its potent cultural critiques, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is a wonderful and warm character piece. From its young, virginal protagonist, Lynn, to his friend, Mango, his sergeant, Dime, and the film producer, Albert, who is trying to make their story into a movie, the actors here are complicated, rich and deeply entertaining. Mr. Fountain embraces their flaws, depicting them as young men who both love and hate war, who appreciate and scorn their treatment subsequent to the ambush, and who accept and yet cannot abide the empty platitudes of the rich, entitled men who want to be seen to be doting on them. For all their warrior prowess, these are clearly vulnerable men who would benefit far more from a few days respite than the overstimulated chaos of an NFL spectacular. And this brings us to the author's most trenchant observation.

The culture does not feat heroes for their benefit. They feat them to assuage their own guilt about what the heroes have been forced to do. The culture doesn't care about these boys. If it did, they would ask them what they wanted. They would help them with their care, with their futures. Instead of this substantial and meaningful aid, the heroes get fifteen minutes of unwanted fame while being jerked around by titans of industry with whom they have nothing in common and who seek to only use their momentary celebrity to polish their own egos. It is a display of such profound self-indulgence that would descend to the level of disgusting if it weren't so painfully predictable.

Mr. Fountain has a nimble pen, a sharp eye for cultural critique and a strong sense of injustice and irony, all of which he uses to wonderful effect in one of the best reads in years. (5/5 Stars)

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

From The Week of July 15th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notwithstanding its occasional omissions, this is an excellent and deeply entertaining look at products and people that have shaped our culture since the late 1990s. A must-read for anyone who has watched even a few of these shows... (4/5 Stars)

The history and science of that most desired part of the female anatomy in Breasts

From The Week of June 3, 2013

As much as we'd like to think that humans are creatures of the mind, empowered by intellect, shaped by morals and fired by curiosity, we are still driven by the base desires for what we can see, touch and taste. We can create the most complex technologies and philosophize at length over the finest points of Aristotelian logic, we can implement free-market economies and devote our days to the beauty of the printed word, and still we are consumed by food and sex, by shelter and family, by kisses and caresses. Perhaps this is well. There is, after all, a great deal of joy and comfort to be found in the treasures of fleshy, epicurean delights. And yet, these same excitations have the power to consume us, to reduce our grand intellects to the pursuit of pleasure at the expense of all else. Of these temptations, few hold the power and the objectification of the female breast, a truth expanded upon in Florence William's eminently engaging exploration.

Throughout recorded history, in carvings and sculptures, in song and story, we have celebrated the breast. It has been a source of nourishment and obsession, of critiques and signalling, of pleasure and frustration. It comes in a dizzying array of forms and sizes, a symbol of sufficient power as to warrant the creation of taboos in its name. But what is the breast made of and why has it become such a potent symbol of womanhood?

From the academic controversies that have swirled around its origins to the medical research that has revealed its vital role in the nourishment of newborns, Ms. Williams attempts to not only answer these questions, but to provide this most fetishized part of the female anatomy with some entertaining context. Beginning with its uniquely omnipresent manifestation in human women and ending with a sobering analysis of the ways in which it acts as a dumping ground for toxic chemicals that have accumulated over the lifetime of its host, she investigates, in Breast, its form and function, its social impact and its medical mysteries, all in an attempt to better understand this object of so much cultural attention.

Alternately humorous and chilling, Breasts is no fluffpiece masquerading as literature. There is no titillation here, nor is there any moral posturing. It is a serious and sincere attempt to determine the value and the purpose of the breast, to record its history, to measure its trends and to predict, in some limited way, its future. Drawing upon dozens of interviews and almost as many personal experiments with diet and environment, Ms. Williams sifts years of data and research into an eminently readable chronicle that leaves the reader as informed about the breast's physiology as he is about its augmentation. To have reduced such a mountain of information into such a digestible and engrossing product is, to say the least, a triumph.

While readers will be no doubt entertained by the vicarious glimpse of the breast-augmentation industry, Breasts is strongest when it stands firmly on scientific ground. Ms. Williams familiarizes us with fat and milk glands, with estrogen and other hormones. But most importantly, she enthusiastically joins with those researchers who have sounded the alarm about the way in which our modern world has disturbingly played with and reprogrammed the female body, tricking it into maturing earlier and earlier. These trends suggest devastating consequences for women in the future, exposing them to a host of savage cancers that have the power to rob them of good health and good fortune. Her call to arms, for increased regulation of these damaging chemicals, is heartfelt and level-headed. There's no wailing here, no rampaging feminism masquerading as popular science. Ms. Williams is calm, clear and thorough in a manner that should inspire plaudits.

Women's health is a fraught field in which to wade, one that contains as many opinions as it does curatives, as many clarion calls as it does conflicts. Breasts won't avoid drawing criticism. But that its purpose is clear, its motives pure and its conclusions eye-opening ought to earn it a place of prominence, even amongst this challenging crowd. (4/5 Stars)

Seasons In The Sun by Dominic Sandbrook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

From The Week of July 02, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dancing In The Dark by Morris Dickstein

From The Week of July 02, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Monsters by Stephen T. Asma

From The Week of March 19, 2012

For all of humanity's strengths, for all that we've conquered countless frontiers of thought on our way to earthly preeminence, we remain a species driven by fear. Hundreds of phobias have been documented, ranging from the mundane to the strange, from the mild to the cripplingly severe, but it may be that none of them can compete with our fear of the unknown. This terror is so vast, so all-consuming, that it has lead us to fabricate entire belief systems just to have some sort of order to explain the chaos. We need stability. We need the world around us to make sense. For when it doesn't, we flail for answers we cannot find. Mr. Asma has assembled, here, a wonderful catalogue of humanity's monsters, but it is this fear of the unknown that empowers them to haunt our imaginations.

From misfits to mythology, from demons to the deranged, On Monsters is a tour through the museum of humanity's mental and physical nightmares. Frankensteins and beast men appear alongside zombies and land-bound octopi in this gallery of the grotesque and the devilish, the real and the imagined. The steady progress of science has de-fanged most of these monsters, reducing them to little more than the products of twisted imaginations, but why did we invent them in the first place? What lead otherwise perfectly rational men and women to put their names to first-hand accounts of such deformities when they clearly belong to the realm of the fanciful? Fear and ignorance... The former, revulsion for the unknown, the impure, the apocalyptic, the theological, gave them form, human imaginings based on elements of nature and animated by our disgust. The latter, blindness to the truths of the world, of evolution, of the nature of life, allowed them to persist until scientific advances sucked these creatures back into the pages of myth and story. This virtually guarantees that monsters will always be with us. After all, until science can explain the universe, there will always be room for monsters.

Disturbing and enlightening, On Monsters is an engrossing journey through man's twisted psyche. Mr. Asma, a professor of philosophy, puts our gremlins under the microscope, examining not only the fears that went into their creation but the purposes their existences served. Pleasingly scientific, he relies on reason and research to explain the origins and popularity of the fanciful and the actual. For the author is most revelatory when he connects our nightmares back to the actual creatures that gave rise to them, things so brutally purposeful that they put to rest, for good, any notion that Nature is kind or gentle.

A fascinating read, as much for the history lesson in monsters as for the stroll through the human imagination and the lengths to which it will go to layer logic atop the inexplicable. What's more, Mr. Asma's avoidance of a lecturing tone allows the reader to join him in his exploration of the root causes for our monsters. This invitation should be taken up by anyone even mildly curious about how the mind works and fears. For here lie those forces that spawn prejudice and racism, us and them, good and evil. A better understanding of such forces is bound to make us wiser souls. (4/5 Stars)

Happy Accidents by Jane Lynch

From The Week of December 05, 2011

Though we christen it with a name and imbue it with godlike powers to manipulate events, Fate is nothing more than a human construct to explain the improbable and to soften up, for us, a deeper, more difficult truth. Life can turn on the smallest moments. The flight we didn't catch, the meeting we couldn't make, the promises we failed to keep... All of life's hiccups have the potential power to deprive us of vital opportunities while, perhaps, throwing up others in their place. After all, as much as we may disappoint some people with our failings, our mistakes may cause us to encounter lifelong loves who have the power to make us grateful for our foibles. Though one senses that Ms. Lynch is being far too modest when she credits this particular chaos for the good that has come to her, downplaying the depth of her own talent and determination, she has assembled some startling examples of just how much a life can change when one is least expecting it.

Born to affectionate parents of modest means, Jane Lynch spent much of her formative years firmly ensconced in the white-bred traditionalism of the American midwest which, for a child of the 70s, endowed with a theatrical spirit, was a poor match. She was a dreamer, fixed on fame and fortune, living in a world that insisted its youth foreswear the risks of Hollywood stardom for the safety of a quiet, unremarkable life. Slaving away in a department store simply was not going to cut it. Her exclusion from this community was only enhanced when, as a teenager, she realized she was gay, a secret she'd feel forced to conceal for years to come until stints performing in New York, Chicago and L.A. imbued her with the confidence to be herself.

Finding herself less than a match for society's standards of beauty, success was fleeting for Ms. Lynch early on. Her earliest victories were limited to appearances in commercials and on the small-time comedy stage. But when one such commercial hurled her into the orbit of Christopher Guest, an award-winning director of feature films, her fortunes dramatically shifted. Suddenly, she was in a movie, a serious actor who would go onto feature in numerous big-screen comedies before finding ultimate and lasting success on Glee, a hit launched in 2009 with Ms. Lynch as the show's sharp-tongued villain. Along her journey, she acquires friends, allies, pets and a wife, all while seemingly leaving little by way of acrimony in her wake. This is a worthy achievement for anyone, let alone one who has reached for and grasped the stars.

Though Ms. Lynch keeps her readers at arms length, Happy Accidents is a fun romp through the world of a struggling performer, the soul cursed with many things to say and with no one to listen. She communicates with clarity the ups and downs of her profession, thrilling in its victories without ignoring the powerful loneliness of its failures. She leaves the reader cheering her on when she finally earns lasting success. But despite Ms. Lynch's winning charm, we are never truly allowed inside her world, or her head. The author is frank about her struggles with alcohol sparked by hiding herself in the Closet; she is open about her personal foibles which have lead her to push people away; she even includes a few anecdotes that must have been difficult for her to reveal to perfect strangers and perhaps she considers this enough sharing. But there is always a reserve, a protective veneer, a smile forced to hide what lies beneath, that is tangible throughout and prevents the reader from fully embracing the subject.

It must be painfully difficult for an intensely private person to confess her life's secrets, but these are why autobiographies are written, so that their writers can work through their own history and so that their readers can feel as though they understand what lies behind the public masks of people they will probably never meet. To the extent that Ms. Lynch conveys her warmth, her charm and her lovable flaws, she is, here, eminently successful. But to the extent that she allows us to know her, to understand her,she leaves something to be desired. On balance, a worthwhile read that left me wanting good to come to a kind-hearted person who worked hard for her achievements. (3/5 Stars)

Hotel Heaven by Matthew Brace

From The Week of November 21, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

The Yugo by Jason Vuic

From The Week of October 10, 2011

To a pervasive degree, our world is shaped by fateful, corporate decisions. From the IPhone to the BMW, companies, the world over, produce innovative products in the hopes of maximizing both profitability and market share. Then, once these products are widely available, it is left to customer choice to separate the winners from the losers, the diamonds from the lemons. And boy, have there been some lemons. After all, for every Snapple, there is New Coke. And for every BMW, there is the Yugo.

This legendarily awful car, as Mr. Vuic demonstrates in this, his riveting look at an epic fail, is surely one of the worst vehicles in the history of personal transport. From its sloppy construction to its infamously underpowered engine, the Yugo, was the result of a slap-dash attempt by the communist Yugoslavia of the 1980s to generate a car industry that would alleviate its debts by servicing the world with a small car done dirt cheap. It should come as no surprise then that the Yugo, from its insubstantial weight to its problematic spare tire stored in the engine compartment, suffered numerous, devastating problems. And yet, despite its farcical faults, seemingly all of which have been memorialized in hundreds of jokes -- the best of which Mr. Vuic includes at the beginning of each of his chapters --, nearly 200,000 Yugos were sold in the United States from 1985 to 1989 when its problematic history finally overcame its bargain-bin pricetag and doomed it to the status of laughingstock.

As much as the folly of the Yugo prompts amusement, there is a serious side to this humorous story. From the pro-Yugoslavian lobbyists inside the American government who helped to make the car a reality, to the charismatic showmen who actually sold it, Mr. Vuic lifts the hood on the story of the Yugo, the little car that couldn't, in an attempt to understand just how such a poorly designed car could get through the rigorous screening that keeps most of the world's worst cars off American roads. He discovers that the Yugo likely wasn't as bad as it was purported to be, that its Yugoslavian designers worked hard and meant well when they modified the car from the Fiat it was based on, and that its disrepute likely stemmed as much from the chicanery of its salesmen as it did from its shortcomings as a vehicle. Here, Mr. Vuic is at his best, reconstructing the career of Malcolm Bricklin, a many-times-failed entrepreneur whose cockiness and boastfulness ensured that the Yugo would be a disappointment. For as much work as he did to seize upon the Yugo as an opportunity, to help steer it through the safety testing and bring it to market in the United States, his overconfidence, at best, and his fraud, at worst, clinched his and the Yugo's demise.

The Yugois a delightful tale about an epically bad car and its epically over-the-top salesman. Mr. Vuic is a talented author who balances, here, the humor of the Yugo's history with the dark side of capitalism. For as much as it encourages innovation by enticing winners with rich profits and widespread fame, it also encourages shysters to take shortcuts in order to attain that fame and fortune. There is likely no solution to this problem except, perhaps, to always doubt that which seems too good to be true. This is a thorough examination of a failed car, the era that spawned it and the high jinks that sealed its fate. As funny as it is informative and one of the best light-hearted efforts of non-fiction this year. (5/5 Stars)

Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne

From The Week of September 05, 2011

Since the Industrial Revolution, the human population has expanded so rapidly that, today, more than six times as many humans are alive as were alive 100 years ago. Even more frightening are estimates for future growth which generally put the population's peak at nine billion by the middle of the 21st century. For the planet to carry such a bloated population, humans will have to urbanize even more than they already have which strongly suggests that urban planning will be a critical field of study in the decades to come.

One obvious solution for how nine billion souls will transport themselves in what is likely to be a peak or post oil world is the bicycle, that most sturdy and lightweight of wheeled machines which requires only the pumping of human legs to power it. But what might it be like to use a bicycle on a daily basis? And which are the best machines to use? Which cities sport the best layouts? And what might one see and experience when one is not traveling at 60 miles per hour? These are just some of the questions I'd hoped Bicycle Diaries might answer. Unfortunately, it is far more of a paean to its author's apparent fame, and a canvas for his artistic adventures, than it is a thoughtful discussion on the bicycle and its benefits and challenges.

From New York to Los Angeles, from Berlin to Hong Kong, Mr. Byrne, a musician and avid cyclist, travels the world on two wheels. Distilling decades of cycling down into 300 slim pages, he describes his journeys through the vastness of the American south, the hyper-urban buzz of the American northeast, the cyclist-friendly sanity of northern Europe and the lively chaos of South America, all while painting vivid, if fleeting, portraits of the cultures through which he pedals. The result is a whirlwind tour of the world's major cities, in all its glories and its warts, as seen through the eyes of a cyclist.

Bicycle Diaries is a glorified travel log. Mr. Byrne has a keen eye for cultural distinctiveness, convincingly describing the societal faultlines that run through our world. Unfortunately, this talent, along with a flair for a good turn of phrase, cannot save this mishmash of social commentary and bicycle philosophizing. Mr. Byrne spends twice as much time here reconstructing musical gigs and picking over his fascination with high art than he does on his actual bicycle which goes without a single mention in his main narrative. In fact, some of his city tours don't seem to involve a bicycle at all which makes me wonder if they were included only for contrast. I went in hoping to find descriptions of urban environments enmeshed with entertaining, two-wheeled adventures. I came out unenlightened by a few half-assed stories chased with some interesting cultural observations.

Engaging at times, but far too self-focused to be of interest to anyone who is not already a fan of the author. I wanted to be captured by the union of the wind, the machine and human ingenuity. Instead? Navel-gazing of an unsatisfying sort. (2/5 Stars)

Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy

From The Week of June 26, 2011

Revolutions rarely seem to pan out the way their instigators expect them to. Darwinism begot Social Darwinism, Marxism begot Stalinism, and imperialism begot terrorism and exploitation. Ariel Levy argues, in Female Chauvinist Pigs, that we can add feminism to our list. For rather than engendering equality between the sexes, as imagined by its architects, feminism has empowered what Ms. Levy calls the rise of Raunch culture, or the transformation of the female form into a commodity to be consumed by men and women alike.

From Playboy to Girls Gone Wild, from strippers to lesbian bois, Ms. Levy assembles a history of Raunch culture which she connects back to a 1970s dispute between two factions of feminists born out of Womens Liberation. The antiporn faction argued, unsurprisingly, that pornography was smut, a degradation driven by male desire and, therefore, something to be rejected. The sex-positive faction that opposed them advocated for sexual freedom, choosing to define equality between the genders as the ability to be, do and love whatever and whoever they pleased. Though antiporn feminists won a few early victories, Sex-positive feminists won the war, unleashing a culture of women, freed from the chains of propriety, ready to act as they saw fit. Thirty years on, that freedom has been made manifest in Playboy centerfolds and silicon enhancements. It is exemplified by stripper poles and lurid photo shoots. It has penetrated even youth culture where younger and younger girls desire to -- or feel pressured to -- perform for the boys who purport to love them. Is this feminism's legacy? Is this true sexual freedom?

Though Ms. Levy stops short of heaping a full measure of scorn upon Raunch culture, she effectively highlights its shortcomings while leaving open the question of its benefits. In this, she leaves little doubt about the extent to which the commodification of the female form discomforts her. In her defense, it is far more difficult to quantify the benefits of Raunch culture; after all, it's all-but impossible to know how many women have used their bodies to pay for everything from their education to their clothes. Not only can't we generate a number, we can't even know for sure that these women take psychological damage from this exchange. Some women, I imagine, take little or no damage from selling themselves, buffering themselves from its coerciveness with healthy helpings of self-confidence. Others, meanwhile, are surely crushed by it, left exposed to its debasement by past abuse and poor self-esteem. It's much easier to gather graphic evidence on how female commodification has distorted womens bodies and their position in society. Here, Ms. Levy is razor- sharp, deploying scores of interviews to enlighten her readers on a world that makes even this freedom-loving libertarian squirm uncomfortably.

This is a worthy read. Ms. Levy has hit upon an important problem with sex-positive female identity, chiefly that it has permitted women to descend into the superficiality that often characterizes male sexual behavior. But there's an important aspect of this story Ms. Levy neglects.

So long as men desire women as strongly as they do presently, it will be impossible for women to completely liberate themselves from Raunch culture, from commodification. The human experience tells us that everything, from our bodies to our ethics, is for sale, for the right price. Men want from women what only women have and they often want it to the exclusion of almost everything else in their lives. As a result, men are willing to pay an extraordinary price for that female commodity. How is any human supposed to resist that?! Women are handicapped because male desire has set up an unfair game in which women have to resist temptation to profit from the easy road of giving themselves away for financial and social gain. To me, the issues Ms. Levy raises aren't feminist in nature; they are psychological. How do human beings resist commodification when it's so easy for them to get what they want for what, for some of them, may be little cost? I have little doubt that, if the roles here were reversed and women wanted from men what men want from women, men would be commodifying themselves. Men would be descending into Raunch culture. It's just too tempting to do life the easy way.

This is fascinating work. (3/5 Stars)

Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell

From The Week of March 27, 2011

Though I was tangentially aware of the dubious circumstances by which the Hawaiian islands were adopted into the Union of the United States, Ms. Vowell's humorous and caustic history of the colonization of Hawaii, by Americans, was powerfully enlightening. Composed with the characteristic Vowell wit, the author interweaves the traditional beliefs of Hawaiians with the story of how waves of missionaries landed on Hawaii's beautiful beaches, Christianized its inhabitants, claimed some of its lands, and set into motion a process of Westernization which eventually lead to the Bayonet Constitution. She describes how the passing of a few decades emboldened the Americans who had settled on Hawaiian lands, and who were in favor of Hawaii's accession into the Union, to give the Hawaiian king an ultimatum, sacrifice his power or lose his position in a coupe. Though the king agreed to sign away his power, his decision was irrelevant. The bayonetters wanted Americanization. And though it would require them to bring down a king and a queen to realize their goals, they were more than up to this bullying task.

Though Ms. Vowell does justice to the unconstitutional spirit of Hawaii's annexation, her sweeping account spends as much time cataloguing the history of Hawaiians since the 19th century: their traditions, their beliefs, their poets. She touches on the key, 19th century figures who shaped Hawaiian culture and Hawaiian thought. While using the arrogant accounts of missionaries to reconstruct Hawaiian life prior to 20th century assimilation into Americanism. So while she leaves us with the sense of the injustice of Hawaiian statehood, she educates us on its inevitability. Being that the history of humanity seems to be oftentimes defined by one group's violent acquisition of what another group can't defend, someone would have claimed those lovely islands and imprinted upon them their own cultural brand. Perhaps it was good that America got their first, but at what cost?

As quirky, edifying, and entertaining as ever. Few contemporary writers bring it home as consistently as Ms. Vowell does. (3/5 Stars)

Rich Like Them by Ryan D'Agostino

From The Week of March 20, 2011

How do people get rich? Surely no one has worn out more pairs of shoes in the effort to track down the answer to this eternal question than Mr. D'Agostino who, after generating a list of 50, rich, American zipcodes, sets out upon a door-to-door odyssey to learn the truths of acquired wealth. From I.T. Seattle to old-money Connecticut, from gentrified Atlanta to booming Houston, Mr. D'Agostino pounds the pavement of some of the country's most exclusive neighborhoods, working a mixture of charm and flattery to solicit from the successful a few helpful tidbits on the acquisition of wealth. Though his necessarily condensed account of his experiences leaves the reader with no conception of how often he was urned away, his subjects, on balance, seem quite willing to talk to him about their triumphs. But then, as Mr. D'Agostino points out, who wouldn't want to brag a little about conquering the game of life, at least as it's defined by contemporary America?

Though Rich Like Them has enough informational nuggets to satisfy readers looking for tips on getting rich, it is primarily a collection of cleverly told life stories, some hilarious, some fascinating, that do much more to enlighten us on the nature of the successful than the means of their success. Sure, some of the characters here are simply in the right place at the right time, but others exhibit a set of basic skills admirably and doggedly applied. Some get ahead through simply being kind while others advance by unhesitatingly seizing an opportunity. And while there's no universal tactic described here, there does seem to be a core decency to all of Mr. D'Agostino's subjects which, while not excluding ruthlessness, offers a hopeful view of the nature of human success.

Rich Like Them is as charming as its subjects. Mr. D'Agostino strikes a wonderful balance between enthusiasm for his innovative project and introspection concerning the nature of wealth and the people who have claimed it. Though his account benefits from his riveting subjects, the piece would be much the worse without his own dogged determination to give earnest thought to the questions he's posed. Not exactly the kind of piece that wins Pulitzers; nonetheless, a valuable and worthwhile read for both the thoughtful and the ambitious. (4/5 Stars)

1968 by Mark Kurlansky

From The Week of December 26, 2010

Certain years are so clogged with events so calamitous, so explosive, so ruinous, that both the years in question and the events which shaped them deserve closer scrutiny. Mr. Kurlansky has picked out 1968 as one of these years, arguing that no other year in living memory has been so thoroughly plagued by so many disasters both political and military. And though there's plenty of room to question Mr. Kurlansky's premise, the litany of incidents he explores here makes his both a strong and an entertaining case.

The Tet Offensive, the seizing of the USS Pueblo, the rise of student activism in the United States, the murder of Martin Luther King, the promising birth and crushing defeat of the Prague Spring, student protests in France nearly toppling their government... 1968 was afflicted, from stem to stern, with war, political oppression, and the death of hope. But while 1968 was an end to many things, it was the birth of many more. It liberalized college campuses, laid the groundwork for the protests that would help end the Soviet Union two decades later, created an entire generation of activists willing to challenge the status quo, and sparked the modernization of society into something freer and truer than the oppressive religiosity and patriotism which characterized the prior decades.

Mr. Kurlansky writes vividly of these events and the pain they brought, the blood they spilled, and the changes they spawned. But while his narrative is compelling, the case for the interconnectedness of these events leaves something to be desired. Mr. Kurlansky points to the newness of television and the universal opposition to the turbulent Vietnam War as spot fires from which 1968's various anti-authoritarian rebellions drew their fuel. But while a sense of burgeoning globalism and the overextension of American power may have provided inspiration for the various student protests, he fails to convince me that 1968 was any more apocalyptic than 1972, or 1945, or 1948, or 2001, or any of a dozen other years in which the impact of indirectly connected events sparked passionate and sometimes violent reactions. The more people we have living on the planet, the more events we have. And given that all humans operate from the same basic code, it's unremarkable to me that some of those events can cluster together to form an apocalyptic-seeming year like 1968.

But even if the grander explanation here fails to satisfy, 1968 remains a wonderful biography of a most tempestuous year. The events Mr. Kurlansky puts under the microscope are as riveting as they are disturbing. There's a lot here and it is presented with clarity and passion. (3/5 Stars)

Our Dumb World by The Onion

From The Week of October 31, 2010

As a loyal reader of The Onion, the hilarious website of political and cultural satire, Our Dumb World was, for me, a must-have. Modelled on an atlas, this collection of scathing primers for our world's most noteworthy nations hacks its way through its readers' delicate sensibilities, leaving no sore spot unprobed in its quest to bring to light the sum total of the world's faults and hypocrisies. There are almost no weak spots here, with highlights including the entries for America and the Democratic Republic of The Congo, the latter of which had me on the floor for a good 30 seconds.

We all, at times, take ourselves far too seriously. I, for one, am grateful to have The Onion around to bring me back to the festering cesspool that is the world we've made. This is a wonderful read for one not easily offended. Consequently, for those of you who find yourselves touchy on the question of national identity, steer clear, or else risk combustion. (3/5 Stars)