China's flailing birth into modernity in Age of Ambition

From the week of June 9th, 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A tortured man in a tormented land in Lawrence In Arabia

From the week of June 9th, 2014

Mythology plays a strange and complex role in the legacies of history's legendary figures. Heroes and villains both find themselves subjected to its whimsical powers, the former elevated out of the mists of obscurity to shine like the essence of virtue, an example to all those who follow, and the latter shrouded in the darkness of devilry, their cruel deeds used to assure present-day citizens that they aren't so barbaric. Without mythology to generationally resurrect the stories of the past, we might never have heard of such figures, let alone learned their lessons. And yet, this historical airbrushing is so deeply rooted in the cultural prejudices that have shaped and carried them that, often, very little of the actual person is left for us to study. Fortunately, for Mr. Anderson, his subject has only suffered a century of such treatment. The rest of the mythological sediment the author himself expertly scrapes away to reveal a character of endless fascination.

Born into less than reputable circumstances, at least by the measure of his Victorian era, T. E. Lawrence rose from the obscurity of a difficult childhood to become arguably the most famous figure of World War I. An archaeologist with a particular fondness for the Arab world, he was initially tapped by the British Government to survey the Middle East which became a battleground in the Great War when the Ottoman Empire refused to side with the Entente powers. Keen to protect its colonial interests in the region, not to mention the vital oil reserves necessary to fuel their ships, Britain needed to understand not only the strategic situation in the region but the cultural one as well.

Lawrence might have remained a historical footnote, nothing more than a consultant on Arabic affairs, were it not for Britain's shambolic defeat at Gallipoli, a foolish engagement that not only swept into the sea the lives of thousands of young men from both Commonwealth and Turkey, but robbed Britain of any territorial advantage. Forced to rely on key figures in the Arab world, Britain turned to Lawrence to liaison with the region's tribal leaders. Not only would Lawrence come to cherish these relationships, they would serve to highlight the faithlessness of his own imperialistic government, truths that would permanently change his view of the western world. Lawrence would persist in his task, however. For he believed in an Arab world for the Arabs. And to achieve that, the ottomans would have to be defeated, the doing of which would make him a legend of history.

A superlative work of non-fiction, Lawrence in Arabia is a thorough, spellbinding account of the man, the myth and the world that spawned him. Scott Anderson, an author and journalist, exhibits, here, prose of the first order that not only drills down into Lawrence and the lives of the regional figures who encountered him, but also more-than-capably withdraws to a more global remove to discuss the political and militaristic maneuverings of the involved powers. His descriptions of Lawrence's labors are so wonderfully enmeshed into the overarching narrative of imperialistic exploitation and notions of smug, European superiority that the reader, made breathless by western perfidy, looks on in wonder at an unfolding tragedy of the first order, horrific events that, though they occurred a hundred years ago, nonetheless maintain sad echoes of the present. That the author so ably and effortlessly evokes such comparisons is a credit to his grasp of the subject.

There are actors here, other than Lawrence himself, that garner attention. William Yale, the prospector for Standard oil; Faisal Ibn Hussein, a warlord and Lawrence's primary ally; and Mark Sykes, an infamous British noble and diplomat whose corrosive whimsy wound up destroying Arab faith in the west. Each man, in his own right, is a creature of fascination and complexity. And yet, none hold a candle to Lawrence whose problematic-unto-abusive childhood drove him to lengths of ascetic self-denial that verged on the fanatical. His capacity to endure suffering is as breathtaking as his transformation from creature of self-contained interests and passions into an individual possessed of both the arrogance and the will to believe that his view of what was just could be imposed upon the western world. That he failed is not surprising. But that he thought he might succeed says more about the man than all his trials combined.

It is impossible to read such books without being enriched by them, not only in the events themselves but in how they characterize the broader tides of history. There's a palpable sense of tragedy that hangs over this work, a perpetual sense that human civilization, for all its brilliant advancements, is heart-breakingly prone to collective acts of senseless violence. From the indescribable idiocy of the Great War itself, down through all the self-interested decisions spawned by it, we come to understand some measure of the cultural disdain and suspicion the Middle East has for the West. It is there, for all to see, in the actions of our fathers and our forefathers, what we are capable of doing so long as our interests appear to demand it. Until we break that habit, until we establish, for all time, the notion that there are simply actions too manipulative, too duplicitous, too heinous, to carry out for the sake of necessity, we will just repeat these mistakes over and over. This is the lesson of the Great War, or it ought to be.

Splendid work. First-rate biographical history... (5/5 Stars)

The criminality of the death of the Celtic Tiger in Ship of Fools

From The Week of April 6th, 2014

For society to function properly, for it to have hope for more than chaos and discord, the people must have trust in the State. There is no other way to maintain the rule of law. The State collects taxes in exchange for providing services. If those services are corrupted or dysfunctional, then taxation becomes, in the minds of the citizenry, just a nice word for extortion. And the moment the individual realizes this, then resistance against this unfair system is the only ethical course of action.

As clear cut as this may seem, however, there are complications. After all, only the most cynical citizens want to believe the State is broken. Thus, we grant it chance after chance to convince us otherwise. It is far easier to give the government a second chance than it is to overthrow it. But one can only give so many second chances. Once those are exhausted, there are only two options, rebellion or surrender. Sadly, the latter seems to be the path in Ireland, a tragic reality stingingly illustrated in Mr. O'Toole's engaging polemic.

From 1995 to 2007, the Republic of Ireland experienced a 12-year economic boom that, for a brief time, made this moribund country the envy of the world. After centuries of oppression, misrule and sectarian discord, the Celtic Tiger, as these boom times were christened, finally seemed to be lifting the near-permanent shadow from the heart of this benighted place and giving it a glimmer of hope for a brighter future. For once, jobs were plentiful, allowing the Republic to claim one of the world's best unemployment rates. For once, real-estate developments were inviting the famed and the fortunate to Irish shores, making the emerald isles a place to see and be seen. For once, foreign investment, particularly in the IT field, appeared to be offering a higher quality of life for the average citizen. There was just one problem. It was built on a lie.

Through reckless lending policies and criminally lax procedures, private Irish banks fuelled the Celtic Tiger by extending astronomical sums to already wealthy Irish developers who in turn used that money to develop a country that did not need it. This form of trickle-down economics may have happily continued on for years to come. But when the credit crisis detonated Wall Street in 2008, quickly sweeping the globe, those German and French banks that happily lent those Irish banks money to pass on to Irish developers suddenly wanted their money back. Unable to cover their debts, these Irish banks instantly collapsed under the strain of absurdly skewed ledgers and would have drifted into oblivion but for the Irish government who, in stepping in and nationalizing the debts of these banks, instantly burdened every Irish taxpayer with additional debts of more than 50,000 Euros. How this calamity came to be, both the systems that permitted it and the government that refused to stop it, illuminates these pages and sets fire to the notion that there ever existed a reasonable, moral Irish state.

Ship of Fools is is a blistering, convincing broadside to the Celtic Tiger and the government that manufactured it. Fintan O'Toole, a journalist and public intellectual, walks the reader through the last 50 years of Irish economic policy, an adventure that ought to put his every reader to sleep. But how could a single eyelid even threaten to droop when every turned page reveals another scam, another dropped ball, another scandal by which the Irish government revealed itself to be nothing more than a public-facing shell corporation for the Republic's obscenely wealthy elites, a small cadre of men who, over decades, established an Irish gentry that not only held the reins of business, but collared the government and the regulatory bodies designed to contain them. In this, the author lays down a painfully obvious pattern of corrupt and selfish behavior that made the death of the Celtic tiger both obvious and inevitable.

Though Mr. O'Toole largely keeps his critical focus on the government dysfunction that allowed the Celtic Tiger to all-but destroy the Irish state, he does not spare neoliberalism its fair share of the blame. It may well be that this business-first system of low taxes and small government has merit. Perhaps, in a vacuum, it could be executed admirably and allow every citizen a chance to succeed on their own, without aid or succor from governments. Certainly, there's appeal to economists in this scheme. After all, governments act in the interests of their constituents and from the necessities of politics, not caring what the consequences of these half-informed decisions might be. Removing this power from government removes the temptation to act which will allow a well-engineered system to operate smoothly.

However, a free market invariably evolves into one dominated by massive, conglomerated firms that use their outsized power to not only crush their competition, but to silence their opposition. The moment they've succeeded in ensuring that no one can say no to them, they act as only they see fit regardless of the consequences. It is the very definition of a doomed state.

The State cannot exist to service business interests. It cannot exist to facilitate the wealthy. It must exist for everyone, to give everyone a fair chance at life. And as Ship of Fools makes painfully clear, this has never been the case in the Republic of Ireland where self-serving economic policies and a hollowed-out government have created the worst of all worlds. A sad but powerful indictment... (4/5 Stars)

A riveting conclusion to an epic fight for survival in Dust

From The Week of March 3, 2014

For all of society's many virtues, for all that it is the mechanism by which civilization is thrust onward, it would grind to a halt without our lies to lubricate it. From secret projects to marital harmony, lies arm us with the means to avoid awkward confrontations with the truth that might tear apart our missions and our relationships, diverting what would otherwise be deathly blows into glancing hits that are soon abandoned to the trash heap that is our past. But while lies may normalize what could otherwise sunder us, they carry with them a terrible price. For each time they are used in the name of the good, they chip away at the trust of those we use them on until, eventually, their faith has been rubbled, leaving only anger stoked by being played the fool. Rarely has this rageful backlash been deployed better than in the conclusion to Hugh Howey's creepy and gripping series.

For the men and women of the Silos, the world is steel and stone. Having lived and died for centuries within 50 hermetically sealed arcologies, built 130-stories deep in the earth of a ruined world, they have no concept of Africa and America, of lions and monkeys, of snow and sun. After all, it is death to leave the silo, death to go out to the decayed remnants of what came before. And anyway, they have within their silos everything they could ever want: power, food, life and love. What could anyone else ask for?

But now, after centuries, the lies that have underpinned their lives are slowly being revealed, peeled back like layers of sediment to expose the whys and hows that lead them into these sealed lives, these stale existences proscribed by another's power. But rather than finding truths that will set them free, the people of the silos find only the ugliness of a plan so vile, so pervasive, that they will never be the same, knowledge so pernicious that it will spark a revolution that no one, not even the great men who set this scheme into motion, could have planned for. The result of this war will shape the world for millennia to come.

A worthy conclusion to one of the most successful pieces of terrifying science fiction ever penned, Dust is a work of beautiful dystopia. Eschewing the gory horror of the many previous works that have flirted with SciFi, and its nearly infinite capacity to imagine new and twisted worlds, Mr. Howey has brought to life a creepily, self-contained world, married it with a truly horrific premise and watched as his dark creation spawned stories to freeze the blood. Repeatedly, the reader is forced to look on helplessly as the people of the silos are battered by an enemy unfathomable to them, an omnipotent, controlling entity for which they have no analogue. Their collapse before its superior weapons and its mysterious knowledge is as inevitable as it is tragic, an all-too-familiar outcome when the strong clash with the weak.

And yet, where in past works the silos have lacked the tools to fight back, here, in Wool's endgame, the lies are seen for what they are. Precious knowledge that, hoarded for so long by the silos' overlords, has trickled out until the resourceful have glimpsed some measure of their master plan and used that knowledge to make, for the first time, plans of their own, to seize their autonomy, to realize that the truth actually can set them free. All of which would have been empty without Wool's previous works in which readers watched the silos bend under the weight of ignorance until it seemed as though they might all break and leave the world without hope. But with such a foundation in place, their outrage, their keen hunger for revenge, puts a fire in these pages that no criticism can douse, that no convenient turn of plot can reduce, that no force of the old world can stop. And it is a privilege to watch it all unfold.

Dust is not a revolution. Quite the contrary. It draws upon many established tropes to craft its tale. But where Mr. Howey supersedes those who've come before him is in the sheer terror he can instill in his environments. The doom, the claustrophobia, of the silos leaves the reader yearning for sunlight, for open spaces, for the world he knows. It leaves him wondering who will be the next character to fall in a war he can't possibly relate to. And in this, the author shows us the true power of knowledge. There are no clever villains spitting pithy lines about how knowledge is power. He doesn't need them. This truth scores every page and leaves no doubt that, short of the suns that give us life, knowledge has no peer.

For anyone remotely interested in scares and society, in prisons of the mind and the burdens of the heart, Wool is the bible you've been waiting for. Read it and its wonderful conclusion and thrill to literature done with style and cold steel. (5/5 Stars)

Corporate greed and a righteous cause in Tom's River

From the Week of February 17th, 2014

Capitalism has built and furnished our world with the stuff of our dreams. In providing a tangible, monetary reward for the risks inherent in the creation of products, it has given us a society in which we travel on airplanes, entertain ourselves with televisions and and accumulate knowledge with networked computers, all of this in the span of little more than 200 years. The innovation it has spurred has literally transformed our planet, making it and the humans who live on it, unrecognizable to the generations who came before.

And yet, for all of capitalism's incalculable benefits, it sometimes extracts a terrible cost. For in incentivizing humans with the promises of wealth, and in valorizing the pursuit of that wealth, it has created conditions in which the societal costs of mass-production are, at best, minimized and, at worst, utterly ignored, its toxic consequences sloughed off for later generations to deal with, a point powerfully made in Dan Fagin's thorough account of one of the United States' most shameful episodes in its corporate history.

Tom's River, New Jersey has been, for much of its 300-year existance, an idyllic town. Nestled on the mid-Atlantic coast, it is part of the famed Jersey Shore, a stretch of American beach front popular amongst vacationers and tourists. In recent decades, its population has grown, elevating property values and turning tidy profits for those who bought when it was still a sleepy community.

However, for 30 years, a toxic secret lay beneath Tom's River's charm and beauty, one that oozed out of the ground and into the public consciousness in the late 1980s when parents and hospital workers began to notice an unusual preponderence of sick children within the town. Investigations of these clustering cancers would eventually lead to the doorstep of Tom's river chemical, a subsidiary of a Swiss dye manufacturer that had, at least since the 1960s, been dumping its carcinogenic waste products into the town's ground and the nearby ocean. This waste eventually seeped into Tom's River's wellwater, likely causing the statistically significant uptick in cancers from the 1970s onward.

An account of the dumping and the long, torturous battle on behalf of the concerned citizens to have tom's River Chemical held to account, Tom's River is a powerful and moving work of non-fiction. Mr. Fagin's history of the idyllic town, and the chemical plant that poisoned it, unfolds like a car crash in slow motion. Its linear narrative ruthlessly explores Tom's River Chemical's greed and negligence, the agonizing grief of the parents who paid the price for its malfeasance, and the many government inquests and scientific investigations that tried to sound out the when, where and why of what it had done. The gestalt is nothing short of a gut-wrenching tale of soulless capitalism butting up hard against the love of parents for their children who play in an increasingly polluted planet.

Peculiarly, Tom's River is made all the more potent for the messy and controversial resolution of its subject. Fearing the years of life-destroying litigation that would almost certainly result from trying to take on Tom's River Chemical in the courts, and lacking any sort of scientifically grounded smoking gun tying the cancer cluster with the chemical dumping, the parents of the affected children negotiated a controversial truce with the company, robbing this multi-decade odyssey of anything like a satisfactory conclusion. And yet, this is precisely why the work is so extraordinary. For it leaves the reader with no doubt that the concerned were forced by circumstances into such a peace. The limitations of science and the perfidy of politicians left them bereft of any muscle to bring to bear against the company , reducing them to two bad options, a foul-tasting peace or a Pyrrhic war in the courts.

This conclusion, however, in no way diminishes the heros who devoted nearly 20 years of their lives to bringing Tom's River Chemical to heel. From the concerned nurses to the EPA officials, from the determined parents to the stoic scientists, Mr. Fagin introduces us to a swath of honest and earnest Americans trying to right a wrong that no one else wanted to acknowledge. In doing so, we come to understand not only the frustration of the unheard but the pain of the healer who can only look on and watch as cancer, in all its varieties, eats away at the innocents in their care. If there's any flaw with the work, it is the absence of interviews from Tom's River Chemical and its Swiss masters who are utterly silent throughout. Whether this is due to bias on the part of the reporter, or heartless lawyering on the part of Novartis, is not at all clear.

Environmentalism, bureaucracy and science all have their moments here, but Tom's River leaves no doubt that, if we are to change our world for the better, it will have to come at the expense of unbridled capitalism. Regulation is a wretched tangle of thorns into which only the foolish wish to plunge, but we must also acknowledge that it is the nature of publicly traded companies to maximize profits at the expense of everyone and everything around them. Their soul drive is to earn. And over two centuries, that drive has given us an amazing world. But the price we pay for that world is too high, for us and for the people who come after us. Incentives must be put in place, penalties so cripplingly severe that they leave no doubt, in any boardroom, that it is more economical to do the right thing than to do the irresponsible thing. To ignore this truth, for reasons of politics or ideology, will devastate our planet which is, after all, the cradle of the generations to come. (4/5 Stars)

An extraordinary person, an unjust fate in The Spy Who Loved

From the Week of February 17th, 2014

Joy comes in many forms. Be it ushering a new life into the world or watching a young mind expand with the possibilities of the life to come, be it performing a perfect piece of music or experiencing the power of a sublimely toned body, we are all uplifted by the exhilaration of life's rare moments, those cherished slivers of time in which we, or those we know, are at our best. But while, for most of us, it is enough to simply have these precious memories, others are not so easily satiated by the past. For these souls, joy only erupts from the extremity of emotion and circumstance, from moments in which one's life or one's wellbeing has been wagered on the outcome. Which is precisely why the past wont' suffice. For it is already a known quantity, a settled question from which victory has already flowed. The next battle is the only cure. But as Clare Mulley explains in her riveting work, for some, there can be no more battles.

Born in 1905 to a wealthy, landed family in Poland, Krystyna Skarbec of a daughter of the aristocracy, an educated beauty of class and repute whose life was overturned and shaped by the two great wars that transfixed Europe in the first few decades of the 20th century. Without the Nazis and Communism, without politics and ideology, she might have been someone's wife, a creature living a life of proscribed comfort in which the sorrows and frustrations of being a pretty woman in a man's world would have remained her own. But when the freedom of her beloved country was crushed beneath the jackboots of continental regimes hungering to impose their notion of unity upon the world, the cage of her social confinement was breached, allowing her to crawl out into a broken world and fight for her own freedom.

Beginning in 1939 and only concluding with the end of the Second World War, Krystyna Skarbec, naturalized by Britain as Christine Granville, was an agent in both the Polish Resistance and the Special Operations Executive, a British organization whose remit was to spy on the Axis powers and to commit acts of sabotage where possible. Trained in everything from parachute drops to the transmission of secret codes, Skarbec operated behind enemy lines in much of occupied western Europe, curriering messages to the Allies, helping to take fortified Nazi positions and even intervening to bribe Nazi officers to spare allied prisoners. But despite her extraordinary efforts and the Allied victory over the Axis, she was never able to free her beloved Poland which would remain in the rough hands of soviet Russia long after she had succumbed to the miseries of postwar life.

The spellbinding account of a remarkable woman, The Spy Who Loved is nothing short of extraordinary. Ms. Mulley, an author and journalist, has helped to resurrect the life and times of a woman who should have never been lost to the rough tides of history, whose fearlessness and determination remain inspirational even some sixty years after her death. Swiftly dispensing with Granville's early years, the author concentrates on Granvile's wartime service, painting a lush portrait of a woman of charm and hunger, of grand habits and even grander drive who surmounted the prejudices of her age to leave her mark, to make a difference, to be someone. That sorrow was her primary reward for such strength of will is a pity that no amount of acclaim can sooth.

Cultures then and now might call Krystyna Skarbec a slut. They might look at her sexual appetites and her many lovers and dismiss her as a woman who slept her way to success. Indeed, this opinion, or fear of, is partially responsible for her present anonymity. For the men with whom she was close were so eager to guard her reputation that they were reluctant for her story to be told at all. This is idiocy. For while it is inappropriate to so blithely condemn any woman, it is even more foolish to do so with a woman who behaved no differently than any of her many male comrades. And even were it appropriate to label any woman such, such a label would not fit. For far from a degenerate, skarbec seized life, sucking from it every drop of nourishment it could offer her. In wartime, she comes alive, relishing her own agency, her own power, her own capacity to be a hero. This is the designation she has earned, not one rooted in dated sexist notions of foolish propriety.

As much as this is a winning biography of a rare woman in a brutal period of history, The Spy Who Loved is also a kind of office drama set in wartime. As the first woman to join the SOE, Skarbec was beset by all manner of prejudices that, with sixty years of reformist hindsight, appear even more absurd now than they must have seemed to her then. Despite her willingness to risk her life for her country, despite her obvious competence in the arenas of espionage and sabotage, she was distrusted, denied the legal use of a gun and often marginalized to the sidelines of a war she was eager to fight. Worst of all these nonsensical sins, however, is Skarbec's treatment after the war where upon England, the nation so fond of thinking of itself as the great civilizer, entangled her in sexist legalities which not only denied her the combat medals she so clearly deserved, but obligated her to pretend to be married in order to receive the citizenship she'd so clearly earned. It is shameful enough that these foolish codes troubled such a courageous veteran. That they also indirectly contributed to her death is an intolerable irony.

The Spy Who Loved could have devoted more time to Skarbec's early years. And indeed, it is slightly troubling that so much of the work has to be told through the eyes of others, an unfortunate necessity thanks to the dearth of skarbec's own correspondence. But these are small imperfections in what is otherwise the biography of a brave, liberated hero who should be celebrated for achievements on the battlefield and pitied for the peace she could never find off of it. Unforgettable... (4/5 Stars)

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

From The Week of December 1st, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A forgotten stain on the American character in The Blood Telegram

From The Week of November 18th, 2013

Government, in all its forms, has forever been a double-edge sword. For all its advantages -- the organization of power and resources into the hands of the able few ostensibly for the benefit of the less able many --, it is predicated on the ancient, animalistic notion that might makes right, that the having of power is also a license to use it as the holder sees fit. This conception has been handed down for generations, from the tribes and the monarchies from which our governments evolved, a time in which all manner of ideas and mythologies were dreamed up to justify the actions of the most high. And though we have mollified such harsh views, varnished them with the veneer of electoral mandates and senatorial debates, that underlying idea of I know best still transfixes our leaders, reducing them from creatures of reason into beings of pure authority. The terrible cost of power's corrosiveness could ask for no better exemplar than Gary Bass' mesmerizing portrait of the intersection of American leadership and Bangladeshi freedom.

Separated by as much as 1,000 kilometers, the two halves of Pakistan were always fated to secede from one another. A geographic oddity born out of the great partition, which saw India declare its independence from the British Empire and Pakistan declare its independence from India, this distance irrevocably strained the natural bonds of community that evolve from humans in close proximity, causing views in both territories to become distinct from one another. And so, when Yahya Khan, then the leader of Pakistan's ruling junta, held free elections in 1970, and found the result going dramatically against him, particularly in East Pakistan, he authorized military action to bring the foolish East back into line.

Supported by the Nixon Administration and all the American materiel it could reasonably supply, the Pakistani Army's ruthless attack on East Pakistan was brutally efficient, leading to the slaughter of nearly half a million people and the conversion of millions more Bangladeshi into displaced refugees who fled to India for safety. This crisis appalled the American diplomats stationed in Bangladesh, prompting them to speak out against its depravities. At first, these warnings were private communications up the chain of command. But when this yielded only inaction, many of the diplomats went public, accusing the Nixon Administration of standing by while genocide was perpetrated by an American ally. The subsequent political fallout not only drove India closer to the Soviet Union, it ignited war between India and Pakistan in 1971 which effectively ended the crisis, the scars of which would linger for decades.

A captivating examination of the conflict, viewed through the eyes of the Nixon Administration, The Blood Telegram is powerful, emotive work that will leave few readers unmoved. Drawing upon White-House recordings, and the first-hand accounts of American diplomats in Bangladesh, Mr. Bass describes in stomach-churning detail the lengths to which Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger ignored the mass-slaughter of Hindus in East Pakistan out of loyalty and expediency to dictators and communists. Working hard to thaw relations with Maoist China, and cognizant that Yahya Khan was the best conduit through which they could work with and access China, the President of the United States armed a junta, ignored the entreaties of India, then and still the world's largest democracy, and stood by while their own weapons were used to perpetrate what their own diplomats termed as genocide. Those who objected to this strategy were dismissed as having "gone native" or as being a political enemy of the Nixon administration, neatly allowing the champion of world freedom to plow forward with its plans regardless of the terrible cost.

Were The Blood Telegram's narrative not so consumed by quotes from Nixon and Kissinger, one would be hesitant to take this chronicle at face value. After all, Mr. Bass seems, at times, eager to fit the American diplomats, particularly Archer Blood, for white hats while conversely vilifying the Nixon Administration. And yet, the filth that pours forth, first hand, from the mouthes of Nixon and Kissinger is inescapably wicked, leaving little doubt in all but their staunchest advocates, that their roles in this affair were pernicious and destructive. They are so anxious to win with China that they sneer at anyone who stands in their way, degrading them racially, ideologically and profanely in an effort to justify their actions to themselves. Sadly, despite breaking the law to support Yahya Khan, neither man was charged, much less censured, for their behavior in this matter.

The Blood Telegram is not without its own issues. Though the work is ostensibly about the brutal suppression of East Pakistan, it is far more concerned with the American role in that ugly incident than it is in actually documenting it. We are exposed to one or two refugees and the odd Indian commander, but all else is reduced to the cold statistics of those who were killed, maimed, or forced to flee. We're afforded no real sense of how Bangladesh tried to recover from its bloody,breached birth, much less what was done for the refugees after the Indo-Pakistan war. This despite the fact that Mr. Bass himself states that this is an underreported, little known bloodbath in the 20th century. It is well that we understand the heroic and the villainous roles American officials played in this affair, but not at the expense of understanding and educating ourselves on the reasons why American duplicitousness here was so damaging.

Chilling work that leaves no doubt that representative government is no better at choosing leaders of principle than randomly pulling names from a hat... The crimes of Nixon and Kissinger should not be forgotten... (4/5 Stars)

the fascinating and disturbing Economy of Prestige

From The Week of October 15th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

The danger of nuclear weapons chillingly captured in Command and Control

From The Week of October 8th, 2013

As much as the history of human civilization has been a slow, steady slog up the hill of progress, a wending towards freedom from all forms of ignorance and oppression, there remains, inside most of us, an unhealthy fascination with apocalypse. It manifests in our literature and our films, in our religions and our dreams, that impulse to step to the edge of the known so that we might peek down into the chasm of the abyss. Why we flirt with oblivion is unclear. Perhaps, in times past, when life was, for many, a torturous, monotonous grind, this longing for annihilation might have been the understandable outgrowth of bearing up under an oppressive weight we were never designed to withstand. But life now is, by any measure, far better than at any time in our collective past. We should be celebrating our achievements, not looking for ways to obliterate them. And yet, the fascination remains, a truth that could have no better exemplar than our history with nuclear weapons. Eric Schlosser expands in his fascinating work.

Grown out of the necessities of World War II, and made possible by the extraordinary discoveries of the golden age of physics that preceded it, nuclear weapons were ushered onto the world stage in the 1940s and inaugurated the first era of human civilization in which, with a few murmured commands, the few could annihilate the many. Certainly, in times past, empires possessed the power to crush tribes and nations, cultures and customs, but their capacity for destruction was not only limited to their slice of the world, but to humanity as well, touching only lightly upon the broader ecology that underpins our existence. But with the dawn of the nuclear age, in which thermonuclear weapons claimed the power to transform entire regions of the Earth into radioactive hellstorms more akin to Jupiter and Saturn than to the planet that birthed us, humanity finally had the power to kill, forever, all forms of life, a power it has never been mature enough to wield.

This point is best exemplified by the nuclear program of the united States which, for the last 60 years, has only narrowly avoided several catastrophic accidents with these apocalyptic weapons. From the Damascus Accident to the Cuban Missile Crisis, from nuke-armed bombers left unguarded on runways to thermonuclear warheads crashlanding in the front yards of unsuspecting citizens, America has had more brushes with radioactive death than any of us would care to know. On several occasions, only a single safety switch has stood between the United States and the kind of devastation from which countries do not recover. And all this thanks to the dubious arguments of powerful men that nuclear weapons are the only way to stay free in the modern age...

At times fascinating and horrifying, Command and Control is an engrossing journey through the American nuclear program. From its shocking failures to its pivotal moments, Mr. Schlosser shines light on the committees, the powerbrokers, the generals and and the scientists that have ensured the United States' safety from foreign threats at the risk of reducing their own nation to nuclear holocaust. Across more than 500 pages, the author details the near misses we know about, hailing the men and women who prevented them from spiraling out of control. In this way, the work, despite its apocalyptic subject, maintains a relatively positive tone when it could have otherwise descended into a seething pit of fear and condemnation.

Command and Control leaves no doubt that nuclear weapons are far too dangerous to exist in our world. Even if our species possessed the requisite maturity to properly handle them, which we assuredly do not, humans and machines are simply too error prone to risk bringing these weapons into existence. No matter how hard humans and machines try to double check every reading, every switch, every cog, mistakes are inevitable. And mistakes in this case don't just lead to a few people being affected. They change the destiny of entire nations, continents, civilizations. To realize how close we've come to annihilation is to understand that some powers are simply too overwhelming for the risk that some flaw in the mechanism, or some misplaced belief by some President, will lead to devastation. Mr. Schlosser could not have done a better job of illustrating this point.

For all of its virtues, Command and Control is hobbled by a poorly conceived narrative. Essentially, the author jumps back and forth between the Damascus Accident and the broader view of the nuclear program, using the former to illustrate the foibles and failures of the latter. This is understandable. Surely, the author had compelling interviews with the survivors of the Damascus Accident, interviews that would have motivated him to use it as the the human face of a monolithic program. However, the Damascus Accident is in no way the most compelling disaster described in this work. For instance, the 1961 incident, in which a single switch stood between North Carolina and a nuclear detonation that would have reduced the east coast to a radioactive wasteland, is undeservedly summed up in a few breezy paragraphs. Meanwhile, the Damascus Accident is repeatedly revisited, but only after hundreds of pages have past, leaving the reader fuzzy on the precise point in which we last left our heroes. The author would've done well to drop the Damascus component entirely, allowing it to exist alongside the other near misses exemplified in a single, linear narrative.

Notwithstanding its missteps in construction, Command and Control is a shattering work that dispels any illusions we might have had that nuclear weapons were and are treated with the utmost care. A must-read for anyone interested in the limits of human knowledge and power... (3/5 Stars)

A tumultuous and revolutionary season recounted in Freedom Summer

From The Week of October 1st, 2013

As much as the religious would have us believe in the holiness of an ideal standard of conduct, an unchanging set of views and values from which one may never need to deviate, we know this is absurd. After all, such standards are informed by the times and the cultures in which they were enshrined. And the merest glance at human history, both recent and ancient, tells us that social mores change over time. What is inexcusably taboo in one culture might not even be worthy of a whisper of controversy in another. Which leads us to an inescapable conclusion. As our physical forms evolve, so too do our morals and mores, taking us on a long and winding journey to freedoms both of the flesh and the mind. This should not be feared. On the contrary, it should be embraced. For to do so is to accept that we can always be better.

But there's a deeper question here, one that cannot be so easily dispensed with. How do mores evolve? What motivates social change? Is it the introduction of foreign elements that must be grappled with, incorporated into our cultural worldviews? Or are mores changed by insurgency, an upheaval from within the culture that has woken to an injustice that must be corrected? Both may be applicable, but I cannot think of a better argument for the latter than the remarkable story of hardship and endurance laid out here by Bruce Watson.

Fully a hundred years after the Americans fought a great, transformative war to expunge their nation's original sin, slavery, life in parts of the racially divided American South had changed amazingly little. African Americans were still segregated, forced to use different washrooms and schools, restaurants and churches, distinctions imposed upon them by their white masters, men and women who had refused, since the end of the Civil War, to admit defeat. Their rage and humiliation coalesced into a movement to deny the rights of their black neighbors, not only disenfranchising them, but igniting the creation of a culture that caused the law to look the other way while the descendents of their slaves were beaten and murdered, raped and marginalized.

Tired of the indifference and the status quo, and chafing at the soulless, forced conformity of the homogeneous, 1950s white culture, a group of young, rebellious, earnest and devoted students, from schools all over the country, descended on the South, in 1964, armed with a mission to compel change upon the ignorant and the backward. With songs and leaflets, energy and passion, they helped to shield the African American community from the slings and arrows of their white peers while they organized to do what most of them hadn't done in their lifetimes, register to vote. The riots and killings that flowed from this hellish summer would change forever the way the world viewed the American South, inspiring lasting legal and social change worthy of Lincoln's memory.

From the policy arguments to the tactical disputes, from the mobilization to the execution, Freedom Summer collects the stories of these legendary rebels that helped to finally abolish this most enduring stain on the American fabric. Shaping his narrative around a number of the Summer's key figures, revealing them in all their admirable passion and headstrong determination, Mr. Watson allows his chronicle, of those few, memorable months in Mississippi, to telescope back and forth between the heatedness of the view on the ground and the more calculated coldness of the view at 20,000 feet, where politics and necessity trump individuality. In this, the reader is afforded an excellent overview of this reckoning with the old South that is as comfortable sitting in the White House, with a conflicted and annoyed Linden Johnson, as it is roaring along at 100 MPH through the Mississippi heat, with the bringers of change and those who sought to snuff them out before they could work their will.

As of this writing, we're less than a year away from the 50th anniversary of this revolutionary summer, a fact which will surely author thousands of recollections, white and black, liberal and conservative, of what happened in 1964. There will be analyses of what it meant, some arguing for everything, others countering with nothing. Freedom Summer may not have all the definitive answers to these inevitable disputes. What it does possess, though, is far more important, a knowledge of the means by which positive change can be wrought. These rebels didn't have to have a coherent message -- on the contrary, the author is quite clear about the many, ruinous disputes that convulsed the SNCC. No, all they needed was the will, and the courage, to enable, and to motivate, the criminally disenfranchised to vote. The poisonous snakes obstructing them, envenomed by their irrational hatreds and burdened by their cultural conservatism, would happily expose themselves at this provocation, slithering out into the bright lights of the national spotlight where they could be judged and found wanting.

Freedom Summer is not a perfect work. It could have spent more time on the lead up to, and the aftermath of, this critical conflagration. Moreover, Mr. Watson virtually ignores the terrible optics of white people, however good-intentioned, riding bravely to the rescue of the beleaguered and uneducated blacks. This must have created fallout, both at the time and thereafter, but these are small quibbles with what is otherwise a wonderful work that exposes, and largely celebrates, the lives of heroes of all stripes who recognized an injustice and, instead of whining about it, chose to attack it directly. Would that they were better remembered by the culture at large.

Inspiring work... (4/5 Stars)

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

From The Week of September 9th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A phenomenal look at a forgotten massacre in King Leopold's Ghost

From The Week of August 26th, 2013

Of colonialism's many sins, the degree to which it encourages humans to separate the strong from the weak, the momentarily superior from the disadvantaged inferior, must be its most grievous. After all, by dint of being both the planet's apex predator and foremost intelligent species, humanity is already predisposed to a self-centered view of the world, skewed to favor the viewer at the expense of all else. To then exacerbate this existing trait with all of colonialism's criminal enticements is akin to pouring gasoline upon a fire, an inferno of injustice, exploitation and degradation from which few ever recover.

Worse yet, though, is what this mental sense of otherness does to the victims who, starved, beaten and destroyed, having no culture or resource left to fall back upon, cultivate the victimizer's toxic tactics in hopes of lifting themselves out of the mire into which their fellows have been plunged. Abused becoming abuser creates the most pernicious vicious cycle imaginable, one in which peace and justice are made foreign concepts to entire generations. This Adam Hochschild exquisitely and passionately captures in his valuable investigative work.

Positioned in the heart of Africa, the war-torn and resource-rich country we know today as The Democratic Republic of the Congo has had a long and tragic history. Though claimed by the Portuguese in the 15th century, it was virtually inaccessible to European imperialism until the nineteenth, when Henry Morgan Stanley successfully traversed its dangerous terrain in hopes of locating Dr. David Livingstone, the missionary doctor and explorer who had famously vanished into this strange and foreign place. Until this time, and despite the Portuguese's unenforced claim, the Congo was an organized, self-sufficient kingdom ruled from present-day Kinshasa by a lord known as the Manikongo. But once Stanley's expedition proved that Westerners could withstand the dangers of the Congo, albeit with an excess of luck and endeavor, this kingdom would fall to the voracious hunger of Western appetites.

By the late nineteenth century, most of the world had been claimed in one way or another by the major western European powers of France, Germany and england. When Stanley's expedition proved that the Congo could be a prize to be won, tiny Belgium, lead by the ambition and hunger of its king, Leopold II, leaped at the opportunity to conquer it and, in a stroke, vastly expand its power and prosperity. Though this conquest would take many years to complete and be recognized by the international community, King Leopold II, with a combination of guile and relentlessness, would eventually prove victorious, creating the Congo Free State which began to export large amounts of priceless ivory and rubber to Belgium in exchange for relatively worthless items like glass and beads. But however horrendous this economic exploitation, the human cost was far worse. For in order to create this trade, Leopold's men instituted one of the most ruthless and degrading administrations in history, one in which women and children were systematically starved, beaten and murdered to encourage Congolese men to labor for Belgian gain.

The tale of these abominable crimes and how they came to light, King Leopold's Ghost is a mesmerizing and moving work of non-fiction. Mr. Hochschild, a first-rate historian who rarely disappoints, has set his nimble pen and sharp mind to detailing an all-but-forgotten chapter of western imperialism, one made all the more shocking for its darkness. For make no mistake. The crimes of King Leopold II and his men are at least as grave and despicable as those of the holocaust. The only difference here lies in Leopold's motives which were not forged by ethnic hatred but by greed, made no less potent by its simplicity. Step by cautious step, Leopold convinced the western powers that his intentions with the Congo were humanitarian, even pious, all while implementing, throughout this conquered land, a rule so foul, so cruel, that it inspired the writing of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a work which was, in no way, forced to exaggerate for effect.

Of King Leopold's Ghost's many virtues, the most memorable is the way in which it it reveals the role bias plays in the lives of man. Belgian crimes in the Congo were brought to light by a series of brave men, white and black, European and American, who, thanks to first-hand experience with the systematized beatings, shootings and rapes of the Congolese people, saw through leopold's lies and began declaring them to the public. However, these individuals were only few in number, a tiny fraction of the thousands of Europeans who had been to the Congo under Leopold's reign and watched the hands of the disobedient chopped off, looked on while entire villages were wiped out and the survivors forced into chaingangs, and observed the punishments with the vicious chicotte which often left its victims mortally wounded. This vast majority were silent. They were content to steal from an oppressed and brutalized people. They were content to earn and look the other way.

Even more troubling, though, are the biases amongst the social crusaders, all of whom believed in the rightness of British imperialism. The queen's justice was righteous and true, a light that should be shone upon the whole of the savage world. But Belgian imperialism was another story, the sins of which had to be exposed. This narrowness of thinking, this inability to recognize the universal despotism and criminality that arises out of colonialism, is utterly arresting, but no moreso than the will of the Belgian people to deny that their little country was complicit in the deaths of nearly ten-million people. Not until the 1980s were the records of this time revealed. And even then, no one was encouraged to read them. This is a crime against humanity they would just as soon bury.

But while there are in this tale no clean skins, there is this. When others forget, we can remember. We can read great books and remind ourselves that all crimes have been executed before, in one form or another. And in this way, when they are tried again,we can recognize them. We can be there to say "stop," "no," "this will not be allowed to pass."

A work as riveting as it is valuable... (5/5 Stars)

Blade Runner redux in Montero's Tears in Rain

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

The many faces of man and India in the long and winding Shantaram

From The Week of July 22nd, 2013

Though we can try to broaden our experiences with travel and literature, exposing ourselves to classes and customs of which we know little or nothing, we will never know others the way we know ourselves. From the thoughts that define our darkest moments to the rhythms of our lives indelibly shaped by the cultures that nurtured us, this is what we know. Everywhere else, we are strangers, floating through societies, defined by languages and landscapes, that would require years to understand. But what if we don't even belong to the places that nurtured us? What if, even there, we are misfits, our energies and temperaments mismatched with what we know? Then escape is our only option, a commitment to life as a stranger in a strange land, the price of which is exquisitely captured in Gregory David Roberts' sprawling work of autobiographical fiction.

The product of a working-class upbringing and a life-defining stint in a harsh, Australian prison, Lindsay Ford is a stranger to himself. A bank robber of some repute, he has fled his native land, and the jail that sought to cage him, and traveled, on a fake passport, to India which, initially anyway, serves as merely a stop on his way to freedom in Europe. However, before Ford can move on, events and new friends conspire to keep him in this unknowable, tumultuous country that he is forced to embrace and understand when, in an act of karmic revenge, he is himself robbed and deprived of all but the shirt on his back.

This defining event sends Lindsay on a remarkable journey of criminality and philanthropy that begins in a Mumbai slum and concludes in the violence of war-torn Afghanistan. Between, he will learn Indian languages, Indian customs and even Indian prisons, each of which serve to deepen his understanding of not only himself, but the suffering of the world. Enlightenment, however, may just come at the cost of his soul which may well be the only thing that one cannot sell in this land of noise and opportunity.

Shantaram is a monumental work of fiction that asks far more questions than it answers. Built on the back of Mr. Roberts' remarkable life, it is a thousand-page odyssey into the India of the 1980s, a place of corruption and sorrow, kindness and justice, that is undoubtedly the star of the tale. For the author forsakes a desire to constantly entertain the reader with plot and action and devotes large swaths of the work to simply describing this nation of a billion souls scrambling to get ahead in a world that makes that an all-but-impossible achievement. Villages and slums, cities and jails, are revealed in all their structure and their limitations, exposing India, at the least the India of this novel, as a place where the failure of organized, fair civic institutions have been replaced by ad hoc operations that attempt to provide some sort of framework for the lives of the lower classes. The patchwork nature of this tapestry is both beautiful and tragic.

Though Shantaram speaks at length to issues that range from morality to corruption, suffering is its profoundest and most consistent theme. Lindsay, Mr. Robert's fictional alter ego, endures a remarkable amount of degradation, all of which eats away at his spirit. In this, he becomes our entry point into the Indians who live with the same treatment, or worse, on a daily basis and do so with, what is to the western mind, a stunning degree of fortitude. The scars of unfathomable poverty linger on them, certainly, but it's the novel's caucasian characters who seem far more burdened by their experiences here. It is they who lack the armor that comes from properly understanding a place, of having their expectations for life calibrated from the moment of their births. The Indians know how to take life's slings and arrows without having them damage their spirit. The westerners, meanwhile, have no such protection which causes them, in the face of all of India's thunder, to break down and lose their way, to become trapped by its schemes, radicalized by its violence, and numbed by its capacity to test the depths of the human spirit.

Shantaram has some revolutionary moments, perspectives and phrases that leave the reader alternately breathless and enlightened, but it does this at the expense of the plot which is picked up and set down at the convenience of its author. Fully half of the work is made up of one rumination or another on the nature of existence which, after awhile, becomes both burdensome and far too apparent. The reader begins to sense the digressions into moral philosophy, to feel them coming, to resist the urge to skip it in order to stay within the story's arc, a frustration that weighs down this truly tome-like work. Had the author made more of an effort to intertwine these spiritual musings with the story's significant episodes, one senses that the read would have been legendary.

Fascinating and enlightening... (3/5 Stars)

The techniques of modern counter-terrorists revealed in The Terror Factory

From The Week of July 1st, 2013

Though technology will eventually liberate human civilization from all forms of political control, government is, for the moment, a necessary evil for the continuance of our march towards a brighter future. For until we can delegate the functions of the societal machine to impartial and intelligent algorithms, organized around the public good while being immune from public pressure, this messy assemblage of technocrats and politicians is the best and only way to regulate commerce, normalize international relations and lend aid to the less fortunate. In order for them to perform these duties, however, governments must be given considerable power over our individual and collective affairs, a reality which eventually, and inevitably, tempts them to seize yet more power in the aim of doing more good. Rarely has this truism been better exemplified than in Trevor Aaronson's shattering examination of the counter-terrorism policies of the FBI.

Despite numerous presidential statements calling for American citizens to exonerate mainstream Islam for Al-Qaeda's nihilistic attack on the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001, the United States' intelligence agencies have spent the years since 9/11 alienating the Muslim community. Employing a series of strongarm tactics, they have aggressively recruited both willing and unwilling informants within targeted communities and unleashed them upon people of interest, individuals who have, through anger or foolishness, braggadocio or malice, harbored some intent to harm the United States. Prior to 9/11, this would not have been possible. For not only did the FBI not possess the financial resources to execute such missions, they lacked the networks of human spies necessary to carry them out.

Since 9/11, however, these chains, which once prevented the FBI and its sister agencies from digging into every dark corner of American life, have been lifted, an evolution that has allowed these agencies to infiltrate religious institutions and everyday businesses, all in the aim of preventing the next attack. But though this is a commendable goal, one that a majority of the populous would undoubtedly support, their tactics have been as crude as the informants they've paid to execute them. And though the these agencies claim numerous successes in this dirty war against extremist elements, their methods have been so manipulative, so self-serving, that they've sparked some to wonder just how legitimate the attacks they've prevented actually were.

Enter The Terror Factory, a devastating catalogue of government misdeeds. Mr. Aaronson, an American journalist, investigates the high-profile prosecutions of terrorists since 9/11 in a manner so systematic, so unrelenting, that he leaves the reader gasping in horror at the sheer audacity of government agencies who, in acting in the name of society's protection, are willing to bend-unto-breaking every law cherished by the citizens they are charged to protect. Informant by informant, victim by victim, the author explores the anatomy of this system of government-sanctioned entrapment of immigrants made vulnerable by Byzantine laws that leave them open to the threat of deportation if they fail to become double agents for counter-terrorist agents who are, in turn, in no way disincentivized to act reasonably, cautiously, or with much respect for the broken lives they leave behind. No price is too high when the stakes are the protection of the homeland.

This is far from a neutral account of this shadow world of informants and their sting operations. In particular, Mr. Aaronson devotes little time to trying to assess the guilt of the individuals caught up in the FBI's various nets. In fact, some of these individuals appear, superficially, to be quite willing to carry out attacks on the scale of 9/11. However, for all his reluctance to speak to the ugliness of some of these characters, the author's point supersedes such concerns. After all, whether or not one harbors the desire to commit a terrorist attack is entirely apart from whether or not one is willing to actually plan it, collect the means to do it and then to execute it. That the FBI eagerly enables these individuals to take all three of these fateful steps merely to arrest them and parade them for the world to see, is abhorrent. That they do so seemingly indifferent to the fact that they have recruited thousands of morally dubious, and sometimes outright criminal, spies in order to complete this self-beneficial mission is tragic.

The Terror Factory is a mesmerizing read that makes it abundantly clear that the United States will stop at nothing to prevent another large-scale terrorist attack on its soil. That it does so at the expense of all its hard-won principles is nothing short of frightening, not only for its citizens but for the rest of the world as well. (4/5 Stars)

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

From The Week of June 17th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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