The City of a Hundred Rows Trilogy by Ian Whates

From The Week of June 03, 2012

Despite our best efforts, despite our planning, our yearning, and our needing, our lives are often beyond our control. For while we make our own decisions, from the trivial to the consequential, from when to cross the street to what career path to pursue, we have no control over the millions of other variables that impact on our choices: the car that unlawfully belts us, or the economic circumstances that render obsolete the jobs our education promised us. Control is an illusion, a construct of ego that helps us to sleep at night, secure in the knowledge that we hold destiny's reins, not the other way around. Mr. Whates harnesses this fallacy and uses it to hammer home our helplessness before grand events. The product that results from this abject lesson, while limited in vision, is quietly entertaining.

Thaiburley is a city of hopes and sorrows, magic and crime. The centuries-old vision of powers time has faded unto legend, Thaiburley has endured war and chaos, riot and despair, fire and nightmare to become a crowded home for humans and aliens who live, side-by-side, in a place like no other. For Thaiburley is a city of 100 stratified rows that reach for all of the promise of the heavens.

Though not initially designed to sort out the haves from the have-nots, these 100 stories (rows) have, over the years, sorted themselves into cliques, each row making a particular contribution to the Thaiburley whole. But while such specialization has its advantages, serving to leave no doubt in anyone's mind where citizens can find what they require, this form of stratification is wide open to abuse. For it is a simple matter to slowly but continuously compel the less fortunate onto lower and lower rows, into the forgotten and neglected depths of the city and far from the law and order of the Heights, where government resides, where law-enforcement patrols the streets, where the sun is yet visible.

In City of Dreams and Nightmares, the series' first instalment, we encounter the vivid consequences of this neglect in the form of Tom, a young street-nick whose short and difficult life has been marred by gangs, violence and darkness. Born to the lowest rows of Thaiburley, he is raised by the streets, welcomed into their thieving arms, and put to their purposes. He, like his brothers in the blue Claw gang, grift, steal and work to protect their turf against the other street-nick gangs that seek to take it from them.

The familiar rhythm's of Tom's dystopic life are shattered, however, when he is charged with making a long and daring climb to the heights of Thaiburley's fabled rows. Skilled in hiding and evasion, he is helped past the rival gangs until he is away and free to climb all the way to the top. But just as Tom is adjusting to the marvels of the lawful world around him, so rich with color, freedom and wealth, the likes of which he's never seen, his reverie and his mission are shattered when he chances to witness an early-morning murder. Brimming with jealousy and privilege, one of Thaiburley's senior officials has stabbed his student to death. Quickly, the murder is blamed on Tom, igniting a city-wide search for the street-nick which not only forces Tom into uncertain alliances, it compels him to flee into the strangest and darkest corners of the city in search of safety and salvation.

In City of Hope and Despair, the series' second volume, Thaiburley has settled into the calm eye of the storm that promises to shake its ancient walls. For though the immediate danger, for Tom and the city, has past, a deeper game is still underway, one that dredges up old nightmares. For while Tom is dispatched to an icy, northern citadel in hopes of fully realizing his talents, Katrina, the young, embittered independent operator who recently helped Tom avoid the wrath of the city's authorities, is forced to confront her grim past when her mother's killer re-emerges to stalk the sin-stained streets of Thaiburley's lowest rows.

How foul is a thing that prays on the unfortunate? Who devours what little hope they have? A thing that requires their sustenance to live, a thing that understands full well that the best victims are ones no one cares about. And so, while a strange and deadly flu sweeps through Thaiburley's most powerful assemblies, preoccupying the authorities, Kat draws upon old allies and friends to combat a nightmare that haunts her dreams with the ruination of her childhood.

In City of Light and Shadow, the most recent entry in the series, the war for control of Thaiburley finally comes to a climactic head when the animating force behind the chaos at its core is identified and engaged in combat by a steadier, wiser Tom. While the city's wisest minds continue to be felled by a mysterious and devastating illness, all of the remaining resources of the Prime Master's administration must be gathered and hurled at this threat lest the source of the city's power lose control of its agents and darken the city forever in powers beyond anyone's command.

Though it suffers at times from a lack of focus and imagination, The City of A Hundred Rows is solid fiction that, in delivering on many of the fantasy genre's legendary tropes, breezily entertains. Mr. Whates will never win any awards for his elementary prose, but he compensates for this lyrical shortcoming with a roster of familiar, charming characters and a story which, though unoriginal, serves the reader with a sizeable helping of satisfaction and amusement. Moreover, the extent to which he grounds his magic in some kind of logic provides the story some welcome framework for what is, ultimately, a mashup of the best elements of fantasy and science fiction.

While Mr. Whates' primary purpose here is entertainment, his tale is not without social commentary. The City of A Hundred Rows is best imagined as a series that the immature lovechild of Charles Dickens and J. R. R. Tolkien might have produced. Stratified Thaiburley strongly evokes images of Victorian-age megacities like London and New York which beseeched visitors and inhabitants to buy into the pretty fiction of their opulence and ostentation while ignoring the grim reality of the impossibly difficult lives endured by their forgotten underclasses. Law and justice exist only for those who matter, those who are visible, those who live in sunlight. The wretches, most in need of support, guidance and protection are beneath the notice of all but a rare, fairminded few.

Unfortunately, this attempt to speak to a broader theme is also the source of many of the work's flaws. For Mr. Whates in no way explains how a dystopian city could continue its descent into degradation despite having a benevolent and all-powerful ruler with legendary warriors at his disposal. The author clearly wished to burden Tom and Katrina, his two protagonists, with miserable backgrounds while also using the corruption and the moral decay within the city as a wellspring of enemies for his heroes to battle. But in choosing to cast Thaiburley's Prime Master as a force for good,and to grant him extraordinary powers, he leaves the reader wondering why the city's leader doesn't simply fix the problems endemic to this place when he's clearly capable of doing so. The conceit, then, that these are challenges only Tom and Katrina must face, as a means of serving the story and accelerating their maturation, is tragically obvious.

No doubt fans of heroes and quests will find the journey depicted in The City of A Hundred Rows enjoyable. Much of its plot reprises much of fantasy's most hallowed tomes. And yet there are too many disharmonious notes here to allow the reader to forget that he is in the hands of an apprentice playing a master's tune: too many characters introduced and forgotten, too many plot threads woven and then neglected, too many moments of deus ex machina for the victories to feel earned.

Compelling for its heroism in the face of corruption and the extent to which it mixes and matches science fiction and fantasy, but in every other respect derivative... (2/5 Stars)

Gifts of The Crow by John Marzluff & Tony Angell

From The Week of June 03, 2012

Intelligence is a wonderful virtue. The catalytic force that empowers our every endeavor, it allows us to process and act upon the information we receive from the world. It makes possible our schemes to provide nourishment to our bodies and our minds while flooding our world with art and literature, ideas and accolades. But for all that human civilization would not exist without intellect to actualize and perpetuate it, it does have one consequential flaw. For it allows its possessor to imagine himself superior to others, a being not only above his fellows, but above all the lesser creatures with whom he shares his world. It would be bad enough if this arrogance had merely caused the wholesale slaughter of his fellow human beings, or the hunting for sport and not predation of his fellow animals. But it has also caused him to assume that no other creature in his world is like him, capable of reason, dignity and insight. It is this myth that Misters angell and Marzluff puncture so effectively in this captivating examination of a winning creature.

Corvids, that family of birds that claims as members both ravens and crows, have, for decades, stunned scientists with their mental capacity. Initially thought to be on an intellectual par with their fellow avians, with evidence to the contrary dismissed as embellishments, years of systematic study of these large-brained birds has revealed some shocking similarities with humans. For Corvids have been seen to mourn their dead, to hold grudges against those who have harmed them, to trade kindness for food, and to enter monogamous relationships with their partners. They share food, raise their young, encourage them to play as a means of learning, and then send them into the world. They use tools and memories; they have friends and foes. By any measurement, they are intelligent and self-aware, displaying all the behaviors humans do, though, in a much more rudimentary form. After 600-million years of evolution, they stand with us as the intelligent outgrowth of the great experiment in life known as Earth.

Combining legends and anatomy lessons, tall tales and scientifically rigorous experiments, Misters Angell and Marzluff, both avid observers of wildlife, document, in Gifts of The Crow, the breathtaking capacity of a remarkable creature. Descriptions of the Corvid's willingness to learn and adapt through play and experience are as eerie as they are compelling. For one cannot help but recognize the numerous ways in which Corvid maturation is like our own childhoods. The life-long bonds of friendship juxtaposed against their ability to feel enmity, to sew discord, not only charges the reader with the excitement and the delight of seeing and knowing that we are not alone, it reminds him that the world was not made for him, that we are as much a beautiful accident as the Corvid, and that intelligent life is, in some fundamental way, universal, an outgrowth of neurons and not a blessing of the divine.

While maintaining an academic tone throughout, while steeping their work in research not hearsay, Gifts of The Crow is, nonetheless, a moving treatise on the quiet, pervasive spirituality of intelligent life in all its mystery, its grace, and its beauty. Utterly potent without being, in any respect, ideological, or polemical, which is, in and of itself, an achievement. (4/5 Stars)

The Vikings by Robert Ferguson

From The Week of June 03, 2012

Time is a corrosive force. For as much as its passing allows us to order and contextualize our lives, lending structure to the narrative of existence, its abrasiveness erodes the landmarks of culture and civilization we erect in honor of ourselves and our achievements. Of course, certain substances stand up better to time's rigors. Stone, for instance,has underpinned some of our longest-lasting edifices. But though stone has permitted structures like Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid to exist for thousands of years, untroubled save for the occasional damaging earthquake, even these achievements serve only to demonstrate time's power. For the paper upon which these societies may have transcribed the meaning for such structures have disintegrated with the passing of millennia, forcing us to only guess at the beliefs and the motives, the methods and the practices, that lent meaning to these monuments and to the cultures who built them.

Oral cultures suffer most grievously at time's hand. For they rely upon story and song to hand down their accumulated knowledge, eschewing the relative permanency of paper and stone for the intimacy of the poetical word, so rich with metaphor and meaning. Nonetheless, any number of calamities, manmade and otherwise, have the power to sever this rich, cultural inheritance and leave priceless stores of knowledge lost forever. Few peoples have suffered the consequences of this truth more than the Vikings. Mr. Ferguson explains in this engaging history.

Today, the Vikings are best remembered for their fearsome appearance, their violent practices and their captivating ships which grimly sailed the Atlantic seas in search of conquest and bounty. Efforts by cultural authorities in Denmark and Sweden, to claim these legendary raiders as their own, have only accentuated their mythology, obscuring the truth that the Vikings were far from the united monoculture depicted in modern renderings. A loose confederation of clans and families, warbands and self-styled monarchs, they were the warlike face of Scandinavia during the dying days of the Norse religion. For 300 years, from roughly the midpoint of the eighth century, through to the Battle of Hastings in 1066 which sounded the death knell for their power, the Vikings imprinted themselves upon western Europe, imparting their genetics, their gods, their culture and their ideals upon those too soft for their axes and arrows.

But as much as they were slavers and pirates, the Vikings were also explorers and colonizers. They sailed to unknown shores and, in as much as they could, compelled their cultivation. A hardy people steeled by bone-numbing winters, they were pragmatic and forceful, willing to do whatever it took to survive until Ragnarok, an armageddon born of doctrine at which their gods would die. They accepted that they lived in a world of chaos beyond their control. And so they adhered to a code that, though brutal by our standards, kept them alive and independent in a world of ice and stone.

Though limited in its scope, The Vikings is an edifying examination of pre-Christian Scandinavia and the warriors, customs and politics it produced. Though much of the finer details are lost to us, Mr. Ferguson deploys the research of geneticists and archaeologists to reconstruct a fairly thorough portrait of Viking life. He is at his most illuminating, though, when elucidating the fractured and factious nature of this warrior culture and the extent to which this disunity energized many of their efforts at colonization. The author also effectively communicates the fearsome strength of the soldiers produced by this culture, unyielding men who managed, at various times, to conquer swaths of Germany, France and pre-feudal England. Consequently, the quick histories Mr. Ferguson provides for the houses of Charlemagne and Godwin are handy and informative.

For all its virtues, The Vikings suffers from a dearth of cultural detail. Mr. Ferguson does yeoman's work dredging up what he can, but is account is nonetheless inflicted by that most pervasive of diseases common among cultural histories, an obsession with the deeds of kings and the rise and fall of dynasties, neither of which contribute much to our understanding of Viking life and cause our eyes to blur over with fatigue and dislocation.

Notwithstanding its drawbacks, The Vikings is a fine work that does what it can to animate a fascinating people in a troubled time. (3/5 Stars)

The Sunflower by Simon Wiesenthal

From The Week of May 28, 2012

Forgiveness is a powerful and vexing pursuit. For to forgive is, in a critical sense, to absolve, to wipe clean the slate of past wrongs in hopes of normalizing relations between perpetrators and victims. Considering that, by and large, more is gained from friendship than from enmity, such a normalization is beneficial to both sides, draining from an emotional wound that ugliest of poisons which harden our hearts and calcify our grudges.

Such logic, however, depends upon the perpetrator being, to some degree, sane. It depends upon him grasping the incentive not to wrong in the future. It depends upon the wrong not reaching the level of the heinous. For how can we forgive the unforgivable? How can we allow our most wicked crimes to be absolved with but a few heartfelt words? Are some sins not too grievous, too nihilistic, for forgiveness? Mr. Wiesenthal compellingly ruminates on this question in this short but moving work.

The year is 1943 and much of Europe is awash in war. Though Nazi Germany has recently endured two decisive defeats in their efforts to conquer Great Britain and Russia, their ubermensch war machine churns relentlessly onward in hopes of realizing its Fuhrer's dreams for an Aryan world. In the path of that terrible destiny stands Simon Wiesenthal, a young, European Jew, whose life is irrevocably altered when he is condemned to unimaginable deprivations in the Lemberg concentration camp for no better reason than he is Jewish.

While at the camp, as he and his fellows suffer, Mr. Wiesenthal is approached by a nurse who leads him to a wounded Nazi soldier. Over an afternoon, the blinded warrior describes, to Mr. Wiesenthal, the circumstances and the tragedies that lead him to this moment, asking, at the culmination of his tale, for the Jewish man's forgiveness. Struggling with this burden, Mr. Wiesenthal solicits the opinions of others in the camp, agonizing over his responsibilities in a matter both consequential and insignificant. After all, one soldier's appeal for forgiveness does not absolve the Nazis. And yet, is it not a key piece of information in the understanding of how this horror came about and how it can be made right in the future? Haunted, Mr. Wiesenthal is liberated from the camp and seeks out the soldier's mother, in hopes of finding some cruelty there that will ease his conscience, but when she only has sadness and regret to offer him, his search must go on.

The Sunflower is a momentous and disturbing search for the truth to an unanswerable question. What are the limits of forgiveness? Harnessing the malevolent energies of perhaps the worst, most systemic crime in human history, Mr. Wiesenthal, a man who would eventually become a noted hunter of Nazis, confronts the notion that forgiveness might well be too small, too soft for crimes against humanity. For when faced with a collaboration of men and women intent upon the arbitrary extermination of a people, what can be gained by forgiveness? What future is there after the apologies are made and closure found? The dead remain. The atrocities remain. History cannot be undone, nor paved over. Some stains cannot out.

And yet, there must be an end sometime. The burdens conveyed by such wicked crimes must be laid down. For to clutch close such pain is to allow ones life to continue to be ensnared by the cruel ideologies that once sought to be dominant in the world. They cannot be forgotten, but nor can they be allowed to rule what time the victim has left. If forgiveness can be a means through which peace can come to the victim, and it seems to me a necessary component to the finding of peace, then it must be granted, if only as a means of smoothing the victim's return to something resembling normality.

As a piece of literature, The Sunflower is intriguingly composed. Divided into two parts, it first relates Mr. Wiesenthal's experience and then answers that with essays from prominent figures who have consumed the story, digested its philosophical nourishment and provided, in turn, their individual answers to his ultimately subjective question. Can one man grant a regime absolution? Does forgiveness even matter in a secularist world? How do we weigh the need to move past horror against our need for justice? All such thorny aspects to this persistent problem are raised and addressed by the luminaries, both light and dark, who speak to Mr. Wiesenthal's brief but telling experience with his wounded captor.

There are no limits to forgiveness. There cannot be. For what has been done cannot be unmade. What has past cannot be rewritten. It is. It must be met, assimilated, and, finally, fatefully, laid to rest. To not forgive is to be consumed by the crime, to extend the suffering conveyed by it. there must be an end.

Moving and provocative work... (4/5 Stars)

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

From The Week of May 28, 2012

Myths, like narratives, rule our lives. From the kindness of Santa Clause to the immaculate sacrifice of Christ, from the reassuring order of justice to the pacifying power of the vote, we are raised on potent ideas to which we bind ourselves in hopes of not only smoothing life's passage, but providing ourselves with a common cultural framework that allows us all to be part of a greater, grander whole. Myths permit us to tell stories about ourselves that soften our edges and promote our virtues, closeting the harshness of absolute truth. But given that myths are, at root, lies, useful but ultimately unavoidable fictions, they will eventually fall apart, tattering under the scrutiny of our maturing eyes and breaking under the stresses applied to them by a changing world. When the myths are dispelled, what will we be left with? Can we handle the truths so cruelly revealed to us? Or must we build new myths to replace the old as a means of cushioning ourselves from that which we dare not regard? Ms. Russell cogitates in her intriguing but flawed novel.

Once a bustling amusement park, home to the best alligator wrestler in Florida, Swamplandia has fallen on hard times. Its star attraction, Hilola Bigtree, has succumbed to cancer, a tragic circumstance that has, in one stroke, deprived Swamplandia of its remaining shining light while unmooring the three teenaged, Bigtree children from the quiet, eccentric lives they had been accustomed to. As the locals throw Swamplandia off for the World of Darkness, a new and tacky park on the Florida mainland, the Bigtree clan struggles to adjust to this new and unexpected reality. While the Chief, their father, vanishes into the mainland to sort out the park's abysmal finances, Kiwi, his only son, takes on a job as a janitor at their hellish rival, sending back all the funds he can spare in hopes of keeping his home afloat.

Meanwhile, on their island home, Ava Bigtree watches her sister slowly descend into madness, searching for understanding amidst the ghosts of Swamplandia's past. This journey will compel Ava to follow her into the swamps that surround their home, driven to save her sister from the underworld she's so eager to fall into.

A surreal novel that breezily transitions between reality and myth, casinos and spirit realms, Swamplandia! is a work of painful nostalgia, a recollection of both the innocence of childhood and the brutality of growing up. It chronicles the discomforting expansion of the world as we age, how simplicity must needs give way to complexity, how morality abandons the comfortable polarity of white and black and enters into a nuanced gray that must be experienced before it can be understood. It acknowledges that such experiences are scarring, but that there is no other way but through. For to reject the harshness of reality is to reject sanity. It is to cut oneself loose from the bondage we all submit to when we grow up and agree to be shackled by civilization.

As much as Swamplandia! tries to dance between myth and reality, as much as it labors to tease us with the seductions of adolescent and familial dislocation, it is ultimately flawed work. Its ventures into spiritualism are as unconvincing as its plot is predictable. The tragedies that befall its characters are, at times, so obvious that the reader is left wading through dozens of pages in order to reach the inevitable. Such threadbare puppeteering on behalf of the author prevents the work from ever reaching any kind of emotional awakening. Every action, every episode, is one step removed from us, a reality that precludes the reader from feeling the novel's traumatic jeopardy.

Swamplandia! claims some lyrical prose and some moving moments, but it would have been much more effective if it had dismissed its flirtations with spiritualism and confined itself to an examination of the disillusionment of adulthood. For this was, by far, the work's strength. In every other respect, this is a half-realized dream. 93/5 Stars)

Eva Braun by Heike Goertemaker

From The Week of May 28, 2012

From chiefs to presidents, from visionaries to celebrities, humans have always responded to strong leaders. A consequence of our hierarchical coding that demands we cohere around powerful personalities, we have allowed them to create our culture, establish our social norms and organize our governments. We have let them inspire us to be better and we have permitted them to terrify us into committing to ruinous war. For good and ill, we remember them better and longer than anyone else, their potent legacies handed down to us through fables, a gallery of giants with lessons to teach. But what attracts us to these luminaries of history? What gives them the power to compel our fealty? Surely it is more than a quirk of evolution that allows them to master us and imprint upon us their ideas for a glorious future. Of all such figures, few have been responsible for more horror and more fascination than Adolf Hitler. This is the history of the woman who followed him unto death.

The product of a seamstress and a schoolteacher, Eva Braun was born and raised in tumultuous times. Germany, an empire at her birth, collapsed, during her adolescence, into a doomed republic burdened by hyperinflation and the punitive reparations the Treaty of Versailles compelled it to grant to victorious France. This scarred and defeated country was the place of Braun's formative years, a giant brought to its knees by trickery and betrayal. Or this was at least the palatable fiction pedaled by Hitler and his Nazis, a movement comprised of proud and angry men who could not stand to abide the notion that mighty Germany could have been vanquished in war fair and square.

Fascinated by photography, Eva Braun fell in with this vehement crowd in 1929 when she was hired on by the National Socialist's official photographer. By 1933, she was not only committed to the cause, she had graduated to Hitler's inner circle of confidantes, rejecting the moderation of her parents to become a creature comfort to a dictator at the age of 21. Deploying the real threat of suicide as a means of binding herself to the standoffish Fuhrer, Braun eventually became Hitler's most loyal supplicant, willing to keep herself clear of his public life if only he would share with her his private one. The mutual bond grew throughout World War II until, finally, when all other hope for victory was gone, they married in the rubble of Berlin, at the heart of a world annihilated by their actions.

Eva Braun is fascinating work. Dismissing the popular notion that female Nazis were merely dragged along in the wake of their powerful husbands, Ms. Goertemaker constructs a portrait of Eva Braun that leaves little doubt that Hitler's only wife was devoted to both her man and his cause. Successfully placing Braun at key meetings throughout the war, the author convincingly argues that Braun was in a better position than most to understand the extent of the devastation her lover was visiting upon the world. Moreover, it is clear that it was well within Braun's powers to reject the ugliness into which she'd happily sold herself. That she refused to do so, that she contentedly and knowledgeably followed him into death sets up, for the reader, the age-old question of immoral leadership.

Do electrifying leaders use their innate charisma to compel their followers to abandon reason for cruelty and war, or do the followers themselves enchant their leader with the very charisma they then credit him for bewitching them with? Does the monster make himself, or is he the gestalt of the pain, the suffering and the wounded pride of all his creators? Eva Braun is a case study for the latter for Ms. Goertemaker leaves little doubt that the young woman was like the millions of fellow Germans who joined the Nazi party, desperate to believe in something and someone who could erase their degradation, who could give them work, and who could imbue them with worldly purpose. It did not matter if the result of sewing this corrupted seed would be a blighted crop. All that mattered was the restoration of what should have always been.

Ms. Goertemaker adopts an academic's scholarly remove to narrate the history of a woman at the center of a fascinating time. Her account suffers somewhat from a lack of correspondence that would have allowed us to hear Braun's own voice, but the author fills in the silhouette of her subject with the backgrounds of relevant figures with whom she interacted, using their biased opinions to help complete the image of a youthful woman utterly devoted to her man. (3/5 Stars)

The Idea Factory by Jon Gernter

From The Week of May 28, 2012

As much as we might wish otherwise, our world is built upon the genius of a few. We play, of course, a key role in actualizing their vision by mining their materials, building their factories, paying their salaries and adopting their products, but ultimately we are merely the audience for sublime imaginations, guinea pigs upon whom brilliance can be given form and purpose. the pride of some may be wounded by this stark reality, but it cannot be ducked. Every device we use, not to mention the traditions and habits they produce, is a manifestation of intellectual might and first-rate vision the likes of which we can only dream of. So let us revel in that genius; let us marvel at it. For such transformative times are rare and priceless, few moreso than the episode captured here, so well, by Mr. Gernter.

The research and development arm of the telecom monopoly that dominated the United States for the first half of the 20th century, Bell Labs transformed our world. From the vacuum tube to the transistor, from the video phone to the transcontinental cabling that would one day make the Internet a reality, this collection of quasi-corporate scientists, operating on a sleepy campus in suburban New Jersey, was responsible for a series of inventions and innovations that catalyzed the technological revolution, providing critical momentum for our hopes of becoming a post-industrial civilization. Though operational for decades prior, its most productive period came in the feverish times after World War II when the United States was awake to the possibilities of technology and their liberating power. From 1947 to 1962, Bell Labs laid down the basics for the personal computer and sent the first American satellites into space, all in the furtherance of a single, organizing mission, the creation of a system that would connect every human on Earth and allow them to communicate whenever and however they desired.

From these revolutionary technologies to the geniuses and the eccentrics who envisioned and birthed them, Mr. Gernter returns us to the limitless promise of the 1940s and the 1950s. He tours Bell Labs, its architecture and its workspaces, its corporate structure and its core mission, in order to capture the essence of this special time while attempting to excavate and identify the key factors -- money, minds, monopolies and mentalities -- that spur innovation. For without it, our civilization stagnates, its problems left to fester and grow in the face of feckless opposition.

The Idea Factory is a masterfully thorough history of the origin of our modern, technological world. In clear, linear prose, Mr. Gernter gives equal attention to all the critical aspects of Bell Labs and its story, its structure, its results, and the many personalities that made it legendary. From its early years to its inevitable death, the author enchants us with the excitement and the energy that filled its halls without ignoring the uglier truths propagated by its scientists and its masters. In this, Mr. Gernter manages, here, that rare and wonderful feat of journalism, to infect his readers with his enthusiasm and his awe without sacrificing his objectivity, an admirable balance perhaps helped by the five decades between now and the heyday of this remarkable place.

But beyond a piece of elegant history, Mr. Gernter convinces us, here, of a deeper truth, that our world hinges on pivotal periods in time, that our customs, our tools, even our toy are defined by these periods, and that, but for quirks of fate, all that we know might have a very different shape. The possibilities for humanity and the planet that birthed it are endless so long as we remember that anything is possible so long as we ignore dogmas and doubters, leaving our minds open to every potentiality, every idea. For to do any less is not only to deprive ourselves of our best future, but to forget the lessons of these men at this time.

A captivating subject... (5/5 Stars)