Hostage Nation by Victoria Bruce, Karin Hayes & Jorge Enrique Botero

From The Week of June 25, 2012

However many societal, cultural and even familial benefits humans derive from possessing a strong desire to conform, species that self-select leaders for the rest to follow take on a difficult and challenging burden. For in sacrificing a measure of his autonomy and trust to the leader, the follower not only opens himself up to being manipulated by the leader into acting against his own interests, he inadvertently contributes to the deification of the leader by swelling his ranks of compliant followers and making him the person around whom all else revolves. In situations where leaders are relatively grounded individuals, the damage dealt by such a centralization of power is minimal as the leader refuses to indulge the darker side of his nature. However, where the leaders are bellicose and bold, aggressive and tempestuous, then the cult of personality swiftly careens out of control and gives birth to ideology, a living, breathing mentality that is beyond any one person's control.

Ideology, like leadership, can be put to good purposes. It can harness the willingness of the able to be mindful of the unfortunate. It can propagate ideas of mercy through a violent world. It can even accelerate the adoption of new and helpful mores. But when it turns violent, when it is shaped from pain and grief, anger and distrust, it can bring entire nations to their knees, devouring them from within. This excellent piece from Ms. Bruce, Ms. Hayes and Mr. Botero has many virtues, but this is its most enduring and demonstrative lesson.

Arising from decades of social and political chaos in the first half of Colombia's bloody 20th century, the FARC was, for decades, one of the world's most effective revolutionary forces. Staunchly communist, the FARC has, since its inception, devoted itself to the overthrow of the Colombian political order, deploying a toxic blend of murder and mayhem in hopes of actualizing their dream of a future Colombia free of corruption and foreign influence. Backed by a guerilla army which, at its height, numbered over 30,000 well-trained and fervently loyal soldiers, they used a mixture of hostage-taking and cocaine trafficking to feed, clothe and arm themselves, ostensibly in the name of their stated mission.

At the height of their power, in 2003, the FARC would take, as a matter of business, four hostages, holding them for nearly six years in an effort to extort spectacular ransoms from the wealthy nations they called home. The three Americans were pilots and private contractors, working, at the behest of the US government, to destroy drug crops from the sky. The fourth hostage was Ingrid Betancourt, a flamboyant Colombian politician whose marriage to a French citizen made her something of a celebrity in France and, as a result, an object of potential interest to the French government. Four gilded prizes that should have commanded fortunes! As weeks become months and months years, the ransom's never come. Instead, the FARC finds itself beset by a resurgent Colombian army flush with American cash, fickle alliances with mercurial foreign powers and a decaying superstructure corrupted by drug profits and the soul-deep cynicism that naturally flows from men and women born into chaos and despair. For the FARC, the world has never been more dangerous.

Hostage Nation is first-rate journalism. The result of a collaboration between two American journalists (Hayes and Bruce) and a Colombian reporter and film-maker (Botero) who has devoted much of his adult life to the intersection of corruption, the FARC, and Colombian politics, it elucidates the history of the FARC, using the hostage-taking of Betancourt and the three Americans as a lens through which to view their aims and their tactics, their successes and their failures. It faithfully, if cynically, describes the circumstances that lead to the taking of the four hostages and the efforts, botched and otherwise, to see them safely home, delivering, in the process, a sweeping history of a revolutionary organization born in war and sickened by corruption.

But in as much as Hostage Nation is a primer on the FARC and its relationship with Colombia and western powers, it dives deeper to teach us three enduring lessons about life in the modern world:

(1) Governments, though they might wish us to think otherwise, act more in their interests than they do in ours. They are megalithic institutions tasked to serve the general public, not the interests of a few, even if those few are fighting for them.

(2) Elicit drugs must be legalized. For however much they may sicken individuals who come in contact with them in the light of day, forbidding them only sensationalizes them, dramatically inflating their value to the extent that entire private armies can be floated on the back of their ill-gotten gains, armies devoted to nothing more than profit at the expense of society.

And (3) it demonstrates, with painful clarity, the degree to which ideological movements are inevitably corrupted by greed and the pursuit of power. However pure the founders of a movement may have been, they and those who come after them cannot sustain their beliefs in the face of the need to succeed. For having worked so long for a single goal, they will do anything it takes to win, even if it means selling out their own morals.

This is exceptional work that skillfully weaves together the macro history of a movement and the micro histories of men and women who watched years of their lives stripped from them by captivity. It is passionate and unapologetic without being polemical which is quite an achievement in the current cultural climate. (5/5 Stars)

The Tielmaran Chronicles Trilogy by Katya Reimann

From The Week of June 18, 2012

For humans, nothing is more central to who we are than identity. It is the sum of us, the gestalt of our life experiences, our neurological responses and our physical makeup, all of which come together to create an individual self that, thankfully, cannot be duplicated. For if it could, then we would be nothing more than clones, definable programs that have run their course before and will again, predictable beings stripped of that most essential aspect that distinguishes us from unthinking organisms.

But what of twins? Are they not, in some sense, clones? Are they not created from the same recipe, reared by the same parents, released to experience the same environment? Or are they different sides to the same coin, halves of a whole that can only be made one by union? Ms. Reimann harnesses the energy of such philosophical questions in this sweeping, fantastical trilogy.

In the ancient empire of Bissanty, a place of gods and storms, sacrifice and slavery, justice is as scarce as mercy. Llara Thunderbringer, the highest of the twelve Gray Gods, commands the five corners of the empire, her power on earth secured through the Bissanty emperor and his five princely sons who ensure symmetry throughout the realm. Thus, when Tielmark, its most southern province, rose in rebellion against this most cruel of imperiums, throwing off Bissanty's oppressive yoke and pledging itself to the service of Eliante and Emiera, the twin goddesses of the hunt. Under their protection, Tielmark thrived for three centuries, safe from the machinations of the ritualistic empire which never forgot this most grievous betrayal. Pride and symmetry would not allow it.

Still, their are holes in every plan, gaps that can be exploited and widened to let through vengeance and darkness. In Tielmark's case, this weakness stems from the pact its heroic prince made with the twin goddesses. In exchange for their protection from Llara and Bissanty, he vowed that his heirs would forever marry women of common, Tielmaran blood, ensuring that Tielmark would forever be ruled by its own. Failure on the part of any of its subsequent princes to fulfil this pledge would destroy the agreement with the twin gods and leave Tielmark unprotected against the holy wrath of its powerful and ruthless neighbor to the north.

In Wind From A Foreign Sky, the trilogy's opening volume, 300 years have past since that fateful agreement and Tielmark is vital and peaceful. The common folk ply their various trades largely free of the dominion of their betters who are raised to respect the finest noble traditions. But stirring in Tielmark's capital is a dark plot that might well see the relatively young kingdom toppled into ruin. For representatives from Bissanty have secreted themselves at the prince's court, deploying a combination of magic and temptation to subvert figures at both the heart of the government and the ceremony of marital renewal that must be soon made in order to honor the twin gods. Their aim? To make an abomination of the ritual, leaving Tielmark bereft of divine protection.

Standing against this plot are two adolescent sisters only now coming into their mystical powers. Gaultry and Mervion are twins, the bastard offspring of a father who, upon being elevated to the nobility, abandoned them to a woodland life with their grandmother, unable to acknowledge them as his own. This is at least Gaultry's angry view of her father's betrayal. Mervion, the gentler of the two, harbors less enmity for a man who has been recently slain in what appears to have been a hunting accident. His slaying triggers a series of events that sees Mervion captured and an accomplished soldier sent to guard Gaultry's life. But not even this wolfish warrior can keep her safe when she fixes her mind upon rescuing her sister, an act that causes her to take center stage in Bissanty's insidious plot.

In A Tremor From A Bitter Earth, the Chronicle's second entry, the danger has only escalated. For Bissanty has sharpened its attacks on Tielmark, sending sacred assassins into her lands to butcher the powerful witches that both keep Tielmark safe and ensure the continuation of her most important rituals. When Gaultry prevents one of these assassins from killing Tielmark's prince, she spares his life, beseeching her sister to help her protect the boy from the poisons imposed upon him to ensure his loyalty.

While the sisters work to heal the young assassin, showing him far more mercy than he showed his victims, Martin, Gaultry's protector, rashly ventures into the heart of the Bissanty empire, on a mission to see his honor cleared. But when he is captured by Bissanty's most powerful sorcerer, Gaultry, with the young assassin in tow, must follow his trail. For love and duty demand nothing less. She is not at all prepared for the truths she discovers in this most exacting of empires.

In Prince of Fire And Ashes, the trilogy's concluding effort, the war for Tielmark's future is brought to a head when the aligning of the stars opens a small window of time in which the fledgling country can raise a prince to the kingship and forever banish the claims the Bissanty empire has to Tielmark. In order to make this elevation a reality, however, royal blood must be shed, blood that will pave the way for a monarch's crown to be rested, by the hand of the gods, upon the head of Tielmark's highest noble. As a priestly conspiracy works behind the scenes to fulfil an ancient prophecy the bloodiest way possible, Gaultry, now a seasoned witch, endeavors to untangle 50 years of lies in hopes of finding, at the heart of this web of secrets, truths, of her origins and of the means to create a king.

Though its plot is troubled by clumsy, post-hoc rationalizations conjured up to justify the dangers its characters are subjected to, The Tielmaran Chronicles is, on the whole, entertaining work. Steeped in the finest traditions of female mysticism -- witchcraft and taro readings play prominent roles throughout --, Ms. Reimann has created a feminine response to the all-too-common chauvinism of fantasy fiction. This alternative energy provides the story with style and punch that elevates it above the ubiquitous trope of farmboy-fights-the-dark-lord that dominates high fantasy.. Gaultry is convincing as a young woman who, while struggling to come into her powers, is burdened by the rejection of her father and overwhelmed by the political intricacies of life at court. In this, Ms. Reimann has successfully animated a heroine that galvanizes her epic.

However, the series suffers from two major flaws that prevent it from achieving greatness. In the main, Ms. Reimann struggles to animate any of her characters beyond Gaultry, her heroine. Everyone, from the prince she's tasked to rescue to the darkly dispositioned soldier who earns her loyalty, is a caricature, floating in and out of the story. They exist only to provide something against which Gaultry can act: a man to be besotted with, a prince to save, a boy to aid. True, most secondary characters are designed to bring out the virtues of the story's protagonists. However, when done well, they have their own personalities, the foibles of which lead them into the blunders from which the heros rescue them. Ms. Reimann cannot even muster this much for Mervion, Gaultry's twin sister. Which leads us to t he series' second flaw. After investing so much time and thought into the symbolism of twins and polarities, dominant and submissive, hard and soft, darkness and light, she reduces Mervion to a plot zombie, a piece to be moved about her chessboard.

Notwithstanding the shortcomings of plot and character that burden her trilogy, Ms. Reimann largely succeeded in her mission here, to create a mystical world of angry gods and intricate prophecies. Both serve these three novels well, creating an escapist atmosphere full of crackling power and divine destiny. Were that these virtues had been married to a strong story, this series might well have coalesced into a tale worthy of the masters of the genre.

A decidedly mixed bag, but certainly work that will be welcomed by those fond of magic and fate. (3/5 Stars)

In The Middle of Nowhere by Terry Underwood

From The Week of June 18, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Great Improvisation by Stacy Schiff

From The Week of June 18, 2012

Though wars are most visibly and vividly contested on the field of battle, they are arguably won and lost by diplomats wielding nothing sharper than their pens and their wits. For while soldiers are trained to kill with frightening proficiency, they are merely the most obvious manifestation of the will of those who comprise the government. They make and break the treaties; they pay and provision the soldiers; they even give them their orders, telling when to fight and when to hold their fire. They hold the reins of power. And so it's little wonder that a diplomat has been credited with perhaps the second most influential contribution to American independence, behind only that of George Washington. Benjamin Franklin, and his years in France, secured the existence of the fledgling republic. Ms. Schiff explains in this her history of the great inventor's time there.

For the first nine years of the American republic (1776-1785), Benjamin Franklin, that most famed inventor and rebel, was the ambassador to a country without whose support America would have never won the war. France, the shining light of cultural Europe and a staunchly monarchical country with a centuries-long rivalry with England, had little in common with the breakaway colonies attempting to rid themselves of their British masters. Not only were most Americans emigrants from England, they had just recently participated in a war with England against France, culminating in a French defeat that saw them lose virtually all of their North American holdings. What's more, no matter how much enmity the French crown had for england, no matter the outstanding grudges yet to be settled, America was a pathetically weak power with virtually no international profile and, thus, no reputation as a nation capable of keeping its promises and punching above its own meager weight.

And yet, for three, long, frustrating years, Mr. Franklin toiled and schemed, negotiated and cajoled, manipulated and wheedled, until France finally agreed to financially and materielly support the Americans in their bid for independence. Grunts, gold and gunpowder were all dispatched to American shores where they were received by George Washington and his desperate army. With this fresh infusion of support, the Americans turned the tide of their rebellion and thrust the Tories from their shores, forever altering the course of history. And all of it made possible by the cunning, the charm and the cleverness of one man, 3,000 miles away, at the court of a French king...

Full of contentious rivalries and venomous disputes, selfish agents and pompous egos, A Great Improvisation is a vivid reconstruction of the heady years of the American war for independence. Entirely focused on Franklin's machinations at the French court, Ms. Schiff, an American historian who most recently penned a captivating biography of Cleopatra, animates Benjamin Franklin to a wonderful extent, revealing a man of breadth and power. For this most libertine of diplomats was intoxicated by both women and wine, reality and abstraction. A giant of his time, he possessed a powerful mind capable of manipulating kings into going against their own best interests all while fending off treasonous attacks, from his own delegation, which sought to undermine his authority, thus jeopardizing his most critical mission.

But as much as Ms. Schiff succeeds in bringing Mr. Franklin to life, her work's greatest virtue is the extent to which, with an archaeologist's care, she removes the shroud of legend that the American founders sought to wrap about themselves, revealing them to be mere mortals, driven by grudges and biases. She vividly details how the depth of their discomfort with licentious France, coupled the desire to believe in their founding mythology, lead them to commit the age-old sin of nation-builders the world over, to whitewash their own history, downplaying the contributions of their allies in order to make their own efforts, to repel and even defeat what was then the world's most powerful empire, seem all the more extraordinary. This whitewashing caused Franklin's reputation to suffer a double blow. For not only was he himself licentious, and thus worthy of the same suspicions directed at France, his efforts at the French court to secure aid for the American rebellion could hardly be significant if, indeed, the mythologizers were right and America sprang, fully formed, from the womb of liberty.

A Great Improvisation is compelling history lyrically told. Ms. Schiff does, at times, assume that the reader has more knowledge of events of this period than is perhaps reasonable or wise to expect, but then this is nothing a quick trip to Wikipedia can't cure. Fine work... (4/5 Stars)

True History of The Kelly Gang by Peter Carey

From The Week of June 11, 2012

Given sufficient time for a man and his life to pass into legend, to become the stuff of heros and villains, love and tragedy, the truth of a thing becomes virtually impossible to grasp. For too much first-hand knowledge of legends, and the world they unfolded within, have been lost to the rigors of time. Robbed, then, of context and neutrality, we impose our own wishful narrative upon these important, cultural events, viewing them through our own biased lenses and judging them by the standards of our times, not those that birthed them. But what if there were compelling, contemporary accounts of these events, accounts that survived time's erosion to inform our present? Would they change our view? Would they add flesh to bloodless myth? Mr. Carey speculates and demonstrates in his sweeping, epistolary novel.

A key figure in the early history of Australia, Ned Kelly (1854-1880) was a legendary robber of banks and a thief of horses, a lover of women and a giver to the poor. The son of Irish immigrants, his father a convict and his mother a landholder's daughter, he came of age in a brutal period of colonial history in which the unforgiving law listened obsequiously to the rich while deeply ignoring the poor. This pervasive sense of injustice, along with the difficulty of making it in the hard-scrabble world of frontier Australia, combined to limit Ned Kelly's options and set him upon the path of crime that would earn him so much fame.

In boyhood, he was tasked with providing for his family. Having lost his father early, he spent his youth laboring to clear his family's uncultivated land while his mother managed his half-dozen siblings, earning coin for the table through the selling of spirits. Apprenticed, in adolescence, to a bushranger, the young Kelly learned the skills that would one day make him famous. However, in the process, he also earned himself the enmity of the police whose watchful eyes would never long stray from him. Consequently, the authorities would not be far afield when a combination of family disputes and police corruption exposed Kelly, now an adult, as an outlaw. Their subsequent pursuit of him would force Kelly deeper and deeper into banditry and crime until, pushed to his limits, he made one last stand against the men who had hassled, harangued and hobbled his him, his wife, and his family for the whole of his short life.

The winner of the 2000 Man Booker Prize, True History of The Kelly Gang is an engrossing tale of life in the face of corruption. Narratively driven by a fictionalized, 12-part autobiography of Ned Kelly's life from boyhood to demise, it captures not only the impossible challenges faced by settlers in 19th century Australia, but the extent to which its stratified culture all-but precluded those at the bottom of the social ladder from climbing out of the lawless and soul-crushing poverty into which they'd been sold. And so, as much as Mr. Carey should be commended for authenticating his account with the lively and colorful vernacular of the period, utterly convincing the reader, at times, that this is Ned Kelly's voice, the extent to which he vividly depicts the inescapable degradation of the poor is the virtue that carries his thoughtful, funny, harsh and ultimately tragic novel.

There have been, certainly, more worthy recipients of the Booker. After all, at root, Mr. Carey has simply re-imagined the biography of a real man's life. Yes, he has animated it with relationships and shootouts, glossed it with a sympathetic sheen and packaged it with an outlaw's captivating voice, feats all,but it remains another man's story, not one conceived of by the author's own mind. His is, I'm sure, not the only winner to draw inspiration from history, but surely Mr. Carey's stands alone in the fact that all of its creativity flows from its shaping,not its content.

Notwithstanding the extent to which the work has been cribbed from history, True History of The Kelly Gang is full of colorful cutthroats and crooked cops, legendary feats and tragic calamities, polished by a memorable brogue. This well-spiced stew is more than sufficient to drag over the line Mr. Carey's fascinating and sympathetic re-imagining of one man's life. (3/5 Stars)

The Cut by George Pelecanos

From The Week of June 11, 2012

Though war produces many devastating consequences, levelling cities, ruining economies and changing the destinies of nations, perhaps it's profoundest affects are reserved for those who prosecute it. For even in this technological age, war requires warriors to fight, men and women plucked from normal lives and sent to do hellish deeds, the enduring consequences of which no amount of training can prepare them for. Their only defense is the necessity of their mission and the approval of their brothers in arms, a potent combination of drivers that make possible the ultimate sacrifice.

But what if this bulwark is insufficient? What if the necessity of the thing cannot guard the warrior against the depravities he's forced to actualize? What if the action, the killing, gets into his blood and refuses to depart even when he's returned home to the stability of his old life? Mr. Pelecanos speculates in his spare but striking novel.

A veteran of the most recent Iraq War, Spero Lucas has Washington D.C. in his blood. The adopted son of hard-working Greeks, he was a head-strong boy of 19 when the September 11th Attacks changed the history of his nation. Feeling the pull of patriotism, he entered the marines and was shipped out to Iraq where he lost a sizeable chunk of both his innocence and his twenties. Home once more, he contents himself with freelance, investigative work for a high-profile attorney who isn't above defending the odd violent drug-dealer.

Missing the action and the camaraderie of the war, Lucas is receptive when one of the attorney's clients,currently in jail pending trial, approaches him with a deal. Someone has had the temerity to steal from the marijuana kingpin while he's incarcerated and that simply cannot be allowed to stand. If Lucas agrees to recover his stolen property, he can keep 40 percent as his cut for making right what fools put wrong. With memories of the war singing in his veins, Lucas agrees to the arrangement, plunging himself into the underbelly of a city that not so long ago was the murder capital of America. Remnants of these violent times linger on in the American capital, remnants that might well allow Spero to feel like he's once again a warrior.

Comprised of the fatalism of The Wire, the cool of Elmore Leonard and the mystery of the classic detective novel, The Cut is crime fiction at its most engaging. Spare unto skeletal, Mr. Pelecanos prose could well be criticized for a lack of affect and sentiment were such expressions and emotions not left to flow from the words and deeds of his small but vivid cast of characters, rather than from the author's own flowery pen. In this, he asks of his readers more than is obvious in the first few pages. For it is an easy thing for an author to euse prose to omnipotently fill in the gaps for his readers, to use the thoughts of his characters to spell out what cannot be said. In assiduously avoiding this convenience, this crutch, Mr. Pelecanos insists that his readers peel the literary onion, that they feel out the scenarios his characters get themselves into, that they understand the urges and the drives of a world they will likely never know.

But more than the work's structure has made The Cut a success. For Spero Lucas is a captivating presence. A young man possessed of vitality and drive, he is as urgent as he is hampered by inexperience, as eager as he is damaged by war. For while he has managed to re-engage with civilian life more or less successfully, re-awakening all the hungers of a vibrant, healthy male, he has been forever changed by the war which has imprinted upon him a dangerous desire for action that must be sated. For this thirst has become the cornerstone of Lucas' life, the guide by which he tracks through this half-forgotten world. To abandon it would be to abandon who he's become. And yet this need is a sire's song that will lead him down a dark and treacherous road.

This is both breezy and affecting, quiet and thunderous. It is easy to see why Mr. Pelecanos and The Wire formed such a devastating partnership. (4/5 Stars)

Da Vinci's Ghost by Toby Lester

From The Week of June 11, 2012

As much as we distract ourselves with the mundane pursuits of work and play, shelter and sex, the search for meaning is a siren's song inside all of us, driving us to seek out the universal truths that underpin our lives and the universe that encapsulates us. How is it structured? What are its organizing principles? What, or who, created it? Is humanity nothing more than a random outcome of evolution, or are we a purposeful result of something more aware,more divine? In some of us, these questions are only flirted with during times of intense self-reflection. In others, however, they catalyze the mind, compelling it to travel down roads to self-discovery that have the power to change the world. Few men produced so much from this marriage of drive and introspection than Leonardo Da Vinci. And few of his ideas and drawings have had as much symbolic power as Vitruvian Man.

Reproduced in textbooks and stamps, paintings and poems, Vitruvian Man is both the culmination of a thought experiment and the representation of the intersection of man, his world and the universe that houses them both. First theorized by the Roman General Vitruvius in his treatise on architecture, the image -- a man fit within a circle within a square -- is the illustration of the idea that man, specifically the properly portioned man, is the universe writ small, a microcosm of the world he inhabits. In his organs and his dimensions, his aptitudes and his limitations, are the blueprints upon which all else is built. For like everything else in the world, he is subject to proportions, proportions that can be reduced to mathematics, mathematics that govern the design of every godly organism.

Though Vitruvius conceived of this homo-centric notion 1,500 years before Leonardo Da Vinci's birth, it took this giant of the Renaissance to actualize the thought experiment, to prove at least that man could fit inside a circle inside a square. Of course, not even Leonardo was able to prove the philosophical implications of this discovery. Answers to these mysteries, if available, lie many years ahead in our turbulent future.

Da Vinci's Ghost is a charming and concise examination of Vitruvian Man and the master who gave him form. Despite spending the majority of his time here meandering through any of a number of historical digressions, Mr. Lester engagingly establishes the background to both Vitruvian Man and the ideas and biases that dominated the world that spawned him. And so, when the author is finally ready to confront the thought experiment head on, the reader is well-armed with the context necessary to fully comprehend the philosophical implications of just such a notion. For to fit man within a circle, representing the perfect celestial form, and a square, representing the building blocks of the world around him, is to position man within a universal continuum. It is to conceive of him being either the perfect form upon which all else is modeled, or simply one more iteration of a design fundamental to the universe. It is to marry man to both the cosmos above his head and the earth beneath his feet, a relationship that forever embeds him in the grand scheme of life.

Mr. Lester could have taken more time here. For as thorough as he is with the lead-up to Leonardo's sketching of Vitruvian Man, his account of its impact upon the world ends rather abruptly thereafter, leaving his readers only to muse at the myriad ways in which this notion has intrigued and shaped the thoughts of philosophers and mathematicians alike. However, in every other respect, this is wonderful and compelling history, precisely that kind of narrative non-fiction that excites the mind with the tantalizing mysteries of an unknowable universe.

Imaginative work... (3/5 Stars)