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)

A weird, re-imagined American West in the universe of The Half Made World

From the Week of February 17th, 2014

We all have our masters, powers into which our service has either been captured or sold. They take many forms, of course, from the internal demons that drive our actions to the external forces that seek to puppeteer our strings, but the influence remains, a constant, guiding pressure that redirects us onto paths of another's choosing. Occasionally, these influences are positive -- the mentoring we receive from parents on our lives and luminaries on our careers --, but often they are negative, coercive pleas, from within and without, that entice us to surrender our money, our will, even our freedom. What we can do about this is unclear. After all, it is not as though these influences always make themselves known to us. But we must try to resist. For to do otherwise is to sell ourselves into slavery, to ourselves and to others, of a kind vividly illustrated in Felix Gilman's weird world of spirits and steam.

In an alternate 19th-century West, where the land is as unforgiving as the people are ruthless, the Great War is a constant, undulating vice that squeezes the hope from the humans caught between its two, thrashing sides. To the east is the Line, the relentless march of mechanized civilization captained by the ruthless Engines, a collective of conscious machines who have tasked themselves with bringing their relentless order to the world. The Engines are so oppressive, so pitilessly efficient, that they have largely rubbed out the spark of individuality that flickered in the hearts of their subjects, assembling them into a mass of amoral tools with which to act out their will. To the west, meanwhile, are the anarchic agents of the Gun, guerilla fighters endowed with extraordinary powers who regularly infiltrate the lands claimed by the Line, seeking to disrupt the schemes of the great engines who want them exterminated. Both are nearly immortal, causing the fallout of their unfathomable conflict to land on the very mortal humans attempting to live in the cracks between forces.

But after many years and countless skirmishes which have ground to dust several attempts at democracy and a more human order, the war might be at an end. For the last great general of a conquered republic may well have, within his shattered mind, a weapon capable of defeating both the Engines and the spirits of the Gun who have risen up to fight for control of the human world. The race to find the broken general and pull from him this terrible secret is fierce, as the victor will surely hold in their hands ultimate victory. But it may well be that the general is too far gone to surrender what he knows, leaving it to the will of others to find their way out of darkness.

Two fascinating entrants into an already crowded genre, The Half Made World and its successor, the Rise of Ransom City, are sweaty, gritty exemplars of the power of Weird. Hailing from the strange shoals of Steampunk, they are a playground in which Mr. Gilman can re-imagine our past, casting it in a far more archetypal light. The author dispenses with the restrictions of our grounded reality and, in their place, animates the cultural and economic forces that shaped the West, investing them with power and agency. The result is the creation of tangible gods who walk the earth, who guide human affairs, who fight and bleed and scream and plot, but who remain as alien to us as any god we can imagine. We do not know why they do what they do, only that they do it, only that they will continue, only that it is within their nature. These truths are so prevalent in Mr. Gilman's world that his people accept them without thought and, largely, without struggle.

Of the two works, The Half Made World is by far the more successful. The author gently introduces us into his brave new world by giving his first work the familiar-unto-trope structure of a small band of heroes racing to find the key to everything before the pernicious forces chasing them can seize it for their own wicked will. This customary plot is then fleshed out with powerful and beleaguered personalities who, in their own ways, are haunted by the demons that this world has bestowed upon them. Their hunger for absolution, for escape, for understanding, for purpose, is as mesmerizing as this world of living, breathing concepts is darkly vivid.

But where The Half Made World succeeds, its successor fails. Structured as an autobiography from a highly unreliable narrator, it is little more than a series of explosive bloviations that, though they advance the plot, do very little to capture the reader's interest. Rather than explore the strangeness of his weird world, Mr. Gilman, here, finds himself with little more than a paean to the literature of 19th-century America, a time in which the P. T. Barnum's of the world could largely get away with penning extravagant tales of their dubious exploits. Harry Ransom, the work's narrator, is a garish bore about whom it is exceedingly difficult to care, a reality that naturally drains the work of its impact and significance.

Notwithstanding the struggles of The Rise of Ransom City, Mr. Gilman has made a substantial contribution to the new and energetic world of the Weird. Superficially, the genre seems like little more than a lazy attempt to attenuate the familiar until its distorted form can produce some kind of entertainment. But this reading misses the way in which breathing actual life into otherwise inanimate concepts compels the reader to acknowledge both their power, in shaping our existence, and their excesses which, when unchecked, have the capacity to plunge us into a world of grit and smoke. In its fevered dreams, it asks us to reckon with what we are making of our world, questions that will linger long after the last page has been turned.

An engaging journey... (3/5 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)

The next Walmart and the life of its genius creator in The Everything Store

From The Week of January 13th, 2014

Genius is a fascinating and complex virtue. From physics to literature, from mathematics to philosophy, it has allowed the gifted among us to make quantum leaps of understanding that have changed our world and benefited us all. But while such gifts are to be admired, and perhaps even envied, by us mere mortals, they do not come without a price. For to be so far beyond one's peers in a particular area is to understand what it means to be alone, to see the world the way few others do. It's only natural for this to encourage arrogance at the expense of empathy, to foster autocracy at the expense of collaboration. Many geniuses will be socially connected enough to avoid this fate, but others, particularly those who find themselves at the pinnacle of powerful organizations shaped by their particular talents? Perhaps not. The ups and downs of just such an adventure are chronicled by Brad Stone's engrossing history of Amazon.com.

One of the earliest successes of the internet age, Amazon.com, known now as simply amazon, began in 1995 as a small bookstore operated out of a Seattle garage and has, in the years since, grown into one of the world's largest retailers. Shaped by an unwavering devotion to the customer, it is the Walmart of the Internet, luring in many of the world's best and most ubiquitous brands with the promise of its 200-million users and deploying that market power to relentlessly drive down costs for the benefit of the consumer. From books to toys, from music to jewellery, it has extended its tentacles into virtually every aspect of modern commercialism while investing its profits into 21st-century industries like cloud computing and digital streaming, ventures that promise to position amazon as one of the most vital companies of the next 20 years.

But how did a tiny internet startup grow to rival Walmart? The dreamchild of Jeff Bezos, amazon's gifted founder, it was conceived in the halls of a new-York-City hedge fund as an "everything store," a a customer-first retailer that would leverage the advantages of the internet to put products in the hands of customers swiftly and smartly. Without much backing from external sources, however, Mr. Bezos began more modestly with a bookstore that would use its vast warehouses to collect every book in print, giving consumers access to literature that rarely, if ever, made it onto shelves of brick-and-mortar booksellers. Early success with this model made the company one of the internet's dot com success stories, opening a geyser of investment that Mr. Bezos would use to make his dream of an efficient, universal marketplace a startling reality.

The controversial history of this legendary company, The Everything Store is an arresting work of non-fiction. Mr. Stone, a journalist for Bloomberg Business Week, takes the life of Jeff Bezos and the rise of amazon and interweaves their narrative histories into a united tale that is much about the complexities of business as it is the personal characteristics of amazon's brilliant and driven founder and CEO. Despite having little access to Mr. Bezos himself, or his immediate family, the author constructs a detailed portrait of amazon's ascendance on the back of dozens of interviews with men and women who played key roles in its rise. Though many of these accounts are critical of Mr. Bezos and his managerial style which seems, at times, abrasive and obsessive, their admiration for his gifts and respect for his devotion is nearly universal. Their anecdotes coalesce into a portrait of a man who is both brilliant and uncompromising, insightful and reckless, but who is nonetheless seized by an entrepreneurial will so potent that it suffuses this work with its passion.

The Everything Store is more than an assemblage of legendary meetings and dramatic near-misses, celebrated acquisitions and quiet grudges. It is, at its core, a work about the unique strain of corporate philosophy imposed upon amazon by its fixated founder. Since launching the company in the 1990s, he has refused to let himself, or his company, slow down to catch a breath. Believing that consumerism on the Internet is a landgrab that the old stalwarts of commerce are ill-equipped to capitalize on, he has relentlessly pushed for amazon to grow, often, far beyond its capacity to handle the demands placed upon it by customers who expect satisfaction, who have no sympathy for its eccentricities, and who have no idea of the mad scramble to both keep the website running and their orders fulfilled. On the surface, this strategy seems insane. Shouldn't one consolidate one's gains before thrusting one's pride and joy into new frontiers? And yet, Mr. Bezos' frenetic pace, though costly in terms of personnel and failed ventures, has not destroyed amazon. It has, instead, shaped it into a rival to Walmart which was already the world's largest retailer before Amazon was even being conceived. Reckless, perhaps, but successful? No question...

A review of this work would be incomplete if it failed to address the controversies that have swirled around it. Many of amazon's luminaries, both those who granted Mr. Stone interviews and those who did not, have gone public with their complaints which have ranged from accusing the author of mishandling their quotes to making profound factual errors that might undermine the confidence of some in its authenticity. As there's no way to verify these claims, it is pointless to even contemplate siding with either party. However, some of the accusations do have some corroborating evidence. Mr. Stone does take liberty with his characterization of Mr. Bezos, occasionally straying into his mind during certain key moments to guess at his feelings, his thoughts. Mr. Stone also meddles in the personal history of Mr. Bezos in a manner that is, at best, presumptuous and, at worst, ethically questionable. However, the former is but a relatively small crime in the world of narrative fiction and the latter is a matter between the principals and not us. For the rest, one will have to decide for oneself who is more believable, the journalist attempting to thoroughly tell the story of a tech titan, or those inside trying to protect their friends and the brand they've all worked so determinedly to build. Given the balanced tone of the work which, to my mind, has few if any hints of a deeper agenda, I side with the journalist.

An inspirational and transformative work about an exceptional company and the even more exceptional minds and spirits that shaped it... A must-read for 2014... (4/5 Stars)

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

From The Week of January 13th, 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

Immigrant communities and the future Local in the dystopic On Such A Full Sea

From The Week of January 6th, 2014

Customs and traditions, laws and codes, shape our cultures, giving them their definition, their structure and their uniqueness. And yet, to us the culture simply is, the ever-present framework in which we have the experiences that make up our lives. It is as familiar to us as our friends, and so its trials and tribulations are taken as what must be, the tapestry of our individual existences. It's only when we absorb the strangeness of other cultures, either ones with which we share a world, or the ones that fell before our times, that we come to understand that what we assume to be normative, customary, is not so because it is the right way. Rather, it is simply the way it is done, for us and no one else. This is a powerful truth. For it grants us perspective not only on the human capacity to acclimatize, but it teaches us that nothing is as it must be, that everything is subject to change, to evolution, to improvement. This, if little else, is a point delightfully made in Chang-Rae Lee's dystopian novel.

In a near-future world blighted by widespread, environmental upheaval, life for the many has become difficult and often brutal. In the region formally known as the United States, society has devolved into three distinct groups which are characterized by varying degrees of autonomy and economic power. The Facilities are coastal communities, agrarian settlements that have grown up in the hollowed-out cores of former seaboard metropoli. They are nourished by trade with the Charters, a collection of seemingly powerful and healthy enclaves made prosperous by their isolation from the rest of the world. Occupying the wild, untamed lands between these two kinds of communities are the Open Counties, a seemingly lawless region of broken land in which the unfortunates of the world eke out a meager existence and to which tourists from more stable lands visit out of anthropological curiosity.

A resident of a Facility which has grown out of old Baltimore, Fan is a Tank Girl, a laborer tasked with ensuring the livelihood of the Facility's stock of essential sealife. She seems largely content with her existence until, one day, her boyfriend disappears into the Open Counties, to where and what end no one knows. Fearing for him, Fan decides to follow in his footsteps, forsaking the relative safety of her familiar little world and entering into the great, dangerous beyond. Repeatedly beset by powers much more ruthless and potent than she, Fan must continually scrabble for a foothold in this strange place, little knowing if the winds of fate will carry her to or from the boy she loves.

A fascinating treatise on the nature of expectations and human malleability, On Such A Full Sea is, nonetheless, a failure as a work of entertainment. Mr. Lee, an author and professor of literature, has fashioned a darkly captivating world full of half-glimpsed political machines and well-thought-out immigrant communities which have adapted to the violent tides of history by coalescing into their own, largely self-sufficient units. In this, they convey one of the work's most powerful ideas, that power is fundamentally local, that the global superstructure we've managed to erect over the last century is fragile, and that any significant disruption to the world order will plunge us back into a world where community is everything and where banishment from the collective is a punishment worse than death. In the hands of a skilled author, this is a notion brought vividly to life in this richly imagined future.

However, in almost every other way, On Such A Full Sea is an irritating bore. Its most frustrating element by far is its composition. Written in a kind of observational prose, the narration is from the perspective of an omnipotent first person, a collective we that hovers over Fan and her quest while remaining removed enough to provide the reader with details of the world that Fan may not know. This style certainly helps Mr. Lee make broader points about class and culture, and it absolutely lends the work a literary polish rarely seen in genre fiction, but it also precludes us from feeling any emotion from, much less for, the actors on its elegantly wrought stage. On Such A Full Sea is the literary equivalent of buying the worst ticket to a 50,000-seat house. We are left to watch from the nosebleeds while tiny ants down below execute their intricate skills, every nuance of detail and emotion occluded by distance. Worse in this case because while purchasing the ticket is a conscious act, a voluntary imposition, here, it is imposed on us for negligible gain. Mr. Lee could've illustrated his broader points without reducing Fan from a living, breathing person into a tiny puppet, propelled by the winds of plot and fate.

It pains me to be so critical of such a rare work. For infrequent is the genre novel with aspirations of being more than a pulpy adventure. On Such A Full Sea is as much sociological study as it is an adventure novel, and anything that bucks the norm should be welcomed. But enjoyment here is made all-but-impossible by the work's tone which suppresses the value of the individual to such a degree that caring about anyone is difficult at best. A fascinating failure... (2/5 Stars)

The stressful world of the NFL explored in Collision Low Crossers

From The Week of January 6th, 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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