A tortured man in a tormented land in Lawrence In Arabia

From the week of June 9th, 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The long, rich and despotic history of Iran in Empire of The Mind

From The Week of May 1st, 2014 Though pride insists that we have the right to act as we choose, our wills unfettered by the shackles of anyone else's desire, we are, inescapably, beings shaped by history. History is the gestalt of our experiences, the joys and traumas, the victories and the defeats, that, by individually imprinting themselves upon us, collectively influence our futures. We can try to recognize these influences in hopes of minimizing them, or perhaps even with an eye towards completely weeding them out, but how can we mitigate something we can't even measure? How can we extricate the fallout from something that has already happened to us? As much as individuals struggle with answering these questions, nations are equally subject to them. For what is a nation if not the collective will of human beings who share geography, culture, history? What scars the people scars the nation as well and leaves behind marks that take centuries to fade. The experiences of many nations provide evidence of this truth, but few more vividly, or tragically, than Iran. Michael Axworthy elaborates in his piece of narrative history of this consequential country. Home to one of the world's oldest human civilizations, Iran is a nation as fascinating as it is troubled. For millennia, it has produced poets and scholars, theologians and mathematicians, whose insights and revelations have both enriched the world and advance the scope of human knowledge. It has hosted dynasties and religions, groundbreaking universities and defined entire disciplines of science. Without it, the world, and the peoples that populate it, would be exceedingly different. And yet, for all of this glorious history, for all that its culture makes the Ancient Greeks look like Johnny-come-latelies, its recent past has been ravaged by the plagues of corruption, colonialism and conflict, all of which have taken its toll on this proud nation. Made a pawn in the Great Game of the 19th century, in which the British and Russian empires vied for regional dominance, and made a slave to oil interests in the 20th century, during which its politics and its institutions were ruthlessly manipulated by foreign governments and foreign corporations, it has become a suspicious theocracy, one that seeks, through the favor of god, to wrestle back its rightful place, as one of the world's premier nations, the first amongst younger equals. But the world is not what it was when Iran was a center of culture and knowledge. And it may well be that Iran cannot return to the prominence it claimed for so long. An exploration of the long history of a singular nation, Empire of The Mind is a riveting portrait of a country transformed by the insights of science and by the vicissitudes of geography. Mr. Axworthy, a professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Exeter, transports us back millennia, before the Romans, before even the Greeks, and gradually marches us into the present, introducing, along the way, religions, scientists and kings that have characterized this place of mountains and faith. The reader witnesses the fall of Zoroastrianism and the rise of Islam, the decline of tribalism and the assembly of the nation state, the destruction of pluralism and the elevation of theology. But for all these potent forces, none prove as consequential as colonialism. The world is not short of examples of colonialism's cruelties. It seems, at times, that half the world has suffered beneath its ruinous shadow. And yet, Iran has escaped most of the obvious consequences, instead, bearing up under more subtle and insidious damage. Perhaps, this is owing to the fact that Iran was more of a client state than a colony, its interests, and therefore its policies, torn between the various western powers fighting for dominance in the 19th century. This subservience certainly engendered a sense of humiliation within such a proud culture. And yet, this anger would be but a rehearsal for the outpouring of betrayal and rage that would come later, during the 20th-century's thirst for oil, when Wilsonian promises of self-determination gave way to the ruthless politics of necessity that undermined their governments, manipulated their intellectuals and empowered their dictators. For those of us fortunate enough to have been reared in countries spared the indignity of being subjected to the merciless will and the selfish whimsy of other nations, this shame is difficult to relate to. The West looks at Iran today and sneers at its theocracy and expresses incredulity over the insanity of its nuclear weapons program. But while the convergence of these forces is certainly cause for dismay, they should be properly understood as the consequences of meddling, of manipulation, of exploitation. For in the minds of a people, whose culture has been forgotten and whose sovereignty has been toyed with, what could possibly germinate but distrust? Put in this situation, we would all want the security of knowing that we would never again be someone else's tool. While maintaining an admirable neutrality, Empire of The Mind conveys not just the history of Iran but the powerful ways in which that history has informed the problematic present. This is no mean feat, particularly for a work that strives to be much more than an ideological weapon with which to chastise one's enemies. It is far easier to descend into the language of victimization and or excusemaking. That Mr. Axworthy avoids this while delivering an engaging read on a consequential country makes this one of my more thoughtful reads this year, only marred by the fact that its publishing, coming in 2007, denies the author the opportunity to read Iran's history into the failed Green Revolution and the events of the Arab Spring. Quality work... (4/5 Stars)

A pleasing romp through a realm of Asian gods in The Eternal Sky

From The Week of April 20th, 2014

Living, as we do, in a world shaped by science and empowered by technology, it is difficult to imagine how society would function without them. Religion would certainly step out from its forced confinement backstage to reclaim its civil authority, but religion is only the dogmatized distillation of a power that runs far deeper, that may well have been with us longer than any other human concept. Mythology... For in a world without systems of logic and procedure, when truthseeking is reduced to hunches and hubris, mythology must be the genesis of both society and its customs, forged by the will of visionaries into a sword of belief that everyone can carry. What would it be like to live in such a world, where such concepts, such gods, are real, their powers shaping the lives of millions? Elizabeth Bear imagines in this engaging and bloody trilogy.

In a world of empires and Jin, warriors of the step and wizards of the tower, a ruthless conspiracy is afoot to bring chaos and war to the known realms. Having worked its corrupting will into the tribalism of the Plains and the politics of the imperial court, it has cleverly warped the existing bonds of family and law that have kept the realms relatively stable, manipulating them until brother besets brother and clan besets clan in a bid for discord and despair that it is uniquely positioned to capitalize on.

Standing in the way of this ruthless powergrab are two unlikely allies. Temur is a warrior of the step, grandson of the great khan who was left for dead on a battlefield that has robbed him of clan and future. Samarkar is a princess, sister to the reigning Emperor who has made a singular sacrifice to attain the powers of a wizard. He is powerless and alone. She is exiled and friendless, but as the conspiracy unfolds, and the land is riven by plague and infighting, they are thrust together by circumstance to try to right a wrong and discover just what is tearing their worlds apart. Joined by friends with their own pasts, their destinies will be written in blood across a changing sky, reconfiguring a world that has tried, and failed, to kill them many times over.

Imaginative fantasy fiction from an author of many literary disciplines, the Eternal Sky is an entertaining romp through a world drenched in myths and consequences. Eschewing the typical proto-European backdrop that characterizes so much of the genre, Ms. Bear has drawn from a more eastern inspiration, chiefly, the customs and politics of Mongolian Asia, when the Khans were at the height of their power. But the author does not simply flirt with this fascinating time in Asian history when the Mongol nations violently clashed with dynastic China and caliphate Islam, briefly creating a vast united empire that was ruled from horseback, she delves deeply into the stories and the traditions of these great powers and conjures from them monsters and mayhem, magic and malignancies that not only buffet her heroes, but drape the world of The Eternal Sky in the cloak of familiarity and authenticity.

Despite its pleasingly atypical setting, The Eternal Sky could have been just another trilogy, the churning out of familiar tropes for the entertainment of audiences wishing to gorge themselves on such familiar fare. But Ms. Bear, who has frequently exhibited a fondness for cutting against the usual grain, has generated a series of winning characters that further set her chronicle apart. Temur is a fearsome warrior who, despite the cruelties he's endures, maintains a core of decency that makes him eminently relatable despite his tribal upbringing. Samarkar is a newly minted mage who, despite her noble blood and her physical charms, rejects the narrowness of a life proscribed to her class and her gender and, instead, becomes a person not afraid to get her hands dirty in a world that desperately needs her. Even Hrahima, the half-woman half-tigress who accompanies them, is animated beyond the typical nonsense of such fantasy breeds to become a fearsome creature with whom the reader can sympathize.

These are not easy accomplishments. That they are so effortlessly achieved is both a credit to the author and a boon to the reader.

However, while the setting and the characters are winners here, the plots leave something to be desired. Ms. Bear has opted for the standard approach of the quest that binds together the brave band of heroes which, without twists, feels tired unto exhaustion. This feeling is not at all abated by repetitive surprise attacks upon the band which, in both style and substance, are tiresomely reminiscent of adventure games spanning the decades. But while these are flaws that hobble the work to some degree, they are in no way fatal blows upon what is otherwise delightful work.

A pleasing creation that gives us a taste of worlds we rarely see and demons we rarely fight... Well worth the time and money... (4/5 Stars)

http://www.amazon.com/Steles-Sky-Eternal-Elizabeth-Bear-ebook/dp/B00FO77KRA/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=&qid=

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)

The extraordinary labors of a revolutionary in Sperber's Karl Marx

From The Week of May 20, 2013

No life is without challenges, moments of crisis and uncertainty that leave us grasping for answers and yearning for stability. The daily intersection of personalities and fortunes essentially ensures that something, at some point, will go wrong. But it's one thing to understand that life has its difficulties; it's entirely something else to deliberately steer one's existence into the winds of such uncertainties, to face them head on with brashness and truculence, and to do so while knowing full well that it may be decades, even centuries, before any of one's labors will make a meaningful difference. The will that must be required to never take the easy road, to forever endure the hardships of deprivation, in the name of a singular goal is remarkable. Mr. Sperber elucidates in his winningly thorough biography.

One of the most pivotal figures of the last 200 years, Karl Marx was a German political philosopher and armchair economist who lived during the twilight of empire. A polemicist who believed strongly in the corruptive power of the elites, his writings provided the intellectual fuel for a series of revolutions that would, after his death, sweep away the monarchies of eastern Europe and replace them with a powerful and equally corruptible proletariat, or people's party, that aimed to create a Marxist heaven on Earth by empowering the collective whole at the expense of the greedy individual. Though he would not live to see any of his predictions, or his beliefs, put into practice on a national scale, he became, in death, a people's hero, an intellectual whose complete and eloquent rejection of the disproportionate allotment of power and money in western society made him the godhead of 20th-century communism.

But though we know the legend well, how well do we know the man? For while Marx's role as the father of the resistance to capitalism is well known, almost forgotten is his poverty, his love for his children and his enduring devotion to his wife who, despite her upper-class upbringing, stood with Marx throughout his tumultuous life which was characterized by a scarcity of, and thus a desperation for, money. His partnership with Freidrich Engels is well-documented, but less so his unwillingness to let go of a decades-old family dispute, nor his struggles to maintain ownership of the movement he was creating, nor his deficiencies as an orator which counterbalanced, in every way, his excellence as an author. Hell, he spent more time as a newspaper columnist than he did as a revolutionary, a fact which, along with the other revelations of the man's existence, make this towering figure a creature of complexity and fascination.

Though it delves, at times, too deeply into the murky waters of economic theory and German philosophy, Karl Marx is a potent and thorough biography of a most dour and engaging man. Mr. Sperber, a professor at the University of Missouri, has gathered up Marx's works and his letters, his deeds and his friendships and fashioned from them a chronicle of the life of a giant of history, a man who has had as many deeds done in his name as some deities. The portrait that emerges from this meticulous assembly is of a man who struggled to find his place, a man who fought his enemies and his slighters at every turn, a man who spent more of his life as a political refugee than he did of a citizen of any country, and a man who knew everything about money and power except for how to make either. For this, he is both a creature of amazement and pity.

The author's characterization of Marx is simultaneously the work's best and worst feature. On the positive side of the ledger, Mr. Sperber removes the mask that history has placed on Marx, revealing him to be an emotional individual whose stubbornness often outstripped his good sense. His willingness to invest his entire life in the erudite refutation of capitalism, as practiced by the western powers, is downright remarkable in light of the Sisyphean nature of the war he was trying to wage against a completely entrenched system. And yet, this brings us to the negative. For Mr. Sperber does very little to actually explain why he was so devoted to an unwinnable war. The author illuminates Marx's influences, his schooling, his family history, his citizenship of the authoritarian Prussia, all of which go some way to sketching out an outline for his motive. But the unimaginable personal deprivations Marx suffered in the name of simple defiance demands a clearer description of what drove him to such atypical lengths. This is a man who endured the better part of a lifetime of financial humiliation, all in the name of exposing a rotten system. Why, when he so clearly possessed the talents to excel within that system?

In every other way, Karl Marx is a satisfying read that breaks the philosopher's life down into manageable sections, each of which succeeds in shedding light on Marx and his world, on 19th-century politics and 19th-century despotism, and on the eternal conflict between socialism and capitalism. But its occasional detours on the road to enlightening its readers prevents it from being truly great. (4/5 Stars)

Charlemagne brings the giant of European history lyrically to life

From The Week of April 1, 2013

For as long as humanity has been capable of passing down its history, it has revered legends, figures of time-shrouded myth whose deeds are as grand as their appetites. All of our hearts swell at the prospect of conquest, whatever shape it takes, but these singular men and women seized that desire and stamped it with such force into the metal of our history that their immortality is virtually assured. Perhaps we would do well to forget them. Perhaps, if we were unaware of how brightly their stars burned, some among us would not be driven by the need to eclipse them, regardless of the destruction such would sew. But we'd have as much luck wishing away the sun as erasing our giants. For even in death, they have but to extend their hands and we find ourselves being welcomed into their destinies. This truth is exquisitely explored in Richard Winston's engaging biography.

The son of kings and the forger of an empire, Charlemagne is one of the foremost figures of our age. An illiterate man with a passion for knowledge, he was a creature of contradictions, of enlightenment and devastation, who rallied the men of his far flung province of the fallen Roman Empire and, over 47 years of rule, created a new imperium upon the ashes of the old. The conquerer of Europe, he caused popes to bow to his will and to craft crowns so that he might place them on his brow, acts motivated by glory, surely, but also from a desire to restore the order of what had been centuries lost in the death of old Rome. That he was successful where others had failed speaks to luck, but also to a once-in-a-generation will to leave behind a world better than the one he had found.

Charlemagne fought the Saxons and the Lombards, the Saracens and the Bavarians, but war was not his legacy. That was rooted in the idea of a united Europe, a continent that could set aside its disagreements and work in concert towards a common goal. Moreover, it was invested into the scriptoria he created, places of learning that could restore at least some of the wisdom of the fallen ancients and bestow upon the subsequent generations the capacity to build towards a world not consumed by war, but progress. These were mighty goals Charlemagne worked towards during his long reign, but fate prevented them from coming to fruition as he'd hoped. For with the passing of his eldest sons, men in whom he'd rested his hopes for a continuation of his dreams, his empire fall to Louis, King of the Franks, a pious but unwise man whose squandering of Charlemagne's efforts plunged the continent into centuries of intellectual darkness.

This is the tale Mr. Winston tells in Charlemagne, a lyrical account of the life and times of the most powerful European figure to emerge from the ruins of Rome. Drawing from Einhard's contemporary account of the emperor's life, as well as what other sources remain from the eighth century, the author paints an irresistible portrait of a singular mind, one as shaped by conquest as it was by metaphysics. Though little remains of Charlemagne's youth, and though it is difficult to corroborate the exact nature of his various deeds, a pattern of behavior emerges across the whole of the man's life, one that speaks to a complex nature that would be as well-suited to the cut and thrust of our century as it was to the tribalism of his own. From the manner in which he treated his wives to the esteem with which he held knowledge, we are made witnesses to the man more than we are the warrior, the spirit more than the deeds, a reality which is sure to frustrate those interested in military history but that pleases those others who find themselves fascinated by the minds of giants.

Charlemagne, for all its delightful prose, is a largely sympathetic account of the founder of the Holy Roman Empire. Mr. Winston is far harsher on the emperor's contemporaries than he is on Charlemagne himself. Perhaps Charles the Great was a man above all others, an unyielding spire of morality lashed by a seething sea of corrupted souls, but this seems far too simplistic given what we know of humanity which is much more liable to produce individuals of gray morality than of purely white and black. The only spot of criticism Mr. Winston levels at Charlemagne is the mercilessness with which he treats the Saxons who, time and time again, rise in rebellion against him, but even this seems muted compared to his paeans to Charlemagne's successes.

Notwithstanding its vagaries and its sympathies, Charlemagne is a vivid and lively document that teaches us as much about the man as it does about fate. For the readers of this chronicle will not be able to walk away unaffected by Mr. Winston's conclusion that, had Charlemagne's eldest sons lived, the subsequent 13 centuries of history would have unfolded quite differently. In peace, the schools Charlemagne founded would have had time to build on their learning, to spur on the intellectual flowering that only occurred centuries later. Instead, Louis' unsuitableness caused many of Charlemagne's reforms to wither on the vine, a tragic fact that caused Europe to devolve back into the post-Roman gloom that had already consumed it for 400 years.

Imagine a world without the Middle Ages, without irreason and theocracy. Imagine a Renaissance that began five centuries earlier in Charlemagne's Europe rather than Italy's city states. Imagine if industrialism came to Europe in the 13th century, not the 18th. We would today be among the stars.

Well worth the read, as much for the dream as for the man... (4/5 Stars)

Ho Chi Min details the enlightened, revolutionary and tyrannical faces of a world leader

From The Week of march 4, 2013
What motivates a man to devote himself to a life of struggle? For the world is full of treasures just waiting to be explored, arcologies of past and present so vast that lifetimes would have to be spent to absorb all their stories. And yet, while some choose to immerse themselves in these worlds of knowledge and discovery, others reject these enriching existences in favor of lives aimed at a single, overarching goal, often thought to be unattainable. Is this hubris, the arrogance of the individual's belief that his is the only will capable of shaping reality? Or is it the mark of greatness, the symbol of a man triumphing over his own needs to give to the world a measure of justice? This fundamental question underpins Mr. Duiker's fascinating if mysterious biography.

Born in 1890 to Confucian parents living in French-controlled Vietnam, Ho Chi Min rose from obscurity to become one of the formative figures of 20th-century Asia. A student and a traveler, a thinker and a toiler, his life's journey took him from the parlors of Boston to the kitchens of Britain, from revolutionary gatherings in Paris to Soviet schools in Russia, until finally depositing him back in Vietnam, at the head of a movement to take back his homeland from the European and Asian colonialists who sought to dominate it. Here, he helped ignite a war that, while it dispatched the French from his native shores, helped make Vietnam the focal point for a Cold-War showdown 20 years in the making. This conflict with the United States devastated his divided country, tipping it into a political despotism from which it would take decades to recover.

Despite the fact that Ho Chi Min was a pivotal figure in both of these wars, and more broadly in the liberation of his country from colonialist rule, his life remains a mystery. Driven to communism by the political perfidy of the west, he was nonetheless a deep admirer of both the United States and France. He immersed himself in their cultures and their values, drawing from their founding documents models of responsible, moral government for his own subjugated nation. Moreover, he was a fighter for freedom, and yet he allowed his administration in Northern Vietnam to be characterized by political executions and one-party totalitarianism, sins that would never be tolerated by the nations he so admired. These appear to be contradictions that will never be resolved. For they might well be present in any man who drives himself to be the father of his nation.

Though at times consumed by an obsessive eye for detail, Ho Chi Min is nonetheless a thorough examination of southeast Asia in the first half of the 20th century. Mr. Duiker, who served during the Vietnam War and who has since become a professor of history at Penn State University, certainly trains all of his formidable powers upon the life of his subject, from his early travels to his Soviet radicalism, from his pleas to the west to his resistance to French, Japanese and Chinese control. However, his work here functions best as a lens through which to examine the broader effects that European colonialism had on Vietnam. For there can be no doubt that France's unwillingness to acknowledge Vietnamese independence, coupled with the deaf ear the liberty-obsessed United States turned to Ho Chi Min's pleas for aid, sapped the west of the moral authority necessary to make anti-communist allies of these ancient nations searching for a 20th-century identity. These tragic missteps not only lead to wars of attrition, they completely re-shaped the political conflicts of the latter half of the century, ensuring that millions more would suffer under the authoritarian yoke of totalitarianism for decades to come.

As a biography of Ho Chi Min, though, Mr. Duiker's work here leaves much to be desired. For though the author manages to capture something of the essence of the man in his youth, this impression fades with time until Ho becomes almost a complete enigma, no more three-dimensional here than he is in the posters and the legal tender that bear his likeness. This is not entirely Mr. Duiker's fault. After all, it is abundantly clear that the details of Ho's later life, particularly the decades in which he actually held political power, have been assiduously guarded by the authorities who have inherited the countries he created. Getting trustworthy and honest information from them must have been virtually impossible. And yet, Mr. Duiker doesn't help his case by abandoning the effort to understand Ho. Indeed, as if snubbed by the man's impenetrable facade, the author succumbs to a lifeless, systematic recitation of historical facts that we would expect from a textbook, not from a biography of a human being. In this, Ho Chi Min leaves much to be desired.

Ho Chi Min is an excellent primer on the political and economic forces at play in southeast Asia leading up to the Cold War. It is thorough and scholarly, virtues that imbue it with gravitas and meaning. But as a biography of the man himself, it suffers at the hands of mythology, the forces of which will make Ho's life all the more opaque in the decades to come. (3/5 Stars)

First two volumes of Malazan Book of The Fallen begin a dark and brutal adventure

From The Week of February 11, 2013
It's comforting for humans to believe in free will. For self-determinism means that our actions, from the bold to the boneheaded, are our own. In a world where we are all equally empowered to choose, we can celebrate our triumphs and decry our failures, knowing that we are solely responsible for the full spectrum of these outcomes. After all, how would we learn and grow if all our choices were seconded to another? What would be the point if we were all being guided to some predestined fate? And yet, for all that we enjoy this free will, most of us also believe in gods, omnipotent beings who, to greater and lesser degrees, take a hand in temporal events, steering us to certain outcomes. But what if the world was nothing more than this? Divine schemes that made of us nothing but pawns for their pleasure? What if we simply existed to act out their games? Mr. Erikson imagines in the first two instalments of his epic series.

In a world of magic and death, empires and war, gods play for keeps. Empowered by the copiousness and zealousness of their worshippers, they spin out plots millennia in the making, willing to even make themselves physically manifest in the world if it advances their unimaginable aims. Their subjects, a collection of intelligent races predisposed to war, act out their cosmic contests, most without even being aware that they are creatures of a much greater game.

In this difficult world, so often plagued by suffering and death, an empire has risen from the ashes of the old to impose order upon the tribes and clans, fiefdoms and city states, that chaotically comprise the known world. Helmed by the empress Laseen, an assassin who may or may not have had a hand in the death of her predecessor, Kellanved, the Malazan empire is set on bloody conquest, an iron-fisted and often cruel subjugation of not only the continent from which it sprang, but every other continent of which it has knowledge. Its all-conquering armies, numbering thirteen in all, trudge through storm and desert, forest and tundra, to carry out the will of their powerful empress, knowing that their lives are nothing next to the achievement of her goals.

Populated by an expansive roster of grim characters, and characterized by a show-don't-tell style of prose that often leaves the reader adrift in a mysterious world of unfamiliar customs, Malazan Book of The Fallen is a challenging, even confrontational read that spares no prisoners. Mr. Erikson interweaves moments of philosophy with long skeins of bloody slaughter to create the tapestry of a world beleaguered by rampaging armies and vengeful gods. This energy, this vibe, is so consistently depicted that it leaves the reader wondering if the world itself is coming apart at the seams, as it experiences the opening salvos of an apocalypse that will see it reduced to ash and bone.

Though burdened by the often overwhelming task of establishing such a vivid world, Gardens of The Moon and The Deadhouse Gates, the first two instalments of this epic adventure, are both successful works that, for the most part, live up to the ambitious dreams of the man who authored them. Their plots, though appearing at first to be overly convoluted, are, in the main, straightforward attempts by the Malazan empress to ruthlessly expand her empire with no thought or care for those who stand in her way. Though she has powerful mages at her disposal, her goals are primarily enacted through her exceptional armies who will often stay on campaign, in foreign lands, for years at a time, knowing more of their brothers in arms and their missions than they do of their lands and their families back home. In this, the Malazan empire is clearly inspired by ancient Rome with which it shares a similar structure, an equally voracious thirst for power, and a technical brilliance that helps it to impose its will and its customs upon those unwilling peoples who fall beneath its ravenous shadow.

However, this is where allusions to our world effectively end. For in every other respect, Malazan Book of The Fallen is a masterwork of imagination that can never quite escape the deus-ex-machina of its numerous gods. While its divine actors aid the series by lending it a unique blend of menace and weirdness, they are also its downfall. For the reader comes to understand that Mr. Erikson's characters are not ultimately in control of their own lives. They are subject to the whims of others infinitely more powerful than they. And though occasionally they luck into positions of leverage that allow them to thwart these gods, most often they become pawns of prophecy, a reality which robs them of too much of their agency. In order to emotionally invest in a tale's outcome, the reader has to possess some belief that the prime movers have some capacity to choose for themselves. Otherwise, they are merely puppets for beings we rarely see and cannot fathom. They might as well represent the author's whimsy in which case Mr. Erikson's puppeteering becomes far too apparent.

Make no mistake. This is a work of profound skill, imagination and ambition. Credit is often heaped on other creators of modern fantasy fiction, Jordan and Martin to name but two, for manifesting complex worlds. But these are all-too-recognizable as distorted reflections of our own, alternate realities that rely upon our myths, our symbols, to convey lessons we already comprehend. Malazan Book of The Fallen is, but for a few exceptions, something altogether foreign from everything we know. It is the purest manifestation of sheer creativity that I've encountered in some time. It is a shame then that it is bestowed with such a narrow slice of the emotional spectrum. Its first two volumes are works almost entirely of rage and revenge. There is no light to balance the darkness.

A promising beginning to a remarkable, if problematic, niche product. (4/5 Stars)

Gritty The Dagger and The Coin a first rate fantasy epic

From The Week of January 28, 2013
Appearances deceive. For we are not the body we were born to nor the rank we were blessed with. We are not the profession we occupy nor the role we play. Rather, we are the talent we possess, a blend of natural ability and skill honed by knowledge and experience that has nothing to do with gender, race, class or deportment. Of course, no one can see this true self. For it is virtually impossible for anyone to disregard all of the superficial packaging that our culture and our biology value so highly. But if they could see truly, if they could conceive of this essential self, then the world would undergo a revolution as social distinctions we hold so dear collapse in the face of objective truth. Mr. Abraham flirts with precisely this tantalizing reality in the first two instalments of his new fantasy epic.

In a world mastered by dragons who have not been heard from for centuries, the thirteen races of humanity are left to muddle along without their overlords. Dogmen and snakemen, fishmen and human, they clutch at the shards of empire, trying to hold onto their little corner of what the dragons left behind. The result, then, is a fragmented world where the subversive ideas and technologies of the Renaissance clash with an entrenched feudalistic nobility whose claims to the reins of power grow feebler and feebler each day.

Into this often deadly morass of politics and theology is cast Cithrin, a half-breed orphan girl taken in by her city's local branch of a powerful bank. Discovering that she has a head for the business of risks and loans, she learns at the feet of her master until an external threat to the city compels her to adopt the life of a smuggler in hopes of secreting the bank's most valuable treasure out of the city and to the safety of a more secure branch. Along the way, her path crosses with the men and women who, through necessity and avarice, honor and zealousness, shape her world in the years to come. Some of this shaping will be to the good, but most will be ill, a savage struggle for power that will cut down the noble and uplift the unready. And always, in the midst of this storm, Cithrin endures, trying to carve out, for herself, a life worthy of her considerable potential.

The Dagger and The Coin, so far consisting of The Dragon's Path and King's Blood, is fantasy fiction of the first order. Owing more to George R.R. Martin than Joe Abercrombie, it nonetheless alchemizes the political realities of the former and the shocking violence of the latter to create a new, potent brew of gritty, real-world fantasy that has far more in common with renaissance Florence than it does with elves and dwarves. It is fired by a cast of morally gray characters, all of whom are motivated by consistent, understandable agendas born of their life experiences rather than authorial expediency. Laudably, this is as true of Cithrin, the series' ostensible heroine, as much as it is of the various villains who directly and obliquely oppose her.

Mr. Abraham possesses an exceptional talent for world-building. For though both of these volumes come in at under 400 pages, which might as well be a novella by fantasy's grandiose standards, they nonetheless establish a rich, tangled, Renaissance environment that, though inspired by masterworks that have come before them, are not in any sense beholden to them. Dragons and spider goddesses are as old as the genre itself, and yet these tropes are not master of Mr. Abraham. He is the master of them, driving them into a new world of the weird and the mechanical that speaks to K. J. Bishop and K. J. Parker, respectively, far more than it does the men who inspired the form so many decades ago.

But perhaps Mr. Abraham's greatest achievement here is the degree to which he unapologetically taps into the political realities of worlds in transition. The world of The Dagger and The Coin does not exist simply to provide an escapist thrill for its consumers. It is driven by the engine of the change that must come to all declining eras, a change characterized by irreconcilable political conflict, subversive philosophies and explosive violence that are its deaththrows. In this, Mr. Abraham is evoking our late-capitalist world which is likewise speeding towards a swift and devastating conclusion. Technological advancement, a rapid expansion of the population and acute depletion of natural resources will soon converge upon one another, undeterred by the mutually assured destruction that will result from their encounter. We are no better positioned to comprehend what will result from this as Cithrin and her clan are aware of what they will face, but we do share this much. It will be ugly, for us and for them.

The Dagger and The Coin combines yesterday and today in a manner that is as thrilling as it is intelligent. A must read for any admirer of realistic fantasy. (5/5 Stars)

Evils of colonialism and the dawn of modern China in The Opium War

From The Week of January 7, 2013 Though nations are defined by the whole of their histories, their attitudes and dispositions are determined by key events, pivotal moments which shape their views and interactions with the world. A nation with no history of invasion, for instance, might only discover the evils of colonialism through conquest of other peoples while nations with a history of being invaded would know, from prior experience, that nothing good can come of conquest, no matter how pure the motives that initiated it. And so, just as the individual is defined by his experience, so too is a nation. This is enduringly demonstrated in Ms. Lovell's uneven history of one of China's formative events.

One of humanity's most ancient civilizations, China, for much of its history, considered itself superior to the rest of the world. While Chinese scholars were pondering the secrets of the universe and the self, European tribes were still futilely fumbling around for the lightswitch of civilization. But while this superiority held for centuries, the arrogance it bred eventually turned Chinese society insular, closing itself off to the outside world at a time when Europe, ignited by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, was undergoing massive change.

Thus, when the British, beginning in the 18th century, came to trade for Chinese tea, they must have seemed a simple folk from an insignificant island, no more a threat to a hundred-thousand united kingdoms than a fly to an elephant. But in 1839, this illusion was dramatically and irreparably shattered when that tiny island nation, thirsting for tea but lacking the silver the Chinese wanted in exchange, went to war with the great Asian dragon and, in three years, brought an ancient empire to its knees.

Deploying weapons and tactics not studied by its generals, the British bombarded Chinese defenses, violated Chinese sovereignty and disregarded every dictate of international trade in order to achieve one simple goal, to compel upon China a trade agreement that would, in every way, benefit the British. For while they lacked the silver China would take in trade for tea, they had, in abundance, Indian opium, a powerfully addictive substance which, if it could be forced upon China, would not only net them all the tea they could want in turn, but create an enduring market of addicts who would trade the British almost anything in exchange for a fix. Fearing the worst, China revolted, rallying behind one of its national heroes to reject this deplorable exchange, but both their concerns and their resistance were swept aside, creating, in the ashes of Chinese pride, the stirrings of the modern Chinese state.

Meticulously reconstructing the events surrounding this conflict, The Opium War returns the reader to the simpler, crueller time of the 19th century when there was no apparatus in place to prevent the selfish needs of a stronger nation from exercising its power over a weaker brother. Ms. Lovell, a professor of Modern Chinese History, assembles the prime movers on both sides of this now nearly 200-year-old war, reviving the political machinations that ignited it and capturing the necessities of national pride that drove it to its coercive conclusion. But while she does a credible job weaving together both actor and event into a cohesive and comprehensible whole, the work aims higher than a simple re-imagination of a long-dead event. It ambitiously cultivates an understanding of present-day China from an understanding of the lessons and the effects of the First Opium War. By linking this conflict to more modern movements of Chinese pride, Chinese sovereignty and especially Chinese xenophobia, it unspools an engaging throughline from the modern day all the way back to the event that arguably launched the notion of contemporary China.

Unfortunately, while Ms. Lovell has an eye for detail that aids her well in the creation of a big picture, she exhibits here very little ability to hold the reader's attention during her re-telling of the actual war. She fails to animate any of her major players, save perhaps Lin Zexu, the imperial appointee who attempt to rid China of its opium. And given the number of actors involved in this destructive ballet, this is a damningly poor success rate for a history which rests upon its characters to embed us in the now alien ideas and cultures of the time. Moreover, the prose simply fails to hold ones attention, this in spite of a reader actively interested in this period of Chinese history.

There are notable virtues here. Ms. Lovell has winningly connected her chronicle to events that affect the people of today, both within and without of China. But her work's failure to transform the war and its players into a living, breathing moment in time prevents it from reaching the heights to which it aspired. (3/5 Stars)

The Diving Universe by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

From The Week of September 03, 2012 Though it is now fashionable, particularly in entrepreneurial circles, to marginalize the value of history in favor of the sciences, there is perhaps no field of study more vital to the continuity of our culture and our worldview than history. For while the sciences have engineered our civilization, bestowing upon us a society uplifted by technology, history has blessed that world with knowledge of the arts and of philosophy, giving color and depth to a world otherwise reduced to mathematics. What's more, history has made the technological world possible by preserving the wisdom of the ancients, meticulously storing their insights for a future in which our finest minds can further chip away at the mysteries of the universe. Without history, we have no link to our past, no cultural heritage to proceed from, no knowledge to rely upon, and no wisdom to help us avoid the catastrophic mistakes of fallen civilizations. We are merely creatures eking out an existence identical to those experienced by our ancestors, grubbing in the mud for food and shelter. Ms. Rusch demonstrates this truism effectively in her uneven series.

Millennia from now, humanity will have travelled so far from Earth that the planet's location, even its appearance, will be little more than a memory. Humanity will have explored the Milky Way galaxy, finding on its millions of habitable planets little by way of intelligent life. It will consider itself supreme. But eventually, so much time will have past that some of these human cultures will have spun off from the main body of humanity, creating their own civilizations, their own histories. Attempts will be made to re-knit the fabric of humanity, but those efforts will fail, allowing these limbs of humanity to drift off, set upon their own paths, their own futures. Eventually, they will even forget their origins, truths gilded and enshrouded by legend and myth.

Now, more than 5,000 years have past since the exodus from Earth. But though this should have provided ample time for the various arms of humanity to evolve and develop technological wonders that would obviate any need for sweat and strife, this is very much not so for one of its lost limbs. In this region of space, humanity has long since descended into imperialism and war, as a retrograde empire ruthlessly tries to maintain its grip over its far-flung holdings while keeping its greedy gaze fixed on the Nine Planets alliance, a loose affiliation of worlds who have so far resisted the Empire's attempts at conquest. Such has been the Empire's thirst for war that history and the more peaceful sciences have been neglected, abandoned so that adolescents might play with the weapons of the gods. This has resulted in a society whose overall knowledge is rapidly regressing, a society held up only by the needs of the moment.

In Diving Into The Wreck, the series' first instalment, we are introduced to Boss, the eccentric captain of Nobody's Business, a mid-sized spaceship customized for salvage and exploration. Boss, something of an expert in archaeological digs in space, has, for years now, hired out her talents to tourist groups interested in the ruins of spacecraft which, with the passage of time, have lapsed into legend. It's by no means a perfect life, but considering that she's lucky to even be alive, Boss isn't complaining. After all, the childhood experiment that not only claimed the life of her mother, but lead to her father abandoning her, could have easily claimed her life as well. But it didn't and now, regardless of the nightmares, Boss is determined to be her own woman.

However, when she discovers the wreck of a lifetime, everything changes. All her plans for her future, along with the walls she's put up between herself and her past, are threatened when she verifies that, yes, she has just stumbled across the ruins of a Dignity Vessel, rumored to have been part of an old Earth fleet that's now thousands of years dead. Purported to have lacked faster-than-light travel, the vessel should not be anywhere near this region of space. And yet, there it is, the archaeological dive of a lifetime. Boss must know its secrets, even if they bring her uncomfortably close to deeply disturbing truths about her own past.

In City of Ruins, the second volume in The Diving Universe, boss finds herself the reluctant but determined spearhead of two distinct missions, the most vital of which is to preserve the independence of the Nine Planets alliance. For the Empire, she's learned, is attempting to recreate lost technologies found in the wreck she discovered in Diving Into The Wreck, technologies that will certainly grant them the power to overwhelm the worlds that have so far managed to maintain their independence from the Empire. Feeling responsible for these technologies falling into imperial hands, Boss begins a crusade to re-balance power throughout the region, little knowing that it will put her in direct opposition to the father who abandoned her.

Her second mission, however, comes upon Boss rather shockingly when she unexpectedly comes face-to-face with humanity's past. For an accident has brought into her time a living, breathing dignity Vessel complete with a bewildered crew of humans who have travelled 5,000 years in an instant. As the men and women on the ship try to adjust to this crushing revelation, boss attempts to establish first-contact with these legends. Though her efforts are thwarted by cultural and linguistic barriers that have calcified into thick walls in the five millennia separating their times, they manage to establish a connection just in time to realize that the Empire is keenly interested in Boss' activities and the awesome discovery she has unearthed.

In Boneyard, the most recent effort in the series, boss and the captain of the dignity Vessel try to integrate their teams under a single corporate umbrella which will continue the search for lost technologies, for the discovery of the lost dignity Vessel has prompted Boss to realize that her civilization is actually behind the one that existed 5,000 years ago. But while she and captain Cooper continue to seek outt the fate of the fleet that his ship once called home, a member of Boss' team has been captured deep in imperial space. Knowing that the Empire will stop at nothing to pry the secrets of Boss' mission from her friend, boss must try to rescue her, but at what cost?

Energized by its unusual approach to science fiction, The diving Universe is, in turns, entertaining and infuriating. Ms. Rusch, an author of works that range from Star Wars to Fey, writes in clear, unchallenging prose that invites a wide audience to enter into her unusual universe. For where other series concentrate on wars and aliens, weapons and conspiracies, Ms. Rusch devotes herself to a much more quiet and methodical world, one in which reason and patience rescue her characters from peril far more often than heroism does. Her emphasis on archaeology is a bold choice. For it asks the reader to re-imagine the field from the perspective of an outsider. Our digs try to rediscover our own past, but what would it be like to have someone else try to rediscover ours? What if we were nothing more than dusty bones buried under centuries of collapsed infrastructure? This, combined with a vivid expression of her passion for diving, lends Ms. Rusch's work a charmingly rustic feel for a series set in space.

However, as much as its conception is inventive and its setting is imaginative, the series' characters and their circumstances are, at times, disastrous. As much as I am inclined to grant the author the benefit of the doubt -- perhaps her actors are simply acting in accordance with the customs of their future society --, they can be incredibly pedantic. Identical arguments are not only held more than once in the same novel, similar disputes are repeated across the entire series, causing the unified whole to feel as though it's running in place. Worse, Ms. Rusch spends virtually no time developing this supposedly villainous empire. Readers are left completely uninformed about its structures, its customs, even its rulers. Its only representatives are individuals who already have tangled and thorny histories with the story's characters which makes it impossible to distinguish the Empire's villainy from the ill-feeling created by personal disputes. It seems clear that Ms. Rusch wants her readers to take the Empire's authoritarianism on faith, to view it through the same biased lens that Boss does, but this prevents us from building up our own trepidation of the Empire. Instead, we must adopt Boss' view which hardly argues for anxiety and urgency. What's the point of having an enemy in a story if we do not fear it?

The Diving Universe is empowered by interesting ideas and intriguing approaches, but it is unfortunately marred by a narrowness of execution that left me wanting much more background and much more urgency. Entertaining, but deeply flawed. (2/5 Stars)

Hirohito by Herbert P. Bix

From The Week of August 06, 2012

Self-delusion is a remarkable and underrepresented aspect of human nature. For it has the capacity to convince us that we are right when we are wrong, righteous when we are sinning, strong when we are weak. In an effort to ease the pain of the cognitive dissonance we experience every time we compare our actions to our morals, self-delusion sands down the rough edges until our two worldviews, the internal and the external, are once again in harmony. But of course, this way lies disaster. For eventually, after the internal has had its way with the external, our conception of the world is so far out of step with how things actually are that calamitous mistakes are inevitable. We have lost all perspective. And with that goes any hope of relating to anyone of consequence, much less anyone we care about. For the powerless, this is simply pitiable, but for the powerful, for those in whom society invests authority, the consequences can be disastrous. Mr. Bix demonstrates in this lengthy, scholarly biography.

The child of centuries old Japanese nobility, emperor Hirohito stood at a vital crossroads in 20th century history. Born in 1902, he was trained from the cradle to not only be the imperial ruler of an emerging world power, but to be a man of the military, to be disciplined, to be regimented, to be efficient. But more than a leader, more than a man invested by his people and their government with an authority second only to fascist dictators like Hitler and Mussolini, Hirohito was thought by many to be divine, to be a force through whom the will and the superiority of imperial Japan could be made manifest on the world stage. A warrior became the focus of a war machine that had but few rivals in the century's early decades.

With no checks in place to mitigate this unimaginable power, Hirohito used it. He shaped his government to suit his desires; He authorized territorial conquests in Manchuria and China, looking the other way when his soldiers committed abominable war crimes; he even bid that war be declared on world powers like the United States, heedless of his military's own assessments that Japan would be overmatched in such a conflict. He did all this while endorsing the very culture that kept him in power, believing in the conceit that he understood both his place in history and his family's position in his country's destiny. Such hubris drove his empire into ruin, causing the deaths of millions of soldiers in war and hundreds of thousands of citizens in the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It destroyed the Japanese economy, ended imperial rule and directly lead to the American occupation of Japan. It lead to the end of the world that his family had so carefully imagined and that his supporters had so imprudently endorsed. It created a new Japan.

However, as Mr. Bix argues in this, his exhaustive biography of the last true emperor of japan, Hirohito himself escaped the consequences of his actions with only a few moderate wounds. He had to surrender his power and take up a largely ceremonial role in Japanese culture. He had to sit by and watch his country be transformed into a democracy. And he had to swallow the humiliating concessions made to japan's reformer, the United States. There would be no war crimes trial for Hirohito. For he was useful to japan's masters in Washington, Americans who, ignorant of Japanese culture, would invariably blunder in the country's westernization. He could glue the nation together while it was reborn into a new form, a new state.

This usefulness, contends Mr. Bix, lead to the suppression of Hirohito's role in WWII and the events that preceded it. Instead of the mastermind, Hirohito had been the victim of a militarized state. He was held captive by the influence of bellicose forces within Japan's government which foolishly sought out a war with the west. He was helpless to prevent the inevitable and destructive outcome. Perhaps, as the decades accumulated, he even believed this notion. But Mr. Bix does not. Arguing against the tide of popular opinion, he calls upon government records and the accounts of Hirohito's contemporaries to paint a different portrait of the man, one consistent with what we know of human nature, that power is corrupting, that to use it is destructive, and that to relinquish it is impossible. The idea that a man invested with ultimate authority refused to deploy that authority goes against everything we know about man and of Hirohito.

This is fascinating work. There can be no doubt that Mr. Bix has strongly held views on the role Hirohito played during WWII. But his scholarship and his willingness to declare his position on the matter, openly and honestly, lends his work here credibility. There's perhaps too much attention paid to the machinations of Japanese politics in the 1920s and 30s which must have been bewildering even then. But he nonetheless leaves us with a captivating portrait of a fascinating man who deserves both our pity, for the extent to which he was born into a life he could never change, and our scorn, for not rising above the world around him to be a visionary for his country. An intriguing study of a powerful man in a turbulent time... (3/5 Stars)

Tamerlane by Harold Lamb

From The Week of July 09, 2012

Human history has produced some bloody chapters, periods of profound violence and upheaval that have not only altered the fortunes of those millions who lived through them, but that, in reverberating down through subsequent generations, have changed the very course of human civilization. Empires have been smashed and raised up, peoples celebrated and exterminated as a consequence of such chapters which have unleashed every imaginable plague, from the human to the fecal, upon the unsuspecting world. How are we to interpret the deeds of those who drenched these periods in blood? Should they be venerated for the order they formed, or reviled for the destruction they sowed? Should they be remembered as they clearly wished to be, or forgotten as a reminder to those who might take inspiration from them and attempt to improve upon their deathly designs? These are some of the questions we are forced to consider while consuming Mr. Lamb's biography of arguably the world's greatest conquerer.

In 1336, in what is now Uzbekistan, Tamerlane, known contemporarily as Timur, was born without fanfare to a family of inconsequential landowners in an Asia still reverberating from the conquests of Genghis Khan. Sixty-eight years later, he would die, in the heart of an empire that he himself had forged, having outlived his enemies, his wives, and, tragically, many of his own children. In the nearly seven decades between, in which he rode across half the world, he created a people, conquered much of Asia, terrified Europe, and waged wars of unimaginable cost in human lives to civilizations still recovering from the aftereffects of plague and ignorance. He built cities, made roads, appointed judges and laid down laws. But he did so on the still smoking ashes of his own conquests, not so much bringing order as re-shaping it into an image that pleased and properly honored the grace, the power and the dignity of the great Tamerlane, conquerer of the world that mattered.

Forced to draw from but a few contemporaneous sources, Mr. Lamb, a noted narrative historian, is at his imaginative best in Tamerlane. Capturing the richness of the palaces and the lushness of the gardens, the horror of the battlefields and the terror of the vanquished, he pulls from the clutches of legend and infamy a man of contradictions. For Timur was both of his time and ahead of it; a man of faith and a man of mass-murder; a man of principle and a man who allowed his men to drink deeply of the rapacious cup of pillage. He was a force for both widespread creation and mass destruction, making him one of history's most chaotic forces.

Mr. Lamb makes no apologies for the conquerer. While he asks his readers to consider Timur of his own time, he acknowledges that the man was ruthless when crossed and merciless when acted against, detailing the voluminous incidents in which Timur practiced his bloody form of justice. And yet, the author is careful to catalogue the glimpses of the man's humanity in his civilization-building: the art, the order, the scholars, the books. Most intriguingly, he chronicles the life and death of the young Timur's first wife, the only creature who seemed capable of restraining him, leaving the reader to imagine a future in which she had lived to temper Timur's iron with the softness of society.

While such biographies are entertaining, they fall short of edifying. Too many vital sources have been lost, leaving even the scholars among us to speculate over the fragmented truths that have descended to us from the intervening centuries. Nonetheless, considering that Timur succeeded where Napoleon failed, and capitalized where Alexander did not, an examination of his deeds and his time are an instructive chapter in the history of our bloody development. (3/5 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)

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)

The Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan

From The Week of May 21, 2012

Of humanity's many pursuits, none can claim to have changed our world more than war. Since civilization began, it has forged nations, imposed cultural norms, popularized languages and redistributed wealth. It has created some empires while it ended others; it has elevated some gods while it smashed the idols of others. It has been the armory for technological advancement and the arsenal for democratic rights. For good and ill, for better and worse, war and its fickle fortunes have shaped all that we know and all that we hold dear. Few incidents in history provide as vivid an example of this principle than the great Peloponnesian war. Mr. Kagan's account demonstrates.

Launched in 431 BCE by an insignificant skirmish between minor players in ancient Greece and ended in 404 BCE with the destruction of the Athenian navy and the subsequent fall of the empire that floated it, the Peloponnesian War was a conflict that pitted the Delian League, lead by democratic Athens, against the Peloponnesian League, captained by oligarchical Sparta in a war for all of Greece. Though hostilities between these rival forces were halted on several occasions, their 27-year grudge match still managed to claim the lives of thousands of combatants, the freedoms of dozens of city states, the honorable civilizing customs of the Homerian age and the internal economies of all of the Greek powers. It began in Spartan fear and Athenian hope; it ended in the fall of Greece and the rise of Rome. Greece, with its philosophers and its innovators, its statesmen and their ideas, would never again occupy the center stage of human existence.

From Pericles to Lysander, from the tangled webs of Athenian politics to the exacting discipline of Spartan life, The Peloponnesian War is Mr. Kagan's simplified account of perhaps the most consequential conflict of the ancient world. Before Octavian and Brutus, before Caesar and Pompey, before Rome, there was Greece, a loose confederation of remarkable thinkers and warriors, statesmen and laborers who, at the height of their powers, drove the mighty Persian empire into the sea. They gave us science and mat, philosophy and culture. But this wisdom, this strength, was not enough to keep them from being tipped, by rivalry and envy, into barbarism, chaos and the end of all they held dear. Step by doomed step, Mr. Kagan reveals the events that cast Greece into shadow, paving the way for the rise of a new and familiar world.

Though plagued at times by the 2,500 years of change that stand between us and the apocalyptic events it chronicles, The Peloponnesian War is a challenging and rewarding read. Mr. Kagan, the Stirling Professor of Classics and History at Yale University, successfully translates ancient disputes and customs into a language comprehensible in the 21st century. Consequently, many of the actors in this most ancient drama spring to life from the pages of his dry text, fighting for dominance and victory in a warrior's world. But as much as the work lends skills and motives to individuals otherwise lost to the vicissitudes of time, its most enduring contribution comes from the extent to which it chronicles a war that seems shockingly similar to far more recent conflicts, particularly, World War I which was also launched by a relatively insignificant conflict and which was continued despite the participants being fully aware that it might well destroy the fabric of their societies. Such were the needs of honor that this reality seems to have been made secondary to the thirst for victory.

For all its value,The Peloponnesian War is troubled by a notable flaw. While, yes, Mr. Kagan is forced to reconstruct this most ancient war from only a handful of incomplete sources, he does very little to supplement the readers knowledge of the actors here with his own scholarly expertise. For instance, though he spends some time draping Pericles in honors and greatness, he does very little to explain why the Athenian statesman was held in such high regard. Thus, while we come to understand how these men and the powers they helmed came to rack and ruin, we understand them only shallowly, their motivations discarded in favor of seemingly endless rounds of negotiations, machinations and war. Moreover, Mr. Kagan does little to relate these events to our times, an addition that would have been decidedly welcome in a tome this long.

Fascinating work, but burdened by its relentless focus on the facts of the war in lieu of valuable context. (3/5 Stars)