God's Jury by Cullen Murphy

From The Week of October 22, 2012 Though the human character is possessed of many heartening virtues like compassion, generosity and altruism, these cannot be counted without also tallying up its more lamentable aspects. And of these, surely our tendency to be judgmental must be considered among the most grievous. For few other features of human nature have been responsible for more death and destruction than judgment which not only legitimizes our childish jealousies, it enables a capacity for slaughter on a scale that has kept human civilization from reaching its full potential. For in passing judgment on a man, one is effectively elevating himself and his codes of behavior above the object of his judgment. He is declaring that his way is better, that he is wiser. And with this superior mindset in place, authoritarianism is soon to follow. This sad, recurring truth inherent to the human character is demonstrated well in Mr. Murphy's fascinating if scattered history.

Ignited as a means of punishing heretics and scaring the faithful into proper compliance with Catholic orthodoxy, the Inquisition has existed,in various states,for almost 800 years. Formalized in 13th-century Europe and headquartered in Rome, its practitioners were dispatched to the four corners of the Catholic world where, empowered by the church, they would sit in judgement of strayed,and supposedly straying, adherents of the faith. Described by Mr. Murphy as having been detectives,prosecutors and judges rolled into one, inquisitors were not burdened with the necessity of proving their cases. They were not troubled with the bothersome necessity of public trials. Backed by the awesome authoritas of the Catholic church, they could act as they saw fit, arrogantly confident that only god, and perhaps their ecclesiastical masters, could judge them. In this way. Armed with these unimaginable powers, the Inquisition not only supposedly uncovered crypto-Muslims and Jews, they actively worked to foil the plots of those disorderly rebels who aimed to reform the church,untroubled by anything like the modern law. For in such times, they were the only law that mattered.

Chillingly penned and extensively researched, God's Jury is the gripping and disturbing result of ten years of labor. Mr. Murphy,an American author and magazine man, dredges up 800 years of church history to mount a devastating case against not only the abuses of civil liberties inherent in the surveillance state, but the ways in which the human capacity for hypocrisy and smug superiority are unleashed in the judgmental, blinding them to the balms of compassion and decency. In illustrating how inquisitors cynically kept their hands clean even while consigning tens of thousands of their fellow humans to painful torture and fiery death, The author marshalls any number of cases of the abuse of church power not so much to assault the already crumbling walls of an ancient institution, but to highlight the ways in which we can all, even the righteous, especially the righteous, be tempted to separate ourselves from our morality for the sake of power over others.

For all its virtues, God's Jury suffers somewhat from flawed construction. In incorporating elements of memoir, investigative journalism, historical non-fiction and political commentary, it is compelled to make compromises in order to come in at fewer than 400 pages. For instance, a more thorough reconstruction of the Inquisition's earlier centuries is forsaken in lieu of an analysis of how its practices and the desires that drive them can be connected to modern-day state-sponsored surveillance. But while there is value in connecting these dots, the effort dilutes the history that is the backbone of Mr. Murphy's tale, a reality that makes of it a jack of many trades but master of none. Still, it may be that the present-day connections drawn here will please many readers who might've been off-put by a dryer reconstruction of dark deeds now centuries gone.

It may well be that the Inquisition's ugliness was confined to those who claimed to be Catholics, that others were beyond their purview. But given the degree to which the Inquisition systematized cruelty, and in light of how difficult it would have been to be anything but a Christian for much of the time of its height, this fails to be a distinction with any meaning. It wasn't as though the faithful had much of a choice. In wishing to live as they chose, they were broken and burned. There is, for them, no apology too strong to earn forgiveness. (3/5 Stars)

Red Country by Joe Abercrombie

From The Week of October 15, 2012 Entropy is an inescapable force. Even the most efficient systems in the universe, systems so complex and advanced that we can barely comprehend them, must bow to the laws of decay. For this is the way of things in the grand experiment we call life, a universe in which everything and every one is destined to die from cold. Entropy cannot be defeated; it cannot even be argued with. It can only be put off for a time by the wisdom of self-restraint and the careful husbanding of resources which must inevitably run out. So what do we do with this terrible truth? Armed with the knowledge that everything will eventually devolve into nothingness, do we yield to the inevitable? Do we surrender, knowing that everyone else must, at some point, follow? Or do we stubbornly persist, aware of the unavoidable but equally unwilling to concede that life, while we have it, is worthless? Mr. Abercrombie, in his inimitable, British way, confronts such existential questions in his latest, grimmest novel.

In a savage world of mud and war, swords and slavery, peace from the powers that be is a rare, priceless commodity. For the Union, the Northmen and the gurkish, the continent's three notable, imperial powers, are invariably at one another's throats, clashes whose toxicity inevitably infect their civilian populations. The most consequential strain of this virus of war is the degree to which it makes monsters of men, burning out their capacity for empathy and making a mockery of their morality. And so, not only do the little people have to avoid being conscripted by the major players, they must stay beneath the radar of the cruel men changed by them, men who are willing to do anything for profit.

Shy South isn't so fortunate. A thief turned farmer, she is largely content with her lot, turning her back on her past as a bandit to raise her child-aged brother and sister with the help of Lamb, a family friend, a mild-mannered Northman who harbors his own dark past. Her settled life takes a sharp and devastating turn, however, when, after returning from selling their goods at market, Shy and lamb discover their farm burned and her siblings vanished. Spurred on by rage and desperation, Shy begins to track the men who attacked her family, learning that they are a mercenary group specializing in stealing children, for what purpose no one is willing to imagine. Through plain an desert, across river and forest, Shy and Lamb hunt for what was taken from them, little knowing that they are flirting with the crux of larger events.

Set in the same universe as The First Law trilogy and its two supporting novels, Red Country is the most virulent murderer in Mr. Abercrombie's gallery of rogues. Though his other works take great pleasure in subverting the most conventional tropes of the fantasy genre, the heroic quest, the war for all the crowns, this latest effort narrows its focus in order to feature and confront more enduring truths about human existence: that it is short, that its successes and its failures are often decided by nothing more purposeful than happenstance, and that our choices are rarely entirely our own. Summoning a cunning and clever pen, Mr. Abercrombie creates a host of fantastic characters, harnesses them with a most difficult mission and lets them loose upon his grim world, letting the death and the oftentimes hilarious Gallos humor do all the talking.

For all its wit and gracelessness, its savagery and its bumbling, Red Country possesses an even deeper truth, that, in life, the most difficult achievement is to overcome ones nature. We are the way we are, cowards and heroes, fair and foul. To alter that destiny, to overcome our shortcomings, requires unceasing dedication and an indomitable will. It demands that one reject the values they were taught and embrace a new way of being, all the while knowing that the temptation to revert to their prior, easier, more natural self will forever be nipping at them, insisting that its insidious song be heard. Who has the determination to realize such a permanent transformation? Not many.

Mr. Abercrombie is the king of helplessness. He deploys his keen understanding of the weaknesses of the human heart to demonstrate the many ways in which we let ourselves down and turn our lives into cliches. And he does it by entertaining us and teaching us that energy, once spent, can never be recovered.

This is not his finest work -- that award must go to The Heroes or Before They Are Hanged --, but Mr. Abercrombie's second best is far better than the best of what most others have to offer. (4/5 Stars)

The Island At The Center Of The World by Russell Shorto

From The Week of October 15, 2012 Though we cannot recognize all the ways in which its influence manifests upon us and our society, the past is always with us. It lives in our language and our culture, in our institutions and in our customs, the seeds of another time flowering through our present. This is why we study history, why it is more than dates and times, battles and fetishes, because to understand them is to understand how we are like them. It is to comprehend the unbroken chain of cultural and biological genetics that have been handed down to us across countless generations. We do not invent things or generate ideas in a vacuum. They emanate from our training and our society, from our experiences and our backgrounds, all of which falls under the banner of history. To understand it is to understand ourselves and this is what Mr. Shorto endeavors to do in his exhaustive chronicle of an unfairly forgotten American colony.

Before the English and the French, before the Boston Tea party and the American Revolution, there existed, on an island we now call Manhattan, the headquarters for a colony named New Netherland. The result of Dutch efforts to find a route to Asia not already claimed by the Spaniards or the Portuguese, it was Holland's western-most colony, an ambitious, and even at-times prosperous, stab at empire that claimed a considerable portion of what is now New York's coastline. Established in 1614, it was governed by several iron-fisted Dutchmen whose heavy-handed policies drove their own colonists, who then enjoyed more rights than most European subjects, to discord and rebellion, disharmonies which went a long way to preventing the colony from flourishing and becoming a desirable destination. However, what the Dutch did not themselves ruin by dispute the English finished with war, deploying a measure of their increasing navel power to capture the colony and bring it under the banner of Britannia.

However, though New Netherland persisted but for some 50 years, its presence left enduring marks on the island which would one day be the beating heart of business and commerce in the human world. Its physical layout and even some of its legal codes were adopted there by the British, ensuring that more than the Dutch names for streets and neighborhoods would survive into the 21st century. Its people endured on the land they'd chosen, carving out lives expanded by their descendents, leaving a legacy that would long outlive the names of the men who fought over and shaped the forgotten colony of New Netherland.

As much a tale of archaeological history as colonial, The Island At The Center of The World is an engaging, if overly exhaustive, examination of a brief but fascinating period of pre-American history. Mr. Shorto, a historian, capitalizes on the somewhat recent discovery, and ongoing translation of, Dutch histories of the colony previously ignored. From these documents spill a treasure trove of information about the colony's leaders and the political rivalries in which they disastrously embroiled themselves in the years prior to the English conquest of what would come to be called New York. To the author's credit, New Netherland's strong, formerly neglected characters are fully realized here, their actions held up against the backdrop of the three Anglo-Dutch wars which saw the colony traded back and forth before being firmly settled in the English camp, ironic given that the English crown itself would soon be worn by Dutchmen.

This is an interesting chronicle, full of personalities and difficult deeds. However, while Mr. Shorto does yeoman's work in reviving the importance of the Dutch history of early America, he does less than a stellar job grounding these deeds in a coherent chronology. The importance of rivalry and dispute are elevated well above dates and times, leaving the colony's 50 years to blur together in a seething mass of discord and trailblazing. That said, this shortcoming does little to diminish the degree to which he has brought New Netherland into focus, all while popularizing the astonishing efforts of the dedicated souls who work, even now, to complete the difficult translation of 400-year-old records.

Verbose but valuable... The united States is a nation of inputs, blood and power, culture and custom, poured into it from the immigrants who swim for its shores. It should then come as little surprise to find that one of its first colony's was a microcosm of what was to come. (3/5 Stars)

Strange New Worlds by Ray Jayawardhana

From The Week of October 15, 2012 Of the many consequential questions humanity is yet to answer, only one has the power to reorder our society no matter the outcome. Is there life elsewhere in the universe, beyond our shores, beyond our star? If the answer is no then we might well be a species sired by the divine. For what would be the odds, in a galaxy of 200 billion stars, that life would arise only on one planet, orbiting one ordinary star? Religionists the world over would have the necessary ammunition to make a victory of their creationist worldview. But if life does exist on other worlds, if, rather than persist alone, we are but a single voice in a vibrant chorus of sentience, then the foundations of our religions and our philosophies will be shattered, leaving us to reevaluate our relatively unremarkable position in the galactic neighborhood. How will we settle this question? Mr. Jayawardhana explains the mechanics of planet-hunting in his delightful, astronomical journey.

For centuries now, we've understood that the sea of lights in the night's sky is a tapestry of stars, suns like our own that burn brightly in the cold vacuum of space. We've even known, for some time now, that these unfathomably large nuclear reactors, during their formation, capture debris which eventually coalesce into planets of gas and rock, ice and iron, that settle into various orbits around their parent stars. We've understood that, for life to form on these worlds, they must be a certain distance from their suns, far enough away as to not be scorched and yet close enough as to not be frozen. However, until the last two decades, we've only grasped these concepts by looking at Earth, our home, and teasing out the laws and circumstances by which planets can be made hospitable to life. Observation of other worlds had, thanks to a lack of understanding and technological advancement, to be left to the arena of speculation and wonder.

All of that changed in 1995 when the first exoplanet, a world orbiting a star other than our own, was discovered. In the 17 years since, astronomers, deploying various techniques and computerized telescopes, have increased that number to 800, worlds of diamond and methane, ice and inferno, worlds where day never becomes night nor night day, worlds so large they could swallow our own without even a burp. And though we have not yet found life in the universe, the possibility grows, with every passing discovery, that one night, a human being will stare into the sky with the aid of a telescope and find out there a world where someone else is looking back.

From microlensing to spectral lines, from hot Jupiters to superearths, Strange New Worlds is a captivating journey through the most recent history of human astronomy: its methods, its practitioners, and its technologies. Mr. Jayawardhana, a professor at the University of Toronto, begins his chronicle by explaining the startlingly difficult means by which exoplanets are detected and concludes with examinations of several of the most interesting members of this crop. And yet, for as educational as these revelations are, it's the journey in-between that delights most. For here, the author conveys not only love for his field but an understanding and a respect for the discipline, the determination, and the passion necessary to advance the cause and push back the unknown inch by painstaking inch. For astronomy is not a science for the half-hearted. It is a nocturnal commitment whose rewards are as rare as they are spectacular.

At the current rate of discovery, the odds are that we will discover someday soon that we are not alone in the universe. And on that day, and the years thereafter, we will look back at the trail-blazers who, over countless nights, studied the sky and brought us incrementally closer to that shattering revelation. Mr. Jayawardhana is one of those pioneers. And though his work here is brief, he wastes few words, packing a lifetime of understanding into a text any layman can comprehend. This is enchanting and rewarding work.

Highly educational and not in the least dull... (4/5 Stars)

The Moreau Series by S. Andrew Swann

From The Week of October 08, 2012 Playing god is a tricky game. For as much as we have summoned the technical and cognitive powers to master various scientific disciplines, we are in no way divine. We lack that wealth of wisdom and understanding, of patience and vision, possessed by such theoretical beings. And yet, our expertise in the sciences has given us the keys to unlock the doors to the properties of the life around us, to alter the very genes upon which these organisms live and grow. Are these not the powers of god? And if so, do we not owe it to the life that we create that we take on the responsibilities of parenthood, of stewardship? These are vital questions we will all be forced to confront in the decades ahead, decades defined by genetic engineering and depleted resources. They are questions Mr. Swann confronts in his fascinating if overly bombastic series.

By the middle of the 21st century, war will have utterly reconfigured the world we know. From japan to India, Asia, including the Middle East, will be a wasteland, the devastated gestalt of several disconnected conflicts now known simply as the Pan-Asian War. Refugees from that consequential conflict have found their way to Europe and North America, further fraying the already decaying social safety nets present in those marginally healthier regions of the globe. Worse than the refugees, though, are the Moreau, genetically engineered soldiers from the Pan-Asian War which have flooded into the still-standing cities of the west.

The result of experiments designed to bestow upon the human form the many gifts of the animal kingdom, the Moreau are halfmen, humans crossed with strains of feline, rodent, ursine and canine. Blessed with speed and skill, claw and tooth, these fearsome creatures, made for war, have bred with one another, producing offspring who, while possessed of genes engineered for combat, have never experienced the depravities of the battlefield. No, these second generation Moreau know only the ghettos of the west into which they were born. These so-called Moritowns are 21st century slums, places of death and disease which have been scarred by neglect and exploitation. For other than the purposes of relieving their fetishistic urges, the humans who created the Moreau want nothing to do with them now that the wars are over. After all, the Moreau are walking, talking reminders of the abandonment of their own morality and forsaken responsibilities.

Into this tangled web of corrupt geopolitics and twisted science are dropped a loosely connected group of three genetic experiments, each of whom have found some kind of home in this challenging environment. Nohar Rajasthan is the son of a martyred deserter from the Pan-Asian War. A tiger strain, he rolls his talent for finding people into a career as a private investigator which lands him in the heart of a strange and explosive conspiracy. While clawing his way to the truth, he befriends angel Lopez, a young, Peruvian rabbit breed left for dead in the slums of Cleveland where Nohar was born, and encounters Evi Isham, an government asset formerly of Israeli intelligence engineered to be the perfect human soldier. Together and separately, they pry apart bits of a massive, multi-pronged coverup, the exposure of which is bound to completely transform human civilization.

Though infected by its own strain of over-the-top blockbusterism, The Moreau Series successfully imagines a near-future world contorted by human arrogance and selfishness. Mr. Swann, who went on to pen an excellent trilogy that build on this dystopian foundation, allows Nohar, Evi and angel to each feature in their own volume of this chronicle, a decision which permits us to become intimately familiar with the quirks and needs of the various forms of Moreau. Mr. Swann may not have the most creative prose, but what he lacks here in the way of polish he more than makes up for in inventiveness. For he's constructed a plausible, if grim, world, welded atop this morass of crippled ethics and broken dreams a vicious conspiracy, and wrapped this lethal package in layers of Hollywood thunder and 1940s-style whodoneits which hold together passably well. It's a conglomeration of styles and influences which neatly mirror Mr. Swann's Moreau who are themselves a hodgepodge of various genetic sources.

To whatever extent The Moreau Series is flawed in execution, it more than amply earns the benefit of the doubt by asking thoughtful questions that will inevitably make themselves the centerpiece of mainstream discourse in the years ahead. The Moreau are sentient weapons. They are things created by humanity to serve a single, destructive purpose. When that purpose is completed, they are abandoned, unwanted, subjects of an ugly chapter in history that humanity is ashamed to even acknowledge, let alone admit to. This is, of course, the natural result of innovation without wisdom, of creation without understanding. For all of the issues the Moreau face would have been perfectly obvious to their creators if they paused for a moment's thought. But no, driven by the necessities of war, and unhindered by conscience, they blazed forth and created a new race of beings that quickly discover their gods are profoundly flawed. We should all hope that, when our future selves inevitably grapple with precisely these dilemmas, they are not so shortsighted.

As engaging as it is hampered... The Moreau Series is not Mr. Swann's finest work, but there is much here to keep fans of ethics, science and combat well-entertained. (3/5 Stars)

Tubes by Andrew Blum

From The Week of October 08, 2012 As much as our egos may steer us to think otherwise, we generally know very little about the machinery that keeps civilization afloat. How many non-chemistry majors could create a battery? How many non-mechanics could build a car? How many non-architects could design an office tower? Every day, we rely on the expertise of millions just to get to work in the morning, let alone to take a successful flight to some other point on the globe. Many argue that there is nothing amiss with this form of specialization. And yet, how ignorant can we be about our world and still expect it to function? Is there not a point at which the general knowledge of the workings of the world become not just valuable but essential? Mr. Blum thinks so. For he has endeavored to learn the innerworkings of perhaps the least understood platform for our every day lives.

Born in the late 1960s but brought to the general public in the 1990s, the Internet has utterly transformed our world. In little more than a decade, it revolutionized the way we consume and disseminate everything from news to music, from friendships to obsessions. It has connected a species which was designed to operate best in small social groups and plugged nearly seven billion souls into a global system, a network of commerce and socialization, of research and opinion, that has welded a kind of superculture atop our nationalism, a globalism upon our regionalism. It has made information and its distribution vital to our lives.

But what is the Internet? And beyond that, where is it? Does it live in some top-secret building somewhere, or is it distributed across too many different systems for the answer to be meaningful? Is the Internet a thing, an object, with quantifiable capacities and measurable limitations? Or has it transcended the purely physical to become something more, something that lives inside us as much as it does in the world? Mr. Blum departs his comfortable home in New York City to trot the globe for answers to these fascinating and existential questions. And though the answers he gleans aren't necessarily conclusive, it turns out that the widely ridiculed statement of Ted Stevens, the United States senator from Alaska, was true after all. The Internet is "a series of tubes."

From routers to internet exchanges, from undersea cables to fiberoptic hubs, Tubes is a fascinating journey to discover the heart of the Internet. Mr. Blum travels across much of the United States and Europe, with informative stops in Frankfort, Amsterdam, London and Palo alto, his doggedness turning up complex and fascinating truths about what must be considered to be the most well-used system in human history. Rather than dispel whatever magic the Internet has managed to accrue over its brief life, the author succeeds in charming us with its kluge-like construction and enchanting us with its metaphysical elements which cannot be reduced to simple, dumb numbers. For as much as the Internet is composed of harddrives and data centers, cables and modems, it is also the gestalt of human experience and communication, an immeasurable pool into which humanity pours its passions and its sorrows. Such a thing can never be quantified.

This is memorable work. Mr. Blum adopts a light, characteristically British tone which relies on humor and self-deprecation to tell the story of his journey. But what this method sacrifices by way of sober analysis it gains by way of entertainment, humanizing the technicalities of routers and exchanges and transforming them into objects of understandable, if awesome, significance. Moreover, Mr. Blum's chronicle could have served to be 50 pages longer. The brevity of his examination left me wanting more detail, with numerous opportunities to expand the layman's knowledge of the Internet's systemic workings past up for the sake of a breezy narrative. However, in every other respect, this is lovely work.

The Internet will probably never be perfectly comprehended. Every day, it grows faster than we can even reasonably measure it. But to the extent that we can glimpse the foundations upon which it rests, Tubes succeeds in enlightening us. (3/5 Stars)

Outlaw Machine by Brock Yates

From The Week of October 08, 2012 Freedom is an elusive state. For as much as we proclaim its virtues and celebrate its proliferation, true freedom is antithetical to civilization, arising only when the individual is able to shrug out of the shackles of the state to become a liberated man, answerable only to himself. The truly free do not bow to anyone. They do not allow themselves to be enchained by restrictive laws or womanly vows. They are countries unto themselves.

Given the degree to which civilization has swept across the great body of humanity, there are but few places for the truly free to hide. There is no land they can claim, no banner they can rally to. They must exist as singular units within the broader superstructure of society, lampposts of righteous anarchism positioned along the dark road to the welfare state. They must hold tight to their values while the world moves away from them, towards its apparent destiny as a homogeneous melting pot into which all must be sucked and made to conform. Thus, to distinguish themselves, individuals must take on symbols, badges of honor and courage that signify them as creatures of enlightened thinking and singular attitudes. Mr. Yates covers the history of their most important symbol in this breezy and moving history.

Since the first of its kind hit the road more than a century ago, the Harley Davidson motorcycle has been a laborious machine only its owner could love. Prone to inexplicable dysfunction and hobbled by retrograde design, this infamous American bike lacks the power of its British brothers and the graceful perfection of its Japanese cousins. It is obnoxiously loud and notoriously difficult to drive, especially on the open road where more advanced models put it to shame. And yet, the Harley has not only stubbornly persisted, its popularity has, since its low ebb in the 1970s and 1980s, exploded, its fickle performance and its general inferiority transformed from drawbacks to virtues by its community of drivers seeking a means by which to separate themselves from the masses and express their unwillingness to conform. Every flaw, every drawback, becomes a badge of honor, a point of pride that, when repaired and endured, demonstrates to fellow riders a skill with ones hands and head that allow him to belong to a prized club of individualists who do not depend on society for their pleasures. This is a motorcycle that says something about a man, loudly and truly. He is not like you.

From its design to its corporate stewards, from the wars that gave it life to the gangs that made it infamous, The Outlaw Machine winningly captures the Harley Davidson motorcycle. Here, Mr. Yates chronicles not only the band of intrepid immigrants who envisioned it and actualized it, he gathers up the tricky skeins of cultural history that determined its fate. Though, at times, he waxes a bit too romantic over the bike's influence on the American psyche, this is a flaw easily forgiven in light of his unflinching analysis of the Harley Davidson Motor Company which, but for its most recent management, is rarely acclaimed. And yet, the fact that the motorcycle has not only survived but flourished successfully demonstrates Mr. Yates' argument, that, in some inimitable way, this flawed Hog is a perfect fit for those men and women who, though born too late to be cowboys, nonetheless wish to live beyond civilization's blazing lights.

This is not a story of corporate triumph. This is not a tale of engineering genius. It is not a history of a visionary. The Harley Davidson is antithetical to these clean, easy and even inspiring 21st-century narratives. No, this is a story about how a thing, almost accidentally, came to represent the angst of a subset of humanity who feel as though they have no place in the great, well-oiled machine that is civilization. It is a story about the limitations of order and about the means through which we all try to tell the world who we really are. And in this, it is beautifully done.

A vivid demonstration of how perfection can be overrated... (4/5 Stars)