Cake gone wrong

I am shortly off to vacation, but I invite you to visit Cakewrecks, a site about rather bizarre cakes. This one is rather nasty (don't look before eating). (via Jezebel)

Darling don't you go and take that drug, do you think it's gonna make you change?

Novels, or modern ones at least, are very often negative forms of self-help books. While self-help books promote means of finding happiness, novels more often than not show how choices lead to bad outcomes. The reader hopefully will take the lessons and adjust their lives accordingly. I think a very good novel will often lead a person to reevaluate choices and consider how they might treat others better.

In Dirk Wittenborn's Pharmakon, the questions of happiness and the treatment of others are front and center. At the dawn of the pharmacological era, Dr. Will Friedrich, a psychologist with plenty of emotional issues of his own ambitiously pursues a plan to cure sadness with a substance distilled from a tropical plant. Things seem to go swimmingly and then they don't. The aftermath of the experiment leaves a path of destruction through two generations of Friedrichs.

Wittenborn is interested in the quest for happiness, which he makes out to be as elusive as the quest for Middle East peace. Nearly everyone in the book ends up compromising and settling for something they don't want. With more than one character given to abusing drugs and alcohol, he nicely compares legal means to find happiness with drugs to illegal ones.

The ending isn't terribly satisfying, but I enjoyed my journey with the characters. While much of the story is quite sad, or even tragic, the writing is crisp and often quite funny. Those looking for a skeptical look at the American Dream will find it here.

NYRB sale

The New York Review of Books is having a summer sale. If you are not familiar with their books, then by all means rectify the situation. A select group of individual items are on sale for 25% off (which after shipping isn't all that awesome) but a number of collections are on sale for 40% off which is actually awesome. A few of their collections are particularly appealing.

For those wanting a subtle critique of the Imperialist mindset, look no further than the Farrell and Flanagan collection. I can't speak to the Flanagan, but J.G. Farrell's books, which feature British citizens facing a crumbling Empire in India, Singapore and Ireland are fascinating.

The Science Fiction Collection has a Christopher Priest book, with which I am unfamiliar, but it's Priest so it is probably good. There is also a book by Ernst Junger called the Glass Bees, which looks quite good. Finally there is an edition of the War of the Worlds with Edward Gorey drawings.

Finally if you liked Blood Meridian, this pair of revisionist westerns might be up your alley.

Odds and sods

This is potentially nifty. Random House is releasing Karen Marie Moning's Dark Fever as a free podcast. On the book's website you will get a few chapters per week You can find it here. I don't know a thing about the author, but I like that publishing companies are finding new ways to try before you buy. The podcast approach is nice as well, as you can create chapters more easily on your Ipod or other listening device. Here are a couple of links on how to make CD based audiobooks more manageable on an Ipod. I remember lugging around 24 tapes of the Making of the Atomic Bomb. It would have been much nicer on the Ipod.

Check out this map of the world with country size determined by number of Olympic medal winners. Both Cuba and Australia look to be doing better than their populations would suggest.

Here is Pavement doing Cut Your Hair on 120 Minutes.

Carter Beats the Devil, reviewed here by the Williamsburg, VA regional library blog (which is quite good) is a book I quite liked, but was overshadowed by Kavalier and Klay which I read shortly before it. Like Klay, Devil is set in the early 20th century and tells a well written funny and sad story. I can't say why, but the two seemed quite similar. I should probably take another look now that it has been some years.

Over at Barnes and Noble Paul Paul DiFilippo has a review essay on the peculiar genre known as dark fantasy. I believe James Blaylock writes in this genre. I have a few of his books lying about the house waiting to be read.

Peter Hopkirk

I've rarely enjoyed a book as much as I did Peter Hopkirk's the Great Game. Written in a adventure novelistic style, it tells the story of 19th and early 20th century British and Russian adventurers who risked life and limb as they tried to win Central Asia for their empires. The stories are nearly incredible, with very young men traveling under amazingly harsh condition and with little background. Not surprisingly, they often died whether at their imperial opponents hands or at the hands of the locals, who more often than not, weren't all that interested in being part of an empire.

Hopkirk followed up these books with Setting the East Ablaze and Like Hidden Fire, books about Soviet and Ottoman/German efforts to up-end the British Empire in Asia. Like the Great Game, these are adventure stories, real-life ones, but adventure stories nonetheless. And they are filled with all the twists and turns of a novel.

I've just read his Foreign Devils on the Silk Road, which is also about European competition in Central Asia, but instead of political control as the focus, it is Buddhist art. The part of China now known as Xinjiang, but formerly known as Chinese Tartary or East Turkestan has the brutal Taklamakan Desert at its center. During the Tang Dynasty the area was home to a number of trading towns that featured a particular variant of Buddhist art. As the Tang fell, the towns and the art disappeared under the sands.

Foreign Devils on the Silk Road is about a series of explorers, representing Britain, Russia, Germany, Japan and the United States who sought to capture the archaeological glory of uncovering lost cities, manuscripts and art. Like in the prior books, the explorers were exposed to harsh conditions, although fewer met their end on these quests.

While I liked this book, I didn't like it as much as the Great Game related books. That is quite possibly personal bias, as I quite like political stories and don't have nearly as strong an interest in Buddhist art or archeology. Those with strong interests in these fields will find much to enjoy and even those who don't will likely appreciate Hopkirk's vigorous prose and nose for a good story.

The Fallen Idol

Having just read and adored Our Man in Havana (which for some reason I picked up three or four times before fulling committing --- a bit weak given its short length,) I was thrilled to hear a movie, made by none other than Carol Reed, existed. I was then crestfallen to learn that it is only available on VHS (in the US at least) ! Here's hoping the Criterion Collection fills the gap.

Reed and Greene's best known collaboration is the Third Man, one of the greatest movies of all time, but they also worked together on Our Man in Havana and the Fallen Idol. While I can't say I enjoyed the Fallen Idol as much as the Third Man, fans of that film will want to seek out the Fallen Idol.

The movie centers on the relationship between a lonely Ambassador's son and the British butler who runs his household. The boy idolizes (but also patronizes) the butler, calling him Baines (his far more formal wife is always Mrs. Baines). When the boy witnesses something he doesn't understand, he commits error after error that puts his friend in great peril.

The movie is both visually and thematically similar to the Third Man. Reed focuses in on faces and the faces communicate as much if not more than the words. He revels in shadow and large empty spaces, as in late night streets and unoccupied embassies. The themes of betrayal (sometimes two way) and the breaking of innocence are essential in both films, although this one is a bit gentler than the Third Man. If anything this will movie will prove that Reed was much more than a one trick pony

Sent to spy on a Cuban talent show

Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana is a delightful farce that manages to be serious and laugh out loud funny at the same time. It follows the unfortunate Wormold, a British vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana whose shortage of funds finds him willing to accept an offer to join the British Intelligence Service. As a generally inept and careless person, he can do any actual spying, so he ends up sending fake reports back to London so that he can use his expense fund to pay for his daughter's many expensive needs. It all goes swimmingly until his reports begin to create crises.

The book reads as a humorous novel. The spy characters are nearly all idiotic buffoons who can't see Wormold's creations for the poorly assembled tales they are. There is intrigue all around Wormold who is incapable of seeing it correctly. There is also plenty of domestic farce as his daughter leads him into a series of misfortunes.

The book can be read just as humor, but Greene has more to say than that. On the personal level, Wormold is the sort of weak person who takes the wrong path because it is easy and available. Most (if not all) of the tragedy in the book is a result of his careless approach to life. What's more, despite being a spy story, it's message is that the intelligence world is a world filled with fools whose damage far outweigh any benefit they provide. At the end of the book, a few characters explicitly reject the Cold War, but the book is an implicit rejection of the conflicts that grind up individuals for some higher purpose.

Uh oh

The Washington Post has a profile on George Pelecanos who wonders if he has said all he needs to say about crime.

Pelecanos, who is 51, told me: "Sometimes I think 'The Wire' said it all, and I might as well not write any more crime novels. I can feel my energy beginning to dissipate. One thing I didn't realize about this business when I started was that it could be my job to write a novel a year, but it's also my job to take a walk and think." He owes one more book to his publisher, and the contract specifies that it be a crime novel and that it be delivered by the end of the year, but he's not sure in what direction his writing will go after that. Working in the overlap where the crime novelist meets the literary novelist, Pelecanos has always been willing to push his heroes, his city and his storytelling craft through difficult changes.

I am of two minds. He is clearly at the top of his game right now, so maybe it is time to switch games. We don't want to see the slide in quality that we saw in Chandler or in all the sci fi authors who churn out books far longer than they should. On the other hand, even a so-so Pelecanos is better than most everyone else out there and he is one of the best of writers of DC, the other being Edward P Jones. So hopefully he will switch to politics or some such.

Mixed

Today I love George Pelecanos even more than I did yesterday. For he has name-checked the Silver Jews on his playlist. Now we can quibble over the song selection (I would have gone with the Wild Kindness) but I am quite happy that they lead his list. He also has some nice crime jazz and Drive By Truckers on there.

The Man Booker long list is out. I don't have much to say other than the inclusion of crime thriller Child 44 is nice to see.

Here is Spoon covering the Stones Rocks Off.

You have almost certainly seen this, but if not, take a look at Feist on Sesame Street.

Don't let your babies grow up to be wrestlers

When people think of exploitative industries, the first that comes to mind is generally porn. According to Matthew Randazzo V in his Ring of Hell: The Story of Chris Benoit; the Fall of the Pro Wrestling Industry, one should think of pro wrestling in the same light. He portrays a world in which sadism, substance and steroid abuse and self-inflicted torture are not just tolerated but celebrated. Ranging from Canada's Hart House, with its Dungeon, to the yakuza managed New Japan Pro Wrestling league to the mania of the American wrestling scene, the book is a story of degradation where some, like Hulk Hogan, manage to make millions, while others die in their thirties from the physical and drug wear.

The relatively small Chris Benoit, who Randazzo portrays as both a cruel sadist and maniacally driven was about as small as someone could be and still work in pro wrestling. Of course he became an avid steroid user, and as was well publicized, he killed his wife and young son, using the skills he learned in the ring. The book though isn't a true crime book. The focus of the book is not Benoit's crime, which gets only a few pages, but the crimes of the industry as a whole.

Wrestling fans will likely either eat up the large amounts of industry gossip or be repulsed at the depiction of their favorite form of entertainment as a cesspool. Non-wrestling fans will find more reasons not to watch or attend matches. Befitting the topic, the language in the book is more than a little rough, so be warned.

You can't like everything

I don't have much luck with lyrical fiction. The Man Booker Prize winning the Sea mystified me and I just put down Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. Like the Sea, this book is all lovely language and no story. If you are looking for beautiful evocations of life on a barren plain, then you are in luck. If you want some story, not so much. The thing is I really liked Gilead, her more recent effort. That book, also an exercise in precise and gorgeous language, I found to be much more emotionally engaging, although it could very well be that I more naturally sympathized with the protagonist, a dying father writing to a child.

Apparently Robinson has more to say about the Gilead story as she has written Home, a book which focuses on another household from that story. It comes out in September.

Some more ways to find a book to read

The folks are Barnes & Noble are boosting their website book content. The Barnes & Noble review now has a Guest Book feature where notable authors tell you what you should be reading. William Gibson picks out three speculative fiction books that I now want to read. Based on his picks, I am guessing that Dennis Lehane is going more literary on his upcoming book. There is also a series on five books from a genre, the Rome one is nice as it has the wonderful Rubicon as well as the Silver Pigs which I keep meaning to read.

Most interesting to our YouTube obsessed Internet is the Book files, brief videos on interesting book stories. The one below reveals that the perfidious Reds nearly stopped the publication of Animal Farm.

From Russia with Rubles

There are many different styles of spy fiction. Alan Furst creates moody tales of amateurs pulled into the shadow wars created by the rise of Nazism and World War 2. Charles McCarry writes what might be called intelligence procedurals focusing on the often dreary and morally ambiguous lives of the intelligence operative. Daniel Silva, who has eight novels featuring Israeli assassin Gabriel Allon, follows Ian Fleming in writing the spy as hero novels. Allon is a Cincinnatus like figure. He would be happiest if he could be allowed to restore classic works of art, but he keeps being called back into the field to face threats to Israel and to the West.

In his latest book, Moscow Rules, Allon is called to investigate a rogue Russian industrialist who is rumored to be selling rather nasty weapons to the enemies of Israel. His path takes him in and out of Russia as he tries to find a way to get close to this rather dangerous person. Silva is definitely taking the beware the new Russia line in this book, but you needn't agree with Silva's politics to enjoy the book. You do however have to enjoy cliffhanger adventure fiction.

Like the Bond novels, Allon's life and perspective changes over each book, so you would probably be wise to start earlier in the series or you will get a number of serious spoilers about the preceding volumes.

Hurry boy, it's waiting there for you

Wow, that Last King of Scotland is one hell of a movie. Forest Whitaker's portrayal of Idi Amin was gripping. His rapid switches from rage to joviality to concern were authentic and frightening. Showing the human side of a monster can't be easy, but Whitaker did it. His Oscar was well earned. It's worth pointing out that James McAvoy's performance was also notable. His Dr. Garrigan was an amiable fool, whose series of bad decisions leads to some unpleasant outcomes. He joins the likes of Holly Martins and Harry Angstrom as the ideal idiot protagonists.

One thing I rather liked about the movie is it's focus on the court of Amin. Garrigan ignores the violence in Uganda because it is so easy to do from within the elite circle. When he is confronted by what is really happening, he probably shouldn't be shocked but he is. The equally excellent Downfall makes this difference between the fantasy and real worlds more obvious, but it paints the same picture of wicked decadence.

Mixed

Via Sullivan, here is a nice defense of Starbucks. I like Starbucks for the same reason I like Barnes & Noble and Borders. They take decent quality experiences to places that lacked them. Sure here in Portland I can go to Stumptown for coffee or Powells for books, but where I grew up decent bookshops and coffee used to hard to find. Not anymore.

George Pelecanos has a new book called the Turnaround. For a long time I thought we was on the showing-great-promise list, but the Night Gardener put him into great territory. Here's hoping he continues the streak.

Tom Friedman has a new book coming out on environmentalism. A lot of people hate on Friedman for his GWOT and globalization cheer-leading, but those people out to give his From Beirut to Jerusalem a try, that is one hell of a book. I suspect the haters are also fretting about global warming and they should be glad that an agenda setter like Friedman will be banging the green drum.

You may have seen that Pat Buchanan has a new book out on why the Good War wasn't a good idea. The American Conservative (which was co-founded by Buchanan) has a series of responses to the book, including a typically good one from Andrew Bacevich, titled "How Good was the Good War". The whole piece is excellent, but I thought this line particularly insightful

"Ripped out of context, the war, especially the struggle against Nazi Germany, has become a parable. Whatever their value as a source of moral instruction, parables offer less help when it comes to understanding international politics. Parables simplify—and to simplify the past is necessarily to distort it."

That is a very good critique of the use of history by most politicians and talking heads.

Watchmen

So the Watchmen trailer is out, and it is very visual. The same director made 300. Like that movie or not, it reflected the source material, a brief action-oriented graphic novel. The Watchmen is a densely plotted, very long and thoughtful graphic novel. This comic is beloved by critics and fans, Time Magazine, in a fit of indie hipness, included it in its list of the 100 best novels of all time. This doesn't look like a long thoughtful movie, but it does look like an effects fest.

See what you think.

Now theres a way and I know that I have to go away.

One of the loveliest and saddest songs I have ever heard is Okkervil River's Savannah Smiles. It is sung from the perspective of the father of Savannah, a porn star who took her own life after a disfiguring auto accident. While people will likely be distracted by the porn thing, I think the song will touch any parent who fears losing touch and relationships with their children.

Here is a great live version. This has convinced me that I need to these guys when they roll into town later this year.

Thursday Next

If I have ever read a more raucous and joyful ode to reading than Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, then I have long forgotten it. Set in a fantastical alternate Britain, the series heroine is the titular Next who is a member of the Literary Detectives, a government organization that combats book crime, such as, say, the unlawful editing of books. How can such events occur? Well as it happens, what is written in books exists in it own dimension and if you were to enter that dimension, you could say, leech all the comedy out of the Thomas Hardy books and make them terrible tragedies, as some nasty did in these books.

Did that last bit make you chuckle or leave you confused? If it is the former, these books are for you. In addition to being entirely about books and reading, these stories are marked by an unrelenting tide of jokes. I can think of few books that I want to read that I can also call "madcap," but this is certainly one. One scene features a Beatrix Potter character conversing with a Ming the Merciless clone, over tea. It is a mark of Fforde's skill as a writer in that he can be so incredibly silly, while also sucking you into the (often nonsensical) story.

His latest book in the series, Thursday Next, First Among Sequels, may be his most enjoyable yet. Flinging from one crisis to another, Next deals with (as usual) threats to the BookWorld, the universe, declining read rates, her family and to her pet Dodo (genetically re-engineered, wouldn't you know). The pacing is among the most relentless in this volume, so that if one joke or encounter leaves you a bit dry, you will soon find another.

While I won't stoop to spoiling, I will say that this is a series that can read out of order if you so chose. Yes, certain personages fates will be known to you, but like as not, they have changed in bizarre ways, so that you will be surprised nonetheless. The fun here is in Fforde's seemingly bottomless invention and literary referencing. If you are an inveterate reader, then you need to try these books.

Light posting

Blogging has been light due to work load (boo), cleaning the house to prep to sell (boo/yay!) and going to Crater Lake (yay!). If you haven't been to Crater Lake I suggest a visit. The wikipedia entry has a nice description of how the Lake was formed. My assumption has always been that it exploded, but actually it collapsed!

At this point I will note that if you want a good, intelligent war film, check out Band of Brothers. Or if you just like spotting interesting cameos, this one is still for you. Watch for Simon Pegg, Jimmy Fallon (!?) and James McAvoy among others.

The price of books

Rick Perlstein's Nixonland has been widely hailed as an excellent political book, so it is odd that his previous volume is so rare that it costs over $100 to get the paperback. Papercuts discusses the book's price as well as the phenomenon of expensive books in general. I admit I am rather tickled that I bought a copy at Goodwill for five bucks last fall. (via Amconmag)

Distractions

It's one of those evenings, where the work has piled up and relief is needed. Thank goodness for iTunes which thoughtfully served up Built to Spill's fantastic Else, one of the most soothing songs of all time. Here is a good live version of the song. Here are a few other good songs for bringing down the stress that is work-related.

Soft Rock Star - Metric. Emily Haines is the most under-rated singer in rock. This one is one of her best. Don't shine for swine, indeed.

Steadier Footing - Death Cab for Cutie. A sad song about missed opportunity. So all the more appropriate for work.

I'm Your Villain - Franz Ferdinand. This one is for the petty disputes and bickering that make up many a work day. This should have gotten more airplay.

Don't Ask Me - PiL. The king of cynicism goes for out and out earnestness. I feel I shouldn't like this song and yet I do. I quite like the intro to the video.

Cruisin' - Michael Nesmith. So so good. Wait for Nesmith's freak out at the end.

Anathem

My early take on Neal Stephenson's Anathem holds. This is top top-notch ideas driven science fiction that will appeal to fans of literary adventure and speculative fiction. The book's main characters are monks who study math and science without the benefit of much in the way of technology. The plot, which moves from medieval drama to adventure to classic science fiction, involves the interaction between the secular world and the cloistered world of math and science.

Stephenson balances his story between debates over the nature of reality, consciousness and the cosmos with political intrigues, coming of age tales and adventure stories. By lacing his most rarefied debates with humor and by walking people through the ideas, he makes it easier for those who need a bit more hand holding to enjoy them. As one of his major themes is the decline of thinking in the face of distracting infotainment, he is no doubt encouraging to use faculties that many readers have not touched since their college philosophy or math courses.

His story is driven by dialogues involving topics as dense quantum mechanics, so it is all the better that his prose is as light as it is. Despite the book's length (900+ pages) this is a brisk read, with many humorous interludes. There is an amusing joke for Star Trek fans tucked around the middle of the book and there is plenty for others as well.

In the review copy of the book, Stephenson provides a timeline of this world as well as some background for those less well read in science fiction. My advice is to skip it. Stephenson has taken great care in slowly revealing his world's details which makes for lots of fun guesswork and theorizing while reading. His use of dictionary excerpts is a particularly nice technique. Every 20 or so pages, Stephenson provides an entry from the world's encyclopedia. These entries provide context for earlier conversations as well foreshadow upcoming events. This avoids the often stilted explanatory text found in novels that devise an imaginary world.

The China question

Peter Navarro is worried about China and if you read his book, you are at the very least, you may well get concerned as well. The Coming China Wars details problems with Chinese production, quality control, human rights and environmental protection. He also points to Chinese foreign policy as an indicator that China is moving into peer competitor territory. Let's look at each in turn.

Navarro wants US consumers to limit buying Chinese goods, because it is not good for the American economy and because it supports bad Chinese work and environmental habits. He provides a number of cases of evidence for this, although some lean toward the anecdotal. Many times it is difficult to know the scale of the problems he is presenting. How much of the Chinese produced medicine is shoddy for example? I suppose the answer in that case is that one case is too many, but it can be hard to tell how serious the problems that Navarro presents are. His tone can reach the apocalyptic which reduces the appeal of his arguments to the unsure.

Quite a bit of the problems he relates call into question the ability of China to continue on its growth path. Internal divisions, more class than ethnic, are a problem. Environmental degradation is reaching critical levels and the wealthy classes will only go so long without a shift to a consumer culture. This is helpful, as most of the books you read tend to treat China's rise as inevitable.

On the foreign policy side, he portrays Chinese as a rapacious neo-imperialist creating new outposts places as far from Beijing as Central Africa and Latin America. This shouldn't be unexpected. China is growing more wealthy and powerful and as such it is spreading its wings. In few ways does this threaten the United States in any meaningful way. The Chinese Army, Navy and Air Force remain far behind the US and would not fare well in any conflict and the Chinese are sure to know this. Navarro strains credulity when he suggests Chinese anti satellite facilities on Cuba might lead to a new Cuban missile crisis.

So take a look at this book for some reasons to reconsider your shopping and for reasons to think that China's rise may stumble, but don't over-react.

Cover songs are a hell of a tester

Anathem is taking all my book energies so let's talk covers. The Web continues to serve up some good ones. Here's an odd one. Bonnie Prince Billie/Will Oldham singing Big Balls. If you are in the mood for something more conventional, here is Spoon playing Panic. Britt Daniel's distinctive voice sounds great hear and he plays it straight, even getting the "hang-a the DJ" at the end. Here is My Morning Jacket playing Across 110th Street, which is fun. This will either thrill you or leave you scratching your head. Colin Meloy playing Neutral Milk Hotel's King of Carrot Flowers. If that band is unknown to you, check out this Slate piece, which describes the singer, Jeff Magnum, as the JD Salinger of indie rock.

Or just watch this video for Holland, 1945. The music is upbeat, but as you might guess, the lyrics are not.

Nice guys finish last

If you're looking for a satire of the office place, and you don't mind a little ultraviolence (or I suppose if you are seeking ultraviolence, and don't mind the satire) then you should have a look at Duane Swierczynski's Severance Package. The concerns a group of co-workers trapped in a Philadelphia high rise as they find that their boss is planning to kill them all. Turns out they are a civilian intelligence contractor and they are to be liquidated.

So the theme of the book is that the modern office is a Darwinian nightmare, a place where strength weeds out weakness and morals have no place. While it definitely takes a few jabs at the culture of work, as in the case of the striver who thinks his killer is trying to test his loyalty, it quickly moves to an escalating series of sadistic murders. The killer is particularly inventive in this story and particularly cruel. If you are looking for that sort of read, you have found it.

My major complaint about the book is with the core character, the killer. This person is calculating, incredibly astute, amoral, and yet also supposedly given to bizarre affections and delusions. I just didn't believe in the character and I suspect the complications were put in place to allow for the gotcha ending that Swierczynski has in store for the reader.

In both the good and bad sense of the word, the action is cinematic. It flows with rapid speed and well described detail. As in an action movie, the action itself rather the themes take over the story. Swierczynski makes good use of visuals in the book, which isn't surprising as he also works in the comic book world. For the right audience, this book will be a hit, others will be less than pleased.

The new Stephenson

Neal Stephenson writes learned, lengthy novels, featuring great technical detail and set in eras other than our own. Cryptonomicon, a very large book, explores cryptography in World War 2. His Baroque Cycle, set in 17th and 18th century Britain continues to daunt me with its 3000 pages. If anything can get you to attempt these mighty books, John Derbyshire's review is the thing for it. Thanks mostly to length I haven't read these books, I read and loved Snow Crash and the Diamond Age, books that I suspect Stephenson considers learning projects as both are listed under "other works" on his books page. These books are also more explicitly speculative fiction as they are set in the future and feature all sorts of technical toys

His upcoming book, Anathem, takes the speculative element from his earlier books and the philosophical exploration elements of his more recent works. It is set on a planet much like Earth where a group of monks are starting to interact with the secular world. These monks are a little peculiar as they seem to be math monks, dedicated to the study of math rather than the glory of God.

So far ( I am about a third of the way through) it is an excellent read. The philosophical debates and political conflict among the cloister's various factions are fun to read, the characters are interesting (the main character's story is a classic bildungsroman) and Stephenson's humor is well used. He pokes fun at IT, modern culture, and modern politics in a way that fits in well with the story. One of his themes is similar to that of Susan Jacoby's Age of American Unreason, which argues that modern culture is anti-learning. The learning centric monks looks quite different than the entertainment addicted proles who dominate the secular world.

As one of the principal themes of the book is math, I suspect many will be leery of starting it. Don't be. He approaches the subject almost entirely from a non-quantitative way (although for the curious he provides some narrative proofs in the appendix) and the debates are understandable and interesting to a non-specialist (note: my math grades were my lowest in school).

Happy Fourth

In celebration of the birthday of the USA here are two interesting books I have come across.

I just picked up a copy of George Stewart's The Names on the Land which was recently re-issued by the New York Review of Books Classics line. The book is a thematic exploration of why American cities, states, rivers and mountains have the names they do. There are also a few maps including the distribution of "burgs" and "villes." I've only read a small bit but it has been fun so far.

For example, in the Pacific Northwest I learned there was an attempt, in the competition with perfidious Albion for the Oregon Territory to rename all the Cascades after US Presidents. While we did end up with Mt. Jefferson, Mt. Washington and Mt. Adams, Mt. St Helens and Mt. Olympus avoided becoming Mt Van Buren and Shasta is not Mt. Jackson.

For the smaller set, I highly recommend Go Go America by Dan Yaccarino. The book is framed by a family's cross-country trip and focuses on entertaining details of each state including bizarre laws, inventions and historical events. It features Yaccarino's standard cheery graphics with a splash of retro.

And what better what to celebrate the US on a book blog than with the Library of America? Check out this volume on American environmental writing. And wow, does this noir collection look good.

Mixed

Barnett Rubin points out that Ahmed Rashid has a new book on US policy in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia. Rashid's Taliban was excellent and I am sure the new one will be of value to anyone seeking to learn more this critical region.

Citizen Reader has a nice post on traveling and reading, specifically whether you read about the place to which you are traveling before or after going.

The good folks at Orbit have been republishing the works of Ian M Banks in the US. Consider Phlebas and Player of Games have been out for awhile and I am thrilled to see that Use of Weapons will be out later this month. Use of Weapons is probably his cruelest work, but I really quite liked it. I've started Matter which is a fun read so far.

Speaking of master science fiction writers, I just received a copy (via Harper Collins First Look -- which you would be crazy not to join) of Neal Stephenson's Anathem, which comes with a CD to which to listen while you read. Funnily enough, I don't think any of my favorite music would go with any of my favorite books. I am trying to think of what would go with Kavalier and Klay or the Road and can't think of anything appropriate.

What's the best Pavement song you don't know? This one.

Simplicity itself

In the late 80s, James Gleick wrote Chaos: Making A New Science, an entertaining book that described the rise of the study of chaos. The book also helped popularize fractals. I recall going to an early 90s Lollapalooza where a fellow attendee pointed to a fractal t-shirt and said "woah, chaos theory." In Simplexity, Time science writer Jeffrey Kluger aims to repeat Gleick's success and detail the rise of a new line of inquiry that explores the inter-relationship between simplicity and complexity. While the book tells a number of entertaining and enlightening stories it does not weave these into a strong, compelling thesis. Do not expect the kids at Bonnaroo to get their heads blown by Simplexity.

The principal idea of the book is that defining something as simple or complex is not easy. He gives the example of the pencil, which appears to be terribly simple, but in fact is a complex assemblage of materials from around the world. Much more interesting is his study of how this is manifested in real-world situations. He asks about the complexity of jobs including truck drivers who have to gauge the reactions and behaviors of other people, the status of his machinery, the effects of weather and many other exogenous factors. The highly paid Wall Street analyst running a series of financial models may seem less complex by comparison.

The book is best seen as a collection of a science author's short pieces. The individual chapters are interesting, but they do not build to an conclusion. There is never a clear use of the idea of just what complexity and simplicity are. We just know that when you look at a problem or a system at one level it is simple and at another level it is complex. It is hard to know what to do with this information. Those interested in learning more should turn to the Santa Fe Institute, where as Kluger explains, much of the research in this field is being done. You can read more about its complexity research here.

God speed all the bakers at dawn

Lifehacker asked its readers to identify the books that changed their lives. Results are here. No huge surprises, the books fall out into religion (the Bible and perhaps Ayn Rand?,) political/philosophical (Orwell, Dawkins and Rand) and geeky (lots of sci-fi). I have nothing against any of these books and have read many of them, but it would be another thing to say they changed your life. I've always been befuddled by the notion that a book might change my life. Never had I read a book that would fundamentally change my life and send me on a course I had not intended. I suppose there is the idea of inspiration, which many of them contain, but that seems to me to be the activation of latent tendencies.

Generally speaking if someone says to me "Read this book, it will change your life," I try to avoid it reading it all costs. For one, it sounds culty. For another then I have to talk about it with them and they will try to gauge if my life has in fact changed.

Visiting Canada

I recently was in Canada for work and, as is my habit, I sought out books and candy. Sadly I had little success on either front (although it's not your fault Canada.)

On the candy front, most of the more regional candies like Coffee Crisp are already available in the US. Apparently this is big news to many, as it there was a petition going. On the plus side there was lots of good Cadbury action that we don't get that easily including the peanut butter caramel Wunderbar. My big failure was in seeing but not purchasing the bluntly named Eat More, a candy bar that proves the US is not alone in gluttony. Cybele at Candy Blog says it is OK.

On the book front, I kept looking for Toll the Hounds, a book by Canadian author Steven Erikson. The difficulty in finding it was probably related to the fact that it won't be published until next week. Whenever I visit out of the way used bookstores with low turnover I wish that I kept a list of authors of hard to find books. All sorts of treasures lurk in these places but I have to recall all the books, and in my dotage I have forgotten much. I did find the Drowning Towers by George Turner. This is a dark tale of 21st century Australia sinking into a Malthusian and rising ocean nightmare.

Makes a hard man humble

Poke Rafferty is probably the first mystery hero is also a travel writer. Following A Nail Through the Heart, Timothy Hallinan's the Fourth Watcher continues the adventures of the Bangkok based Asian-American. Poke who has succeeded in building a family finds himself in trouble with the Secret Service and unknown forces of the Bangkok underworld. Lucky for him, as part of research for a book he has been getting training from a former CIA operative in how to navigate the dark and secret corners of the town.

As you might imagine, things are more complicated that is immediately apparent. Turns out that multiple people are watching Rafferty and some have ties to people from nastier places than Bangkok. And some of them are after Rafferty for reasons about which he is unaware. The situation escalates and Rafferty ends up in a cat and mouse game with some unpleasant characters.

The obvious comparison of this series is to the Bangkok novels of John Burdett. While both are set in Bangkok, there is an important difference. Burdett's main character is Thai and the Thai viewpoint plays heavily in those book. Rafferty, as his daughter argues, is an American who wants to be Thai. That tension is a key part of his character as the various elements of his personality lead him in one direction or the other.

This book reminds me of the early Robicheaux books by James Lee Burke. Both feature a good hearted character who goes out of his way to help the weak, while making improbable threatening statements to very bad people. There is also clearly a focus on long term character development with a range of idiosyncratic personalities for Hallinan to grow before the reader's eyes.

(Possible Spoiler)I'm not positive about this, but I believe the title of the book is allusion to Carol Reed and Graham Greene's The Third Man. In both cases the identity of the person is of great interest to the characters.

Coming straight out of Kansas

Because I am apparently a sap for marketing and other shiny objects, I gravitate towards new books. I am well aware of all the older books I have yet to read, but I still focus my attention on the new sections of the library and the bookstore. I really appreciate it when publishers reissue classic works that missed my attention the first time. So a hearty thanks to Picador for re-issuing the stellar Blackburn by Bradley Denton.

The story is a tragic tale of a creation of a monster, Blackburn, with whom the reader will find both sympathetic and repellent. Imagine a combination of Darkly Dreaming Dexter and Anton Chigurgh and you have Jimmy Blackburn. He starts life as a kind hearted boy in a small Kansas town who justs wants time to play with his family. His abusive father abuses him and schools him in the tools of violence. Unfortunately the other authority figures, including school and the law, destroy any chance that Blackburn will walk a legal line. Blackburn takes these lessons on the road where he identifies other liars, cheats and abusers and then kills them.

While the story is ultimately sad it also produces quite a few guffaws. Half of the chapters are titled with a victim number. In these stories, some terribly (or sometimes mildly) wicked person crosses Blackburn's path and Blackburn, generally reluctantly, decides they have to die. It his skewed views and often poetic means of dispatch that lead to the black humor.

The other chapters tell the story of Blackburn's life and how he came to be who he is. You witness the kindness morphing into a kind of vengeance that a real life Batman might employ. Blackburn's code is fairly simple (hurting the weak= death) is sometimes tested by complications. At one point he asks the unknowing victim of one criminal what would be the result of a hypothetical crime and the victim hyperbolically answers "He should be shot." You should avoid hyperbole with Blackburn as demonstrated by his near immediate execution of the offender.

Denton plays with the reader a bit. At one point, Blackburn meets the author of a book about a killer with a moral code. The author is a misanthropic drunk who hates that people idolize his creation. This is a bit of a tweak on the nose for readers cheering on Blackburn, but Denton is not a cruel didact (like Michael Haneke can be) seeking to shame or convert the reader. This is a story about a youth crushed by authority figures.

The story of his life is a story of the decay of the American dream. In that it reminded me of Jack London's story of a wrecked youth, the Apostate. In both stories, circumstances difficult to address crush a boy and it has terrible effects on the family. This is the finest crime novel I have read in years.

Hey, you got your AI in my dogma . . .

Should you wish to grapple with the interplay between science and religion, in the words of Tony Soprano, "you got options." You could TiVo "Faith and Reason" on PBS, ponder some Betrand Russell and G.K. Chesterton (which – like duct tape and a universal remote – no home should be without), or crack open Dan Ronco's Unholy Domain. I've gone with door number three, and I've gotta say, it ain't half bad.

Unholy Domain opens in a dystopian, not-so-distant future, in which the world's political and economic systems are gimping along in the wake of the PeaceMaker, a mess-you-up-like-bad-chicken computer virus. It appears that this piece of sunshine was unleashed, for reasons unknown, by the ubertalented and correspondingly erratic programmer Ray Brown, essentially taking down Teh Interweb. As a result of the devastation wrought by PeaceMaker, the federal government has banned all but the most miniscule advances in technology and devolved into corruption and incompetence. *cough, cough *

Against this backdrop we find the Church of the Natural Humans, a sect of anti-technology nuts whose vestments include shoulder-holstered gats and whose theology puts the Luddites to shame, locked in a clandestine war with The Domain, a cabal of black market tech peddlers (imagine the Illuminati recruiting at MIT and bringing on some temps from Blackwater) to be Lords of All We Survey.

Cut to college student David Brown, whom we accompany on his quest to discover the truth about his father Ray and the PeaceMaker virus. What follows is a fast paced techno-thriller that would fit well between a beach chair and cooler of Red Stripe. Some of the prose is somewhat clunky, but Ronco does a great job of drawing out relationships between his characters that seem more fully developed than most genre authors tend to produce. Moreover, the fundamental questions raised by Ronco about the roles of science and religion in the arc of human development are ones worth considering, even if it's while sitting on the beach with a bronson. Perhaps especially then.

If Dan Simmons' Endymion got you all freaky and hot in the ass, what with its time travellin' spikey robot, the AI TechnoCore and the Galactic Catholics, then Unholy Domain will be right up your alley. On the other hand, if you like your discourse to be more elevated, then go get a Mother Jones. And put the beer away.

Your Government Failed You

Richard Clarke worked for decades in the United States government's national security world. He reached the upper levels of government serving as an Assistant Secretary State and as the chief counter-terrorism official. He left government in 2003 over his disagreements overIraq policy. Shortly thereafter he wrote Against All Enemies, a memoir of his service, as well as a sharp critique of the Bush Administration's terror policy. In his latest book, Your Government Failed You, expands his critique from the personalities and policies of the Bush Administration to the structure and culture of the national security apparatus.

There isn't much that escapes Clarke's scrutiny. The Defense Department reforms meant to avoid another Vietnam failed to prevent Iraq, but helped make it worse. The turf wars, resource allocation and hiring practices of the intelligence community fail to prevent strategic surprise. The Homeland Security Department is described as a underfunded, sum weaker than its parts agglomeration that serves more as a new spoils system than a provider of security.

What is particularly challenging about fixing the issues laid out is the great difficulty in fixing them. In many cases, major legislation will be required and the necessary compromise will take quite a bit of time to implement. More worrisome is whether any single Administration can tackle all of these things in a single or even two terms.

Topics like defense reorganization and the role of the National Guard might be rather dry, but Clarke is writing for both the lay reader and the policy wonk. He provides specific detail about what to fix, but does so in an fashion that doesn't require subject matter expertise. I am particularly happy that Clarke includes global warming (and cyber-security) as a national security issue and that it be treated with the same urgency as issues like terrorism. In terms of threats to the homeland, global warming is probably the worst of all.

None of these issues will be easy to fix and fixing any will be made all the more difficult by the change in the people doing the work. The ideal of government service has certainly faded in this country. Kai Bird, in his masterful the Color of Truth (which, if you can't guess, is gray,) describes the noblesse oblige that led the privileged like the Bundy brothers to seek government service. This is gone, but the government hasn't helped the cause either. On the one hand it continues to outsource key jobs, which may save a bit of money but also fails to develop long term leaders for the government. Then it makes the hiring practices overly long, complicated and demanding and provides pay scales that often require great sacrifice of those who might serve.

In the book, Clarke lays out a number of policy prescriptions to fix the problems he addresses. The most critical one has to be the human resources question. If the government doesn't have the right people to do the work, all the other fixes will come to naught. It is here that Clarke provides the hope that his list of changes might actually be achievable. When the government has the right people in place, it can work wonders.

But I remember everything

Sam Taylor's the Amnesiac tells the story of Jim Purdew and his realization that he cannot remember anything from his college years. His growing fixation on this fact slowly kills his relationship and sends him back to his old college town to try and uncover what he forgot. Along the way Purdew mediates on the nature of memory and identity in a way I found quite engaging.
The novel eventually enters a murky dreamstate, where the lines between reality and imagination are unclear. The story often teeters on the edge of nightmare. Not the nightmare of fright, but of an strangeness, the sense that thinks are just slightly off kilter.This can become rapidly silly, but I think Taylor does a great job with Purdew's wrestling with his memory. I especially liked his use of peculiar manuscripts that Purdew finds and writes himself.

The book lays it on a tad thick with its Phillip Larkin and Jorge Luis Borges references. Labyrinths are everywhere and a character appears who claims to have inherited Larkin's memory! I am poorly read in both artists, so I don't know how someone better read would react, but it might grate.

Taylor well balances his tasks of keeping the story moving and exploring his themes. Purdew, and other characters, are fascinated by detectives and detective fiction. Purdew even calls himself a private investigator at one point. Purdew, towards the end, wonders if the best mystery would merely give clues to the story and end on an quite ambiguous note. This is quite the tease by Taylor, who manages to add some additional tension to the end with this move.

Angels take their time in falling

The United States is occasionally beset by moralistic crusades that sweep up the guilty and the innocent. Prohibition, the satanic abuse scare and the Hollywood black list vary in their extent and their severity, but they reflect a righteous tendency that exists in America. Of course there is a countervailing trend that opposes such efforts, and our arts serve to remind (and occasionally to rub our collective faces) in our collective bent towards social zealotry.

Karen Abbott expands the discussion with her Sin in the Second City, a story which sets a pair of enlightened madams against the forces of moral certitude and reform. The madams ran the pseudonymously eponymous Everleigh Club, a club known for the most extravagant epicurean delights as well as the most lovely of women. As opposed to the competition in turn of the century Chicago's Levee District, the Everleighs treated their employees well, limited violence and substance abuse and established a business as civilized as was possible in their trade.

About the same time of the rise of the Everleighs, the nation became fixated on the white slave trade. This was the idea that young women were tricked into becoming harlots through kidnap, rape and drugging. Like their abolitionist predecessors, the anti-white slave trade advocates rallied the forces of society and government. Abbot shows how their crusade helped in the creation of new institutions like the FBI and continued to build our sex-obsessed culture.

There is much for the reader to enjoy in the book. Those seeking salacious detail will get their fill. Those who look for extensively researched period detail will not go wanting and those who just want a good political story will also be pleased. While it is not the core of the book it is about the trade in flesh for sex, one that in Chicago in the early 1900s was not a terribly safe or rewarding career choice. The stark realities occasionally rear their head, but the reader could be forgiven if they lost sight of it themselves.

Dresden

Jim Butcher's Stormfront : book one of the Dresden Files was one I long hesitated to pick up, mostly because of the prominence of the "Dresden Files." I have an aversion to series books that is based less on experience than it is a kind of fear that the books will be formulaic dreck. There may be a connection to the genre once called men's adventure in which an endless series of crypto-sexual (his gun spat hot lead at the Cuban) tales were presented to reader.

Anyway, the book turned out to be a lot of fun! The main character, Harry Dresden leans a tad goody goody for my taste, but I found him appealing nonetheless. I was also pleased that Butcher made Dresden inept with women. Main characters are often alter-egos for authors and far too many of these sorts of characters end up being hyper-studs.

The plot is nothing special, and won't surprise crime novel fans, but the story elements are a lot of fun. Butcher, in this first book, has laid quite a bit of groundwork for an interesting system of magic based in our modern world. He has a few surprises with the nasties he deploys and I even liked what he did with the ending, which is often a let down in suspense tales.

With the intersection of the supernatural and a thriller/crime novel plot chassis, these books are like Charles Stross's Atrocity Archives tales and Charlie Huston's Joe Pitt stories. They are just a lot less grimy and wicked. I like all of them, but depending on your tastes you might want to go one way or the other.

Evil will triumph if good men do nothing

The Mist is one of the better Stephen King movie adaptations, from one of my favorite Stephen King tales. It features two of King's great strengths, the disturbing gross out and a jaundiced look at the thin line between civilization and barbarism. Between the two, this is really a monster movie, so don't go looking for life lessons.

The monsters are vile to the point that you can overlook the CGI. King frequently looks at how people can slide from decency to mindlessness, in the case at the hands of a religious zealot. The movie's ending is a bit of a shock, although I think Ross Douthat has the (spoilers aplenty) right take on it.

Still there is something to be said for the ease by which civilization decays, as George Will points out in his excellent critique of McCain's response to the Guantanamo decision.

And no, I am not trying to quote Edmund Burke, but rather the Newton Neurotics:

I just got back from a dream attack

The last Silver Jews record opened with " Where's the paper bag that holds the liquor?
Just in case I feel the need to puke," which set the tone for a dark, wonderful album. The new album is much more upbeat and is streaming at this MySpace page. It has the bigger band sound of the last album, but a bit of the gleeful humor of Starlite Walker. I've just had a listen so far, but it sounds good.

Bloomsday

Bookstorm reminds me that today is Bloomsday, a celebration of James Joyce and his book Ulysses. I was actually in Dublin for Bloomsday 92, but celebrated the liquid rather than the literary treasures of Ireland. I don't know if it is worse or better that I was reading the book at the time. Despite spending much time and treasure on books and reading, I haven't done much in terms of actually celebrating them. I did consider signing one of my kids up for Middle Earth camp, but since he hasn't read the books yet, I didn't do it.

The end of the world as we know it

Fareed Zakaria's new book, the Post-American World is a book I hope both presidential candidates read. It is a brief book that tells Americans we need to re-think our view of the world. We need to jettison the idea of the world's policeman and hyperpower and replace it with the world's trusted third party. In this his says we need to be less Britain than Bismarck, which I rather like. We need to de-emphasize military power and re-consider economic competitiveness. We need to spend less time worrying about Iranian nuclear weapons and more about how to work with India and China.

It is the briefness that will irritate the foreign policy specialist readership and attract the casual but interested reader. Unlike other international relations big think books, this one does not provide a vigorous examination of the global system. It also does not provide much in the way of policy guidelines, aside from a shift in resources away from primacy and towards a focus on domestic policy.

For those who are looking for help in trying to understand how the world works today and the US can best deal with it, the book will be of great value. Zakaria provides a high level overview saying the superpower era is over, and is being replaced by a multipolar world and one for the first time with non-European powers as the majority of leaders. He surveys China and India and then describes the US's fit in the new world.

Like a number of useful books, this one will have you wanting to read more, about how the US can change its ways and more about modern China and India. This would be a good starting point for the dispirited American wondering where how we should start over after eight less than ideal years.

Life is just a bookstore

We stayed on the Oregon coast this weekend. It being Oregon, it was cold and damp, so we did visit a few sites, and were surprised to see the Coast Guard Training ship the Eagle in Astoria (worth a visit if you are in the area.) And of course we hit some bookstores. Astoria has a decent number for a small town and in one of them I heard a flash of a Jimmy Buffett song. The people at the attached coffee bar began to wonder aloud just who the singer was. After a few names were bandied about, one fellow remarked that it could be Jimmy Buffett, although he did not pronounce it to rhyme with that which Miss Tuffett sat on. Instead he pronounced to rhyme with the decadent French dessert.

At first I approved thinking he was mocking Buffett, but then he repeated it a number of times and I realized he thought this was the correct pronunciation. I considered mentioning the true way to say it, but decided against it as A) it would be terribly rude and B) it would reveal my all too great knowledge of the singer and his oeuvre. The song, you see, was My African Friend, one that only those who have spent far too many hours listening to Buffett will recognize.

Anyway, I bought quite a few books at the coast. I found a used copy of McCarry's Second Sight, one of the few Paul Christopher books I have yet to read. I also found a copy of Karl Schroeder's Sun of Suns. I've not read any of his books, but the blurbs looked good. And it was only two dollars.

Whenever I am at the beach I stop by the Book Warehouse, a place where unpopular books go to die. This is a store of all remainders, so many of the books are not of interest. Whenever I stop by, I find a gem or two. In this case, there was this biography of Chiang Kai Shek as well as Kevin Phillip's the Cousin's Wars, which I am quite excited to read.

Since I read only two books over the weekend (one of which was a library book,) my book stack is now three books higher than it was when I started.

A case where the "for the articles" excuse works

Sarah Weinman reports that Denis Johnson's new crime novel will be published in Playboy. I though the Tree of Smoke was great, so I look forward to this one. While I initially thought that the Chandler/Hammett reference to which Weinman reacts was OK, I do think she is right. The more obvious reference is to John Banville/Benjamin Black.

Prestige

Last night, I was rather disturbed when I watched the Prestige. Not because of the movie's content, but because I could not recall any of the basic plot developments of the story. This upset me because I read the book in the mid-90s and quite liked it. I liked it enough to send it to a few friends. But as I watched the movie, it was as if I had never read it! This is no slight against the book, thinking of other favorite books that I read back then, like the novels of Robertson Davies, I suspect I would hard pressed to describe the goings on.

The movie is great, with excellent acting all around, but particularly from the two leads, Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman. A number of reviews have complained that the movie doesn't play by the rules it establishes, which I think isn't quite right. While the movie appears to be about stage magic, I think it is more about art and obsession, although the technique of misdirection clearly plays a role.

Having watched the movie, I now want to turn back to the books of Christopher Priest. He is a writer of speculative fiction, which is to say books both literary and geeky. This is a tough spot to be in, as any whiff of genre can send the literary types running, while the limited use of technology and action curtails the science fiction side of things.

Having read the Prestige, I went on to the Extremes, a book I found decent, but not worth recommending. From what I can tell, that book is not considered his best, so now I am going to look for his better regarded books, including Inverted World which is about to be re-issued by the New York Review of Books Classics line. I've also ordered the Separation, a book that plays on some of the same themes of dualism that the Prestige does.

All the animals come out at night

I once had the belief that American history wasn't very interesting. Although I am mostly to blame for this misapprehension, my schooling had an impact. The teaching in my primary and secondary years, while great in many respects, wasn't illuminating in regards to US history. I went to college for a international relations degree, so I learned more about Polish history than American history, domestic at least. With this in mind, I rarely picked up American history books for pleasure reading.

This was of course a mistake. US history is immensely fascinating and engaging and writers like Erik Larson, Tony Horwitz and now Karen Abbott have succeeded in making it even more fun by bringing our national obsessions of sex and violence into the mix. I'm reading Abbott's Sin in the Second City, which is set in turn of the century Chicago, where prostitution thrived and angry reformers sought to shut it down.

Abbott's focus is on the Everleigh sisters whose Everleigh Club served the wealthy and powerful with all manner of sensual delights. Unlike the other houses in the Levee district, the sisters also treated their women well. Abbott contrasts this desire to create a more humane prostitution system with the crusaders who attacked the horrible abuses of how it was normally practiced. It's a very fun read so far, with much period detail.

Having just read one book about the effects of moral crusades on America, it will be interesting to get more of Abbott's take on the crusade against white slavery, as it was called and how it might compare with the anti-communist, anti-slavery and anti-drinking crusades that swept the country.

Just a pepsi, and she wouldn't give it to me

Thanks to the marketing, I assumed that William Friedken's Bug would be another horrorfest like the Exorcist. Not the case. This movie is a claustrophobic study of madness. There are a few of the typical horror movies scary elements, including a stomach churning scene in the middle, but the movie's threat doesn't come from the typical monster-victim relationship. Instead, the movie features two damaged people who reinforce and catalyze each other's paranoias and delusions.

The movie is based on a stage drama and it still feels like one. 90% of the movie takes place in a single set of room. This makes sense thematically as the madness severs connections with reality, including other people. The movie is also dialogue heavy and the characters often fall into the affected, overly articulate mode of stage dialogue. The final third of the film when the madness is filled with over-the-top jibberings that will either fascinate you or have you rolling your eyes. I thought the escalating madness was great.

Us Vs. Them

I am currently reading J. Peter Scoblic's Us Vs. Them: How a Half-Century of Conservatism Has Undermined America's Security, and I'm surprised I have not heard more about it. It one of the most readable, while at the same time intelligent books on modern American foreign policy I have read in quite some time. Even more impressively I think he does a better job of fairly critiquing policy than Richard Rhodes did in his similar recent book Arsenals of Folly.

Scoblic goes back into the Cold War to argue that Bush's foreign policy is not something new under the sun, but is actually the full fruition of a movement that previously had been checked by other foreign policy viewpoints. He argues that Bill Buckley and other writers of the 50s laid the groundwork for a full throated rollback position in the Cold War that sought to defeat communism using military means and believed that nuclear weapons were war fighting rather than political weapons. This viewpoint grew in power when it merged with the neocon stream that believed that US power should be used to spread democracy via violent means.

The title of the book makes it sound both more partisan and less analytically nuanced than it is. Scoblic, who is left in orientation, is fair to many on the right, having many kinds words for Presidents Reagan and Nixon. He also notes that many people that the average reader would consider conservative, including people as diverse as Pat Buchanan and George Schulz adamantly opposed the trends he calls conservative. I wish he had found a term to better differentiate. One of his points is that the neocons didn't so much hijack policy as ally with other flavors of cons, but there are still other flavors that didn't want to play ball.

Still, the book is a pleasure to read and will appeal to those looking for a survey of Cold War policy debates on the right as well as another analysis of the Bush administration foibles. Scoblic's background is arms control, so there is predominance of arms control and other nuclear issues and less about Iraq and Vietnam.

I miss the innocence I've known

I've never read a Chuck Palahniuk novel (and I live in Portland!) so I have no dog in this fight, but I love how the hate of this review cannot be contained and expands to attack the culture at large. (via Suderman)

Check out Tried to Rock, a blog that catalogs the bands that never made it. (via Brownstein) Here is my favorite band that never made it.

Do you recall the news of some years back that Ian McEwan has a long lost brother born of McEwan's parents, who eventually but were then adulterous lovers? The brother, Dave Sharp, has a new book on the way. McEwan wrote the forward, but his name is on top of the cover.

The NYTimes has a nice feature on Lee Child, the author of the Reacher books, one of the world's great not so guilty reading pleasures.

State of Play

One of next year's big political movies is State of Play, which starts off with a pair on seemingly unrelated deaths that begin to undermine a rising politician's career. Rather than wait for the two hour version, I suggest you invest six hours in the original BBC miniseries.

One of my major worries about the film is that it will by necessity remove a number of characters, plot turns, and developments that make the miniseries so much. With the series you get backroom political deals, fascinating shows of the media at work uncovering stories and people sleeping together that shouldn't. Watch it on DVD before the movie reviews spoil it for you.

A pleasant diversion about the end of the world

In discussing the Ultimate Galactus trilogy, I was going call it a graphic novel, but really, it is just a very attractive comic book. Shaun Tan's gorgeous (and wordless) The Arrival, a depiction of the wave of strangeness and confusion in the immigrant experience, is a graphic novel. Ultimate Galactus is a bunch of super heroes fighting a really powerful bad guy. The story is set in the Ultimates universe, a reboot of the universe that moves the origins of heroes up from the 60s to this decade. The battle with Galactus was an early Fantastic Four story, but in this new Galactus trilogy, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Nick Fury and the Ultimates/Avengers battle each other and then Galactus.

The huge number of heroes is one of the problems with the story, there are just so many in there, along with some other cameos, that no character gets much chance to shine. The bigger problem is that the final battle is a bit abrupt. The opening chapters should have been trimmed to allow for more action at the end.

On the plus side, it is an action-packed story that nicely updates a few characters. The old Galactus seems a bit off these days. First of all his name sounds Roman and he is a giant human-looking biped despite being an ancient alien. The new version makes much more sense, and they even make his name more reasonable. They also manage to carry forward elements of the old one quite nicely. The Silver Surfer is quite different, and may displease fans, but I liked it.

The Ultimate universe makes for good reading, and this book is no exception. It is not up to the level of the Ultimates 1 & 2, but those are among the finest super hero stories I have ever read, so that isn't surprising. If you want another take on the superheroes get together and fight an implacable alien foe story, read DC's the New Frontier.

Given the short reading time and the fairly high cost, these sorts of books are ideal for library check-out. At $30 and about one hour of entertainment, the price/time ratio isn't very attractive. For the best ones, of course it makes sense, but you can run out of reading material lickety split if you buy a lot of these.

Sacred Causes

Michael Burleigh's book Sacred Causes, the second in a trilogy about the intersection of religion and politic in Europe, focuses on the 20th century, with emphasis on how the totalitarian regimes battled religions. This book will remind readers that Osama Bin Laden didn't introduce religion to modern international politics, he merely drew our attention back to it.

As a historian of Nazi Germany and someone clearly well-read in religious (particularly Catholic) history, Burleigh is at his strongest when he describes the inherently religious nature of totalitarian regimes like those found in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and Fascist Italy. These regimes took many of the artifacts of religion including martyrs, holy texts, elite orders, divine leaders, and the belief that a perfect society awaits. A key difference in the religious and totalitarian viewpoint is where the perfect society existed. For the religious it awaited after death. For the political, it could rise here on earth, although it would takes lots of death and suffering to achieve it.

Given the desire to completely replace all individual identity with a state defined identity, it is no surprise that these regimes sought to co-opt or (more frequently) cripple religious groups. Religious groups were able to nibble at Nazi and Fascist evil at the fringes, but they managed to directly confront the weary Soviets and Poles in the early 80s. Against John Cornwell, Burleigh argues that Pope Pius XII's did about all he could given the relatively weak influence of the pre-war Vatican and the willingness of the Nazis to kill just about anyone.

The book feels a bit thinner, and the viewpoint begins to trump the analysis in some of the book's other sections. His chapter on Ireland certainly shows that both sides (of the Northern Irish) committed horrendous acts of murder and atrocity and Burleigh clearly wishes Britain would wash its hands of the place. While in other parts of the book, religion is a force for good, Burleigh does not present it as such here. As a part of the narrative it serves as a way to consider the rising Islamic populations and whether they their enclaves will prove as bloody as the northern part of Ireland. Some readers may be put off by his tone in both of these chapters. To be fair, the Irish and Islamic stories are ongoing, while the Nazi and Communist tales are more clearly in the past.

Perhaps because Burleigh is not afraid to let his opinions and viewpoint be known, his prose is particularly vigorous and engaging. At times he selects the five dollar word where a one dollar word might do, but for the most part he constructs lovely sentences that tend to deal with unlovely subject matter. American readers, used to neutral prose, may be taken aback by Burleigh's strong Tory views, but I found them bracing and found it easier to understand the context from which he was arguing.

So let it be written, so let it be done

While I ponder Sacred Causes, have a look at these.

Wow, I somehow missed the fact that the Silver Jews have a new album on the way. This blog has the first new song called Strange Victory, Strange Defeat. Perhaps an allusion to the dueling histories of the Fall of France? Perhaps not. This blogger has the fine sense to post both New Orleans and the Wild Kindness, songs you really need.

The LA Times interviews Alan Furst. He admits plot is not his genius:

Because I'm incapable of creating a plot. So what I learned to do early was to find some particular operation done by one of the secret services in one of the countries and make it my plot, and that's basically what you have in "The Spies of Warsaw."

Huzzah for Bob Barr! Unlike Libertarian Ron Paul, Barr has returned funds from the notorious Nazi site Stormfront. In honor of his telling the Nazis what for, here is Jello Biafra doing the same.

Grow large with food

The Onion has done the nation a valuable service by pitching a satirical product the fast food industry is probably contemplating. It's may be too late for the adults but we need to get Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman in front of more impressionable youth.

Jordan

Ross Douthat wrote this nice piece on Robert Jordan, his former favorite author. Jordan is also a former favorite of mine, although my fandom persisted through my twenties. Despite greatly preferring the George R R Martin and Steven Erikson fantasy series, I have not been able to generate the same level of excitement that I felt over the Jordan books.

It may be the Harry Potter effect. Back in the 90s, nearly every one I knew was reading the Jordan books at the same time and it was a constant source of conversation. With the Martin book and Erikson books, I haven't enjoyed the same shared experience. As Sam Anderson noted about the move to DVD on TV, we have left the era of simultaneity, where we all watch shows on our time. This was almost always the case with books, which makes the rare cases of simultaneity all the more exciting.

One I wish I had missed

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote a number of science fiction novels which I fondly remember. The Legacy of Heorot tells the story of colonization and the perils of misunderstanding xenobiology. Footfall is an exciting update on the War of the Worlds. Lucifer's Hammer concerns the collapse of society in the face of a comet impact on Earth. My major issue with Lucifer's Hammer, bloat, is a much bigger issue in highly regarded Mote in God's Eye.

The bloat issue is gigantic here. The first 150 pages are boring exposition filled where we meet the stock characters (engineer with Scots accent, plucky female aristo along for the ride, young dashing military commander) and learn about the painfully uninteresting world of the future. Once we meet the aliens, known as Moties, it takes many more pages before we learn anything about the society. There are many portentous allusions to things the Moties don't want the humans to learn. It takes so long to get to the revelations, that I really didn't care once I read about them.

All this padding would be fine if Niven and Pournelle had provided a rich world to explore. No such luck. While the initial concept is interesting ( US and USSR unite, colonize space, have a civil war, new empire tries to pick up the pieces) it quickly devolves into cutting and pasting from 19th century Britain. The navy is straight from Horatio Hornblower, with officers named sailing master and teenage midshipman running crew sections.

The Church (which is Catholic, a bit odd given the leading space powers were largely Protestant and Orthodox) is clearly more powerful, without serving any narrative purpose. Has the Church followed its social justice wing or become a rival power center to create challenges for the elite? Has the theology created cultural restraints on the development of technology or society? No and No. All the more galling the Church apparently hasn't changed much at all in a millennium.

There is a decent story about alien contact amongst all its problems, but it is such a short part of the book, it is probably not worth working your way through to find it. As the humans encounter the Moties, they learn that the society could threaten human society. The debate concerns the means by which they must deal with it. The viewpoints expressed nicely describe the classical realist view of politics. Alien first contact follows similar rules and problems as seen in foreign relations. What makes a country a threat? How do you manage threats? What is the purpose of interacting with other societies at all? The book has some interesting, if one-sided, things to say about this, but you have to wade through hundreds of pages of crap to get there. If you are looking for a classic to discover, beware this one.

A few items

Steve Clemons posts a small excerpt from General Ricardo Sanchez's new book. It's so sad, but Bush sounds like General Buck Turgidson.

Ian McEwan has a two part piece in the Guardian on apocalyptic thinking.

I am in the midst of Michael Burleigh's Sacred Causes, which is an excellent choice for those interested in religion's role in 20th century politics. His blog will give you a taste of his deep erudition, beautifully acid style and his Tory politics.

On the geek front, if you are looking for a way to survive those tedious conference calls, may I suggest Mabiweb?