Tuesday 25 September 2012

The Bridge Of D'Arnath by Carol Berg

From The Week of September 17, 2012
Though we endeavor, throughout our lives, to exert as much control over our destinies as possible, Fate is always there, ready to spoil our well-made plans. For while we may find it within ourselves to plot our own futures, we cannot dictate broader events. these are the gestalt of other actors who, in chaotic concert, weave a tapestry of action upon which we must work. Most of us will be indifferent to this fateful intersection of individual and world; after all, most of us experience customary lives which lack the mass to change the pattern of life. and yet, those rare few who do stand at the heart of things will find themselves utterly changed by Fate's hand, a caress that will steer them far from happy lassitude and into painful turmoil. Ms. Berg illustrates in her four-part epic.

Connected by an ancient, mystical bridge that spans the unfathomable void between their two worlds, the lands of Leiran and D'Arnath should have much in common. For centuries, D'Arnathy sorcerers have mingled in medieval Leiran, restoring its sick to health and filling its land with life. but where magic comes easily to the sons and daughters of D'Arnath, it has never been found in the bloodlines of Leiran families, an absence that has encouraged suspicion within the Leiran nobility, suspicions that the realm's priesthood has galvanized into prohibition. Eventually, a ban on sorcerers is found to be insufficient. Now, nothing short of a gruesome death shall be the punishment of any mage found to beoperating within Leiran lands.

One might imagine that the D'Arnathy, superior in every imaginable way to the Leiran, would simply depart, leaving their inferior cousins to their ignorance, but an ancient war with demigods on their own world has reduced 90 percent of their homeland to rack and ruin. what was once beautiful and green is now deserted and brown, the consequence of the wielding of unimaginable power. The D'Arnathy, then, are a people in peril, a people on the brink of homelessness, a people of peace made into the children of war who may yet be wiped clear of the canvas of history.

In The Son of Avonar, the epic's opening volley, we meet Lady Serriana of Leiran, a duchess who has accepted disgrace for living in sin with a D'Arnathy healer. having found in her lover only kindness and steadfastness, her life is shattered when the truth of his identity is publicly revealed and he is put to death in a most cruel fashion. This, coupled with the death of her son by this same man, compels Serriana to reject her life and her station, to withdraw to a distant cottage and spend the rest of her days in solitude.

this reverie, however, is broken when a young man barges into her world. Deeply damaged, he seems not to know his own name, let alone possess any capacity to sensibly communicate with the woman whose life he's interrupted. despite the barriers separating them, though, Serriana comes to believe that this stranger may well come to play a key role in the consequential events to come. For the bridge that has long-connected Leiran with D'Arnath is crumbling. and its falling may well spell the end of freedom on both worlds.

In Guardians of The Keep, the epic's second volume, Serriana's life is once again skewered by fate. having been pardoned by the Leiran king for her relationship with a D'Arnathy, she has returned to Conigor, the keep of her birth, to settle the affairs of her dead brother. duke Tomas' son, however, soon acquires her full attention. for in addition to being somber and sullen, he is deeply suspicious of his aunt who he's been taught to despise. when he fatefully runs away from Conigor, Serriana endeavors to bring him home, but she and her friends are too late. Her brother's son has been welcomed into the arms of the Lords of Zhev'Na, the destructive enemies of the D'Arnathy and they are ready to make of him a god of chaos to stand with them in the ruination of the worlds.

In The Soul Weaver, the epic's third entry, Serriana is again tapped by fate to intercede on behalf of her land when the queen of Leiran herself seeks her out to plead for her aid. the king of Leiran has been incapacitated by agents of the Zhev'Na, a crime which may or may not be connected to the disappearance of their daughter. Serriana agrees to help them even though she is burdened by her own labors. her family, such as it is, is set to be ended by the culmination of the destructive plans of the Zhev'Na. Only a miracle can save them, and Leiran, from ruination.

In Daughter of The Ancients, the final instalment in the epic, the arrival of a thousand-years-dead princess from the wastelands of the Zhev'Na throws the slowly recovering world of the D'Arnathy into chaos. How will she, the eldest heir to the D'Arnathy throne be integrated into the existing ruling structure? Is she as innocent and wronged as she seems, or is she the last ditch ploy of dying gods for one final measure of revenge.? Serriana and her family endeavor to discover the Princess' ultimate purpose while the fates of three worlds hang in the balance.

a sweeping epic, full of consequential deeds and unimaginable dangers, The Bridge of D'Arnath is a difficult, messy adventure. Ms. Berg commands a lyrical pen that does wonderful credit to her work here, blessing it with prose nearly as fine as poetry. But while her facility with language is second to very few, her plots leave a great deal to be desired. Events in this epic lurch from apocalyptic catastrophe to apocalyptic catastrophe, rarely pausing to allow its actors, let alone its readers, to catch their breath. Worse than its implausibility, though, is the degree to which the all-too-frequent explosions, like a bad summer blockbuster, numb the reader, inoculating him to the drama of the piece.

More than the troubled plot, though, Ms. Berg's epic is hobbled by a cast of characters who are rarely allowed to be themselves. Minds are sundered, identities are stolen, and souls are forced into the bodies of those who do not want them. And while these devices allow Ms. Berg to play with ideas of fate and consequence, of identity and personality, they leave the reader with little grasp of what these people are like when they aren't being bombarded by any number of mystical forces. It is, then, no surprise that Serriana is the series' most successful character. for in addition to being a strong-willed heroine worthy of the thousands of pages devoted to her, she is the only one who does not, at some juncture, have her mind scrambled by one godlike force or another.

Let there be no doubt that there is quality here. for all its flaws, The Bridge of D'Arnath bears strong resemblances to the giants of fantasy whose works inspired it. but instead of coalescing from its source materials into its own, distinct being, it is a Frankenstein of Tolkienian questing, Martinian betrayals and Jordanian beauty. It's as if the author conjured up a heroine and welded onto this framework her favorite bits of any number of her own heroes. Unfortunately for her, the weld points are all-too visible to the naked eye.

Interesting work, but the degree to which it is bedeviled by a bloated plot and deformed characters prevents it from taking flight and ascending to the upper echelons of the genre. (2/5 Stars)

The Red Market by Scott Carney

From The Week of September 17, 2012
As much as we are wont to jeopardize them with junk food and cigarettes, stimulants and depressants, our bodies are precious to us, especially when their failure threatens our existences. They are the self-repairing machines that allow us to have families, to perform work, to create beauty and to experience the world. They are the means by which we understand ourselves and the universe. And yet we ride them hard, expecting them to recover from whatever abuses we inflict upon them. Moreover, we expect science to repair them when they cannot repair themselves, confident that their hiccups will not shorten our time on this earth. But what if they do? What if we need the eyes and lungs, the hearts and the livers of others to grow old? What wouldn't we do extend our lives? Mr. Carney explores in his chilling investigation.

Wherever there is supply and demand for a product, there is a market; human flesh is no exception. From hair and skin to organ and tendon, the human body's component parts are of considerable value not only to traders in this market, but those souls desperate for a new lease on life. While some of these red markets are heavily regulated to ensure that the unfortunate aren't exploited by those of means, regulation does not eliminate the need. It merely compels the honor-bound to curtail their behavior while forcing underground all those willing to surrender their scruples to feed the need of the desperate.

From the collecting of Asian hair for sale to American women to the harvesting of the eggs of poor women for sale to the fertility-challenged, Mr. Carney immerses himself in this dark, exploitative underworld that has long-since given up on the notion of the body as sacred. He meets women who felt compelled to sell kidneys in order to procure medicine for their children. He encounters young women who saw no other option but to sell their eggs in order to make rent. He even spends time with men and women who have turned the clinical trialling of medicines into a profession, jeopardizing their longterm health for shortterm profit. If someone can live without it, someone has sold it, participating in a system worth billions of dollars, annually, very little of which flows into the hands of those who need it most.

For all its ghoulishness, The Red Market is captivating work, no moreso than in its introduction which seizes the reader by the throat and demands his full attention. Mr. Carney, a freelance journalist and frequent contributor to Wired Magazine, converts the tragic death of one of his colleagues, abroad in Asia, into a complex journey that takes him from the slums of India to the gleaming labs of Europe, exposing, throughout, a system far from clean or transparent. He contends that, though our ethics and our legislation have the best of intentions, the notion of organ donation is a fallacy that attempts to salve our consciences, to keep from looking too deeply at the necessary costs of a market in human flesh. For while it may be that some of us agree to surrender our organs when we have no more need of them, the system that procures those organs has tangible costs both financial and moral.

Moreover, Mr. Carney makes the powerful case that the regulating of red markets, though in some sense necessary, serves to create the very forms of exploitation they are attempting to stamp out. After all, if someone's need is sufficiently great, or grave, they are not going to listen to their government decry human flesh; they are going to procure what they require. And wherever there is money willing to be spent on a thing there are people willing to take the risk of procuring that product in the hope of handsome remuneration. It is an economic principle as old as human history. Legislation has no hope of standing up to such ancient power.

Tying together economics, exploitation and the human spirit, The Red Market is a deeply disturbing examination of the extent to which we will sell our health for those we hold most dear. There are no easy answers here, but their stories cry out for justice, for some system of sanity to keep these unsfortunats from being so unmercifully used. For until science bestows us with the blessing of artificial organs, the needy will always be out there, just waiting for the desperate to give them what they require. (4/5 Stars)

Countess Dracula by Tony Thorne

From The Week of September 17, 2012
cruelty is a force as puzzling as it is pernicious. Capable of ruining lives and cultures with equal ease, it has engulfed entire centuries in blood and war, its ugly urges spelled out in scars that persist to this day. But while its existence is undeniable, its origins are less clear. For humanity is a species built on altruism, on the singular notion that one act of kindness will be returned with interest. It is this very system of positive reciprocity that has built our civilization. This too is undeniable. Where, then, is there room for cruelty in this equation? It seems antithetical to the very ideas that have elevated humanity out of the muck of ignorance. Whatever its origins, its power is tragically clear, a truth demonstrated in Mr. Thorne's biography of one of history's most gruesome figures.

A woman now hopelessly sheathed in legend, Elizabeth Bathory has become a titillating symbol of cruelty. A 16th-century daughter of one of Hungary's most powerful noble families, she has had ascribed to her, by various, contemporary sources, unimaginable acts of brutality which she was said to have salaciously inflicted upon her own female servants. Having reputedly cultivated a small circle of cronish confidantes to execute her fiendish will, she subjected these helpless girls to boiling baths and sadistic floggings which were said to have filled her halls with blood and death. So legendary was she that her cruelties inspired the myth of the heartless mistress bathing in the blood of virgins in order to recapture the beauty of her spent youth.

But who was Elizabeth Bathory? And just how cruel has history been to her? To answer this question, Mr. Thorne, a cultural historian, delves into the histories of both the Countess and the region that birthed her to unearth a handful of tantalizing clues about this most controversial creature. He discovers that, while the Countess was by no means an angel, her deeds were only remarkable for having been authored by a woman. Bathory was a product of a dark, warlike period in European history, one that produced many masculine atrocities. When these crimes are committed by men, Mr. Thorne argues, they are accepted as the deeds of a man shaped by his time. But when a woman wields a knife dripping in innocent blood, then these are not crimes but unforgivable sins that cannot be tolerated.

Charting the political forces that animated Bathory's world, Mr. Thorne makes the convincing case that the Countess' crimes were inflated by men who had every reason to discredit her. For proof, he points to Bathory's perilous position. For while she was undoubtedly one of her realm's most powerful figures, she was a widow with vast estates and near-endless wealth, both of which were coveted by her family and her rivals. With enemies lurking in every corner, waiting only for a weakness upon which to pounce, her downfall was as certain as sunrise. And so, when the abused bodies of dead servants were discovered on her land, and this evidence married to the compelling testimony of a loyal priest who had previously complained about rumors of ill-treatment from Bathory's castle, the means of her demise was assured. She would be devoured by the wolves she could no longer keep at bay.

Though Countess Dracula is at times dry, burdened by a blur of deeds and families that have long-since been pulled down into the depths of history, it is simultaneously a tempered and scholarly reconstruction of the life of a woman of her time. For Mr. Thorne is correct to contend that, if we but thought of Bathory as a man, these awful deeds would be contextualized in the broader life of a tyrant. Any of a hundred men have done no worse than Elizabeth Bathory, but these cruelties are viewed through a more adoring lens. In the Countess' case, her gender makes her unusual, allowing it to play into Christian preconceptions of sinfulness that have helped propel her out of reality and into nightmare. Bathory was undoubtedly brutal, but she is also a reminder that cruelty does not stand alone. It has causes. And if we are willing to recognize this for Tamerlane, then we must also do so for the Countess.

A sober but rewarding analysis of a difficult subject. Mr. Thorne does well with what he has. (3/5 Stars)

Tuesday 18 September 2012

The Tamir Triad by Lynn Flewelling

From The Week of September 10, 2012
As much as we define ourselves by the fidelity of our friends, the magnitude of our wealth, the customs of our culture and the values of our families, identity dictates who we are. For long before the trappings of civilization influence us, identity demands that we pursue the passions that burn in our hearts. Everything, from how we cope with fear to how we manage our expectations, is filtered through our self-regard. For the pain of acting against how we think of ourselves is too much to bear. We must be the person we feel inside or else we are lost to shame and humiliation, to lies and deceptions. Ms. Flewelling vividly demonstrates this truth in her trilogy which is as bold in conception as it is brave in execution.

A kingdom of warriors and wizards, queens and knights, Skala is a realm in conflict. Defined by an ancient pact with its divine patron, the Lightbringer, who promised to protect it from rack and ruin so long as the realm was lead by a queen of the blood, Skala has long been a land in which men and women were equally free to pursue their own destinies. But after centuries of female rule, a king has elevated himself to the throne, usurping the place of his own sister in order to claim for himself the might of Skala. This duplicitous turn of events not only drives the king's faithful sister mad, it has exposed the land to all manner of blood plagues and foreign armies, both of which threaten to decimate the realm. Skala has broken faith with a god. And such beings are rarely known for their forgiveness or mercy.

In The Bone Doll's Twin, the trilogy's opening volume, we are witness to a terrible secret. Mad princess Ariani, deposed by her brother, labors to give birth to twins. A boy and a girl, this ought to be a joyous event for Skala, but Ariani's misfortune deepens when the boy fails to survive the night, leaving only the girlchild as living proof of her blood and her agony. Worse yet, her brother, the king, has cruelly decreed, as a part of a wider crackdown on women participating in matters outside the hearth, that female offspring of the royal blood are to have their lives ended in order to secure his position on the throne. Should the king learn that Ariani's surviving child is a girl, he is sure to insist she be killed.

Fatefully, wizards attending Ariani save the girlchild's life by mystically disguising her, using the essence of her dead brother to impose upon her the appearance of a boy. Thus, to all but a secret few, Tobin, child of Ariani, is a prince, free to grow up unencumbered by the king's scorn and suspicion. Not even Tobin himself is aware of his true identity, not until he has become a young, promising companion of the crown prince Korin, son of the usurper king, and then it is far too late to go back. For Tobin is now a warrior, a young man of station and power. To reject that life for one of a girl, even if it is to heal her realm, is a bridge too far. But then she has not reckoned on the will of the gods.

In The Hidden Warrior, the trilogy's second instalment, Skala's deterioration reaches critical mass. Attacked by its rival, Plenimar, who employ necromancers to steel their assaults, its capital is burning and its king is flailing. The gods have withdrawn their favor from the beleaguered realm, plunging its people into chaos and war. Their only hope now resides in prince Tobin who must reveal his true identity as the sole female heir to the throne. For if she were to sit the throne, reborn as queen Tamir, she could mend the pact with the gods and bring peace back to her land. But then, how can she declare herself to the world when she cannot even accept her own identity?

In The Oracle's Queen, the trilogy's final entry, the war between Skala and Plenimar reaches fever pitch. What's left of Skala's nobility has rallied to Tobin's banner. And yet, a once faithful friend, crown prince Korin, lurks in a damp but important fortress, nursing his wounded pride. For Tobin, or Tamir -- he does not know which story to believe -- has usurped his place, an event which causes the affection Korin once had for Tobin to be devoured by anger and enmity. These dark emotions open the door to the manipulations of a powerful wizard who has so far cynically served the royal family. Civil war hangs like an ugly haze on Skala's cloudy horizon. It is a realm battered and beaten, but the desire for power is too strong for the selfish to let the land rest. Power must be had. And war seems the only way.

As confrontational as it is laborious, The Tamir Triad is a breath of original air in a fantasy genre paralyzed by derivations. While her world and its magics rarely deviate from the norm, Ms. Flewelling's bold choice to take on the painful dilemmas thrown up by gender confusion affixes to her familiar hull an unapologetic masthead that leads the reader into uncharted waters. Unsurprisingly then, sad prince Tobin animates this entire series. Reminiscent of children compelled by their parents to assume a gender that does not suit them, he labors to please his parents, little knowing that they have bestowed upon him an identity he didn't choose and a destiny he didn't ask for. It is left to him to not only discover that he's been living a lie, but to forge a path out of that lie to some kind of identity he can live with, some manner of self-representation that will allow him to marry together the two people nature and nurture have forced him to become.

However, as much as Tobin elevates this trilogy out of the ordinary, Ms. Flewelling's greatest accomplishment here is the darkly aggressive manner in which she raises these questions of identity. This sgrim, challenging and even brutal series is not one easily swallowed by young adults. For Tobin is not ushered into girlhood by puppies and faeries. In her case, accepting herself is also accepting the uneasy mantle of absolute, monarchical power, power which can, and is, easily abused. In this, the author steers clear of making any sort of feminist declarations. In fact, Tobin's journey reads much more as as the acceptance of the cares and responsibilities of adulthood than it does as any sort of parable for the superiority of womankind. This, combined with an unwillingness to pull any punches, lends the trilogy a wonderful, Gothic energy.

But for all that is praiseworthy about The Tamir Triad, there are missteps here. Ms. Flewelling's roster of supporting actors leave a lot to be desired. Though they have clearly been given a great deal of thought, too many of them fall into the simplistic polarities of good and evil, heroic and villainous. In particular, there is insufficient explanation for why the story's antagonists insist on defying the protagonists. Greed and the thrill of manipulation are apparent, yes, but there is almost no sense of the kind of self-preservation that would ordinarily cause such villains to reform their strategies and live to fight another day. Instead, their relentless assaults serve little purpose but to force the heroes to strike them down. Moreover, large swaths of the three novels are taken up with meticulous reconstructions of medieval life which, though appealing initially, wears upon the reader, fattening up an already lengthy epic.

Nonetheless, while the work may be flawed, the degree to which Ms. Flewelling willingly engages with a difficult and even torturous issue transforms the trilogy from a stone into a diamond. And though it may be rough around the edges, the degree to which it shines leaves the reader unconcerned with its blemishes. (4/5 Stars)

Social Engineering by Chris Hadnagy

From The Week of September 10, 2012
Ever since humans possessed the power of speech, they have been in the con game. For we are social, hierarchical animals, qualities which lend themselves to the manipulation of the thoughts and feelings of those closest to us. These tweaks of ego, these posturings for status, needn't be malevolent, or even harmful. They might be as innocent as looking our best in order to make a good impression upon someone we desire, to get a job we wish to have, or even to express our trustworthiness to those who might otherwise judge us. But they can just as easily bear cruel intent -- deflating truths murmured into the trusting ears of our competition, misdirections knowingly bestowed upon the credulous --, actions which allow us to gain advantages at the expense of both the feelings and the fortunes of others. Though these skills have always played important roles in human interplay, they have never loomed larger than they do now in our interconnected, global world. Mr. Hadnagy demonstrates in his uneven work.

Defined as the victimization of individuals through trickery and manipulation, social engineering is one of the most powerful and pervasive weapons in the world of modern espionage. Deploying a host of tools, from confidence games to software exploits, the social engineer typically preys upon both the kindness and the credulity of strangers in order to achieve one of three customary goals: to penetrate and control computer networks, to test the security systems in place to protect such networks, or to harvest information for fun and profit. Though

Whereas hacking requires the hacker to possess extensive knowledge of both computers and the languages used to program them, social engineering demands that one only possess enough charm to convince the innocent to unknowingly act against their own best interests. Consequently, while its weakness resides in the fact that the exploiter needs a mark upon which to prey, its great strength stems from its capacity to entirely bypass every form of computer encryption implemented to protect sensitive systems. A social engineer does not need usernames and passwords; he does not rely upon the manipulation of ones and zeros. He hacks people, not computers. And but for their own sense of self-preservation, humans have no such safeguards.

As frustrating as it is enlightening, Social engineering is a sometimes fascinating journey through the world of human hacking. Mr. Hadnagy, who has specialized in this field for some time, discusses numerous, nightmarish scenarios in which data vital to both corporations and individuals has been stolen by simply convincing a receptionist to put a USB key into her work computer. The gravity of both his claims and his observations have been backed up by two recent cases, that of Matt Honan and of Stuxnet, both of which used social engineering to destroy an individual's digital life, in the case of the journalist, and to significantly damage an Iranian nuclear reactor, in the case of the worm. In this, Mr. Hadnagy reveals a most critical truth, that a system is only as secure as its weakest point.

Hackers are not foolish. Why lay siege to a digital fortress when one can poison its wells, or parachute onto its walls? A clever exploiter probes for weaknesses, flaws in the system, and attacks there, applying as much pressure to the most vulnerable point until it yields to his demands. It is not the fortified gates we must worry about. It is the smiling, friendly person who can be used as an unwitting pawn in a game they cannot understand.

But while Mr. Hadnagy demonstrates this point with admirable clarity, Social Engineering reads, in every other respect, as an exercise in self-aggrandizement. These 350 poorly composed pages are saturated by the author's ego, the masturbatory fantasies of which stain the entire work. I have no doubt that Mr. Hadnagy has helped people. Nor is there any question that his work may arm the credulous with weapons against the attacks of the devious. And yet, it is impossible to escape the smugness with which Mr. Hadnagy conveys these lessons. Consequently, his supercilious tone, which is as offensive as his prose is childlike, mars the work irreparably.

This is an important topic. And though Mr. Hadnagy has much to teach, his ego and his pen both fail him. (2/5 Stars)

Pompeii by Mary Beard

From The Week of September 10, 2012
The past is handed down to us through images frozen in time. For as much as literature can teach us about the nuts and bolts of historical eras, only images have the power to captivate our imaginations, to depict, with a stroke, both the continuity of human need and the mutability of human custom. With shocking ease, they can declare to us the realities of life so often buried by the portentousness of the word. But such images go beyond tapestry and graffiti. They go beyond art. Some are bestowed upon us by fate and physics, both of which combined, with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, to gift to us a town frozen in time, a town Ms. Beard thoroughly reconstructs in her vivid snapshot of this most infamous Roman town.

A town of merchants and slaves, citizens and gladiators, Pompeii was, until 79 AD, a fairly typical town in the heart of the Roman Empire. Filled with shops and brothels, conflict and politics, it operated within the great shadow cast by the imperial capital at Rome. But though its significance may have been vanishingly small relative to the historical heart of the Republic, this did not dissuade its people from availing themselves of its public baths, of congregating in its numerous bars, of praying in its temples and attending its numerous parties. The town even possessed a 20,000-seat coliseum at which its gladiators fought and died for the pleasure of its residents. For generations, the loving and the lovelorn, the fortunate and the foolish, packed its streets and lived under its roofs until, one day, it all came to an end.

A tempestuous region that had been recently shaken by earthquakes powerful enough to damage homes, it would've come as little surprise to the wise that Pompeii was in line for another temblor. But none of them could've imagined that this latest disaster would be the last as they knew it. On that fateful day in 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius erupted, angrily dumping upwards of 20 feet of ash onto Pompeii's streets, burning into the souls of its inhabitants and into the walls of its structures, scars that would outlast the empire, to be rediscovered and chronicled centuries on by historians eager for a glimpse at a place and a time enshrouded in legend. The volcanic holocaust preserved all from the trivial to the portentous while leaving, for scholars, tantalizing gaps in the context necessary to properly place such evidence. It is a town millennia gone. And these are its bones.

Though at times beset by a scholarly dryness, Pompeii is, in the main, a rewarding journey through a town preserved in volcanic amber. Ms. Beard, a professor of Classics at Cambridge, attacks her subject with passion and skepticism. The former permeates the work, enlivening her summations of Pompeiian life which range from food to sex, casts to coins. The latter, meanwhile, is the wise lens through which Ms. Beard views her archaeological delvings. For while others are willing to draw exciting but hasty conclusions from scrawls on the walls of brothels and from bowls on the bartops of shops, she holds herself to a higher, more admirable standard which prevents her from misleading the reader down the path to supposition. This wariness is most welcome, not only because the author presents it with deftness and humor but because of ancient Pompeii's place in modern culture, a fascinating, engrossing tourist trap at which many tall tales can be spun for personal gain.

There's no avoiding that the work, at times, stalls, burdened by too many names and too many customs unfamiliar to those of us who have not spent a lifetime studying antiquity. Nonetheless, when Pompeii shines, it does so brightly, reminding us of the temporary nature of custom and tradition. For what seems to us both obvious and permanent seems to those who follow us strange and ephemeral. This is a welcome lesson, one that opens our eyes to the foreign and compels us to view it with as much legitimacy as we do the familiar.

A pleasing if uneven journey. (3/5 Stars)

Tuesday 11 September 2012

The Diving Universe by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Safeway In Arizona by Tom Zoelner

From The Week of September 03, 2012
Blame is a senseless exercise. As much as it may satisfy our anger to indulge in it, it solves nothing. For to blame is to suppose that we possess all the information necessary to properly apportion it which is almost never the case. In fact, blame actually harms our efforts to divine the truth. Not only is it used by the guilty as a shield against the slings and arrows of the righteous, it cautions wary bystanders that any slip, any misjudgement, any disaster on their watch is bound to bring opprobrium down on their heads. And if that is inevitable, then why not lie and obfuscate? Why not block and evade as a means of self-preservation? If truth means anything to us, then blame must be relinquished as a weapon. For it is only in a full understanding of a catastrophe that we can know how to fairly dish it out. Mr. Zoelner conveys this vital lesson with tragic clarity in this masterful memoir.

Gabriele Giffords was one of the good ones. The daughter of a prosperous, Arizona family, she grew up curious and passionate in a world all-too-often gripped by narrow minds and fixed opinions. Dedicated to the notion of bettering her community, she devoted years of her life to public service, first as a state senator and then as a Congresswoman, spending thousands of hours listening to the wishes and the complaints of her constituents and trying to square those needs with the dictates of her party. And though her efforts sometimes failed to satisfy, they earned her widespread respect in a deeply partisan world.

On January 8th, 2011, Jared Lee Loughner, a 22-year-old college dropout, walked into a Safeway in Tucson, Arizona, where Ms. Giffords was holding a public event, and did his best to destroy all of this promise. Firing once, at close range, he sent a bullet into the Congresswoman's brain that would have killed her but for the quick thinking of those nearby and the medical expertise of the surgeons who saved her life. Six other souls were not so lucky, cut down by the fire of a young man enthralled to a case of paranoid schizophrenia which prompted him to execute his terrible and senseless plan. The shooting would not only change the lives of those who survived the attack, it would not only burden the spirits of the families who lost loved ones in the violence, it would shine a powerful spotlight on public discourse in the United States, igniting a brief but potent backlash against incivility and harshness in political speech considered to be marring the nation.

For Mr. Zoelner, however, the wounds would go far deeper and say far more about Arizona than it would the country to which it belongs. A son of the same Tucson community that shaped Ms. Giffords, Mr. Zoelner, an American journalist, uses the terrible shooting as a launch point for an investigation into Arizonan society. In chronicling its history, particularly after the onset of air conditioning which fuelled an explosive expansion in the state's population, he describes Arizona as a community of transplanted souls, people who have chosen to make a new beginning in this expanse of sun-drenched desert. This polyglot of elseness, combined with the oppressive heat that plagues the state during the year's warmer months, prevents, he argues, any natural links from being forged in the prefab communities that spring up around the waves of immigrants. Instead, families stick to themselves, in their temperature-controlled homes, their problems sealed away behind doors that rarely open for idle conversation.

This isolation, coupled with criminally lax gun laws and Ms. Giffords' contentious 2010 reelection to Congress, created, Mr. Zoelner persuasively contends, the perfect target for Jared Loughner who, acting upon conspiracies drummed up by his illness, committed an act of terrorism that caused much soul-searching throughout the nation. It also prompted Mr. Zoelner to write this powerful memoir which emotionally captures not only the pain of Loughner's victims, but the charisma of Gabriele Giffords about whom Mr. Zoelner is clearly and deeply fond. His distress is palpable throughout, bestowing upon the work a kind of aching vitality that is profoundly moving.

Mr. Zoelner is careful to caution his readers that he is less than unbiased about the events of January 8th, 2011. And though we can appreciate his openness about his connections to Ms. Giffords and her politics, he quietly demonstrates, throughout his work, that he is a man possess of an opened and powerful mind. For unlike many others who jumped to conclusions about Loughner and the shooting, eagerly fitting black hats upon those who best fit their prejudices, the author does nothing of the sort. Rather, he casts the widest net possible for those responsible, finding that, instead of catching individuals, he has hooked a confluence of broader trends that combined to harm Gabriele Giffords on that fateful day and will continue to harm others in the future if not arrested and reversed. For the mentally ill cannot be so blithely ignored, nor guns so loosely monitored, nor community links so easily cut without consequences, without numbness and despair and violence setting in.

This is exquisite work which, while hardly objective, is fodder for the thoughtful mind. (5/5 Stars)

L.A. Noir by John Buntin

From The Week of September 03, 2012
Corruption is a pervasive force. An infection as rife among the righteous as it is among the morally bankrupt, it plays no favorites. Why should it? It matters not to corruption what manner of man falls beneath its seductive sway, only that he does, only that he tastes its sweet fruit, learns its cunning ways and extends its dark doctrine. Corruption does not have an agenda. It offers only opportunities by which the willing, and the desperate, can avail themselves, opportunities sure to enrich them while swelling its ranks of converts. The golden age of Los Angeles learned this lesson all too well, a truth demonstrated with style and skill by Mr. Buntin's excellent biography of the coming of age of a global city.

Originally envisioned as a white spot, a safe harbor for caucasian Americans in an ever-more immigrant United States, Los Angeles would swiftly shake off this narrowminded mantle to explode onto the world stage as the foremost destination for glitz and glamour. Thanks to Hollywood, it would come to be invested with the hopes and dreams of millions the world over, millions who would sacrifice all but the shirts on their backs to arrive in its beautiful basin, to sample its seductive wears, to try to make it big in a town with the power to vault the nameless into the stratosphere of the celebrity.

With fortunes being minted on a nightly basis, it's unsurprising that Los Angeles would become a magnet for crime. However, the degree to which the powerful institutions of this city of dreams were corrupted by outside influences would leave even hardened cynics slackjawed with shock. After all, for nearly two decades, from the 1920s to the 1940s, a Combination of crooked cops, hardened gangsters and officials on the take ran Los Angeles. They established rackets, endorsed black markets, profited off of gamblers and skimmed off all manner of vices. Through a mixture of brutality and ruthlessness, they ensured that justice would be available to the white man, scarce to the criminal man, and all-but non-existent to a man of any other color or minority.

This amoral status quo was challenged in the 1940s by the methodical rise to power of William H. Parker, one of Los Angeles' most zealous cops. Notoriously straight-laced in this city of sin, he became a crusader for police power, using a combination of intelligence, legal expertise and persistence to finally elevate himself to the cultivated post of chief of police. From this lofty height, he set out to reform his sprawling town of millions, coming up hard against not only resistance within his own crooked ranks but the powerful interests of organized crime, represented by the infamous Mickey Cohen, entrenched in the city. Time and again, Parker and Cohen would square off for control of the city, driving the former into paranoia and authoritarianism and the latter repeatedly into prison where justice was no less scarce than on the star-studded streets of L.A.

A fascinating stroll through the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles' most golden era, L.A. Noir is a dark and delightful clash of powers that have long since lapsed into legend. Mr. Buntin's lively prose captures the stylishness and the impishness of these gilded decades, managing to induce, in the reader, as many laughs, at the exploits of its unforgettable characters, as grimaces, at the blood and corruption that drenched and controlled its streets. Cohen and parker, natural enemies, provide the work an excellent framework upon which the author fills in the history, good and bad, of a unique city in the grips of a unique time. Moreover, they permit the reader to conceive of just how thin a line exists between cop and criminal. For while one may swear to uphold the law and the other may swear to trample upon it, both can be equally and devastatingly ruthless in the per suit of their aims, leaving behind not only the ravished body of the law but the corpses of those many obstacles that had to fall in order for them to achieve their ends.

though Cohen, the boxer turned criminal, and parker, the hard-head turned police chief, provide the work an axis around which all else rotates, and though their life stories stand in for the numerous other figures who must have worked L.A.'s streets for good and or ill, they pale in importance to L.A. Noir's latter chapters. For as much as humor and panache enliven the first half of Mr. Buntin's history, the latter is consumed by a serious examination of the miserable race relations between the city's minorities and its police force from 1965 onward. From the Watts Riots to the Rodney King incident, Mr. Buntin soberly captures the scandals that deeply tarnished the reputation of the LAPD and the degree to which these incidents were outgrowths of the ambitions of men like Parker who sacrificed all for the sake of their own goals. Thus, while L.A. Noir entertains, it also leaves its readers humbled by a true taste of ruthlessness, both its execution and its costs.

A well-balanced history of a city enchanted by vice and power... Mr. Buntin neglected to do justice to the final years of Mickey Cohen, but in every other respect a captivating read. (4/5 Stars)

Tuesday 4 September 2012

Eona: The Last Dragon Eye by Alison Goodman

From The Week of August 27, 2012
For all of the good it can do when properly harnessed, power remains a terrifying tool. When wielded as a weapon, it has the capacity to devastate entire nations, tearing down societal edifices that have stood for centuries. When wielded for personal gain, it can carve destructive swaths through families and relationships, casting aside the debris of broken lives in order to attain its master's ultimate goal. But perhaps most calamitous to us all is when it is captured, or bestowed upon, the young and the unready, those poor souls who desire it but lack the will and the wisdom to control it. For such an outcome is surely the first step down the road to anarchy. Power can please or harm, heal or annihilate, build or crush. Ms. Goodman demonstrates in the meandering conclusion to her epic duology. In a world of swords and emperors, noblemen and villagers, peace and magic flows from the Dragoneyes, twelve men who have bonded themselves to spiritual dragons whose captured power helps to keep the land fertile and safe. These revered conduits are second only in power to the emperor who ostensibly commands them, though, it is difficult to imagine how even he would prevent them from working in concert against him, such is their might. And yet, for all of their immensity, the power of the spiritual dragons has been slowly fading for generations, to the extent that feats once easily accomplished are now a struggle for these legendary men.

The product of a desperate scheme, Eona, a girl disguised as a boy in order to be allowed into the choosing ceremony for new Dragoneyes, was unexpectedly selected by the Mirror Dragon, the Emperor's own dragon thought long lost. But Eona's elevation has caused an upheaval in imperial society, the tides of which have washed the emperor from his throne and allowed cruel, power-hungry usurpers to take his place. They desire the concentrated power of all of the spiritual dragons and they are more than willing to kill Eona to attain it. Forced into exile, Eona is awkwardly folded into a resistance movement against the new imperial order, but is her destiny in step with the mission of vengeance her comrades have chosen, or will the power she can barely control destroy friends and foes alike?

The riotous conclusion to the epic begun in Eon: Dragoneye Reborn, Eona: The Last Dragoneye struggles to recapture the grace and the exhilaration of its progenitor. The essence of what made Eon wonderful yet remains, the Asian-tinged mythology, the awkwardness of youth, the pain of gender confusion, and the agony of divided loyalties, but the song of these virtues is drowned out by the noise of its story. Hampered by a meandering plot that lurches her characters from peril to peril, Ms. Goodman left this reader benumbed and seasick by the endless spikes of danger its heroine is forced to overcome in order to achieve her destiny and the story's resolution. What's more, several of the narrative's threads are dropped for convenience, signaling a quiet acknowledgement that, while Ms. Goodman had a solid vision of the entwined destinies of Eona and the dragons, she did not know how to advance her characters to the threshold of that conclusion. Consequently, the reader is tossed onto the wind, blown here and there, before finally being deposited on a foreign shore, helpless to watch the story's climax roll in.

Make no mistake, Ms. Goodman is a wonderful talent. And such was Eon's excellence that even Eona's faults are tolerable in order to share in the author's final vision of the piece. But there are simply too many holes, too many conveniences, too many cliches and too many pouts for the work to be enjoyed. Nonetheless, for lovers of coming-of-age fiction, the duology, on balance, is worth a look. It is just a pity that the flow Ms. Goodman enjoyed in the opening effort is not carried on here.

A troubled ending to a bold and ambitious series... (2/5 Stars)

Masters of Doom by David Kushner

From The Week of August 27, 2012
Genius presents itself in many forms. It resides in the tactical brilliance of a general, the mathematical wizardry of a savant, the emotional acuity of a politician and the masterful memory of an historian. From the business world to the academic, from high finance to everyday life, its expression benefits us all, oftentimes in ways we neither witness nor appreciate. But then, once in a great while, genius emerges from the tumultuous activity of a few billion souls, manifesting and demanding with its power that, in ways large and small, we recognize its glory. For it has brought into the world something new, something bold and something beautiful. Mr. Kushner captures just such an event with this fascinating biography of two very different geniuses.

Born in different years, in different states, and to different lives, no one could have foreseen the bonds of trust and ambition that would weld John Carmack and John Romero into the creators of the most revolutionary gaming franchise of the 20th century. Products of broken homes and blunted dreams, they came of age in the shadow of the Cold War of the 1980s, not the technological revolutions of the 1990s. They were told, by their world and their parents, to seek out conventional lives in the arms of customary industry, to make successes of themselves in the boring fields of the tried and the true. But the two Johns were not ordinary men living ordinary lives. Driven by a heady mixture of talent and determination, they rejected the old to welcome in the new, to flood themselves with its glories and its limitations, to find in its code a stage upon which they could perform.

After years of struggle, of sleepless nights and restless weekends, of toiling for the man and his masters, of striving to overcome the restrictions of technology and ignorance, they would break through, publishing in December of 1993, Doom, the first in a series of games that have transformed the PC industry. Combining a relentlessly hellish aesthetic with startling advancements in gameplay, Doom would go on to spawn numerous, successful sequels as well as comic books, novels,films and board games. But while their fortunes rose, their affection for one another waned until an end to their successful partnership in the late 1990s sent the two Johns on very different paths: one into the arms of fame and gaming and the other into mathematics and rocketry. But though their years of collaboration may be few, their legacy will live on for decades to come.

Masters of Doom is a lively history of the rise of the modern, technological world as seen through the eyes of two men whose creations helped create it. Mr. Kushner, an American journalist, takes the reader on a whirlwind tour across the southern United States, following John Carmack (coding wunderkind) and John Romero (gaming visionary) as the winds of fortune blew them together, as their complementary talents interlinked, and as their powerful thirst for success drove them to change the world. The author maps out the history here wonderfully well, describing the dominant gaming cultures of the late 1980s and early 1990s, cultures that would be radically restructured by the happy disruption of ID software's revolutionary products. But he is easily at his best when capturing the two Johns, detailing extensively the similarities that helped forge their partnership and the differences that destroyed it.

Mr. Kushner does not ask the reader to root for Carmack or Romero even though it would have been easy for him to do so. He does not pass judgement on their foibles or their failings even though they are powerful and legion. He remains pleasingly agnostic concerning the major themes that emerge from his work: pride and power, genius and revolution, betrayal and hubris. Like the extent to which the two Johns overturned the paradigm, all of this is left for the reader to sort through, concluding as he sees fit. This is a rare and welcome gift. For many such experts seek to pontificate more than present. There is none of that here.

Masters of Doom shimmers with personalities and blood, with cultural subversion and libertarian economics. It is an irrepressible ride through a time that may never come again, more's the pity. For it is difficult to imagine more change resulting from the efforts of a handful of societal rejects. We would be so lucky to have history repeat itself in the years to come... (4/5 Stars)

American Terrorist by Lou Michel & Dan Herbeck

From The Week of August 27, 2012
In light of the vigor with which we have studied civilization, its benefits and its costs, its surprises and its wonders, we know worryingly little about how best to sustain it. Yes,the old standards of a common education, a shared sense of community, and a market by which to trade and do work are certainly vital cogs in this particular wheel, but not even these powerful platforms can keep our disaffected from falling through the cracks, tumbling down into the nihilism of despair and hatred. These individuals, sufficiently marinated in these negative emotions, care nothing for civilization. On the contrary, they are willing to wound it, to savage it, to try to bring it to its knees.

Why? Why do they desire to lash out at what we have all together made? Moreover, what differentiates them from the rest of us? What critical element distinguishes a man who responds to being fired by applying for new jobs from a man who responds by using a shotgun to revenge himself upon those who wronged him? Normally, these would be questions for psychologists, not journalists. And yet, in this mesmerizing biography of timothy McVeigh, Misters Michel and Herbeck have captured an insight that helps answer both these important questions.

Born in Western New York in 1970, Timothy McVeigh enjoyed an ordinary youth. Enamored with sports and Star Trek, friends and family, he exhibited virtually no signs of the cold, calculating extremist he would later become. Sure, he bent the rules, falling in love with fast cars and powerful guns, but such are the thrills of male adolescence. All of this would change, however, in the 1980s when the dissolution of his parents' marriage and the humdrum nature of civilian life would steer him into the arms of the military where, within a year of enlisting, he would find himself in the oil-stained sands of the Middle East, participating in the United States' crushing defeat of Iraq in the First Gulf War. Bullied as a youth, McVeigh harbored a life-long disgust for the strong who took advantage of the weak. And so, unlike his country, he could not revel in their victory. For he had seen, first-hand, how overmatched the Iraqis had been. To him, it was not a victory; it was a slaughter.

Over the next few years, McVeigh would nurse his grudges into a cold, hard anger. Submerging himself in a world of gun shows and sovereign citizens, he would eventually fix his rage upon his federal government, blaming them for jeopardizing the value of the Dollar, for harboring imperialist inventions abroad, and for wanting to implement a nanny state at home. Every slight, every small infringement upon his liberty, fuelled his outrage until the desire to hit back consumed him. On April 19th, 1995, he would do just that, detonating a 7,000 pound truck bomb just outside the federal building in downtown Oklahoma city, Oklahoma, killing 168 people in what was then the deadliest act of terrorism on American soil. He would consider it a legitimate military action, payback for the overuse of American power and a rallying cry to patriots. His countrymen would consider it a heinous crime for which death was the only punishment.

American Terrorist is captivating work. Misters Michel and Herbeck, both American journalists, gained extensive access to McVeigh and his family, allowing them to sketch vivid portraits of the terrorist, his shy father, his angry sister and his selfish mother. They paint lavish portraits of western New York during the 1970s and 1980s, decades of white flight and economic depression that would continue to torment the area for years to come. They chronicle, in startling detail, McVeigh's three-year journey to Oklahoma City, traveling through the hard-right world of militiamen and sovereignists, survivalists and white supremacists, to finally arrive at McVeigh's destructive destiny. But for as much as Misters Michel and Herbeck do a wonderful job illuminating the many worlds Timothy McVeigh inhabited, this work is at its most potent when making the case that we can only understand McVeigh's radicalism by comprehending how little the man had to lose. Through a combination of circumstance and his own haplessness with women, McVeigh separated himself from virtually all human attachment. He had no partner to provide for. He had no children to live for. He was a man without ties, a man who saw the world through the lens of his loneliness.

His star had been rising. He was an accomplished soldier with a bright future. And then it ended. And without anyone around him to remind him of the truth, he revised his own history, finding something else to blame for his failures. The government became his jihad, the gestalt of all his frustration. And without anyone to live for, he was free to attack his enemy with all the training at his disposal.

Some might consider this to be a sympathetic biography. Some will likely argue that McVeigh shouldn't be studied at all, that he and his darkness should be confined to history. But these are empty claims. We can only understand the flaws in our society through the study of those who find flaw in it. For even in all their tortured radicalism, they can still hold up a mirror for us to view ourselves, how we make the voiceless feel and how important it is to keep them in our thoughts when we act. For it is they who will try to punish us for ignoring them. And when we allow them to do that, we all lose. (5/5 Stars)