The extraordinary life of Gertrude Bell in The Desert Queen

From The Week of February 18, 2013
Life, under ordinary circumstances, is challenging enough as it is. Its roadblocks and digressions, pitfalls and pratfalls, at best, require years to be disentangled and, at worst, allow us never to recover from their terrible grip. But what of those among us who are ahead of their time? What of those who devote themselves to ideas and pursuits that seem perfectly sensible to them but to the rest of us seem senseless? If life, to us, is a series of obstacles, then, for them, it must be a mountain up which ones full span on this earth must be spent in the climbing. The summit might someday be reached, but at what cost, to them and to those who love to question, to challenge, to take a different road? In examining the life of one of Victorian England's most adventurous heroines, Ms. Wallach asks this very question. The answer is decidedly bleak.

The eldest daughter of a British steel magnate, Gertrude Bell was born in 1869, at the height of stodgy, Victorian England. Possessing a keen mind and a determined disposition, she rejected the narrow life of a stayed and dignified British lady to excel at Oxford University before ambitiously embarking upon a series of gruelling travels through the Middle East. Supported by her family's wealth, she was free to indulge her passion for adventure, be it climbing the Swiss alps or traipsing through Arabian deserts, without ever having to settle down, much less marry.

Until the First World War, she was a creature of more social than political consequence. A position in the civil service denied to her because of her gender, she explored in obscurity until the Ottoman Empire signed on with imperial Germany and entered the Great War by attempting to conquer Arabia. Starved for intelligence on the area, the British government turned desperately to their citizens in the region, hoping that they might sufficiently understand this tangle of tribesmen and blood feuds in order to fashion from them a workable alliance. One of their primary sources of information, Gertrude Bell was effectively admitted into the British civil service, beginning a career that would not only last a decade, but make her a prime mover in the creation of both Iraq and Jordan, modern nations drawn out of the sands of Arabia. In this, she became a shaper of the policies of the world's most powerful empire, a startling achievement given the patriarchal nature of British society at the time.

Though somewhat bloated at over 500 pages, The Desert Queen is a fascinating glimpse of a most complex life. Gertrude Bell was, at once, both a maverick and a conservative. For even while she was busting the chains of propriety that threatened to enslave her own existence, she was staunchly patriotic. An imperialist and a royalist, she was a traditionalist who believed so deeply in the fundamental myths of the empire that birthed her that she was willing to side with them against her own gender, rejecting the suffragette movement in favor of the benefits and privileges of her class. In this, she is a messy creature, defying easy categorization. Rather than shunning this reality for a simpler narrative, Ms. Wallach embraces the contradictions of Ms. Bell's life and, in doing so, does her the justice this largely forgotten heroine deserves.

Though this tome is, in the main, a biography of the life of Gertrude Bell, it is also, necessarily, a history of the creation of the modern Middle East. Ms. Wallach ably walks the reader through the process by which the British drew up these nations on a map, providing the work its central tragedy. For in this, we watch, with nearly a hundred years of hindsight, the arrogance that lead these imperialists to believe they could re-shape an entire region of the world without grave consequences. They, and the world, would eventually pay dearly for this presumption, as it helped to fuel tribal clashes that would eventually result in not only distrust towards the West, but revolution, war and terrorism across the greater Levant. And this is perhaps why Bell is hardly remembered. For this act of creation was her life's primary political achievement, an act which is now looked upon with, at best, bemusement and, at worst, scorn.

In the end, Gertrude Bell was a mirror for the Iraq she loved. She possessed the best of intentions, but these were overtaken by narrow mindedness and stubbornness, qualities which prevented her, and her British kin, from measuring the cost of their actions. Thanks to Ms. Wallach's fine work, we feel all of this acutely, mourning the opportunity lost as much as the life uncelebrated. (4/5 Stars)

The depths of human endurance explored in Moorehead's A Train in Winter

From The Week of February 18, 2013
As much as we plan out our lives, the colleges we attend, the jobs we want, the people we attach ourselves to, control over our futures is nothing more than an illusion. For while some of us may have the fortune of executing their plans without incident, others have their hopes and dreams shattered by circumstances beyond their mastery: car accidents and pink slips, assaults and terminal illnesses. These are not foreseeable pitfalls. They are unanticipatable traps that, when sprung, have the power to devastate not just our lives, but the lives of those we love. And if they cannot be avoided, then they can happen to any of us, at any time, dreams broken on the altars of powers beyond our command and our imagination. This decidedly grim theme runs right through Ms. Moorehead's engaging, if bleak, micro history.

The year is 1940 and Europe is exploding into war. The French army has been humiliated by the German Wehrmacht which has subsequently blitzkrieged its way all the way to Paris. There, aided by a puppet government and the collaborative French police, the Third Reich establishes France as a civilized German territory, using its absolute power to slowly roust France's Jews, communists and other dissidents from places of authority. At first, the arrests lead only to imprisonment, but as the war progresses, the Third Reich reaches for a more permanent solution for those who it considers dead weight. Undesirables are taken from their homes and their workplaces and packed into trains which relocate them to brutal concentration camps in which these unfortunates suffer an unimaginable combination of humiliation and forced labor that not only takes the lives of millions, but reduces the survivors to but shadows of what they were.

Though many of France's key institutions shamefully capitulate to the will of the German occupation, in particular its police forces which pursue Nazi-approved targets with sycophantic zealousness, some lone voices speak out against the gradual dissolution of their country. From academics to laborers, these brave souls organize a resistance which endeavors to both disrupt Nazi operations in France and carve a path for a revival of the French army under Charles de Gaulle. Men and women band together to write speeches and create pamphlets, to pool cash and plot attacks, designed to advance the cause of a free France. However, before many of their schemes can come to fruition, the French police attack these dissident networks, making mass arrests of their own countrymen who are in turn deported to Germany deathcamps. These are their stories, of resistance and survival, of degradation and regret.

Though at times relentlessly tragic, A Train in Winter is an unforgettable examination of the French resistance and all that its members suffered at the hands of both the Nazis and the Vichy government. Focusing in particular on a group of young, sympathetic French women who wrote speeches and distributed pamphlets for the movement, Ms. Moorehead captures the essence of the resister. For to be such is to embrace a life of sacrifice, to put above ones own self-interest the rights and freedoms of a nation, and to pay for these beliefs with blood and servitude. Many of the women did not enter the resistance expecting to be captured and killed, but they knew these were possibilities. And yet, instead of standing by, instead of taking the easy path, these individuals chose to risk their precious lives for a future they held in their hearts. Moreover, they did so knowing that they stood to lose not only their lives, but the health and safety of their loved ones, spouses, parents, even sons and daughters.

But though the stories of the women Ms. Moorehead has singled out here are interesting enough, her work ascends to the truly mesmerizing when it chronicles the depravities and the spinelessness of the collaborators. Every occupying force needs them. For no land can be understood and operated without them. And so every occupier incentivizes men and women in key positions to keep their jobs and do their work, placing them into an ethical bind that is by no means easy to escape. But the degree to which these collaborators performed their tasks, oftentimes going above and beyond the call of duty simply to exercise their power, or, worse, to impress their masters, is as startling as it is revolting. The lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of brave souls who sacrificed all for their country were ruined by men and women bent on self-preservation at all costs, making a Faustian bargain with the Nazis for which, sadly, they never had to adequately pay.

As a history of a particular group of women, Ms. Moorehead's tale leaves a lot to be desired. She is too often interested in hailing their virtues, in celebrating their bond, than in truly examining their lives. Moreover, most of these events are now nearly 70 years in the past, making details decidedly blurrier than they appear here. However, as an exemplar of the triumphs and perils of the resisters, as a chronicle of Nazi cruelty and as an enduring statement about the nature of endurance in the face of unimaginable degradation, this is admirable work. Well worth the read... (3/5 Stars)x

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The life of an extraordinary, ordinary man in Tomalin's Samuel Pepys

From The Week of February 11, 2013
As much as history is shaped by its giants, those figures of legend who come down to us from countless tales and nearly as many deeds, it is just as influenced by the smallfolk as well. For while many are ready and able to compose flowery paeans in honor of the great men and women who've danced across the stage of our shared past, no one documents the little people who fight in the wars the great generals win; no one is watching the laborers who manufacture the tools and products that allow the great ones to dispense their words; no one memorializes the lives of the slaves and builders who erected our great monuments. They are forgotten, necessary remnants who go without recognition because no one bothers to remember their deeds. At least in the case of one man, however, these anonymizing shadows have been thrust back. For his talent and his words survived the test of time to describe to us a world we might not have otherwise seen. Ms. Tomalin elaborates in her excellent biography.

Born in the dying days of the old monarchy, Samuel Pepys was a man of talent and intelligence whose life straddled the most transformative period in English history. A poor boy in Tudor England, a young, educated man in Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth, and an aging parliamentarian during the Glorious Revolution of 1688, he survived kings and misfortune, wars and uncertain political winds, to witness not only the repeated plagues that marred mid-century London, but the great fire that all but consumed it in that most apocalyptic year of 1666. He was the son of a tailor who amassed wealth and status in an England obsessed by class distinctions. And yet, he would be but a forgotten footnote in history if his most exceptional diary had not withstood the corrosiveness of time's decay to stand witness to his mind, his pen and the Britain that shaped them both.

Remaining one of the most definitive first-hand accounts of the Great Fire of London, a Hellish storm that devoured large swaths of the city, Pepys'' diary reveals the thoughts of a man on the rise in a time long past. Forsaking the clean narratives that only come with hindsight, Pepys describes his life in detail, from humiliatingly private exchanges with his wife to points of fashion and conduct in the halls of power to which he was eventually admitted. But more than the finer points of his rise and fall, beyond the vagaries of his household, the diary chronicles the appalling anonymity of the everyman, and everywoman, in his London. Not only are there nothing like public services to aid the poor and the unfortunate, there's an abysmal disconnect between the privileged monarchy, who feel entitled to their position, and the wretched outsiders who have no means at all of gaining a voice and putting an end to their powerlessness, a fact that would remain true for decades to come.

A biography of both the man and his enduring document, Ms. Tomalin's Samuel Pepys is a testament to the smallfolk of history all-too-readily neglected by a species obsessed with only the brightest stars. Fixing upon Pepys' glories and his faults, the author wonderfully captures a man's life in 17th-century England. But more than that, she exposes us to his legendary diary which speaks to a rare talent for both detail and self-examination. Pepys, at times, seems like a bundle of faults, a womanizer who has little time for people who are burdensome to him. But we only know of these failings because the man himself wrote of them. He rejected, in part or whole, the urge within all of us to present our best face to the world, to soft-pedal our warts while emphasizing our best features. And in doing so, he gifts to us a trustworthy document about the life of a gentleman in a tumultuous time.

There's no doubt that Ms. Tomalin's biography has its flaws. Its length is bloated at more than 400 pages. Moreover, the author would have done well to better embed Pepys in the world around him, both its trends and its pitfalls. But in every other respect, this is an eminently enjoyable and edifying portrait of a selfish but selflessly honest man through whom we can come to better understand a world we've mostly left behind. Pepys would make for a wonderful inspiration for Pip, the protagonist of Mr. Dickens' famous Great Expectations if Dickens' own story, coming near some two centuries on, wasn't so very much like Pepys' own.

Ms. Tomalin's prose and research more than does justice to a man of history worthy of our attention. (4/5 Stars)

America's Founding Fathers and the land they loved in Wulf's Founding Gardeners

From The Week of February 11, 2013
All nations are shaped by the thoughts, dreams and ambitions of their founders. For the generations that follow these men exult them, elevating their beliefs and their deeds until they are legend, a reality which ensures that their fundamental ideals are perpetuated down through time, even unto the present day. Naturally, as decades become centuries, there are more and more disagreements over what these founders intended, as cultural dislocation causes the meaning of their words to be dissipated by the winds of time, but we still try to live up to the standard they set which makes of them creatures of endless fascination. What was their vision? And how would their views have changed in the face of a rapidly evolving world? Short of availing ourselves of a time machine, we will never know, but we can sift among their letters and their musings for clues, something Ms. Wulf does here with mixed success.

The Founding Fathers of the United States of America are giants of history. The power and the resonance of their names exceeds virtually every one of their contemporaries, even those most royal. And yet, thanks to the success of their glorious experiment, Jefferson and Adams, Madison and Hamilton, Washington and Franklin, commoners all, are the names celebrated in books and memorialized by monuments, their actions having helped to usher in an entirely new world free of the decrepitude of authoritarianism in all its forms.

But who were these men? And what influenced them while they were shaping their legendary ideas? Summoning their journals and their proclamations, interpreting their symbols and their analogies, Founding Gardeners argues that the Founding Fathers filtered their experiences through the lens of environmentalism, a naturalistic approach to the world that began at home and extended out to the rest of the world. From the plantations they so assiduously cultivated to the farmers they hailed as heroes, they celebrated ones connection to the earth, describing it as the most profound and moral partnership man could forge. When all else is uncertain and troublesome, when temptation lurks behind every corner, working the soil will never steer a good man wrong.

Though too narrow in scope and too deprived of analysis, Founding Gardeners is a fascinating read. Ms. Wulf draws upon the copious correspondence of America's legends to establish both their connection to the land that gave them a second life, free of the aristocratic strictures of the old world, and to describe the ways in which these men manifested from this connection a code of conduct, for themselves and the world, that they considered upstanding. In this, Ms. Wulf is most thorough, excavating declarations and obsessions about the earth that seem downright radical by today's standards. Were one to present these quotes, stripped of attribution, and ask the public to guess who spoke them, surely their most common answer would be treehuggers and Gaia-worshippers, minds without any grasp of the complexities of the modern world which brings us to the book's central problem.

It is difficult to imagine how the views of these founders are relevant to our era. Ms. Wulf claims to have written the book after journeys across America's landscapes inspired her to investigate what the Founders thought of the land to which they'd devoted themselves. But it is nearly impossible to read her work here and not imagine that she sought to demonstrate the degree to which modern society has deeply drifted from the ideals the Founders had for the country they birthed. This is a point worth making; for if we're to celebrate these men for their vision and their views, then we have to take in their environmentalism as well. And yet, Ms. Wulf at no point acknowledges the extent to which the intervening centuries have transformed the world. In the time of the Founders, America claimed a population of ten million. Today, that number is 315 million, nearly a 32-fold increase that does not even come close to representing the manifest change that industrialism and technology has wrought upon a crowded planet. This needs to be said. We cannot go back to what we were. Nor should we wish to. That world is as unchanging as it is rife with illness.

There's much here to admire. Ms. Wulf has perhaps overemphasized the role the land played in the lives of these men, but in highlighting it she has humanized them in ways both fascinating and endearing. But if Founding Gardeners wished to be more than a piece of nostalgia, it needed to confront the question of how the thoughts and dreams of the Founders could operate in our world, not theirs. (3/5 Stars)

The Internet's creation chronicled in the fantastic Where Wizards Stay Up Late

From The Week of February 04, 2013
Once in a great while, the course of human history is upended by a transformative event, an incident, an invention, an intercession, that leaves an indelible mark upon the world. These events are all-too-often tragic in origin, calamities of war and disaster that just as easily claim the lives of the innocent as the impure. But regardless of their tone, they are rare enough that they attract not only the inquisitive attentions of the passingly interested but the expert lenses of the academically engaged as they attempt to better understand, or better preserve for posterity, something that might not soon come again. Of all such events, none may mean as much to as many as the creation of the Internet. And yet, on this topic, history is oddly quiet, especially when compared to the endless volumes penned about the Second World War whose consequences, for most of us, have long since faded into memory. With charm and rigor, Ms. Hafner and Mr. Lyon correct this notable wrong with their edifying tome.

Born of the dreams of visionaries, not as legend has it from the efforts of the US military to maintain communications during a nuclear attack, the Internet began life in the early 1960s as Arpanet, four relatively simple but extraordinarily expensive computers networked together by genius, high-speed telephone lines from AT&T and a great deal of prayer. A public-private partnership between ARPA, a government agency under the aegis of the US military, and BBN, a pioneering technology firm, Arpanet was constructed to both push back the boundaries of science and to prove that the ideas upon which it was based were not only sound but brilliant.

Until Arpanet, terrestrial communications technologies had been mostly stagnant since the creation of the telephone system in the first half of the 20th century. Satellites had been launched into space, but telephone calls were still being routed through manual switchboards labored over by an army largely comprised of women. By inventing the idea of information as packets, by sending those packets of information in bursts that would maximize the use of the telephone lines over which they were traveling, by creating a universal language by which computers the world over could understand one another, and by cementing the protocols by which networked computers could cooperate and communicate over a network, the scientists working on Arpanet laid down every fundamental component of what would eventually be the Internet. these systems and protocols are still used today, long after most of their inventors have lapsed into obscurity, their stars forever outshined by Facebook and Amazon, Apple and Google, none of which would have existed without the inventiveness and the altruism of men who sought to create something bold and new.

There is no doubt that Where Wizards Stay Up Late is an excellent history of Arpanet. Ms. Hafner and Mr. Lyon not only deliberately and intelligibly illustrate the technologies that underpin the Internet, they patiently walk the reader step-by-step through its shoestring creation, chronicling the frustration and the wry humor of every failure along with the satisfaction and the triumph of every success. But even if their chronicle was a pile of dross, not even worth the paper it was printed upon, it would have done a wonderful service. For without reading this engaging work, who can claim to name the inventors of the Internet? We know Zuckerberg and Page, Jobs and Gates, Joy and Allen; these men are rich, cultural giants who have been the most visible shepherds of our technological revolution. But what of Roberts and Licklider? What of Baran and Davies? What of Metcalf and heart? Without the aid of a Google search, do we know them? Do their names burn across our cyberspace sky? Hardly.

This is shameful. Our culture has become dangerously dependent upon the notion of celebrity. We believe so much in stardom, in the idea of the great-man theory of history, that we assume that those who either shunned the spotlight, or who never felt its beneficent caress, were unimportant, afterthoughts on the stage of human development. But time and time again we're proven wrong. Household names are not so because they are necessarily important. They are so because they are either lucky, charismatic, or good at spreading word of their achievements, little of which has anything to do with merit. This is what makes Where Wizards Stay up Late such a triumph. For it seeks not to mythologize, to canonize, or even to uplift. It adopts the same sober but inquisitive tone used by the dedicated and creative men who empowered one of the largest transformations in human history. May they never be forgotten.

This is first-class work. At times technical, but this is by no means an impediment to its enjoyment. One of the worthiest reads this year... (5/5 Stars)

The rise and fall of the American Mob in Cuba in Havana Nocturn

From The Week of February 04, 2013 The rise and fall of the American Mob in Cuba in Havana Nocturn
For decades now, the American gangster has been a figure more of celebrity than ridicule. From Godfather to Goodfellas, pop culture has celebrated his anti-heroism, identified with his restlessness and cringed at the violence he's meted out to those who've wronged, crossed, or obstructed him. He embodies that strange disquiet that lives within all of us, that feeling that the strictures of our lives are far too confining and that a life beyond rules, beyond laws, beyond the boundaries of a conventional existence can only thrill us with its chaos and rebellion. The reality, naturally, while still glamorous, is far more grim. For the life of the gangster is much like one of their favorite businesses, one big gamble upon which a life's fortunes are bet. This much and more is captured by Mr. English's intriguing, if somewhat infatuated, history of the Mob in Cuba.

Prior to Fidel Castro's 1961 communist revolution, Cuba was nothing like the grim, socialist nation we know today. Open to trade from the United States, it, like other islands in the Caribbean, was a primary destination for American tourists coming down from the east coast. Much of Cuba's economy relied upon this inflow of American cash which naturally manifested in the creation of businesses to service the needs of the tourists. Unencumbered by the same morality laws that constricted behaviors back home, Americans, like most other tourists, were able to enjoy all the pleasures the island had to offer and then some, confident that their transgressions would never make it back to their native shores.

Though this tourism existed prior to the Mob's interest in Cuba, it skyrocketed when, after being deported from the United States, Lucky Luciano settled there in the late 1940s, intending to create, with the backing of the local dictatorial government, a gangster's paradise where sex, booze and gambling were as ubiquitous as the cigar smoke that would fill the beautiful hotels harboring all of this libidinous activity. Though Luciano was soon pressured out of this scheme by a furious US State Department, Meyer Lansky, the Jewish gangster immortalized in the second Godfather film, ran with their shared dream, inspiring the creation of a strip of hotels to rival Las Vegas over the next decade. These schemes would make many a gangster rich, for, this time, the mob had successfully sunk its fingers into a national government, incentivizing the politicians to encourage, rather than resist, this criminal trade. It was a beautiful dream that lasted for nearly 15 years, until the depravities of a president inspired a socialist revolution that would sweep not only the political old guard from Cuba's shores but the Mafia filth as well, leaving fortunes to dissipate into the white sands of a newly communist country.

Animated by charmers and celebrities, criminals and con-artists, Havana Nocturn is Mr. English's guided tour through an attempt by the American Mafia to create the closest thing to a sovereign state of their own in 1950s Cuba. In detail, the author describes the lengths to which the Mob linked their profitability with that of Cuba's general economy, creating all the incentives a dictatorial government would need to enable the Mob's elicit activities. This financial tapdance, along with an engrossing chronology of highlights of Lansky and Co's exploits on this most infamous Caribbean island, forms the backbone of a work that largely succeeds in its attempt to characterize the golden age of the American Mob, an age that, for inventors in Cuba, would come to an abrupt end with the rise of Fidel Castro.

Mr. English's account, full of murderers and sex tourists, beautiful girls and devilish dictators, would be dead on arrival without the unique contributions made by Lansky and his crew. Relying on details published in their own memoirs, the author amalgamates their colorful deeds with the austerity of Castro and his movement to create a captivating juxtaposition of political and economic forces. He's so successful in weaving together these narrative threads that, at times, Havana Nocturn feels like nothing les than a ticking timebomb as these two such disparate factions, criminality and communism, authoritarianism and revolution, thunder towards an inevitable, devastating collision. However, as much as the work entertains, its sincerity is not entirely convincing. Castro, here, feels white-washed, a sympathetic hero whose motivations are rarely probed. This may be thanks to a lack of eyewitness material on his rise to power and the years that would immediately follow. Nonetheless, we're left with a figure somewhat discordant with the man we know today.

This is more a work of entertainment than education. There's no question that it shines a light on a time now lost to the gloss of Hollywood history, but it lives too much in the heads of its criminals and revolutions to be completely trusted. (3/5 Stars)

Gritty The Dagger and The Coin a first rate fantasy epic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Galileo, the arrogance of a man; the ignorance of a church

From The Week of January 28, 2013
We all err. But while most blunders succumb to the rigors of time, others thunder across human history, requiring both centuries and apologies to be laid to rest. This may not be fair; we all, from time-to-time, act out of ignorance and to have that held against us, and the organizations we serve, is a stain that cruelly blots out all of our subsequent good deeds. And yet, I cannot help but think this is just. For perhaps the judgement of history should be as searing as it is unforgiving. For is this not the only dependable deterrent in place to dissuade the narrowminded from acting foolishly? Is this not the only reliable spur we have with which to prod the stodgy and the selfish into a wider view of the world? There is enough ignorance in the body of humanity. We do not need more from the authorities in whom we place our faith. This much Mr. Reston makes clear in his engaging biography.

A giant of history, Galileo Galilei redefined our understanding of science and the solar system. He discovered planets and moons, invented telescopes and spyglasses, all of which re-enforced the Copernican view of the universe. Unfortunately for Galileo, however, he endeavored in a time of superstition and theocracy, a time in which the Pope stood above even the kings of Europe, let alone its citizens. And so, when the great astronomer's Copernican beliefs clashed with the geocentric dogmas of Catholicism, the resulting inferno consumed the balance of his life as religious censure robbed the world of the genius of one of our era's foremost minds.

As much as the Catholic Church stands to be blamed for this folly, Galileo shares responsibility in his downfall. For he was a man of pride and ambition, a man whose correspondence speaks to a deep dissatisfaction with his station in life. Striving to have more, to be more, he abandoned caution for arrogance, an imprudent decision that put him into the bloody hands of a powerful church unwilling to let his "transgressions" abide. The result, perhaps the world's most famous exile that stained the reputation of one of the world's foremost faiths for 350 years.

Less a biography of Galileo than a chronicle of his battles with a close-minded church, Galileo is a riveting reconstruction of the latter half of the life of the great astronomer. The author abandons a detailed history of Galileo's family life, touching only briefly on his distant relationships with his cloistered daughters and his frustrations with his mooching siblings and in-laws, to focus instead on the central conflict of Galileo's life. A religious man, Galileo did not seek to overthrow the power of his church, but when his discoveries contradicted its dogmas, he could not forever be silent. Perhaps, if this was the man's only transgression, it would have been allowed to pass. But as Mr. Reston exemplifies, a habit for inflaming the ire of men both powerful and petty robbed Galileo of the benefit of the doubt from a stern institution already fighting off the existential threat of Protestantism. A consequential clash, then, was inevitable, the details and fallout of which is captured here wonderfully well.

Galileo might have done well to devote more of its pages to the backgrounds of the men who lined up to condemn Copernican Galileo. Mr. Reston does spend some time with Cardinal Bellarmine, the prime mover of his doom, but Pope Urban VIII is, here, little more than a figure at the side of the stage, outside the brilliance of the bright lights. However, these failings are washed away by the author's animation of Galileo himself. For there is little of legend here. The mythology is stripped back to reveal a convincing portrait of a man quite carried away with his own intellect. And might well he would be when surrounded by such darkness. This professorial pompousness, though, seems as unwise now as it would have then, at least to Galileo's friends.

As fascinating as it is captivating, Galileo is gripping work that does as much to illustrate the sins of a church as it does to peel back the historiography of a man become scientific saint. Both failed in the most human of ways. And yet, the former's failings helped doom the world for the next two centuries. The latter sought only to sheathe it in the light of objective truth. Little wonder that we can forgive the latter but never the former. (4/5 Stars)

A bloody and brutal clash of faiths chronicled in The Great Siege

From The Week of January 28, 2013
Self-sacrifice is a force without peer. For notwithstanding the promises religion makes to the faithful, to ease the burden of death with the sweetness of heavenly reward, no one can be certain of anything beyond this life. It may well be that this is all we have: this body, this family, this spouse, these children. One chance, one dream, one opportunity to be what we will be. Knowing this, that some among us can summon the bravery to knowingly surrender that existence, with all its pleasures and its pains, for something as nebulous as a cause, a belief, an understanding of what is right, is beyond description. Fortunately, we have examples to illustrate where words fail. Ernle Bradford does so capably in his expeditious chronicle of a pivotal moment in human history.

Having stormed out of the desert sands of seventh-century Arabia to conquer considerable swaths of western Asia, the Islamic ottoman empire was near the peak of its powers when, in 1565, it launched an invasion of Europe, dispatching 30,000 well-drilled imperial troops across the waters of the Mediterranean and into the heart of a Christian continent. All that stood between this mighty force and the shores of Italy was Malta, a tiny archipelago commanded by the knights of St. John and populated by the native Maltese with whom the knights had an uneasy peace. It should have been an easy matter for the great ottoman empire to overwhelm this ragtag force of civilians and soldiers whom they outnumbered, by some estimates, three to one, converting the rock into a base from which they could send devastating attacks into mainland Europe. But a series of military missteps by the ottoman commander gave hope to the Christian garrison that they might hold out for the time it would take re-enforcements to be sent from Sicily.

Thanks to the courage and sacrifice of the knights and the civilians who supported them, a siege meant to last days ended up lasting months. The Maltese fortifications, pounded almost daily by Turkish guns, somehow withstood countless attempts to breach them. Betrayals and deceptions, violence and vehemence, characterized the conflict which bled the turks so badly that, instead of pressing onto Italy and forever rewriting western history, they withdrew back to Istanbul where their ambitions for western conquest would forever be but dreams of magnificent sultans.

While it lacks that spark of brilliance, The Great Siege is a solid, informative chronicle of a key moment in recent western history. Mr. Bradford dutifully walks the reader through the siege's ebbs and flows, sparing neither side when tallying the brutalities in which both sides indulged. He renders the commanders of the belligerents with a steady hand, commendably refusing to succumb to historiography when the opportunity to do so must have been tempting indeed. For the brave band of virtuous westerners fending off the horde of eastern savages is a narrative that all-but writes itself. But such simplicities do a grave injustice to history that is, as always, far more gray than white or black.

Mr. Bradford, here, is at his best, though, while capturing the ugliness of a medieval siege and the toll it took on the men dragged into it. The sacrifice of life, willing and otherwise, on both sides, is remarkable. More over, the depravities of the conditions the combatants were forced to endure is enough to cool the temper of even the most hot-headed warmonger. For here, the glories of war are rarely spotted. Instead, one is left with a chronicle of the churning, grinding nature of battle that is as sobering as it is edifying.

Lacking the prose and the biographical background to make it great, but in every other respect a well-constructed chronicle of the highs and the lows of war. (3/5 Stars)