Even though I consider myself a pretty experienced reader and fairly capable of discussing literature like the competent layperson that I mostly am, sometimes the emotional expression of a story is so overwhelming that I find it difficult for quite some time to react to it other than on a limbic level. Virginia Woolf wrote of Charlotte Bronte: "So intense is our absorption that if some one moves in the room the movement seems to take place not there but up in Yorkshire. The writer has us by the hand, forces us along her road, makes us see what she sees, never leaves us for a moment or allows us to forget her." and that would be a decent description of my experience of Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death, if you exchanged Yorkshire for post-apocalyptic Africa. Okorafor, via Onyesonwu, her protagonist, whose name means 'Who Fears Death?' in Igbo (or 'an ancient tongue' in the world of the book), is the strong personality and emotional force that drives the story swiftly and surely to its conclusion.

Who Fears Death is set in a post-apocalyptic Africa that bears a strong resemblance to post-colonial Africa. Onyesonwu inhabits a world with sorcery, spirits, and shape-changers, but she also faces racism, genocide, weaponized rape, patriarchy, and female genital cutting. The book is narrated as if it were a transcript from an interview, and the story falls roughly into two sections. The first is a coming of age story centered in the village of Jwahir, which is far enough away from the violent clashes of the Nuru and the Okeke -- the two warring tribes whose history and destiny are central to the story -- that Onyesonwu can have a relatively normal childhood. The second part of the book deals with Onyesonwu's discovery of her epic destiny, and her hero's journey to the center of the conflict.

It's easy to be a bit jaded when it comes to the Campbell-esque quest, and I did find the book slightly less engrossing when it was focused on jumping through hero hoops; however, the main character is a young African woman whose strengths include getting angry and turning into a vulture, so I was willing to forgive the formula to an extent. I found the story more fascinating when it concerned the developing relationships of the intrepid band Onyesonwu takes with her. I wanted more time with Mwita and Luyu and poor Binta, and more of the constant negotiation that it takes to have a loving, equal relationship in a hostile and biased world.

I did find the conclusion rushed and not entirely satisfying, and I had a problem with the flow of information. It's not at all uncommon for the mostly-ignorant Chosen One to get led around by the nose via prophesy and wizards, but I nonetheless found it frustrating and distracting. I really wanted Onyesonwu to have less power and more agency, especially at the end.

Okorafor wrote Who Fears Death after the death of her father, but she was also inspired by an article about weaponized rape in the Sudan, so the story comes from and addresses both personal grief and political motivation. While it's sometimes difficult and disturbing, it is also an enjoyable book and an important work.

Edited by Peter Straub (Who I had a hard time placing: Didn't he write Jaws? No, that was Peter Benchley. The Exorcist? William Peter Blatty. Hrm. Turns out he wrote a few books that I've never actually read.), American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny (Volume 1 is 'From Poe to the Pulps', and Volume 2 is 'From the 1940s to Now') are Library of America anthologies of horror short stories.

I found the title a little off; I guess it's meant to suggest supernatural horror? The stories are mostly speculative except for a couple that aren't, and there are a few that aren't particularly terrible or horrific, but any anthology is going to be hit and miss, I guess. I do, however question an editorial mandate that wants 'Tales' to evoke campfire stories, but then includes Henry James as one of the authors.

I vastly preferred the first volume, which has a few classics that you've read a thousand times, but also a bunch of stories and authors that were new to me, at least. Fourteen of the 44 authors are women, many of whom I'd never encountered before. 'An Itinerant House' by Emma Francis Dawson, a 'protégé of Ambrose Bierce' who purportedly starved to death, is, while not perfect, especially fascinating; and Fancis Stevens' 'Unseen -- Unfeared' is well worth a look as well. Trolling the biographical notes, I learned that Harriet Prescott Spofford's 'The Amber Gods' (sadly not included -- we have 'The Moonstone Mass' instead) was remarked by Emily Dickinson to be "the only thing I ever read in my life that I didn't think I could have imagined myself". I have got to get ahold of that story! And I am amazed that I have not until now heard of Seabury Quinn, a lawyer specializing in mortuary law, who also happened to contribute 93 psychic detective stories to Weird Tales.

Of the more well-known authors, several of them seem to have been included to lend a little prestige to the collection, and certainly not on the merit of their stories. Some of the selections seemed a bit idiosyncratic as well, but maybe that's just because I'm really not a fan of 'The Thing on the Doorstep'.

I didn't like the second one nearly as well. Some of that is due to my very general preference for older literary styles (I tap out around Virginia Woolf), and probably some is due to there being half as many woman contributors, but I'm chalking the rest up to crap stories. Even so, I did love the Jane Rice story 'The Refugee' and 'The Events at Poroth Farm' by T.E.D. Klein (I've since found some other work by Klein available to read, but nothing as yet by Rice, more's the pity). And, although I usually find Michael Chabon too clever, I have to admit that 'The God of Dark Laughter' is an amazing parody of Ligotti's 'The Last Feast of Harlequin'. It was meant to be a parody, right?

"Feminism is one of the great and substantial democratic movements, a tradition of thought and action spanning more than two hundred years." The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present, by Christine Stansell is a history of feminism, but it's also a much-needed reminder that feminism is vital to democracy, just as democracy is vital to feminism. It's a must-read, not only in the 'this is a good book and you'd enjoy it' sense, but in the 'this should be part of every American history curriculum' sense. In fact, there are so many things I love about this book that I'm having trouble deciding where to start. 

Stansell spent nine years researching and writing The Feminist Promise, and the result is complex, thorough, a 'thick understanding' (a term Stansell uses and which I'm stealing from now on) of the tensions involved in the movement variously known as women's rights, feminism, women's liberation. Feminists often need to remind people that women are not a monolith; Stansell reminds us that feminists aren't either, and really never have been. Differences of privilege, position and opinion have divided feminist thought and action, but they've also given us many different avenues of attack.

The Feminist Promise begins with Wollstonecraft and the French Revolution, but the book is mostly focused on feminism in the United States. There are a few detours to Britain and France, and a couple of unfavorable comparisons with Scandinavian labor policies, and the last chapter, which focuses on global feminism in the '90s and later, expands upon the codependent relationship between feminism and democracy, and the difficulties that feminist organizations face in the absence of stable democracy. The history of American feminism is especially bound up with the history of the civil rights movement, which Stansell identifies as another great movement of democracy.

Even though I would consider myself fairly knowledgable about both history and feminism, I learned a hell of a lot from The Feminist Promise. Stansell doesn't mythologize or try to establish an overarching narrative -- she does employ an understanding of some feminist conflicts as mother/daughter tensions, but she does so with a fairly light touch -- she also doesn't demonize or shy away from unfortunate truths. Like a lot of histories, the older material is more slow-moving and spread out, while the chapters become faster-paced and more packed the closer we come to today.

Stansell concludes her history with a personal observation that will seem familiar to many feminists. Writing about becoming a feminist in 1969 she notes "I anticipated a quick exit, but because the cause seemed so indisputably just and the remedies so obvious. Surely it couldn't take too long... Forty years later, the expectation of imminent, thoroughgoing change is gone. And there has been no quick exit, for me or anyone else." She sees a victory in the movement of feminism from the fringes to the center of both culture and policy, but cautions us that this "does not mean that the classic wrongs of women have been righted," and challenges us to not only remember our history but learn from it and move forward.

Hey look, yet another book about art theft. Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art, by Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo is much more personal and exciting than some of the omnibuses of art history that I had been grinding through, and a welcome relief. The scope of Provenance is the story of John Drewe and John Myatt, the first a con man, the second a forger. Together, they commit crime! 

And what stunning crimes they committed! Their genius, mostly attributed to Drewe, was to forge provenance in addition to forging paintings. Drewe managed to get access to several important archives (usually by promising substantial donations), and he actually changed catelogues and records so that when he went to sell Myatt's forged artwork, a paper trail already existed that appeared to be an entirely reputable third-party source. It's very clever, and, as a bonus, nobody's sure just how many archives he tampered with.

Provenance is interested in the implications of this crime, but it's also concerned with making a good story out of it, and it mostly succeeds. It's very sympathetic to Myatt, who, at the time of the story was a single parent just trying to make ends meet by painting knock-offs. After a short stint in jail, Myatt actually leveraged his forger history into a fairly successful career as a legitimate faker; as I've noted before, to most people forgery seems to be a victimless crime.

Drewe, on the other hand, comes across as an unstable menace. Nobody likes to get conned, and there is that little thing about wrecking the historical record. He was also less available for interviews, so there's more speculation and less certainty as to his activities and motives, but it seems pretty clear he was a bully and vicious if cornered.

Eventually the two get brought down by a combination of alert law enforcement, rigorous archivists, and one very persistant art historian. Honestly, at this point I'm convinced that there need to be way more movies with awesome librarian heroines who spy on Nazis and take down forgers.

Provenance is well-written and entertaining, and even if you weren't already on an art history kick it would still be an enjoyable and interesting read.

In 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs from Billie Holiday to Green Day, Dorian Lynskey takes on the popular protest song from the 1930s to the 2000s. These are not, apart from 'We Shall Overcome', the songs that people get together and sing at protest rallies; instead, each chapter uses a specific song by a specific recording artist to highlight the way particular types of music have interacted with particular types of politics in different eras. So, think Motown and civil rights, or arena rock and famine in Africa, or post-punk and the IMF/World Bank. The artists featured are predominantly British and American (with a three-chapter section dedicated to Chile, Nigeria, and Jamaica). They're also predominantly men (Billie Holiday, Zilphia Horton and Nina Simone feature in the first section (1936-1964), and after that the Plastic Ono Band and Huggy Bear are the only groups with women contributors). If you're so inclined, I did make a playlist on YouTube featuring those 33 songs, making this the only review on this blog so far with a multimedia component.

Lynskey is both thorough and insightful when it comes to the tension between the music and the politcs. Although he doesn't feature her in a chapter, the book starts with a quote from Joan Baez: "There are two approaches to music. One is, 'Man, I'm a musician and I got nothin' to do with politics. Just let me do my own thing.' And the other is that music's going to save the world... I think that music's somewhere in between." Which is why 'Street Fighting Man' sounds like a protest song when it really isn't, and 'Born in the USA' sounds like a jingoistic anthem when it actually is a protest song.

He's also cognizant of how the relative wealth and privilege of the rockstar lifestyle is difficult to reconcile with revolutionary politics, how hard it is to enact real change, and how easy it is to become disillusioned with the real process of politics (as opposed to sloganeering). Many a protest singer has given it up in favor of making 'real' music, making real money, or getting stoned/drunk. And I think he makes it very clear the gulf between making a protest record and maybe being heckled or blacklisted in the US, and making a protest record and being tortured to death by reactionaries, as Victor Jara was in Chile.

Frustrated as I am (if you hadn't picked up on it) that he did not include more women artists, I did find Lynskey pretty perceptive when it comes to Riot Grrrl: "As soon as it became fair game for journalists, it collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. And though Riot Grrl was an imperfect movement which deserved close scrutiny, there was still something alarming about the viciousness and intensity of the backlash, and what it meant for any future bands who might want to make a political statement." And, quoting Steven Wells: "[Huggy Bear] have had their ideology combed over, examined, misinterpreted, rewritten and kicked to death a hundred times. Talk about breaking a butterfly on a wheel. If the Clash or Dylan or Bob bloody Marley had suffered such intense scrutiny they would have all failed the examination."

I thought 33 Revolutions was a good, fairly detailed history of political music in the 20th century, and it might even make a good jumping off point for the political history of the time period for someone who's less inclined to history and more inclined to rock. Lynskey did the research, and had a lot of access to the artists -- many of whom come off as total pricks, as you may expect, excepting Billy Bragg, who always sounds like he might be the nicest person ever -- and the result is readable and revealing.

As part of a series on award-winning women authors of Eastern European descent, I picked up Tiptree Award-winner Dubravka Ugrešić's Baba Yaga Laid an Egg. Based on the cover blurbs I almost put it down again: "A mirthlessly witty divertimento on female old age." "A whirligig of outrageous invention." "Dolefully humorous." "A grown-up novel with grown-up prepositions." I hadn't even realized that prepositions had a life cycle. Fortunately for everyone concerned, I ignored the reviewers, pressed on, and thoroughly enjoyed reading everything between the covers.

Baba Yaga Laid an Egg is a meditation in three parts (plus introduction) on being an old lady. The first part ('Go There -- I Know Not Where -- and Bring Me Back a Thing I Lack') is an autobiographical account of the author and her aging mother (if you like that kind of thing, you should go ahead and assume scare quotes around just about everything in this review, because the book does have a recursive, postmodern slant that questions everything, but I'm not up to that much punctuation myself), and a trip to Varna, Bulgaria to reconnect with the past. The second, and longest, section ('Ask Me No Questions and I'll Tell You No Lies') is a fairy tale about three old women (with connections to the mother in the first part of the book) who take a trip to a spa, and complications ensue. The book ends ('If You Know Too Much, You Grow Old Too Soon') with a commentary on the first two sections of the book, with respect to Baba Yaga folklore, written by Dr. Aba Bagay, a character from the first section of the book, and obvious anagram for Baba Yaga.

I'm kind of torn, because I want to talk about the implications of that last section (and whether the proper verb would be 'pale-firing' or 'kinboting') and how it relates to the first section (which I had to go back straightaway and reread), but I really want you to go and read the whole thing first. So, I'm only going to say that I loved almost every bit of this book (I admit, the rhyming couplets were a little annoying), even (maybe especially) the last section (which apparently a lot of reviewers found boring) and I want you to love it, too. And then comment so we can discuss it!

I picked up Téa Obreht's The Tiger's Wife because Jere brought it home from the library and I was in between books at the time. Jere always makes fun of me for not reading any modern fiction, and I had asked the internet for fiction recommendations and gotten approximately zero responses (unfair -- my aunt did recommend a couple of authors, I'd just already read them), so there I was. I did not have many expectations, although I did know, from Jere and from the cover blurb, that Obreht was a young up-and-comer darling of the New Yorker. I thought it was enh, okay, good for a first novel but I probably wouldn't go out of my way to look her up in the future. Of course, yesterday she became the youngest author to with the Orange Prize for Fiction, so that goes to show how much I don't know what I'm talking about.

The Tiger's Wife is not a very good novel, but it does have some good stories in it. The main character, Natalia, has just heard about her grandfather's death, and reminisces about some experiences that they had together and some stories that he had told her (with some of the details pieced together by her at some unspecified time after the scope of the book to make the accounts more omniscient in narration). The stories are multi-layered tales (insert obligatory matryoshka doll reference here on account of the book being set in an unnamed, until recently wartorn Balkan country; or, better yet, call it a needle inside an egg inside a duck inside a rabbit inside an iron chest buried under a green oak tree) which have a folkloric/magic realism feel to them. They are mostly fun and interesting except where they run up against the 'reality' of the novel; because folklore is actively anti-depth when it comes to characters, and novels are necessarily pro-depth when it comes to characters, so synching the two forms up smoothly can be like trying to roller-skate on shag carpet with velcro wheels.

The biggest difficulty I had with the novel is that Natalia is just a mouthpiece for her grandfather's stories -- which could have been a statement about the Balkans, or could have been an interesting thing to subvert with an awesomely unreliable narrator, but sadly, no. Natalia is a cipher, and her own story is pretty non-existent and pointless; she's mostly a vessel for his memories. This ties into the second-biggest difficulty I had, which is that all of the women characters exist only to motivate the men: my wife is from 'Sarobor', so I will be sad and moved when it's being decimated; my sister is dying so I will spend my life trying to arrest death; I met a girl who inspired me to defy my uncle and ultimately doom myself. The absolute worst of the bunch is the titular Tiger's Wife -- a deaf, mute girl with no name who is simultaneously the inspiration for and the victim of everyone and everything. Ugh.

I will spare you the rant about how the reasons I didn't like The Tiger's Wife are probably the reasons why it's getting so much attention and approval. It is mostly a readable book, and you should give it a try yourself. If you generally like modern fiction you will probably love it.

With its teeny-tiny chapters full of amazing and intricate facts, The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society & the Birth of the Modern World, by Edward Dolnick, is like a cabinet of curiousities of the scientific revolution. Although it does progress eventually towards calculus, the theory of gravity, and Isaac Newton (fun fact: whenever I read Isaac Newton, I always think Isaac Newt-weight and then Isaac Newt-Tori-Spelling -- please tell me I'm not the only one) it does so in a pleasantly roundabout way that nicely encompasses the weird amalgam of discovery, science, faith, and superstition that fueled the Royal Society and seventeenth-century society at large.

The Clockwork Universe begins where the Middle Ages left off: with Satan around every corner, and the End of the World at any moment. While Newton was inventing calculus, London was enduring first a plague and then a great fire. The men (yes, they were all men, at least in the Royal Society) who invented new forms of math and discovered new laws of physics and new realms of biology also believed in unicorns and alchemy and that God was probably going to judge them unworthy. The scientific method was still in the process of being worked out, and there was a whole lot of room for error.

Dolnick reminds us that "Science today is a grand and formal enterprise, but the modern age of science began as a free-for-all." I'm pretty sure I've seen scientists at play today, and they're not always very grand and formal, but it's true that the Royal Society had them beat in sheer bugfuck crazy. I've seen a video of scientists speculating about what would happen if you stuck your hand in the Large Hadron Collider -- Robert Hooke would've just done it. Seriously! After playing what happens if I stick (a snake, a chick, a bird, a mouse, a candle, my hand) in a vacuum chamber, Hooke built a larger one and got inside (it broke before he died). Everyone (except Newton; Dolnick: "No man ever had less of the flibbertigibbet about him than Isaac Newton.") was just messing around with everything and having fun and torturing poor defenseless dogs and blowing shit up.

It's a little bit hilarious and a little bit awful, and a little amazing that they got anywhere, but Dolnick does a good job of explaining the changes in philosophy and practice that made it all possible.

It may be love when you receive as a birthday gift a great book about cephalopods. It is definitely love when you receive a knit kraken as a valentine’s day present. To say that squids are part of my geek cultural identity is an understatement, which is why I was excited to get Kraken: The Curious, Exciting, and Slightly Disturbing Science of Squid by Wendy Williams.

Wendy William’s book travels from prehistory to early America right on to tomorrow, from Monterey to Australia to Massachusetts, tracking the natural history of the squid and octopus.  This book shines when discussing the biology of cephalopods: their evolution, the roots of life, their natural history. From the structure of the eye, to neuroscientists experimenting with squid axons, to the nature of cognition, this book really shines. The scientific excitement she brings to the subject makes this an exciting read and places it in the top of science writing. If all science writing were this good we’d have more people reading about science.

Where she falls flat is any attempt to talk about cephalopods in culture and especially modern culture. Her historical treatment is incredibly western (personally I probably should be thankful she doesn’t touch on octopus images in Ukiyo-e) and stops in the 70s. She obviously hasn’t heard of the internet, because frankly she doesn’t talk about the huge cult of the squid that’s pretty much everywhere.

So, read this book if you want more cool science than you can shake a feeding tentacle at. But skip over the cultural ruminations.

I think it's fair to say that any foodie author who describes the spicing of a dish as 'ineffable' does not really have her head in the game, so while Jessica B. Harris' High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America is a decent basic history of African American life, with a slight culinary bent, it's not a very strong history of African American foodways. Since I really wanted to read the latter, and don't have much interest in the former, I had a bit of a disappointing time with this book.

Each of Harris' chronologically-organized chapters is bookended by a personal, somewhat food-related anecdote to start, and a quick glance at a historical, usually food-related fun fact at the finish. The middle bits are the general history parts, often enriched with biographical details of African American cooks of that era. This is not to say that there aren't some interesting stories tucked in here and there, as well as some foodie details that entertain, but even the recipes at the back of the book seemed lackluster.  I wanted more specificity, more focus, and way more food.

I think that it's probably a very difficult task to tease out from any food tradition what parts are regional, what parts are economical, and what parts are a taste preference. Researching African American foodways also involves negotiating colonization and displacement, ruptured traditions and syncretism. Harris opts for a much easier, but ultimately much less satisfying book by going wide rather than deep, ineffable rather than precise.

If you were looking for the big book of Nazi art looting, you could do a lot worse than Lynn H. Nicholas' The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War*. The book, which spawned a documentary film of the same name, is a very thorough recounting of the massive redistribution of art and archives before, during, and after World War II. It's much less sentimental than The Monuments Men, which is less about the art, and more about the manly men who rescued it, and broader in scope than The Venus Fixers, which has a similar depth but concentrates just on Italy. It's also not, unfortunately, as entertaining as, say, Stealing the Mystic Lamb or The Forger's Spell; anecdotes and human interest take a back seat to the dauntingly huge task of following the displacement of much of the art in Europe.

Huge and massive really are the operative words here: "The December 1950 summary for Wiesbaden reported that 340,846 items had been returned since its establishment, a rather meaningless statistic given the fact that one single 'item', a library, had contained 1.2 million objects, and another, 3 million." The scope of the book covers Nazi siezure of Germanic art from its own people (and censorship of 'degenerate' work of its own citizens), the outright looting of Poland and parts of the Soviet Union, the more careful and selective removal of art from occupied Austria, Belgium, Holland, and France (always with an eye on propaganda), and the constantly changing policy of 'safeguarding' Italian art, plus a whole lot of retaliatory destruction once the tides of war had turned.

Beyond the theft of property under many guises (besides simply seizing many objects, the Nazis also forced museums and people to sell or trade art for low prices or works of inferior value), Nicholas follows the trail of museum curators and gallery owners who moved their own property, sometimes multiple times, in an attempt to escape both looting and destruction. By the time the Allies and their dedicated, but comparatively tiny, team of MFAA (Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives) officers, entered the picture, the task of locating and redistributing everything was impossible, and their priorities became increasingly political. Many works were never found, and many others ended up half a continent away from where they started.

I'm not going to lie, this book took me a long time to read. It's very dense, and in some places very dry, and although it does focus on an important cultural aspect of World War II, the art world can seem a bit impenetrable for those of us on the outside. Ultimately, though, the real, human stories shine through all the names, places and facts. It's easy to empathize with artists simply forbidden to paint, and it'd be hard not to cheer for Rose Valland, hero-librarian of the French Resistance. It's not difficult, either, to be appalled at the (many, and by no means all Germans) art dealers who made a fortune throughout the war years, even though my personal experience with art dealers is limited to vendors at local craft fairs.

* The title refers to a popular painters' subject; unfortunately, it's also meant to allude to the looting of art across Europe. While art looting is terrible, it's not at all equivalent to actual rape, and the title's therefore a pretty poor choice.

The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination, by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, is one of the ur-texts of feminist literary criticism, and, as such, you'll have read a response or reaction to it in just about any later work on the subject. It's always nice to go back to these books, even if they're a little outdated or overexposed, as long as you can try to approach it with fresh eyes and an open mind (do not be that guy who won't read Tolkein because he's too derivative). In this case, I've read chapters and excerpts of Madwoman, but never the whole thing at a go before.

One (make that two) caveat(s) -- it definitely helped that at this point in my life I've also read most of the major (literary -- definitely not all the scholarly) works to which Gilbert and Grubar refer. While they do a good job of summarizing each important work and giving detailed criticism, there are definitely arguments that are more easily absorbed if you already know the whole story. Also, my library did not send me the most recent version of the text, which the internet informs me has an all-new introduction (and is for some reason not sold in India).

Madwoman is, at its heart, about the difficulty of being a woman writer in a world where the pen is an extension of the penis. Ever since patriarchal religions posited a male Creator, the right of small-c creation has been in the hands of men. For early women writers, there is a social aspect of fighting to be considered capable of writing, but there's also an internal aspect of considering oneself capable. Then, too, there's the aesthetic challenge of creating an authentic woman character, one who evades the characterization of woman as the angel of the house or/and hell from the waist down.

The nineteenth-century solution was doubling -- creating two characters that approach authenticity from each side of the patriarchal coin, then holding them up next to each other so that, with the right lenses on, you can just make out the 3D image of a real woman. The titlular example would be Jane Eyre as contrasted with Bertha Mason Rochester, but I'm sure you can think of dozens of them, and so can Gilbert and Grubar. Like all good critics, they're willing to delve into the juvenalia and letters (so we don't have to), and they come up with just scads of examples.

Madwomen also incorporates (cautiously) Bloom's 'anxiety of influence' theory by observing in many nineteenth-century women authors an occasional fascination with Milton and Paradise Lost. Milton is the poet to beat, of course, and extraordinarily difficult for a woman to challenge on his own ground -- Eve, Satan, the Fall of Man, all that kind of thing. The readings here on Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights are particularly strong and engaging; not that I always entirely agree, but well worth thinking about.

Apart from the Milton digression and a chapter on women poets (mostly Dickinson (complete with a hilarious comparison of Dickinson and Whitman), with a smattering of Browning and Rosetti) at the end, the sections of Madwomen are mostly reserved for detailed criticism of three major authors -- Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot. I love and reread these authors on a regular basis, and even I thought these chapters occasionally bogged down with too much detail and a little bit of repetition. Not that you shouldn't read them! But maybe read them one at a time, with a fair break in between for digestion.

Of course, if being too thorough is the worst criticism I can come up with, you probably have a good idea of why this is such a seminal (heh) text. Oh, I can come up with a few more quibbles if I try -- sometimes there's a bit of whimsically overextended metaphor that doesn't quite parse, and there's a tendency to dismiss whole swathes of women's literature as not 'real literature' because it hasn't stood the test of time without questioning just why (hint - patriarchy) it hasn't -- but the fact is that this is still a valid, solid work that deserves a full reading.

The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia's Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan charts the brief decline of the KGB followed by its resolute resurrection as the FSB as a key political force in Russia. Written by two courageous journalists it has a ton of insight anf fascinating stories.

The authors describe how the FSB suffered an almost dissolution in consequence of the Soviet Union's collapse in 1990 and the failed coup of August 1991. Dazed and disoriented by the brave new world of capitalism, a majority of generals and other senior ranks scuttled the Lubyanka and placed themselves at the service of the new moneyed class, the oligarchs and their imitators. Later, under Putin, the FSB started solidifying in its power and influence and this book tells this story very well providing details to how the wild political freedoms that accompanied gangster capitalism were systematically eroded by the Kremlin's new masters. Chapters talk about attacks on alternative centers of power in Russia's vast regions, at environmental groups and human rights organizations, at foreigners and, as the authors know only too well, at the recently won media freedoms.

Unfortunately, the book has one weakness. Because it is, in so many ways, the story of courageous journalists it never gives enough background. Several chapters cover aspects of the internal security apparatus of Russia that are not, I believe, part of the FSB and it leaves a disjointed feeling. A few appendixes with more details and “wikipedia” style entries would have been appreciated. I found myself having to go on line at several points to understand the wider context of what the authors were describing, and that was disjointing.

This book is strongly recommended to anyone who wants to understand the background and behaviors of Russia's security power makers.

My son (with some help from Jere) got me Stephen Greenblatt's Shakespeare's Freedom for my birthday. It's a slim volume, and a splurge in hardcover, but I'm always happy to read Greenblatt on Shakespeare, so it was an excellent choice for a gift. Freedom from convention is what Greenblatt is mostly going for here, not the "apparently unbounded power and visionary scope of [Shakespeare's] achievement" and the attempt to measure an expanse generally necessitates coming to its edges.

Greenblatt chooses Theodor Adorno, a philosopher from the Frankfurt School, as his guide through the territory -- the book began as a series of lectures on Adorno and Shakespeare. As such, the four chapters, concerned with Beauty, Hatred, Authority, and Aesthetic Autonomy, mostly stand alone. Greenblatt attempts to draw them together in an introductory parable of 'irreducible individuality' featuring Barnadine from Measure for Measure, an admitted murderer who refuses to be executed, and is eventually pardoned, but there really is no central thesis.

The individual lecture-essays are well worth a read, though it's probably not a good introduction to either Shakespeare or Adorno. I'm trying to avoid oversimplifying or ruining anything, so I'll just note that I enjoyed the meditations on "Shakespearean Beauty Marks" (think Cleopatra and her divine flaws) and "The Limits of Hatred" (insiders and outsiders; Antonio/Shylock; Iago/Othello), and I thought that "Shakespeare and the Ethics of Authority" (Macbeth, Lear, and Bill Clinton), the one essay I'd read previously, was still marvellous. "Shakespearean Autonomy" was more diffuse, running from A Midsummer Night's Dream to The Tempest by way of Coriolanus and Philip Sydney, but still engaging.

Is there a word, maybe from the German, that means both outraged and nauseated at the same time, a sort of smash-barf response that's more volatile than just throwing up in your mouth a little bit? Because that's how I feel after reading Matt Taibbi's Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America, which is not, I hasten to add, a reaction to Taibbi's prose, but to his subject matter -- the financiers and politicians who are on the path to ruining our country, if not the world.

In a quick, 250 pages, Griftopia combines a solid layperson's explanation of several current financial crises with an indictment of the systems that perpetuate them. It's often funny, if you enjoy cynicism and making fun of Randians (which I do), and there's a certain informality of diction that you might expect from a Rolling Stone contributing editor. For example, here's Taibbi on Objectivism:

"To sum it all up, the Rand belief system looks like this:
1. Facts are facts: things can be absolutely right or absolutely wrong, as determined by reason.
2. According to my reasoning, I am absolutely right.
3. Charity is immoral.
4. Pay for your own fucking schools."

It's also often flat-out depressing, as we're reminded of the real people who have gone bankrupt, and lost jobs, homes and savings, because our government is either failing to protect us from corporate predation, or, more likely, in cahoots with the predators to bleed us dry.

The majority of the blame for the various (commodities, real estate, stock market) bubbles bursting is laid on the banksters and their cronies, but Taibbi reminds us that this is happening in part because we are allowing ourselves to be distracted by red/blue ideologues, by the (corporate-owned) media, and by our own greed: "...in a country where every Joe the Plumber has been hoodwinked into thinking he's one clogged toilet away from being rich himself, we're all invested in rigging the system for the rich."

Taibbi goes through a lot of unflattering metaphors trying to fully convey the nastiness of the situation as he sees it, but the ones he keeps returning to are all from the true crime genre. Grifters, mafiosi, crack dealers -- imagine that America is D'Angelo Barksdale. Sure, we get to be one of the protagonists of the story, but maybe not for much longer. The king stay the king.

Pop quiz: Which of these paintings is by 17th c. Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, and which is by 20th c. Dutch forger Hans van Meegeren?

If you know the answer, you're a better art expert than just about everyone from 1937 to 1945. Or, more likely, you've heard this story before. If you haven't, or if you'd like a pretty thorough recap, try Edward Dolnick's The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century (even if you imagine that probably the greatest art hoaxes of the century are the ones that we haven't discovered yet).

Dolnick begins at the end, when van Meegeren got caught for war profiteering and had to convince the Amsterdam police that he didn't actually loot those Vermeers, he forged them. Treason carried a death sentence, but forgery got him a year in jail and free drinks at the pub for fooling Goering, so van Meegeren was an enthusiastic witness against himself, even going so far as to paint a real fake Vermeer while in custody to prove his guilt. He died of heart failure before he could serve any time, but he'd made his point by then.

In order to get at the full story, Dolnick recounts, in an unhurried, somewhat meandering style, brief histories of occupied Holland, and Nazi art looting; observations on Vermeer's preeminence, and the judgment of museum and gallery curators and art experts; and entertaining anecdotes about forgers -- who they are, why they are forgers instead of artists, and the ins and outs of the process of both making the paintings and getting them sold.

On the one hand, he notes, a forged piece of art does what it's supposed to do -- hang there on the wall and look, one presumes, as pretty as it did before you knew it was a forgery; on the other, art investors rarely buy for looks -- they're in it for money, status, and a piece of history, all of which go out the window when their piece is a fake. Our views of forgers themselves are likewise ambivalent. Few of us feel sorry for the poor millionaires who get swindled, but forgers can muck up art history irrevocably, or at least make things very confusing for experts, not to mention the rest of us.

Okay, pencils down. The top painting is the forgery, van Meegeren's faux-Vermeer The Supper at Emmaus, and the second one is the authentic Christ in the House of Martha and Mary. If you've read this far, you get an A for effort no matter which one you picked.

I took a quick break from art history to read Charles Seife's Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception, and you should, too! This is a book that I would recommend for anyone. It's fun, it's a really quick read, and even if you already know all the math, it's convenient to have all this info in one place. Plus, it's a book about lying with statistics that doesn't quote Mark Twain, and how common is that?

In Proofiness, Seife reminds us that, while we are often led to view them as pure fact, numbers in the real world measure real things, and are thus really fallible. We can be easily fooled by numbers, either by accident or intentionally, because they lend authority to an argument. Seife takes us through the most common tactics of chronic number-abusers: juking the stats, cherry-picking data, pretending to specificity, and, when all else fails, just making stuff up. Then he uses real-world examples to show how 'proofiness' is adversely effecting our economy, our judicial system, and even basic democracy.

Seife brings passion and a sense of humour ("78 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot.") to the work that make it a compelling read. He also really tries to avoid any political agenda beyond educating people so that they can make better decisions (I would argue that his title somewhat undermines his professed non-partisanship, not that I mind). It's more of a media literacy book than a math one, and as such would maybe be an especially appropriate gift for anyone you know that needs a hand with not believing everything they read (or hear, or watch on TV).

Around halfway through Stealing the Mystic Lamb: The True Story of the World's Most Coveted Masterpiece, Noah Charney offers this summation of where all the panels of the Ghent Altarpiece  -- also known as The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, and the titular most-coveted masterpiece by Jan van Eyck -- were located prior to World War I:

"On display in the original location, the Vijd Chapel of Saint Bavo Cathedral in Ghent, were the new copies of the Adam and Eve panels by Victor Lagye, the wing panels copied by Michiel Coxcie in 1559, and the original van Eyck central panels, returned from Paris.

The Belgian government had the original van Eyck Adam and Eve panels. They remained in the Brussels Museum, save for a few months in 1902 when they were on loan as the centerpiece of an exhibit of Flemish masters in Bruges.

The Berlin Museum, inheritor of the Prussian royal collection, owned the six original van Eyck wing panels. In 1823, the museum had acquired the Coxcie copy of the central panels of The Lamb, which had been on disply in the Munich Pinakothek, after having been acquired from L. J. Nieuwenhuys. Therefore Berlin now displayed a semblance of the complete Ghent Altarpiece, with nearly as much original material as Ghent could boast."

Got all that? Good, because those panels are just getting started.

Stealing the Mystic Lamb is an excellent art history gateway drug, as evidenced by my cyclopean stack of library books about art looting, theft, and forgery. Exploring the history of the Ghent Altarpiece from every angle, Charney begins with a Dan-Brown-is-envious in-depth examination of the work, its intricacies, and historical significance; followed by a necessarily less-detailed but fun-to-speculate-about biography of its painter, Jan van Eyck; and a primer on Belgium in general and Ghent in particular.

Then the fun begins, as we follow the painting through various wars and schemes, of which some outcomes are as yet unresolved. The Ghent Altarpiece was (and still is) a big deal, and a big trophy, a symbol of national pride for the Belgians, and of victory and supremacy for the French and Germans (it's mentioned by name in two articles of the Treaty of Versailles).

If you've read anything about Nazi war looting, you probably already know that most of the altarpiece eventually ended up in a salt mine in Austria. It was destined for pride of place in Hitler's crazy Linz museum scheme (it was also suspected to have possibly been a secret map to the Arma Chrisi - eat your heart out, Brown), and especially prized as having been recovered from the French and returned to its rightful land.

Despite being very rich in detail, I found Stealing the Mystic Lamb a really quick and entertaining read, but it did bog down a bit in the heroic conclusion. This is mostly not the author's fault, as it seems there are as many (if not more) stories as there were people present for the big denouement (spoiler alert - the Nazis lose). Compared to other works about the post-World-War-II art recovery effort, however, it's an utter breeze (I'm looking at you, Monuments Men), and I highly recommend it.

Moving Pictures by Kathryn and Stuart Immonen is an interesting graphic novel that is, on the surface, all about the status of art in the early days of World War II. Set in Paris the book is about a young woman curator involved in the packing up of art from museums and also the Nazi search for all the best art they can get their hands at. It name drops some famous thefts (altarpiece of Ghent, the fate of the Mona Lisa) and shows an awareness of the historical context, for example Napoleon. 's history of art theft. But the true focus of the novel is people, objects and morals disappear during war, the removal from life of the typical and the usual and the routine. That during war the constants were taken. And while I in my safe western world can only imagine just how frightening that must have been this book in its few pages strives to convey that emotion. This complex puzzle of a book with its multiple timelines does a great job of conveying that fear and uncertainty in a very intimate read. Highly recommended.

Stella Rimington should know espionage with her almost 30 years of experience at MI5, including her stint as Director General, she can claim an understanding of theory and praxis. And while she’s not alone in turning her years of experience to fiction, she does succeed where many fail in avoiding complete wish fulfillment (James Bond anyone?) and telling a mostly good set of stories with her Liz Carlyle stories. I’ve recently read the first four novels: At Risk (2004), Secret Asset (2006), Illegal Action (2007), Dead Line (2008).

These books are unpretentious but authentic novels that are largely successful as spy thrillers. Unfortunately, for all the authenticity Rimington's limitations as a writer are pretty obvious. While her characters are well thought through, she has no ear for dialogue in casual conversations. Her endings are fairly anti-climatic, with the villain being apprehended almost as an after-thought. It is obvious that Rimington is more interested in the process of investigation than the hands-on business of saving the day. Which I actually find a positive; I just wish she didn’t rely on so many coincidences to get the investigation moving and that she was better able to depict the intuition and analysis that are supposedly the trademark of her main character.

These books are light and fun and a good antidote to the super-machismo that dominates so much of the spy thriller genre. While not a master of the literary form I would definitely recommend Rimington, I even got my wife to read one.