Ex Libris

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2011-12-27T17:21:00.000-08:00

Having just returned from a year-long term as a Special Consultant to Miskatonic University's excavation of the Plains of Leng, I find that, in my quest to recover the Shining Trapezohedron, I have sorely neglected my duties viz. reviewing the books. With my antiquated ibook (retrofitted for steam power) fully repaired and ready for duty, and with a long backlog of tomes to record judgement upon, I should begin at once, but I regret to admit my critical faculties are rusty, especially after having to deal with shoggoths. Nevertheless, I shall endeavor to get back in the habit of regular postings. Until then, a few capsule reviews, for your delectation:

Reamde by Neal Stephenson

I really wanted to like this one, but I don't. That doesn't mean it isn't a good thriller, but that's all it is. The speculative flights of fancy expressed in Stephenson's previous work (especially the recent Anathem) have given way to an untamed sprawl of complex (and frequently implausible) plotting and rather pedestrian characterization. This is not a book of deep thoughts, and from Stephenson that is a disappointment.

Packing For Mars by Mary Roach

Very much in the vein of her previous books (such as Stiff, a humorous and informative primer on the various afterlives of human cadavers), full of funny and interesting anecdotes and lessons about the practical aspects of keeping living things, mostly people, alive and healthy in space. There is almost an entire chapter devoted to zero-g fecal collection. Enough said.

Holidays in Heck by P.J. O'Rourke

Holidays in Hell was the first O'Rourke book I ever read, a viciously funny tour of various military situations around the globe. This is a banal, unfunny tour of a Republican taking his family to various vacation destinations. O'Rourke's humor and sensibility have ossified over time, and the stench of the 2nd Bush Administration hangs over the stale jokes like - well, like zero-g fecal collection.

The Vicomte Returns! (Again.)

2011-02-09T18:36:00.001-08:00

This post shall be necessarily brief, and devoid of pictorial enhancement. Merely a preliminary announcement of my belated return to these pages. With my Thinking Machine under repair, I am updating via my new Semi-IntelligentPhone. Please be assured that further reviews (as well as other disturbing, yet strangely compelling new content) will follow shortly. Until that time, I remain your obedient correspondent.

The New Ratings Are In! The New Ratings Are In!

2010-04-21T11:40:00.000-07:00

Yes, friends - you heard right. All Ex Libris reviews now come with an easy to use rating from the Vicomte. Try it today!

Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakauer

2010-04-21T10:55:00.000-07:00

In 2004, right around the time it was becoming all too clear that our military adventure in Iraq was far from "Mission Accomplished", Pat Tillman died in Afghanistan, shot to death by soldiers from his own unit. For some time, Tillman's death was portrayed by the Pentagon and the Bush Administration as a heroic sacrifice, demonstrating Tillman's honor, courage and patriotism. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In Where Men Win Glory, author Jon Krakauer (Into Thin Air, Under The Banner Of Heaven), comprehensively depicts Tillman's life and brief career in the Army Rangers, creating the full and contradictory picture of a genuine human being, instead of a media stereotype. Macho, yet gentle, outgoing, smart, and surprisingly self-aware, Tillman felt compelled to give up a multi-million dollar contract to play pro football for the Arizona Cardinals after 9/11, enlisting as a private in the Army.

During the time he was training in the regular infantry, and then in the elite ranger school, Tillman (who was accompanied in enlistment by his brother Kevin) gave no interviews, and sought no media attention. By all accounts, he joined up because he felt it was right for him to do so. Even as he experienced a deployment to Iraq, and began to think that the war there was ill-advised and pointless, he continued to serve with distinction, because he simply wanted to be as good a soldier as possible.

His career ended on a hill in Afghanistan in 2004, under a hail of bullets fired by soldiers from his own unit. The details of the many errors of judgement and failures to observe procedure that led to Tillman's death are interesting reading, but ultimately irrelevant. "Friendly fire" deaths are a commonplace event in all armed conflicts - the details vary, but the results are always the same.

What matters more than the final truth about how Pat Tillman died is how that truth was evaluated, decided upon, and covered-up by Tillman's chain-of-command, all the way up to the Pentagon and the Bush Administration. The story of Tillman's death was initially portrayed as a heroic stand against Afghan "terrorists", enjoying a media response very similar to the now-discredited stories of Private Jessica Lynch in Iraq (in whose "rescue" mission Tillman played a small part).

The media, at this time largely reduced to a kennel of eager lapdogs, jumped unquestioningly onto the bandwagon, as Tillman was fast-tracked by the Pentagon for a posthumous Silver Star. His family, meanwhile, were told nothing about the actual circumstances of his death. Only after the President himself planned to refer to Tillman's "heroic scrifice" on national television, did the Pentagon decide that it would be politically dangerous to maintain the cover-up. There were simply too many witnesses, not least the soldiers who killed Tillman accidentally.

But actual details relased about the incident remained sketchy, as the Army brass sought to insulate the higher officers whose poor decisions contributed to the incident. (The short version is that Tillman would probably not have been shot, if the Army had been willing to leave behind a heavily damaged Humvee.) After three separate investigations (one of which was conducted by officers involved in the events), the Pentagon was left with a contradictory mess, and imposed virtually no punishment on officers above the level of Tillman's Lieutenant, who was essentially employed as a scapegoat for his superiors.

Attempts by Tillman's family to get the unvarnished truth were countered with Army public relations and endless spin, the full story remaining cloudy until the debut of this excellently researched book. The failed PR attempt to spin Tillman's enlistment, deployment, and tragic death for political benefit, is connected throughout the book to the many other public failures of the Bush Adminstration and the Pentagon in the prosecution of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts.

As always, Krakauer seamlessly blends revealing pictures of individuals (particularly Tillman) with strong, well-researched factual reporting on the shooting incident itself, and the embarassing path to the attempted cover-up. The many tragic errors of the "War on Terror" have become common knowledge during the last few years: WMD, no exit strategy, Abu Gharaib, etc, etc. This is one more story, a very intimate and personal one, of the consequences of the Bush Administration's incompetence and hubris.

Denialism by Michael Specter

2010-04-01T08:45:00.000-07:00

Apparently, there are people out there - large numbers of them - who now believe that childhood immunizations for such diseases as mumps, measles, tetanus and polio are more hazardous than they are useful. That such ignorami are fronted by celebrity "experts" like former MTV bimbo Jenny McCarthy and her current paramour, "comic actor" Jim Carrey, should come as little surprise.

What does surprise is how many First World citizens are willing to believe the uninformed anecdotal speculation that supports movements like anti-vaccination campaigns, over massive and incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. Michael Specter's Denialism explores the phenomenon of widespread public hostility to the concept of scientific methodology and empirical fact.

In chapters covering such subjects as the pro-polio crusade, the "organic" food craze, the unreasoning fear of genetically modified crops, and the absurdity of "alternative" medicine, Specter clearly, concisely and persuasively presents the massive spread of scientific evidence that exists to debunk such claims.

The deeper issue, of course, is what is causing so many presumably normal (and non-mentally challenged) people around the world to believe in the modern equivalent of fairy tales. It's largely a combination of faith - the evidence of things unseen (and unprovable) - and a fundamental inability or unwillingness to rationally measure and evaluate risk.

Faith, as we all should realize by now, has gotten a big boost during the Bush years of Fundamentalist ascendancy. When more than fifty percent of Americans disbelieve evolution in the contradiction to all verifiable evidence, rational discourse regarding the health of our children hasn't got a chance against fear-based rumor.

And in the post-9/11 world, Americans have somehow been convinced that they can be protected against all risk, despite the obvious - that life is more dangerous than ever. Nobody can live a life devoid of risk - the only rational way to live is to try to measure the risk of one course of action against another. As thinking human beings, that's what our intelligence has been developed to do.

Is the vague and totally unsupported assertion that vaccinations cause autism reason to risk a global epidemic of smallpox or polio? Is a desire for "pure" food good cause to create an agricultural system that will result in half the planet starving to death from underproduction of crops? The answer to these questions will not be found in personal belief, but in objective science, and anyone who favors the former over the latter is on a slippery slope to the dark ages.

The Vicomte Returns

2010-03-31T21:44:00.000-07:00

After a disappointing shooting season (not improved by my being bored into coma by Lord Buttforth's incessant prattling of his losses at Chemin-de-fer), I have resumed my sacred mission to provide you, Kind Reader, with my variegated musings on the state of literature today.

More improvements to the site are forthcoming, and I trust they will meet with your generous approval. I shall endeavor to maintain the very highest standards of literary criticism, always with your intellectual welfare uppermost in my mind.

I remain, as ever, your obedient servant,

The Vicomte

An Advisory From The Vicomte

2010-03-19T17:13:00.000-07:00

Due to the commencement of Grouse Season in the Scottish Highlands, inevitably followed by the usual round of high teas and weekend garden parties, the Vicomte will be on a brief hiatus for the remainder of this month, and some part of the next. Never fear - the Vicomte will return.

A Softer Dave Cullen

2010-03-16T15:55:00.000-07:00

A word to the wise - the new softcover edition of Dave Cullen's stupendously well-researched and emotionally searing account of the 1999 Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold high school massacre, Columbine, (reviewed at this site) is now available.

Ordinarily I wouldn't comment on a paperback release of something I just recently reviewed, but the new edition features considerable new content, always welcome when updating a work of non-fiction. I appreciated the additional features (especially the map), and I'm sure you will too. A shout-out to Dave Cullen for updating the hardback, and extending the most vital element of this book - its sense of perspective on an oft-misinterpreted tragedy.

The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross

2010-03-16T14:58:00.000-07:00

Do you enjoy spy novels a la Len Deighton? What about eldritch Lovecraftian horror? James Bond thrillers, you say? Well now, you can have all three, plus plenty of Pythonesque satire, in one easy-to-read volume! But wait, there's more - real historical events, with strange, alternate explanations, and multidimensional mathematics, combined with advanced computational demonology, all at no additional cost!

Welcome to the freaky, fantabulous world of Charles Stross. Welcome to The Laundry. Meet new hire Bob Howard - just an ordinary cubicle mole, with an unusual gift for some rather arcane applications of higher mathematics. After very nearly laying waste to a considerable section of Central London, Bob has been recruited into England's most secret service, The Laundry.

This wheezy, decrepit organization is composed of equal parts Victorian stuffiness, Cold War Paranoia, and Thatcher-Era bureaucracy, and its mission is combating the forces of Evil. Not communists, or terrorists, but real, genuine Evil - demons, gorgons, succubi, and especially the many-tentacled Elder Gods who wait on the other side of existence, desperate to reclaim their dominion over the Earth and its unknowing inhabitants.

The job is not without its perks; Bob has flexible hours and a company PDA that can cast highly destructive spells. But he also has to endure vicious competition, nasty superiors, and a rigidly restrictive expense account. (Failure to account properly for all expenses can result in a trip to the Auditors - and very limited future employment as a zombie.)

Bob's latest mission is to investigate an American physics professor, who has stumbled onto a method to open a gate to the other side - a very large gate. Before he can say "Yog-Sothoth", Bob is up to his neck in Middle East intrigue, old Nazi incantology, and the possibility of an extradimensional ice giant sucking all the energy out of the known universe. Plus a little bit of adventurous romance.

Stross's writing is brilliantly funny, combining lots of esoteric (and somehow plausible) information, with fast-paced action, Bondian gadgets, and an all-too-believable hero, who spends most of his time completely over his head. What makes the trip especially fun is the internal consistency of Howard's world - a secret history of 20th Century politics, war and magical intervention - and the combination of grotesque supernatural horror with the banality of ordinary Government employment.

Stross followed this book with an equally enjoyable sequel, an expansive pastiche of Ian Fleming's James Bond called The Jennifer Morgue, as well as a couple of shorter Bob Howard stories. All are clever, funny, knowledgeable, and well-integrated stories, and entirely outside the author's usual realm of hard science fiction. I'm hoping for another tale of The Laundry (hopefully novel-length) very, very soon. Preferably before the end of the world.

The Wreck of the River of Stars by Michael Flynn

2010-03-15T16:19:00.000-07:00

Unless you are a serious devotee of science fiction you've probably never heard of Michael Flynn; I hadn't until a couple of years ago, and I take my science fiction very seriously. He tends to fly beneath the radar, eschewing melodramatic space opera, in favor of highly detailed, very plausible multi-threaded stories, spread out on a very large scale. Unlike many authors of the genre, he publishes only once every several years, and the level of skill, commitment and imagination that goes into each novel makes the wait worthwhile.

I lucked onto Flynn with a novel called In The Kingdom Of The Blind, a fabulist present-day thriller about a plot (actually several plots) to control world events via the science of Cliology, or the mathematical analysis of recurrent historical trends (Clio is the traditional Greek Muse of history). I then went backwards, into Flynn's Firestar quartet; four sequential novels illustrating how one woman with a great deal of money (and a severe phobia of asteroid impacts), can seed an entire generation of high school students with the inspiration to reach for the stars, as well as the education to get there.

The saga follows several of these students (and some of their adult mentors) from the present to the near future, as they build a private fleet of commercial spacecraft and eventually develop the technology to open the solar system to paying customers. What makes the Firestar books unique is the hyper-realistic depiction of the enormous economic, political, social and especially personal costs of such an extraordinary effort. Lives are lost, reputations ruined, businesses destroyed and the world forever altered by the struggle to colonize space - but the benefits are equal to the price.

Flynn followed this series with The Wreck Of The River Of Stars, set decades after the Firestar protagonists have established the interplanetary trade. The title is the name of a legendary spaceliner, using magnetic sails to ply the interplanetary spacelanes between the inner planets and Jupiter's moons, carrying high-priced freight and glamourous passengers.

But the book begins long after the decline of the great sailing ships, inevitably replaced by faster, fusion-powered vessels. Once glorious, The River of Stars is now a lowly tramp freighter, her sails stowed, her passenger decks largely mothballed, and her sleek beauty marred by a quartet of retrofitted fusion motors. Worse still, her ranks of spiffy officers and cabin stewards have given way to a scruffy, mismatched skeleton crew of misfits and losers, held together solely by the grace of their remarkable captain, Evan Dodge Hand.

We never see Hand in action; the book opens with his untimely death. Simultaneously, a rogue pebble impacts the ship's fusion system, shutting down two of the engines. Depending largely on gravitational largesse to make its rendezvous with Jupiter, the ship needs at least three working engines to avoid missing port, and flying out into the eternal darkness. As the members of the crew try to work together to address the problem, they uniformly fail to see the more important issue: without the Captain to mediate between them, their individual failings, idiosyncrasies, and emotional baggage doom the effort from the start.

With a necessarily limited cast of characters, confined to a single locale, Flynn creates an unforgettable group of damaged personalities, each with a full complement of prejudices, recriminations and tarnished hopes and dreams. A ship's doctor sublimates her romantic and sexual needs with a drug addiction. The First Officer (now Acting Captain) with a horrible episode of indecision in his past, spends his time replaying old military battles on the ship's computer, abandoning any pretense of leadership.

Meanwhile, the ship's engineer trusts his own inflated ego (inflamed by the sexual rejection of his young and fatally inexperienced assistant) to repair the damaged engines before the deadline. And two other crewmembers, associated with the ship's halcyon sailing days, plot to outfox the engineer by hatching a daring plan to unpack the rigging, and fly into the Jupiter roads triumphantly, under full sail.

There are other crew, and other equally fascinating stories, aboard The River of Stars, and each has a vital part to play in the making of an avoidable disaster. In Flynn's world, character is destiny - each individual's flaws create an inescapable trap, all interweaving together in a blind inexorable march toward doom. This is epic tragedy, rendered on an intimate, almost tender scale. And the emotionally wracking "if only" moments of missed opportunities, failed communications, and personal hubris resonantly emulate such nonfictional catastrophes as the Titanic and the Hindenberg.

This is a dense, subtle, nuanced, and above all, human story - brimming with fallibility, questioning the possibility of redemption, examining the latent darkness of the human soul. I've had to read three times to see into its depths, and I do not plan to review the two unrelated books that Flynn has since written, Eifelheim and The January Dancer, until I have reread them thoroughly. On first acquaintance, though, both show themselves to be just as thoughtful, as imaginative, as realistic, and as moving, as The Wreck Of The River Of Stars.

SDXAU5WBSJNX

Blackwater by Jeremy Scahill

2010-03-11T16:21:00.000-08:00

"Old Blackwater, keep on slayin', Good old Uncle Sam gonna keep on payin'..."

I recommended yesterday's book, Tulia, for those who like to get outraged. Today's book, Blackwater, should probably not be read by such people, as it will likely lead to so much outrage that the results will include vomiting, uncontrollable weeping, and paralytic strokes. Yes, my friends, we have finally located the Heart of Darkness, and it's in North Carolina.*

Or possibly in Holland, Michigan, where Blackwater's founder, Erik Prince, was born and raised in an insular community of Dutch Calvinists, who came to America to escape religious persecution. (I should note here, as a person of Dutch extraction myself, that whenever people from Holland are fleeing their homeland due to religious persecution, it means that they are more conservative and intolerant than the people they're fleeing from. For more info on this, see the history of South Africa.

Prince really was a prince in this backward kingdom, because his father, Edgar, was definitely the king. Edgar made a billion-dollar fortune, based on his development of the auto sunshade vanity mirror (Note - vanity is one of the Seven Deadly Sins.) When Edgar died in 1995, Erik decided to renounce his career as a Navy SEAL, and returned home to take over the family business. His tenure didn't last long as long as his father's, though; he sold the company for $1.6 billion a year later.

What did the little Prince do with this money? He plowed it into an assortment of far right-wing political and religious activist groups, for a start, and then he created Blackwater, a private training base for military and law enforcement personnel. Located on 6,000 acres in the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina (yes, that's actually what it's called), Blackwater started out as a relatively simple endeavor; sort of a giant shooting range, only more luxurious.

Within a few years, though, events such as the Columbine massacre raised Blackwater's profile, positioning the company to take advantage of the big enchilada - 9/11. Suddenly, Prince was thrust into the world of no-bid government contracts; a world he was well equipped to move in, considering his many connections to the Administration's new right-wing, theocratic overlords. By the time of the Iraq war, Blackwater was on its way to becoming the premier contractor providing training, firearms, and private security to the occupation force.

By private security, of course, we mean mercenaries. Thanks to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld's new leaner, meaner, stupider Pentagon policies, the United States military was "outsourcing" many of its military missions, including training, supply, and occasionally, killing people. Blackwater happily took up the slack, contracting for hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.

Adding a profit motive to war is like taking coals to Newcastle; there are already plenty there. But Blackwater (and its later imitators like Triple Canopy and Erinys) took the practice of war profiteering out of the shadows and into the murky dusk of a new era. Unfortunately, in their zeal for growing their new business, they often failed to live up to the standards of the armed forces they were supposed to replace.

Like, for instance, when they sent four of their private warriors through the most dangerous city in Iraq in March of 2004, armed only with light weapons in a couple of stock SUVs. Of course, Blackwater's supply contract (which may, or may not have been subcontracted through Haliburton) called for at least three men in each heavy machine gun equipped, armored vehicle, not two men in each unarmored SUV.

Also, in its haste to move a convoy of vitally needed kitchen utensils through Fallujah, the company also neglected to conduct a risk analysis or provide an adequate map of the chosen route (along which Iraqi insurgents were successfully holding heavily armed Marines at bay). End result - four contractors shot, dismembered, burned and strung up on the girders of a bridge, an event recorded on video, heavily televised, and subsequently used by the Bush Administration as an excuse for a disastrous crackdown on the city.

Other Blackwater innovations included hiring mercenaries from former right-wing Chilean and Honduran "death squads" (at a considerable discount over domestic stormtroopers), unprovoked shootings of unarmed civilians, and private air taxis used for "extraordinary rendition". Fortunately, the company maintained that it was under the authority of the US military, without being restricted by its rules of engagement or legal jurisdiction, and thus couldn't be sued or held accountable by... well, anyone. More recently, however, Federal judges have failed to appreciate the inspired logic of this position. Lawsuits are plentiful.

So, during the time that the Bush Administration's occupation of Iraq spiraled down into catastrophe, Blackwater made hundreds of millions of dollars in fees, all the while glorifying "free market capitalism", as well as "Christian principles". Politicians and fundamentalists nationwide lined up to praise a corporation with all the moral rectitude of Benito Mussolini. And Erik Prince announced the company's expansion into new enterprises, such as creating staffed "private military bases" in corrupt oil-exporting nations like Azerbaijan.

I really don't have much to say about Scahill's writing ability - it's certainly competent and well-researched. But any stylistic concerns are all but eclipsed by the steadily mounting horror of the content itself. Blackwater, he makes very clear, is Ground Zero for the monumental clusterfuck of greed, arrogance, incompetence, and pure evil that defines the Iraq war, and the political/religious movement that created it.

I honestly can't say I loved reading this book - I was nearly overwhelmed by rage and nausea at several points. But if you don't already know all the details of this shadowy threat to liberty, justice and common sense, you probably should. The Democrats may be in the driver's seat for now, but their perch is precarious. Blackwater, and the people who allowed it to thrive, are still around... and they're just waiting for another turn.

*(Grammatical note - I have just confirmed that the apostrophe in "it's" is valid only for the contraction of "it is" and not for the possessive form. In previous posts I have not used the apostrophe in either case, out of confusion and laziness. But I have, with great effort, reformed myself, thus bringing more enjoyment to you, the home viewer. And many thanks to the "Its vs. It's" webpage - give it a look! http://www.stormloader.com/garyes/its.html

Tulia by Nate Blakeslee

2010-03-10T15:17:00.000-08:00

This is one I just happened upon at the library - I didn't know anything at all about the events chronicled by journalist Nate Blakeslee from 1999 to 2003, so I took a chance, and I'm very glad I did. Tulia is a small town in the Texas Panhandle, and in 1999, a joint County-State-Federal drug enforcement task force raided it and arrested more than 40 of its citizens on charges of cocaine sales. The vast majority of those charged were black and impoverished, and the arrests netted fully one fifth of the town's total black residents.

Just another sad story about the intersection of race and poverty with drug use, one might think. But this bust was unusual in several respects. First, all of the arrests were for delivery of powder cocaine, instead of the much more common crack. Second, all of the arrests depended on one sole piece of evidence: the testimony of Tom Coleman, the Swisher County undercover officer who made, according to his own testimony, more than 100 buys from more than 40 different people over an 18-month period.

There was no corroboration for these arrests - no police witnesses, no audio or video recordings, nothing but the often vague and cursory descriptions of each bust by Coleman, and the drugs he supposedly recovered. On this basis alone, more than two dozen people were sent to State Prison for terms ranging from 2 years to 361 years, by the Swisher County Sheriff and District Attorney, neither of whom ever questioned in any way the credibility of their sole witness, Coleman.

And Tom Coleman, it later turned out, was a very bad man. The son of a revered Texas Ranger, Coleman has been described by his former employers in law enforcement as "not trustworthy", "paranoid", "racist", "a thief", and "a pathological liar". He was actually placed under arrest by the Swisher County Sheriff in the middle of his tenure as an undercover officer, on charges of theft filed by his previous employer, the Sheriff of Cochran County, Texas.

Coleman was returned to work one week later, after making restitution for his thefts and reporting the charges "dismissed" to the Sheriff. Oddly, the Sheriff never inquired further about the charge, and failed to complete the paperwork necessary to report the arrest, per procedure, to a nationwide criminal tracking database. During the trials of the Tulia defendants, both the Sheriff and the District Attorney, as well as Coleman's direct supervisor, testified that they had the highest confidence in Coleman, and were unaware of any negative information in his work history.

During the trials, a coalition of interested Tulians, defendants' attorneys, and local journalists (including Blakeslee, writing for the liberal Texas Observer Magazine) worked together to attract national attention to what was developing into a major scandal. It looked very much as if the County's Sheriff and DA, the Task Force leadership, and even the trial judge, had voluntarily either closed their eyes to, or actively covered up the malfeasance of their heroic officer, even as the continuing trials revealed more and more evidence of his corruption.

Ultimately, four of the defendents were represented in state Habeas proceedings by a combination of local defense, NAACP Legal Fund, and private firm pro bono lawyers. During the course of this hearing, under a new judge, all of the very sordid details of this ugly story came out, including allegations that Coleman had overcut the drugs in his possession to multiply the amount available for buys, and then used the cash from these buys to pay the restitution of his thefts.

I won't reveal any more of the story, in the interests of those who would like to discover the rest of this fascinating story for themselves. Blakeslee's writing is clear, concise, and logical, making the complexities of the case easy to understand. He also demonstrates a strong familiarity with the background of West Texas politics and history, as well as a deep understanding of the paradoxes inherent in the 1990s "War on Drugs". But my greatest appreciation is reserved for the simmering outrage that underlies the objective reporting of this disgraceful episode.

Tulia reminds us that, even as we move into the new millenium, the age-old forces of prejudice, dishonesty, and corruption remain alive and well in the midst of the organizations we give the power to deprive ourselves of life, liberty and property, not just in Texas, but all over the country. It is surely no coincidence that a tragedy of this massive scale occurred during the tenure of a Texas Governor, later President, who so embodied the retrograde beliefs that pervaded this injustice: George W. Bush.

The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb

2010-03-08T14:42:00.000-08:00

I would never have found this book on my own. Normally, books about the emotional tribulations of people when bad things happen to them doesn't really pique my interest, nor do inspiring stories of redemption. But after I reviewed Dave Cullen's Columbine, my dear cousin, the Archduchess of Lambeth-Steinmetz, suggested The Hour I First Believed as something I might enjoy.

I'm not sure how much I enjoyed it, but I can recommend Lamb's book as compellingly readable. Enjoyment is not a word one uses lightly when dealing with a plot involving the husband of a high school teacher who barely survives the Columbine massacre in 1999, and who then goes through years of intense PTSD and prescription drug abuse, climaxed by a fatal hit-and-run killing of a teenager.

Caelum Quirk, that husband, also has to contend with the criminal and civil suits associated with his wife's tragic decline, as well as her later incarceration, all while embarked on a quest to discover the mysterious and secret truth of his family history, which involves some famous female ancestors from the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the Connecticut state prison farm for women they founded on land ceded from the farm where he was raised, and has now returned to.

The main reasons the book kept me interested were the easily absorbed dialogue and narration by Caelum, along with a constant and often surprising multiplicity of plot developments. Lamb puts a lot of significant events into this story, perhaps too many for one person's life. It seems a remarkable coincidence that he should discover that his mother (and grandmother) were once imprisoned in the Lydia Quirk Correctional farm (founded by his great-grandmother), next door to his family home, while his wife is also serving time there.

But that's part and parcel of this novel's thoroughly gothic charm, gothic in this case referring to the genre convention of the unresolved past exerting a crippling stranglehold on present events. The book weaves together disparate mysteries (both literal and figurative) in an attempt to address such themes as the impact of violence, the existence of God, the meaning of morality, the persistence of prejudice, and the enormous amounts of baggage people inherit from their forbears.

Some of these themes are deeper than I care to delve into in a novel; I have a low threshold for dealing with human tragedy, which is abundant here. But then again, the characters are not necessarily wonderful, or even nice, and much of what befalls them can be put down to their own emotional failings and bad decisions. In other words, Caelum and the various members of his family, including his wife Maureen, are fully dimensionalized people, realistic and indentifiable, which are sometimes overwhelmed by the tragic (and perhaps implausible) events that the author puts them through.

Nevertheless, the book is moving, both in the emotional sense and the kinetic one. The narrative spans almost ten years, but it moves fast and smoothly, never leaving the reader feel jarred, or as though something important has been skipped. In some ways, Lamb's rather vernacular style reminds me of early Stephen King, which shares a similar narrative force, pace and plot density. Unlike King, though, Lamb writes not of supernatural horror, but of the more prosaic horror of sudden tragedy and bad choices. On that basis, I think this novel works well, indeed.

Old Man's War by John Scalzi

2010-03-05T15:14:00.000-08:00

Ok, let's pull back from the God thing and turn on some nice, easy-listening science fiction. Old Man's War is a damn good book, and Scalzi is a damn fine writer. Although this is technically genre writing, the syle and resonance of Scalzi's writing elevate it above the usual "It is now the year 2150, and ____________" (fill in the blank with "robots rule the earth", "apes rule the earth", "the earth is only a fond memory", etc.).

The date of the story's beginning is not specified, and it isn't important; in the future life on earth is pretty much the same as it is now - life in space is what's changed. Humanity has conquered the lightspeed barrier and colonized several other solar systems. But there is virtually no exchange of technology or information between the Department of Colonial Affairs and Earth; everything flows one way only - off planet, permanently. Colonists are young, healthy, fertile men and women from low-income nations like India and Thailand, and once they leave, they never come back.

Also, life among the stars is not a peaceful one; the systems that have been colonized lie in close proximity to a variety of intelligent extraterrestrials, and the resources of new colonies are often disputed and/or fought over. So soldiers are required, and these are also drawn from earth, but not from the young and healthy. It is the planet's senior citizens who form the front lines of interstellar defense.

The narrator of the book is John Perry, a 70-something widower with no particular reason to remain on earth. The Colonial Defense Force has, in exchange for a term of enlistment, to make him young again, and train him to fight on behalf of the colonies. The details of his transformation and training are too fascinating and original to reveal here; readers are best advised to discover these themselves. But soon enough, John and a group of new-found friends and fellow former gray-hairs are fighting aliens on distant shores.

What separates the book from other Heinleinesque imitators is the unique romance that develops between John Perry and a mysterious Special Forces soldier named Jane Sagan. Special Forces aren't like regular troops - their nickname is The Ghost Brigades, because they are created from the DNA of old people who die between enlistment and deployment - and they are born as adults, with a panoply of enhanced abilities. Jane Sagan is less than ten years old, biologically, when John meets her. She is also built from the DNA of his late wife, but has none of her memories.

And so a wistful, funny and strange courtship begins between these two very different people, almost of different species, against a backdrop of war, death, tragedy, and political intrigue. It turns out that the people of Earth are isolated from the rest of the galaxy for a reason, and that they are being deceived and manipulated by the CDF for policy reasons. This backstory becomes the pivotal theme and conflict that Scalzi extends in the book's sequels: The Ghost Brigades, The Last Colony, and Zoe's Tale, all of which are equally engaging, humorous, and brilliantly plotted and executed.

The series has continuity; ideally the books should be read in order. The richness of the developing storyline - paralleled by the the developing relationship between John and Jane - keeps on challenging the reader with its exploration of human values, traditions, morality and politics. And each book is individually satisfying in a way that many series books are not.

I love science fiction - its probably my favorite genre - but I am discerning in my tastes. Invention and imagination are no substitute for a good story and sharp writing. Scalzi, fortunately, has them all in great quantity, and I eagerly look forward to future efforts by this outstanding talent.

Under The Banner Of Heaven by Jon Krakauer

2010-03-04T09:52:00.000-08:00

I seem to be on a God kick lately. I'm not sure why, except maybe that the nature of faith, taken to extremes, fascinates and horrifies me. That presumably normal and rational human beings can convince themselves of total absurdities, and then hurt or kill other human beings based on that belief, demonstrates, I think, a profound deficiency in human brain design. What's worse is that it is a defect that seems to be on the rise.

On July 27, 1984, the 137th anniversary of Brigham Young and his Mormon followers arrival in their promised land of Deseret (now Salt Lake City, Utah), two brothers, Ron and Dan Lafferty, slit the throats of Brenda Lafferty and her infant daughter, Erica, the wife and child of their brother, Alan. They did this because of a revelation from God.

In actuality, they did it because Brenda Lafferty had refused to conform to the misogynistic tenets of the Fundamentalist Mormon religion, and was instrumental in convincing Ron Lafferty's wife and children to leave him for the same reason. 15-month old Erica was murdered because she was "a spawn of the devil", i.e., Brenda. Two other individuals who crossed Ron Lafferty were also marked for death that day, but escaped execution through a combination of blind luck, and the killers' confusion and laziness.

It should be pointed out that the Lafferty brothers belonged not to the mainstream Church of Latter Day Saints, but to one of many offshoot sects, known as Fundamentalist Mormons, who still practice their founder's command of multiple marriage. Members of the FLDS, as they are called, are well known throughout the western United States for a wide variety of criminal behaviors, including polygamy, statutory rape, kidnapping, welfare fraud, and tax evasion.

Krakauer's book is a chilling narrative of the Laffertys' descent into depravity, climaxed by the remorseless murder of their sister-in-law and niece, interspersed with a thorough history of the development of the Mormon faith and its offshoots. This is a necessary history, because it is impossible to understand the actions of the Lafferty brothers and their ilk without comprehending the unique and sometimes bizarre religion that twisted their reason toward murder.

Mormonism is alone among major religions (with tens of millions of followers in the US alone), in that it is a very recent development, and the texts and dominant figures (or prophets) of the religion are subject to all of the documentation of the modern age, unlike, say, the Bible or Koran. The founder, Joseph Smith, Jr. was a charismatic con artist and treasure hunter - one of many who founded new religions during the Second Great Awakening of religious fervor in America during the early 19th Century.

Unlike the others, however, Joe Smith had a talent for attracting and keeping followers, as well as a comprehensive, if somewhat nutty, philosophy. Smith was repeatedly contacted by an angel called Moroni, who revealed to him the location of a golden book of prophecy, describing the pre-Columbian inhabitants of America as Jewish refugees from Babylon in the time before Jesus. Also, the Garden of Eden was apparently located originally in what is now Missouri.

Fortunately, Christ made a later side trip to the New World to spread the news of his sacrifice to his new disciples. Later, the people of this holy and wealthy tribe were slaughtered to the last man by the evil minions of Satan (Native Americans), which explains why there was no sign of them when the Europeans showed up. The golden book contains the history of these proto-Mormons, and their rules and commandments for living.

In addition to wearing special sacred underwear, practicing "blood atonement", and regarding black people as subhuman, Smith (who was a serious ladies' man) later added polygamy to the list of revealed wisdom. The Mormon church meanwhile endured decades of hostility from unbelievers as they trekked across the country from Palmyra, New York, to Deseret, including massacres and the lynching of Smith in 1844.

Although the modern LDS church jettisoned the practice of polygamy (and later, racism) to assimilate successfully into the American mainstream, thousands of followers refused to abandon these precepts, and formed the core of the FLDS sects, which also teach that women are to remain eternally subservient to their fathers and husbands, may be married against their will as young as the age of 13 or 14 years old, and should serve as one of literally dozens of wives assigned to a single husband.

The conflict of these beliefs with American law (and common sense) has isolated FLDS members from the rest of society, allowing their madness to flourish and grow violent. The Lafferty killings, the kidnapping and brainwashing of Elizabeth Smart, and the saga of fugitive FLDS "prophet" (and pedophile) Warren Jeffs, all find their source in the original tenets of the unreformed Mormon church.

Though Ron and Dan Lafferty were both convicted of First Degree Murder in 1985, Ron Lafferty successfully worked the system to obtain a second trial (he was again convicted and sentenced to death), and continues to evade the firing squad though claims of mental incompetence, 25 years after his crime. Dan Lafferty, sentenced to two life terms, remains in prison, and provides Krakauer with much of the narrative of the killings. Both brothers remain unrepentent, and refuse to acknowledge any wrongdoing, in that their actions were ordained by God. The wages of faith are death.

Krakauer's writing is sharp, detailed, and moving, and describes the pitiful death of Brenda and Erica Lafferty, and the development of the strange and fateful religion that led to it with the same clarity and intensity he demonstrated in his best-seller Into Thin Air. Thorough, compelling, and deeply disturbing, Under The Banner Of Heaven is a critical text in understanding the nature of Fundamentalist faith that, in its various forms, seems determined to tear the very planet asunder.

Good Book by David Plotz

2010-03-03T11:17:00.000-08:00

Have I mentioned my profound contempt and loathing of religious fundamentalists? Probably. I was reminded today of the staggering loopiness of these right-wingnuts when Bobo Smyth-Bullard sent me a clipping concerning a fundamentalist's response to the late unpleasantness at Sea World, in which Shamu the "Killer Whale" lived up to his description and iced one of his trainers.

Said response was swift and merciless; according to scripture, Shamu must be killed forthwith - via stoning. (How do you stone to death something that lives underwater?) Also, his surviving trainers must likewise be stoned to death for good measure, says the Bible. As often claimed, the Good Book has a solution for every problem, even if most of them involving throwing rocks at people (or aquatic mammals).

I mention this as an introduction to a delightful book by David Plotz, the editor of Slate, in which he describes, chapter by chapter, his experience reading the whole of the Old Testament. (Like myself, Plotz is a mostly non-observant Jew - neither of us has much interest in the events that follow.) The result is an informative, thoughtful, and very, very funny look at the Good Book's many contradictions, acts of violence, pornographic interludes, and refreshing bits of fine poetry.

Seriously, though - the Old Testament (which includes the five books of the Torah, plus a bunch of books about Prophets, Judges, Psalms, and a poor bastard named Job), is completely whacked. Some of the more outlandish incidents involve: golden hemorrhoids, a mountain of foreskins, killing a thousand people with a donkey's jawbone, the genocide of a dozen or more societies, and an almost endless number of hookers. Any fundie who claims to literally believe everything in here is unquestionably certifiable.

Its not all hookers and hemorrhoids, though. Plotz's evaluation of the Bible, while frequently snarky, is also frequently thoughtful and respectful. His chief problem seems to lie in reconciling the notion of a loving and merciful God with the psychotically jealous and angry deity that informs most of the Bible's events. And it is a tough problem - frankly God's actions throughout tend to make lowly humans seem like paragons of virtue and sanity.

Much of the wackiness of fundamentalism must come from trying to integrate the bitchy, vengeful God of the Old Testament with the cuddly, loving God of the Jesus era. In my opinion, fundies would save themselves a lot of needless anxiety by simply stipulating that God had a stroke sometime around 50 BC, and afterward had a whole different personality.

Anyway, Plotz is at his best when he tries to resolve the violence, misogyny, and chaos of the Bible by applying his own personal interpretations of the text - simultaneously perplexed, humorous and humane, he demonstrates that taking anything in the book literally is the worst possible move. Ultimately, he advises his readers to do the work themselves - read the book, and work through the many contradictions on their own, and, as he did, find themselves deriving new inspiration from the process. I plan to start soon, and will post a review of the Good Book in due course.

The Unlikely Disciple by Kevin Roose

2010-03-01T16:03:00.000-08:00

I loved this book, but I hate the author. Why, you ask? Because the little bastard hadn't even graduated from Brown when he wrote this, and its a damn sight better than anything I could do at the age (or now, for that matter). God, I loathe natural talent. Anyway, its still a great read, and if you aren't the jealous type I'm sure you'll like it just fine.

In addition to people who are more talented than I, I also hate religious fundamentalists - and that's what the book is about, from the perspective of a secret infiltrator - Roose himself, who took a semester off from Brown University to enroll in Jerry Falwell's Liberty College. Liberty, as you may know, was started several years ago, during the heyday of the Moral Majority, to educate good Christians, while still maintaining their insulation from climate of foul sin that surrounds most Liberal Arts schools. (I went to UC Santa Barbara, by the way, and majored in beer bonging.)

Recently, though the school has enjoyed a surge in notariety and popularity, largely instigated by the fact that the Bush Administration chose a large number of Liberty graduates as Executive Branch personnel (often despite their tender age and total lack of experience, or in many cases competence). Roose, the son of Quakers, decided to spend a year among the faithful to observe and comment, quite objectively, on the experience.

And Roose is objective. In fact, for diehard athiest like me, he is almost too understanding of some of the wackier students and faculty at Liberty. But his understanding seems to come from a genuine sense of open-mindedness, as well as a responsibility to be journalistically fair (a responsibility much abused these days by many of his soi disant elders and betters). Roose also successfully leavens the facts with trenchant (though never mean-spirited) humor, and refreshingly authentic and mature reflections on his beliefs as they compare to the often rigid orthodoxy he finds himself surrounded by.

Finally, Roose delivers the most important information to the reader - the inside scoop. Are girls (or guys)who pledge virginity more likely to be extra-kinky when they fall? (And they do fall.) How exactly do you teach Creationism without laughing uncontrollably? (It helps if you cheat.) What is Dr. Falwell (or Jerry, as he is known to the students, really like? Theis last question is pivotal, because Roose, through an accident of fortuitous timing, wound up getting the last personal interview Jerry Falwell gave before his sudden death of heart disease in 2009, an event which shocked the campus to its core, and which gained the author a singular insight into the schools and its students.

I have read a lot of books on Christian Fundamentalism. Some have been clever, some have been angry, some factual and others pure polemic. This one was uniquely personal, moving, honest and fair, and, despite my envy, I give great credit to Kevin Roose for doing the necessary research, and for pursuing objective and engaging journalism.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

2010-02-28T14:38:00.000-08:00

A caveat first - I have not actually read this book - I'm afraid my native masculinity militates against my perusing books of such overwhelming... girliness. My beloved sister, the Contessa of Haut-Eigenwald, however, has read this book, and apparently quite liked it. She appreciated its strong characterization of three women living the deep south of the early 1960s: Skeeter, a white college student trying to avoid immediate marriage, Abileen, a black housemaid mourning her own son, while raising those of her employers, and Missy, Abileen's free-spirited best friend.
Together they cooperate in a daring conspiracy to overturn the status quo of their imprisoned lives. So, if you're a woman, you might find this one just the thing. Give it a whirl, with the Contessa's compliments, and my own, of course.

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

2010-02-26T10:28:00.000-08:00

Just the other day, I was out falconing with my good friend and vassal, the 4th Baron of Smyth-Bullard, when he happened to mention my blog. "You know, Your Grace," said he, "I've been following your electronic journal, and I quite enjoy it. But I do have a question." At this point I casually removed my hand from the hilt of my sword, to encourage further candor, and gestured for him to continue. "Well, it is only that you never seem to dislike any of the books you review - and I for one love to see a bad author savaged in print by a master of vicious sarcasm such as Your Grace."

"Capital point, Bobo," I replied (for such was his nickname at the Old School), "I shall see to it forthwith!" And so, without further ado (and a special dedication to my chum Bobo), enjoy the following review of Dan Brown's latest insipid potboiler, The Lost Symbol...

This is difficult for me to write, for two reasons. First, I am loath to give any attention whatsoever to a talentless hack posing as a writer. Second, I am frankly ashamed to admit that I actually read this piece of garbage. Let me explain by noting that my time at the library that week was curtailed by an important appointment, and the selection was sparse indeed. The book was a new release, and having read Angels and Demons and The DaVinci Code, I figured it would be a relatively painless way to kill a few hours. I was so wrong. As it turned out, I could have spent a less painful few hours trying to kill myself.

I now realize that Brown's books result in cumulative damage - each one is more hazardous than the last. The DaVinci Code? Relatively harmless, if pretentious, fluff. Angels and Demons upped the ante for inane absurdity with a plot that posited antimatter... in the Vatican! The latest opus demonstrates that Brown's hero, symbology Professor Robert Langdon, sees more action than Jessica Fletcher - which makes sense because that kind of stuff happens to college professors all the time. (Just the other day, I heard, Noam Chomsky singlehandely foiled a bunch of Christian Scientists trying to blow up Mount Rushmore with a viral meme.) The suspension of disbelief required by the sum total of these stories is more than ridiculous - its insulting.

I won't waste any time on the "plot", which is essentially a retread of the earlier books. This time, the intrepid Langdon is again called in to consult on a violent crime, associated with - wait for it - a symbolic clue to a hidden treasure. Here it's Freemasons instead of Templars, but the song remains the same - a pretty girl, a twisted villain (tattooed with arcane symbols all over his body!), another scavenger hunt for the "Lost Treasure" of the Masons. More "astounding" plot twists, that only a reader in a persistent vegetative state could fail to see coming. And a panoply of shallow, monodimensional supporting characters that might as well be identified as "Plot point #2" or "Comic Interlude #5". It's like a book-length Betty Crocker recipe.

Here's something else - Gee, Dan, do you recall a little picture that came out a few years ago? Nicholas Cage, scholar, pretty girl, Freemasons, Washington DC, lost treasure? In fact, I think it was called National Treasure, wasn't it? Yes, yes it was. News flash, Dan - its been done before! And as bad as that movie was (not to mention the sequel), your book is worse.

At least National Treasure had a national treasure - a big cave packed full of neat stuff made out of solid gold. When it comes to eventually finding the long sought object of history's desire, you always disappoint. When I read a long, poorly written book about finding the Holy Grail, I damn well want to see a cup at the end of it. And when I struggle fruitlessly through this latest tome about the lost treasure of the Freemasons, I expect to see some gold, not some con about the wisdom of the Bible.

Finally, stay the Hell away from science, Dan - you don't know anything about it, and since your books are not being marketed as Science Fiction, your know-nothing insights about noetics, telepathy, antimatter, hypersonic planes, and genetics have no place in the narrative. Keep your gullible enthusiasm over "cutting-edge science" to yourself. In fact, please keep all further writing that you do out of the public sphere. I beg you.

Normally, I would include a link here to allow one to buy this book on Amazon. Not this time.

(Readers will note the use of a special rating for this book. This indicates an insult to the reader so grievous, that it can only be satisfied on the Field of Honor. I'm talking to you, Dan Brown.)

A Further Word From The Vicomte...

2010-02-25T14:19:00.000-08:00

Terribly sorry! It seems as though I erred (very slightly, I'm sure) in suggesting followers look in the upper left menu bar for the follow icon - again, I'm most awfully embarassed. Please note that I have added a Followers section to the right-hand column, including a Follow button. Please use it - I'm ashamed that, as of now, I have only two, and one of them is me. In order to attract more of a following, I am endeavoring to make the blog more responsive to potential followers - please feel free to offer suggestions in the comments window. I live to serve.

A Dark Matter by Peter Straub

2010-02-24T17:01:00.000-08:00

Peter Straub has been one of my favorite authors for a very long time. I like the horror genre, within certain limits, but Straub goes beyond mere horror, into the rarely achieved realm of mortal dread, which is so much more effective than a good scare.

Beyond that, he's a damned good writer in the best literary sense, with a real sense of poetry that manages to convey impressions of the eternal and the sacred, instead of just plot and character. As such, his novels sometimes be very difficult to review, because their true value is so ethereal.

Straub's usual mode of expression is Gothic; not in the sense of frightened damsels in filmy nightclothes, but more in the Southern Faulknerian tradition - stories of past events that maintain an inescapable stranglehold on the present. Past works, such as the Blue Rose Trilogy (Mystery, Koko, and The Throat) and Ghost Story have explored how unresolved matters have a way of dragging one back into the past to be confronted, often in a surreal and terrifying way. A Dark Matter is no different.

Lee Harwell is a modestly successful Chicago author. Forty years ago, his wife-to-be (also named Lee, and known as The Eel) and four high school classmates participated in a mysterious rite orchestrated by charismatic late 60's guru Spencer Mallon. Exactly what happened that night remains unclear, because Harwell did not participate, but of the only other people present (two college students), one disappeared forever, and the other was torn apart.

Lee's classmates were also permanently changed - Don Olson, apprenticed to Mallon, vanished with him in the aftermath. Jason Boatman went from being a talented shoplifter to a bitter professional thief. Howard Bly has been in a mental institiution for four decades. And his wife, The Eel, has gone blind. Now, after a chance encounter brings back to Harwell the buried horror of that enigmatic night, he decides to find out what really happened.

Further discussion of the plot would be unrevealing, because what Lee discovers is that each of those present that night has seen something different, and all of what they have seen is impossibly surreal. This is where Straub's talent for the otherworldly attains full force. Many of his previous novels have focused on what one of his characters once called "the world beneath the world" - the true, absolute, and insensible realm that constantly lurks behind the thin scrim of what humanity consenually defines as reality. What lies there is inimical to sanity and safety, and that place is where Spencer Mallon unwittingly lead his devoted followers.

The beauty of this concept lies in its poetical imagery and its ambiguity - here good and evil, beauty and horror, love and hatred, are the same thing, tied together in eternity, and definable only by the eye of the beholder. In this reality, what you depart with is just exactly what you bring in, though is may weigh more on the way out. Sometimes much more. In the end, Lee Harwell will get his answers, but perhaps the most important thing he learns is how fortunate he was, and is, to have remained outside the circle of his friends one night in 1966.

A Very Personal Message from the Vicomte - Become a Follower!

2010-02-22T16:40:00.000-08:00

If you are enjoying the Ex Libris Experience (or not - I still demand your loyalty), please demonstrate your affection by clicking the Follow link in the upper left hand corner. You'll be glad you did! Eventually.

Ellroy's World

2010-02-22T11:42:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Ellroy's World. It's just like the world you know, only different - all of the same events, but with different causes, rooted in the bad decisions of bad men wallowing in a morass of violence and corruption. It's the alternate universe created by Neo-Noir madman James Ellroy, and it will twist your mind.

Ellroy's work is probably familiar to most through the movie adaptation of his L.A. Confidential, which simplified his novel considerably, while still managing to capture its essential spirit. But that book was merely the third part of a quartet - The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L. A. Confidential, and White Jazz - all of which feature ambivalent anti-heroes trying to find some kind of salvation in a city so corrupt it makes Sodom look like Branson, Missouri.

In Ellroy's Los Angeles, the cops are not only on the take from the criminals; they are the criminals. The books span a timeline from the late 1940s to the late 50s, and depict the city in all of its torrid glory. Each one is dense with plot (so much so that capsule descriptions are impossible), and generally revolve around a tortured cop protagonist trying to solve a series of brutal and freakish serial killings, while at the same time trying to maintain some distance from the police/mob/political elite that controls the town. Ultimately, though, the details are unimportant - it's the milieu that matters.

Ellroy knows L.A. - and he knows crime. His mother was murdered in the city when he was 10 years old (the crime remains unsolved), and the psychic residue from that event led to a post-adolescent career as a peeping tom, burglar and junkie, getting to know the underbelly of the city with a stunning intimacy. After a close run-in with the reaper, he cleaned up and began pouring his angst into words on paper. His style, conventional at first, eventually metamorphized into a unique hipster staccato, based largely on the syntax of 50s tabloids, which effortlessly fixes the reader into the time and place.

Weaving fictional characters and motivations into real events (such as the Black Dahlia killing), Ellroy succeeds in creating a wholly unified alternate reality, which may be closer to the truth than what we think we know. More importantly, he uses his characters to explore the nature of good and evil, failure and redemption, good intentions and bad actions, in a way that chills the soul.

Ideally, the books should be read in order - while each has a different set of protagonists, there is a background continuity that enhances the impact of the individual stories. (This backstory is largely defined by the struggle over control of the city's police department by two high-ranking officers - ubervillain Old School Detective Dudley Smith and up-and-coming straight-arrow Edward Exley - that inevitably manipulates the other main characters into ugly situations.)

Ellroy followed this triumph with an even more ambitious trilogy - American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood's A Rover - which take his unique style national, exploring the pivotal events of 1960s American history through the same twisted lens of secret corruption. Individual reviews of all seven novels (as well as some of Ellroy's equally arresting non-fiction work) will appear here in future, but don't wait - start reading them now.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

2010-02-20T11:01:00.000-08:00

Neil Gaiman is pretty hot right now - The Sandman graphic novels, the children's film (sort of) Coraline, and a brand new biography of the author and his work have been drawing public ardor and critical acclaim for some time. In my opinion, however, Gaiman's most beautiful, bewitching and rewarding work are delivered by his novels - Stardust, Neverwhere, and most of all, American Gods, a magnum opus on the intersection of global myth and American Culture.

Shadow is an ex-con, just released from prison after serving a due sentence for an instant of bad judgement. His faithful (he thinks) wife, has just been killed in a spectacular auto wreck with his best friend. He is utterly alone and drifting, and then he receives a tempting job offer from the very mysterious Mr. Wednesday.

But Mr. Wednesday is, in fact, a god (you'd probably recognize him under another name). And like almost all mythological gods in crass, consumerist America, Mr. Wednesday has fallen on hard times, forced to petty theft and the short con to make ends meet since all his worshippers stopped believing in him. He has a plan, though, for really turning things around for himself, as well as a wide assortment of other forgotten and neglected gods scattered throughout the land - and to make it work he needs Shadow's help.

Soon enough. Shadow finds himself jaunting back and forth across the country, meeting other obsolete gods such as the two proprietors of the Jacquell and Ibis Funeral Parlor (former Egyptian gods of the dead), Czernobog (an Eastern European guy with a lethal sledgehammer), and Anansi, the African spider god (who, despite his great age, still has style and charm to spare).

To make things even more interesting, Shadow now has to contend with the hostile attentions of America's new gods, (incarnated as Credit, Media, Electricity, etc., and their minions), as well the reanimated corpse of his late wife, who just wants to help in any way she can. And underneath all of this are wheels within wheels of plotting, deception, manipulation and betrayal that astound and gratify the careful reader.

And beneath that is a moving and fascinating explication of how the immigrants of this nation, since time immemorial, have rushed here in such haste to assimilate that they have left their poor faithful deities behind, in favor of new ones born of greed, vanity and information and speed.

This is a very funny book. It is, however, also wistful, tragic, literate, historical, thought-provoking, occasionally surreal, and hugely satisfying. It is, in short, damned near perfect. Even better Gaiman then followed it with a very, very good sequel called Anansi Boys (coming soon to this blog), which is nearly as much fun. I promise you that you will never look at American culture the same way again.

Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

2010-02-17T15:20:00.000-08:00

Here's a double-header. I recently reviewed Atwood's 1985 best-seller The Handmaid's Tale (at the request of my good friend Mark) and I found it so enjoyable that, when I saw Atwood's latest, The Year of the Flood, at the library, I was enticed. Unfortunately, I failed to realize until later that this novel is a sequel, of sorts, to 2003's Oryx and Crake, which I read after The Year of the Flood.

The books are not necessarily sequential - both jump around in time (and are set entirely in the near-to-distant future), and both cover the same basic sequence of world events, from differing perspectives. Many of the same characters appear in both books, and the differing perspectives complement each other well.

The basic plot common to both novels concerns a group of loosely associated men and women from the same unnamed city, sometime during the mid-21st century. The environmental, social and political collapse is in full flower, and society is divided into two groups - the masses of the poor, sickly, violent and depraved, and the isolated, privileged citizens organized into corporate villages, secured by lethally armed private security troops. Corporate hegemony and rampant consumerism dominate the dying planet.

Enter Crake, the best (and only) boyhood friend of narrator Jimmy, who will eventually turn his genius for gene splicing toward engineering a perfected replacement for the human race. He also has a detailed plan for reducing the numbers of the existing version. Against a chilling backdrop of disintegrating society and imploding family life, the two young boys wend their way through the adolescent and adult rituals of the corporate elite, ultimately linked together by Oryx, a mysterious child-woman who will occupy the third point of a very twisted triangle. Together they will bring about the birth of a new age, even as their reasons for doing so remain vague, unwitting or ambiguous.

The Year of the Flood similarly looks back from the same events that climax Oryx and Crake, this time revolving around two women, Ren and Toby, whose lives have touched those of Oryx, Crake and Jimmy repeatedly during the twenty-five year period that comprise the novels. Their perspective comes from their exposure to The Gardeners, an ever-expanding quasi-religious movement that means to counter the corporate hegemony's ascendence. In essence the two books relate the same events from two primary competing worldviews.

The enjoyment here is not necessarily to be found in the plotting, which is relatively spare, but in the tremendously detailed and satirically horrifying world that Atwood imagines is in store, along with the realistic and engaging characters she creates. As in The Handmaid's Tale, she describes a strange and forbidding future that is, nonetheless, oddly familiar, and all too possible. And ultimately, the events that Jimmy, Ren and Toby instigate and participate in engulf them in a snowballing tragedy that they can't forsee, drawing the reader into the whirlpool of their befuddled terror and sorrow.

Although these paired novels lack the compactness and immediacy of The Handmaid's Tale, they are still convincing, thought-provoking, and emotionally wrenching. The Handmaid's Tale effectively presaged the theocratic merger of fundamentalism and totalitarianism that defined the eight-year reign of George W. Bush (and which may not have ended). One seriously hopes that the world Margaret Atwood depicts in Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood is not so accurate a view of our future.