If You Like to Think Impossible Thoughts

If, like Lewis Carroll you have the kind of mind that likes to "think impossible thoughts", then you probably like good sci-fi literature.  I recently finished one of the best I have encountered in this genre, and here is my Goodreads review.

Synchronic: 13 Tales of Time Travel by David Gatewood
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wow! There actually aren't enough stars here (or elsewhere) to express my rating of this collection.

I am a very finicky Sci-Fi fan - dungeons and dragons and anything revolving around swords or special weapons are out, and so are most dystopian works unless they are truly intelligent and actually have some science in them. Alternative futures/pasts I am pretty cool with, and true hard-SF of the Asimov/Clark/Bova and successors I am very into.

But I have always had a soft spot for what is generically called "time travel", although I went into this book expecting maybe at most a collection of creative but well-known paradox stories - "don't shoot your grandfather" kinds of things.

Boy, was I ever wrong! To paraphrase an American idiom - let's just say I think my socks are now firmly in some other time...and I am not too sure I want to chase after them after reading this extremely imaginative, creative, wrenching and hit-between-the-eyes-and-your-brain collection.

Nick Cole wrote a fair warning in the foreword that maybe I didn't quite pay enough attention to:

Time.

The great human enemy. Maybe the greatest. It's beaten everyone so far. The scoreboard doesn't lie:

Time: an immense, incalculable number
Us: 0

The rest of Nick's foreword is well worth reading, and he previews the general storylines that follow, but in fairness to him, it is not really possible to fully prepare you for it.

What follows is an incredible series of stories, unlike the usual time travel stuff in any way. Yes there are a few mild paradoxes thrown in, but the key is that this collection is about people - humans, and their individual battles/compromises/surrenders to time. They are about incredible situations and tests of our humanness, and humanity that just wouldn't happen if we stopped opening that door marked "Time", but then we wouldn't be human would we?

I won't single out any of the individual stories because they are all wonderful in their own way. They will make you gasp, scream, cry (more than once) and even laugh in a couple spots. But most of all, they will make you wonder, and think. And that is what great sci-fi is all about!

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Six Amendments (Book Review)

I just read an interesting new book by retired Supreme Court Justice Stephens.  I may have mentioned elsewhere that the Supreme Court is interesting to me because no other nation has anything that equals it, and while it is maddening idiotic at time (read Dred Scott or Citizens United for examples), they also over time have been the steadying hand since we are working with what was supposed to be a "temporary" Constitution that is definitely showing major fissures in trying to deal with the real flat world. 

Here is my review from Goodreads:

Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution by John Paul Stevens
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Excellent book and well-written. You should know something about Constitutional law and the Supreme Court (NOT what you read or see in the media which is nearly all wrong) in order to enjoy this book fully.

Justice Stevens' recommendations for amendments are not extremely radical, rather they mostly patch up some gaping holes or some colossally misguided Supreme Court decisions.

In either case the Founding Fathers would be aghast at the fact that more has not been done to fix their little "temporary starter" constitution - most of them expected it to last for a couple of decades at most and then be replaced by a more substantive and encompassing document based on experience to that point. Instead, the US has taken the band-aid approach -- using a crazy quilt of Supreme Court decisions and popular-at-the-time Congressional patches to hammer it into something that is at times unrecognizable in practice.

Justice Stevens recognizes the flaws, and makes some credible and interesting proposals to fix them.

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Quiet !

Just simply...Quiet.

This book review has been a long time in coming...for reasons I outline in the review. (From Goodreads):

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Oh crap...now I have actually finished this book, and I have to write a review...but I am not sure how exactly. Let's try this:

Wow
Double Wow...even Triple Wow occasionally

It took me an extraordinarily long time to read this book given my usual pace. But that is because of the work that it is. It is subtitled "The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking". I could have almost stopped there and savored that alone...but I am glad I didn't.

I was introduced to Susan Cain (as were many others) through her TED Talk. I bought this book immediately after seeing it and coincidentally at the end of a very bad experience for me of being a 'pseudo-extrovert', not so much to please others but because I do have a somewhat adventurous spirit when it comes to new challenges. Although I came out of it OK, this time it almost cost me.

So reading this book, there were many times where I simply had to set it aside for awhile (sometimes a few weeks) and let my subconscious mind work over what I had read.

It is that kind of book...full of what probably seems in hindsight like common sense...but it escaped us who were living the life of introverts in a world that for most of the last 30 years or so has valued noise, glamour, and extroversion.

The book gets a bit technical in the middle - Susan did her research, but even there I found a lot of very interesting and valuable nuggets to mull over. Her concluding chapters bring it all together into a combination message of "here is who you really are...and don't be ashamed of it" and "here is how you can learn to live".

The devilish part of me wants to add to that last "or if you are one of the inferior extrovert caste....read this to see who really rules the world". (Sorry Ms. Cain if you read this -- too many public school incidents welling up!).

This is NOT Susan's message at all. She points out repeatedly throughout the book that we need both types to make a living, functioning society, and that indeed there may not be very many pure "types" at all in reality. This is something I agree with very strongly, as I am certainly a hybrid of the two, though leaning heavily toward the "intro" side and much more comfortable with it particularly now that I have read this book.

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Thank you, Susan Cain!

Book Review - War Journal: My Five Years In Iraq

I am posting this Goodreads book review of mine from a couple years ago as a precursor to my next post. It is well worth a read on its own merits:


War Journal: My Five Years In Iraq by Richard Engel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is book is fascinating because of its perspective, but more than a bit disturbing at the same time. It's a little difficult to read at times, yet the pages fly by and the time passes quickly for a five year period. Through the eyes of a long-time Middle East reporter the reader gets a clear picture of just what a mess Iraq was, is, and is likely to be for the foreseeable future. The book runs from the point of the capture of Saddam Hussein and thus the terminus of the then-current motive for the invasion (the 'WMDs' pretext having long since vaporized), through the various flavors of civil war, phony 'show' elections and corrupt US-installed governments up to the 'surge' that was supposed to solve everything.

At the same time Bush and Rumsfeld are railing at home against the 'negative' press that is coming out of Iraq, Engel tells of dodging body parts falling out of trees as he walks by and Iraqi citizens felling palm trees to build defenses against their fellow Iraqi Muslims. Once the centuries-old Shia-Sunni animosities erupt in full-force, the "democratic" elections that the US government touted so proudly quickly fade to the sideshow status that they deserve.

The lessons in the book are many -- the unreal, amazing crazy-quilt patchwork of half-truths and outright inventions that came out of the Bush administration as things went from bad to worse; the frustration of being a journalist who knows the truth, but is faced with a public (and sometimes editors) who don't want to hear it. The one abiding truth that permeates the book from beginning to end, is Engel's continuing admiration, respect, and understanding for the courage and resourcefulness of the US military personnel hopelessly caught in this mess...even when they were forced to stage-play a particular part for the benefit of the folks back home.

Finally, if there was any shred of glamor left in anyone's mind about being a "war correspondent" this book should remove it permanently. Engel's personal experiences, observations, and frustrations with a situation that demanded reporting, but resisted the truth at every turn, as well as personal fears that come out in snatches of his personal video journal lend a humanity and credibility to the story that sometimes seems to be the only thread of sanity in a very strange time.

Book Review - Marching Toward Hell

I thought I would share a book review of mine from a few years ago that has been fairly well-received on Goodreads.  It is by a very knowledgeable author with a lot of experience in the Middle East.  If you want to understand why the US is so reviled in that part of the world and why everything we do over there seems to make matters worse...well, read on:

Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq by Michael Scheuer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A very slow, and at times frustrating read. Slow because sometimes you need to just stop and process the information, and a lot of the information/wisdom the author has to share is in the footnotes, of which there are many. Frustrating when you come to fully realize how completely, totally, and utterly wrong the US policy in the Middle East has been.

This is a book written by a justifiably angry, passionate man, who invested 20+ years at the CIA specializing in the Middle East, among other things creating and running the bin Laden unit and watching Clinton ignore opportunity after opportunity to take bin Laden out, or Bush II execute a half-hearted, ineffective war in Afghanistan and follow it up with a pointless, equally ineffective invasion of Iraq, while bin Laden celebrated his good fortune and the strategic victory that Iraq represented.

Indeed, one of the things I learned from this book is that bin Laden's publicly stated goals not only are very different from what US politicians spout in sound bites for the cameras, but also that they are very consistent over time and make a certain amount of sense relative to the realities of Islam and the Middle East.

Reading this book (and the others by the author) also taught me that there is no politician of either party that can be trusted to give anything like a true accounting of the events leading up to, including, and after 9/11. The 'ruling elite' (a contemptuous term used a lot in the book) of the US in both the executive and congressional branches is in either mass denial, or unfathomable ignorance and stupidity, or both. They are also guilty of a mass paranoia about what other countries think - they are convinced that we have to fight 'polite wars' where civilians are never hurt and a minimal amount of damage is done to the country, largely to keep in the good graces of European governments and special-interest voting blocs at home. The author makes a compelling, if squirm-inducing case for why we need to bring the full force and power of the US military to bear when it is used without tempering it, or apologizing for it.

The book has one interesting theme throughout, which the author returns to again and again, and finishes the book with -- and that is how far from the principles set forth by the founders of the American republic our policies in the Middle East have been...in many cases directly contrary to the wishes and warnings of the very gentlemen whose memories the neoconservative politicians who got us into this mess just love to invoke when they thunder forth about spreading American democracy anywhere and everywhere, appropriate or not.


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The Slow, Slow Politics of the US in the Middle East

It strikes me that no matter what the party in power in Washington, the US really has no cohesive, workable policy in the Middle East and has been proving that again and again for the last 50 years.
I looked up this Goodreads review of mine of Kenneth Pollack's book called "A Path Out of the Desert" and was somewhat startled to realize that I had read it two years ago...when Syria first started shooting its own people and everyone thought the "Arab Spring" was a really cool thing....

Sadly, the problems it points out and the advice it gives are every bit (or even more) timely today as the region continues lurching around from crisis to crisis.



A Path Out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East by Kenneth M. Pollack
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this book at a particularly fascinating time - Late February and March of 2011. Each evening when I read another chapter, it seemed the day's actual events had just rendered the strategy outlined by Mr. Pollack in that section moot. The wave of revolutions large and small sweeping the Middle East as of this writing represent the 'worst case' scenario Pollack outlines if the US does not aggressively pursue a coherent and consistent strategy there.

However, despite the major theme of the book literally becoming obsolete as I read, it was still a very worthwhile undertaking. The deep history of the politics of each country and insight into the motivations behind them is very valuable. To be reading the section on Syria on the very day that the government was gunning down protesting citizens was not only a bit surreal, but added greatly to my understanding of the 'big picture'. It also confirmed my observation that television news in particular, but even some 'mainstream' Internet news sites are very shallow if not outright misleading in their coverage. It is plain that the very unpalatable choices faced by the US in response to today's events are the direct result of inadequate US policies in the past, particularly those of the 'Bush 43 administration', as Pollack refers to it, that probably aggravated and accelerated the unrest and instability in the area seen today.

Pollack's main theme - basically a consistent policy of constructive engagement (a 'carrot and stick') approach, perhaps even in concert with China (the other soon-to-be major superpower), is still worth studying and remembering. If the Middle East ever settles down from the current turmoil, the principles outlined will still be a useful guide. The new regimes will undoubtedly be less friendly to the US, but due to an insatiable appetite for oil in the US they will need to be dealt with...and Pollack's Path would make a good foundation.

River of No Reprieve (Book Review)

I just finished a very remarkable adventure story/commentary/travelogue about a corner of the world that very few people (unless you are unfortunate enough to live there) know about:


River of No Reprieve: Descending Siberia's Waterway of Exile, Death, and Destiny by Jeffrey Tayler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Quite an enjoyable and informative book about a remarkable journey down Siberia's river Lena. Down in the sense of going downstream, perhaps 'up' in the sense that the journey is south to north.

More important Jeffrey Tayler brings his unique insight as an American resident of Russia (Moscow area) to the historical stories of this area. Like his earlier work Siberian Dawn, it is as much focused on the trials and daily challenges of people as his own challenges from the journey.

The people in this book were in many cases outcasts from the "good, old" USSR as exiles and criminals real and imagined, but managed to cobble together a life that had a certain kind of comforting (for them) stability, but when the USSR fractured apart, so did the tenuous support lifeline the people in this area depended on, and mostly their lives have been in a downward spiral since. To say that the capitalists of the post-USSR era were not interested in this 'internal' penal colony and purgatory would be a kind way of expressing the truth.

Tayler's writing is both colorful and very descriptive. Let me quote just one (abridged) passage:

"Around midnight the sun slipped behind the pine-serrated ridges. The orange sky shaded into lavender, glowed phosphorescent green for two or three hours, and then, finally, lightened into the rose of dawn. {...} At times we heard the echoing roar of a brown bear (one night a hungry male torn open an anthill fifteen feet from our tents and gobbled up its inhabitants); [...] Was it any wonder that shamanism orignated here, among Yakuts and Evenks dwelling alone, scattered throughout the wilds, for months on end, with their reindeer? In the fine, tremulous light, trees and stones, rivers and brooks, all acquired spirits, all breathed with a hidden life force." [from Chapter 9]

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Book Review (Iraq War)

I just finished this book.  It tells the story of the pile of deceit, lies and good old fashioned tail-covering that led up to the "WMD" pretext for the Iraq war.  There were of course no WMDs at all but unfortunately the Bush Administration lacked the ability (dare I say "intelligence"?) to see through it, particularly because it served their own preconceived desires.  Too bad for all the soldiers and civilians who paid for it dearly in a completely meaningless conflict.  Here is my review from Goodreads:

Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Man Behind Them: How America Went to War in Iraq by Bob Drogin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If you are an American citizen, this book should make you angry. If you are from another country, it will confirm in your mind the incredible amount of stupidity that flows out of Washington DC, particularly at the beginning of the Iraq war.

Curveball is the name of a not-very-bright Iraqi defector to Germany who wove an improbable, inconsistent, and not very believable tale of mobile germ-warfare weapons labs and stockpiles of weapons in Iraq. The Germans wound up not believing his story, and pretty much came to the conclusion that he was mentally unstable. However, the Bush administration, desperate to find a pretext for invading Iraq and most particularly the CIA eagerly swallowed Curveball's tale whole. The interesting thing was the CIA had never even interviewed Curveball in person before assuring Bush and Cheney that indeed this was the real deal.

It didn't help any that the relationship between the CIA and most other intelligence agencies was purely poisonous and not the rosy 'brotherhood against terror' that Bush told the world. The Germans in particular were still smarting over some arrogant high-handed treatment by the Americans a year or two earlier.

The book tells the tale well and completely and makes it plain that many of the people in the CIA were successful in covering their a__es but also many good, capable career intelligence people left in disgust. The last chapter covers a hastily-arranged White House lunch with Bush, Cheney, Rice and the chief 'WMD finder' for the CIA in Iraq. It is plain that even then when everyone else in the world knew the truth, Bush and Cheney were not quite ready to let go of the myth.

I found myself wanting to reach through the pages of the book and crash their heads together and say "...you morons...just how does it feel to completely destroy a sovereign nation and kill so many people for absolutely no reason ?".

Book Review - Descent Into Chaos

I am posting another of my Goodreads book reviews, this one on a book that discredits thoroughly almost every assumption and move that the US has made in the last 12 years in the Middle East, particularly in regards to Pakistan.

Descent into Chaos: The United States & the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan & Central Asia by Ahmed Rashid
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It took me a long time to read this book, mainly because of all the names of people and places. It is a complex and very detailed look by a respected Pakistani journalist at the mess that is Pakistan and Afghanistan. That it was largely due to the incredibly inept bungling of the Bush administration I knew before reading the book, but just how culpable, how willingly the administration chose the wrong road each and every time and how thoroughly they played into the hands of al Qaeda and the Taliban was something of a revelation.

Another fact that came out with glaring clarity was just how thoroughly the Bush administration lied to the American people - while Rumsfeld was praising the ability of the warlords to govern Afghanistan and Bush was extolling the wonderful aid Musharaff giving the US in tracking down al Qaeda they were both taking American aid money and using it to clamp down and solidify their own power in the first case or feed the money through the Pakistani army and the ISI intelligence service to the Taliban. The US would have been much better off (and closer to dismembering al Qaeda) if they had invaded Pakistan at the outset, but this would have taken too long since they had something resembling a real army and Bush would have been delayed in his blood lust to invade Iraq.

Telling as well is the insider's view of the lack of coodination in NATO between the countries, and the way their reluctance to get involved at all played out in scenario after scenario where NATO countries tried to do at least some nation-building/rebuilding but a disinterested US turned its back (and closed its wallet) to any meaningful recovery activities for the country's infrastructure or the government.

The author has personal relationships with many of the top players in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and brings a depth of knowledge about the ethnic strife and politics of the area that can only can come from living it, and watching your part of the world being savaged by faraway countries with more money and guns than common sense.

Book Review - Country Driving (China)

Here is my Goodreads review of the third book in the amazing, interesting, personal, fascinating, informative, and thoughtful three book series on China by Peter Hessler.  My earlier reviews of the first two books are here and here.

Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip by Peter Hessler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This final installment in Peter Hessler's China trilogy is in itself a trilogy. Three books in one covering a seven year period after Peter got his Chinese driver's license. Getting a license in China is a process that is equal parts bureaucracy and and unintentional humor (imagine a driving test in the US that was based largely on the way people actually drive).

The first of the three books covers a 7,000 mile trip across northern China, chasing the outlines of the Great Wall. The Wall, like most near-legendary places and things turns out to be much more than the common pictures of a sturdy-looking stone and brick structure that we usually see in magazines. Not only can "it" not be seen from space but is actually not one wall but several different fortifications built out of many different materials including tamped earth in many spots, over a wide span of time.

The second book covers six years Hessler spent living in a small agricultural village north of Beijing, where he sees both the struggles and the adaptations necessary in rural China brought by the wrenching changes in recent decades. He also gets an inside look at the impact of national politics at the village level.

The final book covers several driving trips through the rapidly-urbanizing south of China, where he sees factories spring up where mountains used to be and watches those same factories move locations literally overnight to save a few dollars in costs, and sometimes disappear altogether. He also observes the emerging entrepreneurial class, where status and position are marked by the brand of cigarette smoked.

Throughout the book Hessler writes with the same personal, compassionate, observant viewpoint that marked his other books. From rushing a sick child to a hospital in Beijing and calling on doctor acquaintances in the US for help when the Chinese doctors don't seem up to the task, to sitting at a meal in a one-room hut with a family whose father and daughters all have taken up the urban factory semi-migrant lifestyle in the south, you sense Hessler's compassion and commitment to the real story in China -- the people.

Book Review - Oracle Bones (China)

I just finished the third in Peter Hessler's China trilogy of books last night.  Here is my Goodreads review of the second book, Oracle Bones:

Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present by Peter Hessler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Hessler continues his thoughtful writing and narration style in this second book and I won't repeat my admiration and enjoyment of it again (earlier review of River Town).

This book comes after Hessler's "Two Years" as a Peace Corps teacher in Fuling, and finds him a freelance writer in Beijing, and nicely brings together the past and present (up to 2002) of China. If you have not read the "Two Rivers" book, I recommend you do so before reading this one. It is not a requirement, but it will enhance your enjoyment since many of Peter's more memorable students from that book return in this one as he follows up their lives post-graduation - they provide much of the 'now' insight into China.

The primary theme of the book is Chinese history centered around some fascinating old archaeology (themed around the enigmatic Oracle Bones that give the book its title) and new (the slow current-day mapping of a buried walled city). Through research and speaking to some of the last living survivors of the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward eras where Chinese history or the study of it was distorted, twisted and in some cases broken Hessler weaves a story of not only of a long and complex history, but the people who study it despite some great obstacles.

But the book is much more than this - there are 'side threads' and stories throughout, one of the most significant is Hessler's friendship with a Chinese ethnic minority Uighur who eventually emigrates to the US, giving Hessler the opportunity to think anew about the differences and similarities between China and the US. There is also a thread running through the book about one of the primary scholars of Oracle Bones inscriptions, who was a casualty of the social upheavals in China but left an interesting trail of work, friends, and knowledge.

Finally, the book is organized with chapters called 'Artifacts' that are short side journeys looking at specific items and people from the far past of China that do not fit in the main narrative of the book. I found these to be welcome respites from the main story and fascinating in their own right. There is also a very usable map (in the edition I read) so that you can keep track of the various places mentioned in the book which I much appreciated - it had a sticky note marking it the whole time I was reading.

One quotation from this book stuck with me because it is a simple idea but one that leads to some interesting possiblilities - from the Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu:

A fish-trap is for catching fish, once you've caught the fish, you can forget the trap. A rabbit-snare is for catching rabbits; once you've caught the rabbit, you can forget about the snare. Words are for catching ideas, once you've caught the idea, you can forget about the words. Where can I find a person who knows how to forget about words so that I can have a few words with him?"

The idea that words are of impermanent utility probably applies to this book, but it is a very memorable book nonetheless - the ideas are permanent and I know I will be reading and researching more about China because of it. It is a book to be read slowly and one of those I did not want to end since I know there is much more to tell and Hessler is a very talented writer - I look forward to the next.



Here is a video from 2006 at a Google Authors event in Which Hessler talks about the content of this book.

Book Review - River Town (China)

I read a lot, and am especially facinated with China. I have been to Taiwan, but never China proper but would like to visit someday. I am currently reading the third and final book in Peter Hessler's series on China.   It is a great series that will give you a much better and more complete view of this huge, strange country and more importantly, its people.  Here is my review on Goodreads of the first book in the series.

River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze by Peter Hessler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Peter Hessler writes with just the right mixture of objective description and sensitivity to the people and culture around him as he spends two years in the small (by China standards) city of Fuling as a Peace Corps teacher of English. The emphasis of the book is less on the exotic travel aspects, and more on the struggles of adapting to an environment that is completely alien, and in which you are the intruder. His experiences are at once real and surreal, facing choices that we seldom encounter in everyday life or even think about. In one memorable passage he talks about the choice of whether to patronize a ten-year old shoeshine girl who is an elementary school dropout to help her family out, or to recoil in natural revulsion at perpetuating such a cruel and empty existence. In the end, Hessler admits that this was like a lot of daily Chinese life choices, and that he never figured out exactly the right thing to do.

Written in the years before the Three Gorges dam was complete, the surprising stoicism or bland acceptance of the people whose towns and cities were going to be changed forever (sometimes completely obliterated) is surprising at first, but as the book goes on, you realize this is a key part of survival in China, accepting the inevitable or unchangeable and learning to make the most of whatever freedoms and choice a faraway and insensitive government leaves.

I have had the good fortune to do some international travel, although always for "business purposes" which means that you get the pleasure of dipping into a fascinating country/culture for a few days at worst or a few weeks at best, sandwiched in around "business meetings" which unfortunately have a bland, drab gray sameness about them no matter where they occur. But Hessler gets to go much deeper, and he communicates very well the entire experience. He is obviously intelligent, well-educated, and thoughtful, and his writing style is very readable yet it doesn't get in the way of stopping and thinking along the way. There is wry humor as well, as he points out some of the more absurd points of Chinese life, and some of the more obnoxious aspects begin to grow wearisome as his time in Fuling draws to a close.

I eagerly look forward to reading the rest of Hessler's work.