BOOKS

Cornwell pens a pleasant diversion
11/10/08 -- Patricia Cornwell rose to mystery stardom by creating one of the genre’s truly significant figures, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, who took the police procedural into the morgue and forensics labs in a way no one ever had before and paved the way for the CSI television franchise. But very few writers can keep a detective series fresh for long, and the last three of the 15 Scarpetta novels had become strained and unsatisfying. Luckily, Cornwell has chosen to widen her scope ...

The $3 trillion war
Kyi May Kaung, Foreign Policy In Focus
11/4/08 -- The Bush administration and the mainstream media seldom mention the economic costs of Iraq and Afghanistan. But Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University, a 2001 Nobel laureate, and Linda Bilmes of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government rectify this oversight in their new book, The Three Trillion Dollar War.

Saving the world by building one school at a time
Greg Mortensen fell off a mountain in Pakistan and landed in a most remarkable career building schools, mostly for Pakistani girls. Three Cups of Tea is his story, and a fine story it is. Written by Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, this is one part adventure, one part part thriller, one part biography, and several parts inspiration, all rolled into a story guaranteed to lift your heart even more than it sours you on governments' failure to adequately help children who could truly benefit from their aid.

Setting crucial to exceptional mystery novel
Talented writers can use setting to great advantage. Matt Beynon Rees is such an author, as he demonstrates in A Grave in Gaza, the second installment in the Omar Yussef mystery series, which is rapidly developing into the best new series in years.

This mystery could have used better editing
Somewhere inside Vienna Blood is some pretty good historical fiction or a fairly decent mystery. Unfortunately, the decision to try to put both in the same book only serves to diminish both possibilities and as a result, the final product is only moderately satisfying.

Laugh along with a vagabond basketball player
You don’t have to be a basketball fan to appreciate Paul Shirley’s book, Can I Keep My Jersey, but it certainly would help. (Then again, maybe you do have to be a basketball fan.) Either way, his book -- subtitled “11 Teams, 5 Countries, and 4 Years in My Life as a Basketball Vagabond,” is a funny, sometimes very funny, journal of a young man who dreams of playing in the NBA – and gets some chances to do so – but mostly plays in domestic minor leagues or overseas, in such exotic locales as the Russian city of Kazan.

Easy Rawlins reaches the end of the line (maybe)
Author Walter Mosley says Blonde Faith, the 10th installment in his Easy Rawlins mystery series, may be the last. To millions of Easy Rawlins fans, this is not good news. But if the series is to end, perhaps it is just as well that it end here.
The history's interesting, but Hoover isn't
Kenneth D. Ackerman’s goal is laudable enough, but his execution isn’t.
In Young J. Edgar: Hoover, The Red Scare And The Assault On Civil Liberties, Ackerman attempts to draw parallels between the Bush administration’s assault on civil liberties following 9/11 and a time of similarly paranoid government suppression: the years immediately following World War I. It’s a valid parallel. But Ackerman’s decision to use Hoover as focal point undermines his effort.

Michigan author's new book is a hard-boiled gas
Michigan author Loren D. Estleman’s new book Gas City is populated by a motley cast of characters, including a serial killer who’s been killing and dismembering hookers, leaving body parts scattered all over town in garbage bags. In polite company he’s called the Black Bag Killer, but in less formal talk he’s known as Beaver Cleaver.
How to beat conservatives: Start with Health care
“I believe in a relatively equal society, supported by institutions that limit extremes of wealth and poverty. I believe in democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law. That makes me a liberal, and I’m proud of it.” Not enough people make such declarations these days. When one who does has the credentials of Paul Krugman, we would be wise to pay attention.

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy is a book long on information but short on punch, perhaps partly because it is too long, and a bit pedantic. The authors are also guilty of at least one instance of shoddy analysis, and because it's a big instance it slightly undermines our faith in the work as a whole. Still, we can thank Mearsheimer and Walt for at least addressing an issue that gets too little attention.

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Cornwell pens a pleasant diversion
The Front
Patricia Cornwell
G.P. Putnam’s Sons

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John Beckett, Opinion Artillery
11/10/08 -- Patricia Cornwell rose to mystery stardom by creating one of the genre’s truly significant figures, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, who took the police procedural into the morgue and forensics labs in a way no one ever had before and paved the way for the CSI television franchise. But very few writers can keep a detective series fresh for long, and the last three of the 15 Scarpetta novels had become strained and unsatisfying.

Luckily, Cornwell has chosen to widen her scope in the last few years by writing non-Scarpetta books. Hornets Nest, a light-hearted mystery which had as its protagonist a female police chief in Charlotte, North Carolina, was wry and surprisingly funny. Case Closed, a nonfiction account of the Jack the Ripper murders, was well-researched and written. Now, Cornwell has perhaps embarked on another series, this one set in Boston and built around three characters: a hard-charging district attorney, a tough police detective, and his eccentric grandmother.

The Front is Cornwell’s second book featuring this crew, and it’s a bit like a light lunch: generally enjoyable and reasonably tasty, but you know you’ll want something more substantial before long.

The plot is simple:

DA Monique Lamont, who is as cold and ruthless as she is beautiful, has found a cold case that she thinks might have been committed by, but never previously associated with, the Boston Strangler. The victim was a blind British girl who had come to the United States to study, and Lamont envisions lots of international publicity when she can announce the case has been solved.

So she assigns it to ace cop Win Garano, with whom she has a bit of history. Which forces him to enact with a (female) cop nicknamed “Stump,” with whom he might like to have a bit of a future. From there, things expand through not only the cold case but copper (the metal) theft, a meddling reporter, terrorism, and the mob.

All in 180 pages.

The Front is perfectly paced to be a nice little diversion. It would be an excellent book to take on vacation, or to the beach. Cornwell is so good, and so experienced, that she knows how to tell a story quickly and yet still develop it and her characters adequately. At a time when mystery novels are routinely twice the length of this one, and just as routinely bogged down by extraneous characters and sub-plots, this spare style is refreshing. It would be interesting to see what Cornwell could do with this style trained a real puzzler.

The Front isn’t that book. If you haven’t figured out who done it before Cornwell reveals the culprit, you probably haven’t ready many mysteries. But The Front is less about the mystery than it is the characters and their relationships to each other, and Cornwell succeeds at what she’s set out to do. Garano and Lamont have potential, and I liked “Stump.” As for Garano’s grandma, we all have to go sometime.

Friday, August 8, 2008
Saving the world by building one school at a time

Three Cups of Tea
Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
Penguin Books

Greg Mortensen fell off a mountain in Pakistan and landed in a most remarkable career building schools, mostly for Pakistani girls.

Three Cups of Tea is his story, and a fine story it is. Written by Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, this is one part adventure, one part part thriller, one part biography, and several parts inspiration, all rolled into a story guaranteed to lift your heart even more than it sours you on governments' failure to adequately help children who could truly benefit from their aid.

In 1993 Mortenson was on an expedition similar to the one that recently claimed 11 lives on K-2, the world's second-highest mountain, when he was forced to turn back. With the help of a dedicated guide named Mouzafer Ali, he traveled for a week to reach the village of Korphe, where he was sheltered and befriended.

During his recuperation in the village, Mortenson heard about the local school. He went to visit it one day and found 78 boys and four girls kneeling on open ground, buffeted by frosty air, dutifully working on their lessons all by themselves. There was no school building, he learned, and a teacher only came three days a week because the village couldn't afford the $1 a day to pay for a full-time instructor.

Greg Mortenson with Pakistani children. Mortenson vowed to return to Korphe and help the villagers build
Photo: Central Asia Institute a real school. It is the beginning of an effort that will wind from Korphe through the Byzantine worlds of bureaucracy, corruption, fundraising, 9/11, Muslim religious disputes, the Taliban, and perhaps the strangest bureaucracy of them all, the Pentagon.

It was there that Mortenson tried to help the polished brass see that education and true concern for the people of Afghanistan could be effective weapons in the war on terror. As he told a Pentagon briefing, for the $840,000 cost of one Tomahawk cruis missile, "you could build dozens of schools that could provide tens of thousands of students with a balanced nonextremist education over the course of a generation. Which do you think will make us more secure?"

That briefing didn't go too well. But Three Cups of Tea is also a story of dedication, hope and goodwill. Mortenson and his Central Asia Institute are now educating more than 25,000 children in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Which do you think will make us more secure?

Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Setting crucial to exceptional mystery novel

A Grave in Gaza
Soho Press
By Matt Beynon Rees

One of my all-time favorite mystery novels, Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett, begins like this:

I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. I didn’t think anything of what he had done to the city’s name. Later I heard men who could manage their r’s give it the same pronunciation. I still didn’t see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves’ word for dictionary. A few years later I went to Personville and learned better.

With an opening paragraph like that, you just know Personville is going to be trouble. And indeed it is. It also was the start of Hammett’s career as a novelist, a career short on quantity – he wrote only five novels – but very long on influence through his seminal works The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man.

Very little of the 1974 movie Chinatown, which earned 11 Academy Award nominations, actually takes place in Chinatown. But that locale pops up again and again in dialogue. Its mention evokes images of corruption and deceit, and sets up the last dramatic scenes, which of course do take place in Chinatown. The film, for which screenwriter Robert Towne won an Oscar, ends with one final reference. As private investigator J.J. Gittes (played by Jack Nicholson) walks away in a haze of frustration, his partner offers this counsel: “Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.”

I was reminded of these examples – and of how talented writers can use setting to great advantage– while reading A Grave in Gaza, the second installment in the Omar Yussef mystery series, which is rapidly developing into the best new series in years.

Matt Beynon Rees is the author. His talent is one reason A Grave in Gaza and The Collaborator of Bethlehem, the first entry in the series, are both excellent. Their setting – in the Palestinian Territory – is another. This volatile locale affords all sorts of violence and intrigue. But Rees doesn’t merely capitalize on such necessary ingredients. In the best tradition of writers like Ross MacDonald, he uses locale to make the Omar Yusseff novels not only mysteries but social commentary.

Like Hammett did in Red Harvest, Rees sets the tone in the opening paragraph of A Grave in Gaza:

As Omar Yussef came along the passage, the flies left the flooded toilets to examine him. The filth in the latrines soon lured most of them back, but a small, droning escort orbited him as he sweated toward Gaza.

Omar Yusseff is a Palestinian school principal employed by the United Nations. A Grave in Gaza finds him traveling to the Gaza Strip with UN official Magnus Wallender and investigating the imprisonment of a university professor. Eyad Masharawi has been arrested for accusing the university of selling degrees to some Palestinian policemen. Yusseff and Wallender, who is Swedish, meet up with another UN man, James Cree of Scotland, and try to intervene on Masharawi’s behalf. But by the time they finally get to see him, he’s been charged with a more serious crime: collaborating with the Israelis.

This introductory plot is not very different from the main plot of The Collaborator of Bethlehem. But in the third chapter Rees serves notice that there will be plenty of deviation ahead. With a line that could have fit perfectly in Chinatown, Omar Yusseff’s old friend, a police chief named Khamis Zeydan, tells him: “In Gaza, nothing is what it seems.” He explains, “There is no single, isolated crime in Gaza. Each one is linked to many others, you’ll see. When you touch one of them, it sets off reverberations that will be felt by powerful people, ruthless people.”

Those words are prophetic. Every lead Omar Yusseff develops turns out to branch off in multiple directions. Every suspect is affiliated with more than one group. These groups, be they political, security, or terrorists, have multiple and sometimes conflicting agendas reminiscent of the turf wars fought by criminals and police 80 years ago in Red Harvest. As for allies, even they are questionable. One of Rees’ many strengths is how he subtly makes the reader suspicious of those who supposedly are the closest to Omar Yussef.

To readers who enjoy the challenge of trying to solve mystery novels before their protagonists do, A Grave in Gaza is a marvelous test. As you might expect in such a place at such a time, there is no lack of action, danger, and murder. Meanwhile, Rees works history into his story in a way that is not only interesting, but is compelling evidence that the Palestinian Territory has been such a place for a long time now. And by bringing different nationalities like Palestinians, Swedes, and Scots together, he shows that the world is rapidly getting too small for concepts like isolated violence.

Rees, who lives in Jerusalem, where he was Time magazine's Jerusalem bureau chief from 2000 until 2006, covered the Middle East for over a decade as a journalist. A native of Wales, he studied at Oxford University and published a nonfiction book about Israeli and Palestinian society called Cain's Field: Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East, in 2004.

This background allows Rees to convey a great deal of information about Palestinian customs during his mysteries, much as Tony Hillerman has made the Navajo culture come alive in his Lieutenant Leaphorn / Jim Chee novels. But that’s merely a bonus to a series that really doesn’t need any. The Collaborator of Bethlehem, which won the Crime Writers Association John Creasey New Blood Dagger in 2008, was exceptional. A Grave in Gaza is even better.

Thursday, July 24, 2008
This mystery could have used better editing

Vienna Blood
Random House
By Frank Tallis

Somewhere inside Vienna Blood is some pretty good historical fiction or a fairly decent mystery. Unfortunately, the decision to try to put both in the same book only serves to diminish both possibilities and as a result, the final product is only moderately satisfying.

The basic plot is not unfamiliar: Dr. Max Liebermann, a psychiatrist, teams with police detective Oscar Rheinhardt to track down a serial killer of prostitutes. Along the way, the young doctor has romantic difficulties but manages to provide enough key insights to help dogged Detective Rheinhardt. And the case turns out to have social-political ramifications. But this isn’t an Alex Delaware - Milo Sturgis psycho-caper in Los Angeles. It’s Vienna, 1902, not too long after Jack the Ripper terrorized London prostitutes and not too long before Adolf Hitler and the Nazis would rise to terrorize the world.

As it happens, Liebermann knows Sigmund Freud, who is laying the foundation for the field of psychotherapy in cosmopolitan Vienna. The young doctor also is a devotee of classical music, as is his ally Rheinhardt. But Liebermann possesses one quality Rheinhardt doesn’t have – he is Jewish, and anti-Semitism is as prevalent, if not as openly displayed, as love of the arts in the cultured city.

Does the killer hate Jews? Or prostitutes, or women in general? There are enigmatic clues, like that strange crooked cross painted in blood at the scene of a multiple murder. And there are multiple suspects, including a bigoted painter frustrated by the public’s indifference to his art.

Tallis excels at conveying early psychotherapy, anti-Semitism, the “arts” of dueling, be it by swords, pistols or other means, and the conflict inherent in a city that presents a cultured facade while simultaneously discouraging its citizens from forming clubs. As for the numerous allusions to classical music, literature and art, it would take a more cultured person than I to judge their merit. But I think I’m cultured enough to say that there are just too many pages devoted to them.

This is a book that would have been aided greatly by more judicious, and more aggressive, editing. Cut out 20 to 25 percent of its 470-plus pages and you’d have a far more enjoyable novel. Instead, it’s compelling in places and quite interesting in places, but a reader needs either a high degree of dedication or an awful lot of idle time to finish it.

Which is too bad, because Tallis obviously has done some good research, and he paints a vivid portrait of 1902 Vienna. His plot is basically sound, he has created some believable characters, and he offers up enough red herrings to satisfy the hunger of any mystery fan. On the other hand, some central clues are a tad transparent. If you read many mysteries, you should have no problem figuring out who the killer is before the good Dr. Liebermann does. And that moment – oddly enough, in such a long book – comes a bit too soon, apparently to set up a climax that would have fit better in one of Tom Cruise’s less-successful movies.

This is a very uneven novel. The writing is good enough, even quite good in places, and especially strong when it’s more historical fiction than mystery, or when Dr. Liebermann is trying to profile suspects 75 or 80 years before police started to employ profiling. Tallis, a British clinical psychologist, covers some very interesting ground in Vienna Blood.

But when one of the best parts of your book is its postscript, something’s wrong. Like all artists, writers must be more than technically proficient. They must know, as rock and roller Bob Seger once sang, “What to put in, what to leave out.” Vienna Blood could have worked, with a little fine-tuning and a little stripping down. Instead, its pacing reminds me of a car I used to own: It started very slowly, then sped up, then slowed down, then just kept running erratically until I finally shut it off.

Monday, July 13, 2008
Laugh along with a vagabond basketball player

Can I Keep My Jersey?
Villard Books
By Paul Shirley

You don’t have to be a basketball fan to appreciate Paul Shirley’s book, Can I Keep My Jersey, but it certainly would help. (Then again, maybe you do have to be a basketball fan.)

Shirley’s book has too many paragraphs like the one above, a straight line followed by a parenthetical punch-line. But then I don’t much like parentheses – or is it parentheseses? Nevertheless, there is much to like about Can I Keep My Jersey.

For starters, Shirley is no star. He’s seldom a starter, either. The book’s subtitle sums up his lot in life pretty well: “11 Teams, 5 Countries, and 4 Years in My Life as a Basketball Vagabond.” It is the journal of a young man who dreams of playing in the NBA – and gets some chances to do so – but mostly plays in domestic minor leagues or overseas, in such exotic locales as the Russian city of Kazan, which left Shirley ... well ... cold:

I learned that the high today was something like -10C. And that was on a sunny day. (This is November, by the way.) I cannot imagine what possessed a group of people to come upon this spot and decide, “Damn, but isn’t this one hell of a place. We ought to build a city here.” They could have been fooled in May, but come October, a couple of abandoned huts should have seemed like an acceptable loss. Next problem: lack of even the most basic friendliness. ...

Many of Shirley’s experiences were more positive. Many – like the time taking an opponent’s knee to his abdomen caused internal bleeding – were not. But he writes about them all with a sense of humor, and the sense of wonder that only a young man has, in a way that is generally engaging, often funny, and occasionally very, very funny.

One of his pet peeves is athletes who wear religion on their sleeve. During his longest stint with the NBA, as “a backup to the backup” for the Phoenix Suns, he writes about such a teammate:

Recently, one of my teammates approached me in a conspiratorial way as our morning walk-through was ending. He said:

(Break in the action. I will now present two stories. One is true; the other is more like what I thought life in the NBA would be like.)

Story 1: “Paul, we’re having a little prayer meeting in S___’s room after walk-through. We’ll meet up there about five minutes after we’re done here. It is something we do on the road all the time. About half of the guys come. I don’t know if you are interested, but if you are, it would be great to have you.”

Story 2: “Paul, we’re going to get together after walk-through and do some blow in S___’s room. I think some strippers are going to stop by and, let me tell you, the crew we found last year here in Seattle was A-OK. They were letting us snort coke off their ... well, you know. Anyway, this is something we do on the road all the time; about half the guys come. I don’t know if you are interested, but if you are, we could probably spare a gram or two.”

I’m not sure which of the above options offends me more. I wouldn’t participate in either, but if I put the two at the ends of a spectrum, I do believe my potential acceptance would fall closer to Story 2 than Story 1. Of course, Story 1 is the true one; it is doubtful that my team would be tied for the best record in the NBA if half its membership were doing cocaine on the road. At least on game days. My response to the prayer circle invitation was a quick lift of the eyebrow and a “Huh, that’s interesting,” which was a far cry from what I wanted to say, which was “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. You’re going to gather a group of grown men in a hotel room and pray together? Seriously, did no one laugh when you first suggested this?”

Shirley also recounts the intellectual shortcomings of most NBA players, the problems American players can encounter overseas – from girls to insane drivers to teams that don’t pay what they promised – and what NBA players like him do to pass all that time sitting on the bench.

But he also takes time here and there along the way to smell the roses:

I can vividly remember being about 12 years old and watching some NBA game or other with my father and hearing him say about some white guy on the end of the bench, “You see that guy, Paul? He’s got the best job a person could want – backup center in the NBA.” I am neither a center nor even a backup. I am a backup to the backup. I have even less responsibility than the guy we were talking about.

Add in the fact that my contract is guaranteed for the rest of the season, meaning it would take a meteor crashing into the earth, or at least an unprecedented fiscal crisis in Phoenix, for me to worry about whether I’ll have another job in two weeks, and my dad was right – I do have the best job a guy could want.

Not only that, but when it does come time for Paul Shirley to hang up his basketball shoes once and for all – he played this past season for Vive Menorca, in Spain – he just might have a future as a writer. (Really.)

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Monday, June 16, 2008
Easy Rawlins reaches the end of the line (maybe)

Blonde Faith
Little, Brown and Company
By Walter Mosley

“There [are] no more Easy Rawlins books in my head. But I guess it's always possible that I could write another one, but I'm not thinking about writing another one, and this feels like a nice ending to me.” Walter Mosley, interviewed by National Public Radio’s Robert Siegel.

To millions of Easy Rawlins fans, this is not good news. Mosley’s series about the black Los Angeles detective, of which Blonde Faith is the 10th installment, will always occupy a historic niche in the mystery genre because it was the first to feature a black private investigator. It also will be long remembered because Rawlins and his ultra-dangerous friend Mouse are such intriguing characters, and because of the high quality of Mosley’s writing.

But if the series is to end – and we have to say if because Mosley has left that door open not only through his above comment but by the ambiguous ending of Blonde Faith – perhaps it is just as well that it end here.

The plot is basic mystery stuff: A man named Pericles Tarr is missing, the cops are gunning for Mouse, and Mouse himself is missing too, all of which are of concern to Easy. Also missing is Vietnam vet Christmas Black, who has left his Vietnamese daughter Easter Dawn with Easy without explanation – yet another puzzle Easy would like to solve. Soon enough Rawlins is being threatened by tough guys who may be soldiers, drug smugglers, or both. In the midst of which Easy is also being threatened with the loss of his lover, Bonnie, while falling to one degree or another for a young secretary and a sexy ex-nun (the blonde Faith of the title).

It’s all puzzling enough, and Easy’s family is placed in the danger that has come to be required of modern mysteries. But underlying it all is a sense of lassitude, and Easy’s reunions along the way with characters from past novels seem at times like parts of a forced valedictory.

One of the attributes of this series has been Mosley’s use of characters, time and place to inform and comment on American race relations. From Easy’s debut in Devil In A Blue Dress, set in 1948, to the 1967 events of Blonde Faith, Rawlins continually collides with the evolving patterns of racial prejudice. The novels’ primary setting of Los Angeles has had the benefits of being both Mosley’s boyhood home and a microcosm of America, utilized especially well in the ninth Rawlins novel, Little Scarlet, set during the Watts riots of 1965.

In an interview with powells.com after the publication of Little Scarlet, Mosley talked about those riots and the feelings underlying them:

" ... You're born with a love for yourself, but you learn to despise yourself: because people in school think you're stupid, or because whenever the police see you they think that you're a criminal to the degree where you finally believe that you're a criminal. It's like that Chris Rock line where he says the police stopped him one day in his own car and before they were finished he believed he'd stolen his own car.

“In school you're treated as ignorant and told that you're ignorant and people get angry at you if you show any intelligence. You can't get good jobs. You can't hope for a future for yourself or for your children. Even while all that's going on, you still know it's not true. Somewhere in your heart you know it's not true. On one level you're thinking it's true, and you're thinking Oh, I'm just another nigger, basically. And on the other hand you're feeling That is not true; I'm better than this and I deserve better than this. That paves the way for rage. And rage shows itself in many different ways.

“In the mother who kicks her son out of the house. And the son who hates all black women who love white men. All kinds of things happen there. And as Easy points out in the book, at one point the anger and the rage are so great you just go out on a hot summer day and start burning everything down. And that rage is partially exposed by people destroying their own community, which of course is self-loathing ... it's a very complex thing.”

Perhaps Mosley’s greatest accomplishment in writing the Easy Rawlins series has been to make such feelings more understandable. But in Blonde Faith, Easy’s run-ins with prejudice don’t fall into place as well as they used to. It is as if Mosley says to himself, “It’s been a few chapters since Easy encountered prejudice. Better make it tough for him to get into that high-class restaurant again.” Which robs such moments of the authenticity and power that earlier in the series seemed to come so easily to Mosley.

As good as Blonde Faith is – and it is certainly good enough to please most Rawlins fans – there is a feeling of weariness throughout the book, and not the kind of weariness imposed by the author as a plot or character device. It is the weariness of an author who has reached the end of the line, not as a writer – Mosley is too talented for that, and he has demonstrated through his other writing that he is capable of things other than Easy Rawlins mysteries – but a writer who has run out of things to say in this particular way.

If that’s the case, we – and Mosley – should say goodbye to Easy not with chagrin but with fond gratitude. He did his job, did it well, and we are better off for having known him. That should be enough for anyone, no matter what their color.

Friday, May 9, 2008

The history's interesting, but young Hoover is not

Young J. Edgar: Hoover, The Red Scare And The Assault On Civil Liberties
Carroll & Graf
By Kenneth D. Ackerman

Kenneth D. Ackerman’s goal is laudable enough, but his execution isn’t.

In Young J. Edgar: Hoover, The Red Scare And The Assault On Civil Liberties, Ackerman attempts to draw parallels between the Bush administration’s assault on civil liberties following 9/11 and a time of similarly paranoid government suppression: the years immediately following World War I, when America over-reacted to the rise of Russian communism and activist immigrants by jailing thousands and deporting hundreds through over-reaching law enforcement tactics.

It’s a valid parallel. But Ackerman’s decision to use Hoover as focal point undermines his effort.

The problem is twofold. First, we know so much about Hoover by now that any new book placing him front and center had better have either new revelations or some sort of deeper insight into him. Ackerman provides neither. In fact, his Hoover seems somehow superficial, even though Ackerman provides some intriguing details about his parents and even his favorite breakfast (a poached egg on toast, done just so). Second, Hoover is absent from the scene for so many pages that we can’t help wondering sometimes just where he’s gone or why it’s his picture on the cover.

The times Ackerman writes about were certainly interesting enough, and the hysteria as real as post-9/11 anxiety. The Russian Revolution had many people the world over either afraid of or inspired by communism. While American troops were still returning from Europe, U.S. soldiers remained in Russia (for reasons Ackerman doesn’t adequately explore), there was significant labor unrest in the U.S., and growing concern over immigrants (a parallel that unfortunately goes largely unexamined).

Although there were no planes crashing into skyscrapers, the American government was literally under attack. In April, 1919, a bomb had been delivered to the home of U.S. Senator Thomas Hardwick of Georgia (leaving Hardwick uninjured but blowing off the hands of his maid). On June 2, Ackerman writes, nine bombs “had exploded across America, all at about the same time, just after 11:00 PM, each having been delivered to the home of its intended victim, men all connected with recent crackdowns on socialist radicals.” Among the targets had been U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, Cleveland mayor Harry E. Davis, three judges, a Massachusetts state representative, a silk manufacturer and a Philadelphia church.

And in between, 16 packages went un-mailed from a New York City post office because of insufficient postage. When a postal clerk remembered them after reading about the June 2 attacks, “Investigators quickly checked and found a bomb inside each one. ... The intended victims of these bombs included five United States senators, four cabinet members, the commissioner of immigration, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, plus oil billionaire John D. Rockefeller and banking magnate J.P. Morgan.”

The Justice Department, with rising star Hoover playing the key role, responded by spying on radical groups, arresting thousands, often without warrants, roughing them up, imprisoning them in inadequate facilities, demanding excessive bail, and seeking mass deportations. A panicky public was understandably supportive at first. But that support began to wane as principled lawyers like Clarence Darrow and Felix Frankfurter stood up to the government and began to draw out the ugly truths behind the Palmer Raids. Meanwhile, Palmer tried to ride the resulting publicity into the White House (and the American Civil Liberties Union, ironically, was founded in large measure in response to Hoover’s tactics).

This is all good stuff. But it all comes off a bit flat.

Ackerman would have been better off if he had employed Hoover as just one of a cast of several main characters. Darrow and an obscure Labor Department bureaucrat named Louis Post, who is the real hero of the story, are much more compelling characters than Hoover. When they’re on the stage the pace of the book picks up. When Hoover is present, it tends to drag. And when that’s the case with your title character, you’ve got problems.

Maybe it’s not Ackerman’s fault in some ways. Maybe there just isn’t any more known about J. Edgar Hoover’s early life. Perhaps there isn’t any more to know. After all, how interesting can a guy be whose favorite breakfast is a poached egg on toast?

Thursday, April 24, 2008
Estleman's latest mystery is a gas

Gas City
Forge Books
By Loren D. Estleman

Michigan author Loren D. Estleman’s new book Gas City is populated by a motley cast of characters:

* Francis Russell, a police chief who decides, in the wake of his wife’s death, to suddenly start doing his job after 20 years on the take.

* Hugh Dungannon, a priest, and Russell’s boyhood friend and rival for the affections of the now-deceased Marty.

* Palmer, the drunken house detective at the Railroad Arms Hotel.

* Claire Sayer, Palmer’s prostitute lover.

* And a serial killer who’s been killing and dismembering hookers, leaving body parts scattered all over town in garbage bags. In polite company he’s called the Black Bag Killer, but in less formal talk he’s known as Beaver Cleaver.

In lesser hands, such people would merely be the protagonists in yet another mystery. But Estleman takes them, stirs and mixes and adds a sprinkle of spice, a few dashes of humor, and serves up a tasty dish with an old-fashioned, hard-boiled flavor that’s also pleasing to today’s (supposedly) more discerning palate.

Like the scene in which crime underlord Anthony Zeno tells his cold, money-grubbing wife he’s throwing her out:

“I’m throwing us both out. Why should we make each other miserable when there’s a whole population out there that’s too happy for its own good.”

“I can’t talk to you when you’ve been drinking. That’s when the cheap gangster comes out.”

“Certainly not cheap. I was doing some figuring this morning. I’d be ten million dollars ahead if you and I had never met. If I’d spent that much on a mistress I’d have expected a good deal more from her than I ever got from you.”

“You’re a flabby old man. It’s worth more than that just to try and get a rise out of that limp old dick.”

“Thank you. I mean that. I was afraid this conversation would make me feel guilty.”

“You won’t think ten million’s so much when I get through with you. I’ll take you for everything.”

“You’ll find it all in this house and the opera box and in the inventory at Volcanic. I’m not drawing any income at present.”

“Fuck you, you son of a bitch.”

“Not since I can remember.”

Of course, Estleman’s an old hand at writing hard-boiled mysteries. He’s been portraying Detroit and environs in his excellent Amos Walker series for three decades, winning four Shamus Awards along the way. He also has a deft touch with historical fiction, as demonstrated in Detroit crime novels like STRESS and his many westerns. But it isn’t easy, in a world afflicted with drug cartels and terrorists, to make the scaled-down style of dicks, dames and hoods feel relevant. Too many times, such efforts feel forced, like incongruous combinations of Sam Spade wannabes and high-tech villains. It’s Bogie stepping out of The Maltese Falcon to battle Vin Diesel, and it just doesn’t work.

Making the hard-boiled style work in modern settings is hard partly because it’s been around so long and been parodied so often, and partly because so many modern mysteries have become fixated on their protagonists’ personal lives and/or obsessed with procedural details.

Estleman avoids the potential pitfalls by sticking to the fundamentals: corruption, decay, double-crosses, flawed heroes and their flawed lovers. And, of course, murder.

That Estleman makes it work is a testament both to his ability and to the style itself. Cops battling police corruption have been a staple of the genre from Leslie T. White’s The City of Hell in 1935 through James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential. Estleman gives it a nice twist, one that might strike a chord with 50-something readers like me, by having Russell wake up to the fact that, nearing retirement age, he needs to strike back at the corruption and decay he’s seemingly allowed himself to just slip into.

Palmer could be straight from the pages of James M. Cain: a reasonably decent guy dragged down by his demons. Zeno, the mob’s liaison to Russell, is every mid-level mobster from Edward G. Robinson to Tony Soprano. The priest-cop relationship is as old as James Cagney and Pat O’Brien. But Estleman plays them all slightly differently, and in the process treats us to some surprises. He makes this motley crew fit in today’s world as securely as they did in the Roaring Twenties, he gives them modern motives and means, and in the process he shows that underneath it all, very little has really changed.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008
How to beat conservatives: Start with health care

The Conscience of a Liberal
W.W. Norton
By Paul Krugman

“I believe in a relatively equal society, supported by institutions that limit extremes of wealth and poverty. I believe in democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law. That makes me a liberal, and I’m proud of it.”

Not enough people make such declarations these days. When one who does has the credentials of Paul Krugman, we would be wise to pay attention.

You may know Krugman as a columnist for the New York Times. He is also a professor of economics at Princeton University (after stints at Yale, Stanford and MIT), and the author or editor of 18 books. He also was a member of Reagan’s White House Council of Economic Advisers in 1982-83 – an experience he said was “an eye-opening year.”

It certainly didn’t convert him.

Krugman is disdainful of movement conservatives, whom he calls a “radical new force in American politics,” and he blames them for today’s heightened political polarization: “It’s hard to make the case that Democrats have moved significantly to the left: On economic issues from welfare to taxes, Bill Clinton arguably governed not just to the right of Jimmy Carter, but to the right of Richard Nixon. On the other side it’s obvious that Republicans have moved to the right: Just compare the hard-line conservatism of George W. Bush with the moderation of Gerald Ford. In fact, some of Bush’s policies – like his attempt to eliminate the estate tax – don’t just take America back to where it was before the New Deal. They take us back to the way we were before the Progressive Era. ... Partisanship reached its apogee after the 2004 election, when a triumphant Bush tried to dismantle Social Security, the crown jewel of the New Deal institutions.”

One of the strengths of this book is that Krugman, the economist, plays just as much the role of historian. He takes us all the way back to Reconstruction and the Gilded Age and then looks at the ebb and flow between the haves and the have-nots that have characterized American politics ever since. He discusses how World War II contributed to an equalizing of incomes among Americans, how that fed into the post-war boom that transformed the country – and how Ronald Reagan began to roll that all back.

Krugman, who was named Columnist of the Year by Editor and Publisher Magazine, is especially adept at exposing myths that movement conservatives have foisted on us as gospel. He shows, for instance, that supposedly prosperous episodes during the 1980s and ‘90s were, by and large, booms only for the wealthy while the vast majority of Americans just kept falling farther and farther behind. And he shows that countries like Britain, France and Germany have had national health care insurance far longer – and far more successfully – than most Americans realize.

National health care is a topic Krugman often addresses in his columns, and it is central to his arguments in this book. Comparing the U.S., Canada, France, Germany and Britain, he notes that America spends “almost twice as much on health care per person as Canada, France, and Germany, almost two and a half times as much as Britain – yet our life expectancy is at the bottom of the pack.”

As Krugman observes, only in America could Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giulani trumpet our health care system as “the best in the world” when in fact it rates only 37th according to the World Health Organization.

Until reading this book, I hadn’t realized that Britain has had national health insurance since 1911 or that Harry Truman proposed a U.S. system in 1946. But just because it’s taken Americans over 60 years to get with the program doesn’t mean things are hopeless. Krugman outlines possible solutions and shows why they make sense both economically and politically.

Of course, the two are closely linked. As Krugman shows, that’s one reason national health care needs to be a primary concern, especially for liberals: “Universal health care could, in short, be to a new New Deal what Social Security was to the original – both a crucially important program in its own right, and a reaffirmation of the principle that we are our brothers’ keepers. Getting universal health care should be the key domestic priority for modern liberals. Once they succeed there, they can turn to the broader, more difficult task of reining in American inequality.”

Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Tracking the Israel lobby and U.S. policy

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
(Farrar, Straus, Giroux)
By John L. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt

This is a book long on information but short on punch, perhaps partly because it is too long, and a bit pedantic. The authors are also guilty of at least one instance of shoddy analysis, and because it's a big instance it slightly undermines our faith in the work as a whole. Still, we can thank Mearsheimer and Walt for at least addressing an issue that gets too little attention.

That issue is Israel's disproportionate influence on American foreign policy, and the authors do a solid job of showing how legislators and even presidents are sometimes cowed by the power of Jewish political action committees, think tanks, commentators and money. The writers note that the lobby is able to wield so much clout partly because it isn't hesitant to smear anyone who opposes Israel with the charge of anti-Semitism, and they argue that American politicians almost reflexively support Israel even when it runs counter to the best interests of the United States.

"Since the Six-Day War of 1967, a salient feature -- and arguably the central focus -- of America's Middle East policy has been its relationship with Israel," they write. "For the past four decades, in fact, the United States has provided Israel with a level of material and diplomatic support that dwarfs what it provides to other countries. That aid is largely unconditional: no matter what Israel does, the level of support for the most part remains unchanged."

Mearsheimer and Walt present a strong, if sometimes repetitive, case:

By 2005, the U.S. had given Israel direct military and economic assistance totaling nearly $154 billion. The majority of that was as gifts, not loans. And even when the money was loaned, Israel got preferential repayment plans. In the United Nations Security Council, the U.S. has consistently vetoed resolutions condemning Israel. America pays lip service to freedom for Palestinians but doesn't pressure Israel to reach agreement with them, even though settling the Palestinian problem would be a huge step toward peace in the Middle East.

The authors also note how the Israeli lobby has taken advantage of support from Christian leaders like John Hagee, who preach that supporting Israel will help hasten Christ's return to Earth. They even point out the irony in this alliance, since the so-called End Times will place Jews in the position of having to convert to Christianity or being thrown into the fiery abyss. But we think Mearsheimer and Walt under-estimate this phenomenon and its influence on the Republican theo-political agenda.

Of more concern is the authors' insistence that the war in Iraq may have had more to do with the Israeli lobby's efforts than any influence of Big Oil. The writers attempt to downplay oil's significance more than once. Yet when they turn to summing up U.S. interests in the Middle East toward the end of the book they write, "Because this region contains a large percentage of global energy supplies, the most important interest is maintaining access to the oil and natural gas located in the Persian Gulf." How they can see this but not see any link to a war led by two oilmen makes us wonder if these fellows' glasses are poorly focused or just rose-colored.

In fact, the over-riding problem with this book is that Mearsheimer and Walt seem like they're just too nice for their own good. Maybe that has something to do with being academics (from the University of Chicago and Harvard, respectively). Or maybe it's from being stung by criticism when the forerunner of this book appeared in the London Review of Books as an article in 2005. At any rate, they bend over backwards (again and again) to assert they are not anti-Semitic and that they are merely accusing the Israeli lobby of using its power aggressively, not illegally. In the final analysis, they give us plenty of important information but they pull too many punches.

"Usurped powers cannot withstand the artillery of opinion." William Godwin

The history's interesting, but young Hoover is not