“It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing every time you crossed a road.” J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
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Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir, by Gore Vidal Gore Vidal always was a name-dropper. A talented, even brilliant writer, with wicked and incisive views on most any subject . . . but he can’t stop trying to impress readers by reciting the names of famous and infamous people he’s known. To me, it’s more than a regrettable foible . . . it’s a massive turnoff. Partway through the first chapter I began to wonder how long he’d be able to go before mentioning Jackie Kennedy. He dropped her name on the very next page. I sighed, closed the book, and took it back to the library. |
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Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman, by John Krakauer Jon Krakauer details the circumstances surrounding Army Specialist Pat Tillman’s “friendly fire” death in Afghanistan. Along the way he writes a fascinating biography of Tillman, an inspiring and rare man who stood by his principles and acted on them, sacrificing all for his country and his ideas of what is right. It’s impossible to write about Tillman’s death without also exploring the ensuing attempts to cover it up, a shameful business that involved Tillman’s fellow soldiers; his superior officers and commanders; the four-star leaders of the US Army, the JCS, CENTCOM, JSOC, and USSOC; the SecDef; even the President. And you can’t write about the cover-up without also exploring how the military, the DoD, and the nation’s political leaders manipulated news from Iraq and Afghanistan to cover up other incidents of fratricide, to fictionalize events in order to turn them into pro-war propaganda, and to make heroes of soldiers like Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch to drum up public support for unpopular wars.
I’ve read other reader reviews of Where Men Win Glory, and many say they wish Krakauer would have been more “even-handed” in his criticisms of military and civilian leaders and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. What they mean is that they wish he hadn’t written this book at all, because the truth isn’t “even-handed” and they don’t want to hear it. I was a USAF officer for 24 years — a fighter pilot and a joint staff officer at US Special Operations Command — and have witnessed first-hand similar attempts to hide or bury embarrassing accidents and deaths, and to scapegoat lower-ranking personnel when cover-ups fail. Krakauer is dead on. Jon Krakauer is fearlessly honest. With Into Thin Air, he was roundly criticized for detailing the hubris and poor decision-making of the leaders of the disastrous 1996 Everest expeditions. With Under the Banner of Heaven, he angered Mormons everywhere by exploring the excesses of the church and many of its members. Krakauer reported honestly on the life and death of Christopher McCandless, the young man at the center of Into the Wild, refusing to make a romantic hero of this misguided young man. Krakauer is also a damn fine writer who can explain the most minute and technical details of esoteric activities like mountain climbing and complex military operations to lay readers. You can’t get much better reportage, and if you’re not afraid of seeing where the chips really fall you should read Where Men Win Glory. |
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The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood I do love me some Margaret Atwood, and I do love me some science fiction! Atwood writes of a possible near future, one in which middle-class employed people are a small minority, all working for a few giant corporations and living in guarded, isolated compounds run by the corps. Everyone else makes do in the pleebs, living hand to mouth in a world of drug-ridden violence and crumbling infrastructure. There is no government; services that used to be functions of the military and law enforcement are now provided by uniformed personnel of CorpSEcorps (question: is that pronounced “corpse-core” or “corp-see-core”?), a Blackwater-like pan-corporate private paramilitary. All the things we have nightmares about today — irreversible climate change, widespread drought and massive human migration, rampant privatization of governmental functions, the complete breakdown of social safety nets, genetic engineering with fearsome unintended consequences — are at play in The Year of the Flood and its precursor, Atwood’s 2003 novel Oryx and Crake.
As with Oryx and Crake, we inhabit this nightmare world through two engaging, sympathetic, believable characters, Toby and Ren (women this time, unlike Oryx and Crake), members of a secretive religious cult opposed to mans’ destruction of nature. I loved this novel and hated to see it end. But reading it makes me want to re-read Oryx and Crake, so perhaps it hasn’t ended after all. Brilliant, frightening and yet hopeful, The Year of the Flood is Margaret Atwood at her best. |
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Soul Patch: a Moe Prager Mystery, by Reed Farrel Coleman This was my second Moe Prager novel. I thought I was re-reading the first one, because Coleman’s character Moe Prager was still wrapped around the axle about his wife’s missing brother and her evil politician father. I thought all that stuff was settled in the other novel I’d read, but now I think Coleman is one of those writers who milks a theme to death. By the time I got to Coleman’s description of a high-rise apartment complex as a “pile of puss” (no shit), I’d already made up my mind to move on to the next book on my shelf. I probably won’t be reading any more Moe Prager mysteries. |
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Lowboy, by John Wray I’ve discovered that, for me at least, there’s a difference between novels about mental disease written by mentally-diseased authors, and novels about mental disease written by sane authors. I couldn’t finish David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest because the author’s own mental illness intruded so deeply into the story. I was constantly aware of the fact that Wallace’s depression finally got the better of him and led him to commit suicide. It freaked me out, frankly, and I was too upset to go on.
Lowboy, a novel about paranoid schizophrenics, was written by John Wray, an apparently normal though exceptionally gifted author. Even though Wray’s descriptions of people in the throes of schizophrenia differ little from Wallace’s, I had no trouble reading Wray’s novel. I loved it, in fact. Lowboy is a well-written thriller. A mentally ill boy escapes from an institution in order to accomplish a delusional mission (in which he succeeds, by the way, thus saving the world), eluding his pursuers on a day-long chase through New York City subways. His pursuers, a policeman specializing in “special” missing person cases and the boy’s mother (who herself suffers from schizophrenia, though to a lesser degree than her son), know that the boy is capable of doing, and probably likely to do, harm to strangers. The tension is built in, and the gritty detail of subway cars, tunnels, hidden underground chambers, and the strange denizens who inhabit those dark places, is brilliantly described. A gripping, satisfying read. I will now go in search of more John Wray. |
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Makers, by Cory Doctorow If you follow the popular Boing Boing web site, you’ll be familiar with the themes expressed in Makers, Cory Doctorow’s “Novel of the Whirlwind Changes to Come.” If you’ve read Ayn Rand, you’ll be familiar with Cory’s writing style and pacing. If you’ve ever made a list of two hundred techno-geek words and thought about using them in a book, you’ll be familiar with Cory Doctorow’s method. Really, the themes of this novel are the perennial themes of Boing Boing. I told myself I’d plod on until Cory started to indulge his Disney fetish. When he did, I decided to read on until he mentioned Hello Kitty. That was a mistake, because Hello Kitty never came up, but I had to read the entire book to make sure. Had I set my goal on “teh” (as in teh awesome) I could have knocked off about halfway through. Oh well. Apparently the whirlwind changes to come involve free-wheeling intellectual property theft, inexplicably odd spellings of “mafia,” a miracle cure for obesity, and a whole lot of Randian dialog in lieu of plot and action. Oh, and a sex scene lifted right out of a Penthouse Forum letter.
William Gibson covers some of the same ground. Difference is, Gibson can write. |