bob tarantino

BT Review: Web of Deceit

Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush, by Barry M. Lando (2007) (Publisher: Other Press)

[disclosure: a complimentary review copy of this book was provided by the publisher]

This is quite a good book, marred by two faults: first, it's actually one excellent half-book (i.e., until about page 184) coupled with another not quite fully realized half-book to result in one hardcover work; second, it's one of the few works which I can safely say is poorly served by its jacket copy.  The second matter is, of course, hardly fatal; the first is more troubling.

With respect to the jacket copy, politically conservative readers are unlikely to be drawn to the book.  From the title to some of the blurbs on the back cover, some readers will be lead to dismiss this book out of hand - frankly, I would probably have been one of them.  Which would have been a shame - subject to what is said below, this is a valuable book which contains some first-rate reporting, and deserves a wide audience.  One additional quibble: the choice of subtitle and pictures (Churchill, Kennedy and Bush) which grace the cover is, frankly, bizarre: Kennedy, in particular, is only mentioned twice in the entire book, and Churchill's role is only marginally more material; Dubya doesn't make a significant appearance in the narrative until the last fifty pages or so of the text.  Based on Lando's conclusions, Jacques Chirac, among many others, would have been a more appropriate choice.

Lando is at his best right up until he begins discussing the UN sanctions regime maintained in place after the end of the Gulf War in 1991.  One of the comments on the back cover describes Lando's writing as "dispassionate" - which is meant as a compliment, but does, I think, a disservice to the writer.  Lando's writing is anything but dispassionate: the prose fairly sings with a restrained moral outrage - and what makes the first half of the book so refreshing (and probably so jarring for many readers who approach it with preconceptions as to its political slant) is that Lando's outrage is levelled at everyone who deserves it.  When he describes American duplicity towards the Kurds, when he describes the billions of dollars of French weaponry and business handed over to Saddam Hussein, when he describes the moral support lent to Hussein by the USSR, when he describes the torture and slaughter effected by Hussein and his regime - you'll find few better recountings.  No one escapes the detailed dissection, and this serves as an excellent source for whatever nugget of information you're looking to cite in your next argument about Iraq - whichever side of the political divide you fall on.

Unfortunately, the second half of the book degrades into a sometimes parochial harangue against the United States.  Which is surprising, since up until the end of the first Gulf War, the treatment has been admirably even-handed - Lando isn't trying to impose a morality play on his evidence.  He judges Saddam and his regime to have been a loathsome and evil construct, and the Iraqi people and Iraq writ large as the hapless pawn of the cynical game players around it, from the US and USSR to the Europeans to Iran.  But the tone changes and the marshalling of evidence seems to lose its focus - more properly, I suppose, it becomes too focused, a Lando turns his attention to the US to the exclusion of very nearly anyone else.  For example, little effort is expended on examining or commenting on the corruption behind the "Oil for Food" program, or the actions of other players (such as French or Russian commercial interests) in the slow slide from ceasefire in 1991 to invasion 2003.  The book never descends to the screeching over-simplification of, say, a Linda McQuaig treatment, as Lando seems too professional and sober to allow that.  But after the extremely high threshold set in the first half of the book, the fall is disappointing.

While the "final" outcome of the war in Iraq will still be written for some time to come, this book is an admirable, and even indispensable, account of the years leading up to it.  Though it shouldn't be relied on as the sole source, it does deserve serious consideration, and belongs in the collection of materials of anyone seeking to develop a comprehensive account of the modern history of Iraq.

Grade: B

Recommendation: Buy (on the Buy / Borrow / Don't Bother metric)

[I should explain the B/B/DB system, in light of the fact that I've given a middling grade to the book, but also assigned a recommendation of "Buy".  For those following these things, I've given "Borrow" tags to highly graded books (e.g., Shutting Out the Sun) and it's quite possible I'll be giving a "Buy" recommendation to a book which I felt otherwise warranted a poor grade.  The rationale stems from what I think the long-term value of the book is: would a reader be well-served by having this book on his or her shelf for future reference? Especially for prose books, is there likely to be pleasure or additional insight derived from multiple readings? If either of those criteria are met, a book is likely to get a "Buy" - so even a poorly written or structured non-fiction book which contains material that it would be useful to have at hand would fall into that category.  If a book is an enjoyable read the first time through, but unlikely to reveal additional layers on subsequent passes, it is likely to get a high grade, but only a "Borrow" recommendation - a good number of fiction works that I enjoy will likely end up with this assessment. As with everything, your mileage may vary.]

BT Review: Fiasco

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, by Thomas Ricks (2006) (Publisher: Penguin)

We can no longer read anything without checking what prism the writer is using.  We (by which I of course mean I) ingest political and historical media from a stance of perpetual skepticism: am I reading something from the Toronto Star or the National Post? National Review or The Nation? CBC? NPR? NYT? Fox? Globe and Mail or Western Standard? Before determining the veracity of an account, in short, we invariably interrogate the source.  While it is healthy to constantly query, especially when talking politics, it can quickly shade into a wearying cynicism.  Sometimes, rather than being constantly on guard for someone who is trying to pull one over on a reader, you accept the bona fides of the author and just immerse yourself in the narrative.

I finished reading this book a few weeks ago, as I'm in the midst of an Iraq war book jag - and if anyone else has any interest in reading about the war, this book is really among the best I've had the pleasure of reading.  Ricks is at his best when he's chronicling the realities of feet on the ground, rather than using a wider lens, such as when he's recounting the steps leading to the invasion or speculating about the future of the country.  Because those bookends of his narrative, particularly the pre-invasion period, allow Ricks to relax his analytical rigour, they tend to more obviously betray his political preferences and indulge in foreign policy analysis which doesn't seem to be a particular strength - but even those minor lapses help in making his masterful account of the war itself even more compelling by contrast.

The title of course gives away Ricks' conclusion about the conduct of the mission to topple Saddam Hussein and liberate Iraq.  After reading this book, it's hard to come away with a starkly different assessment.  The notes indicate that Ricks' research comprised tens of thousands of pages of correspondence and hundreds of hours of interviews; many of his sources are on the record in their criticisms of the war effort, and if he's fabricating much, it's an awfully cogent forgery.

Whatever his criticisms of the Bush Administration, Ricks writes with an obvious depth of knowledge about and respect for the American military.  The bitterness of many of his interview subjects can't help but emerge in the recounting, and so this is a profoundly depressing read.  It seems that whatever could have gone wrong (whether from intention, negligence or accident) did: the litany of mistakes and missed opportunities is staggering.  Ricks determines that a familiar set of deficiencies resulted in the current situation: a failure to comprehensively plan for the post-invasion occupation period; a lack of sufficnet numbers of troops; a fatal discord between the military authorities and the civilian Coalition Provisional Authority; a failure to implement counter-insurgency tactics and, when they were implemented, a failure to maintain them over the long term; communications failures, strategic failures, failures of will - it becomes painful to read.  Some of the mistakes are cringe-inducing - such as when it is recounted that, as coalition troops moved towards Baghdad, they came across and then left unguarded literally tons of weapons which were cached in depots; because of insufficient troop numbers, the caches were left behind unguarded, thus providing a handy source of materiel for insurgents; because of a (misplaced) fear that the depots might be repositories of bio-chemical weapons, they weren't destroyed.

Many of the detailed stories here (of the battles for Falluja, or Tal Afar, for example) are riveting.  Interspersed among the reportage are gems of military history and philosophy.  And ultimately the reader is left with a book which explains so much, in such a satisfactory fashion, that you can't help but enthusiastically recommend it.  It's obviously not the entire story, but it's a required component of any fair assessment.  Anyone who has any interest in the Iraq war should be reading this book.

Grade: A

Recommendation: Buy (on the Buy/Borrow/Don't Bother metric)

BT Review: Shutting Out the Sun

Shutting Out the Sun - How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation, by Michael Zielenziger (2006) (Publisher: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday)

What if there were people who locked themselves in their rooms and literally didn't leave for days, weeks, months or even years at a time?  What if there were hundreds of thousands of these people?  Beyond the human toll exacted on these individuals and their families, would this phenomenon say anything about the society in which such hermits (for lack of a better term) lived?  Answering that question is what impels Michael Zielenziger to explore the Japanese social disfunction known as hikikomori.

One of Zielenziger's strengths, both from an investigatory and an analytical approach, is that he is an outsider to the culture which he is trying to understand - this seems to enable his efforts to contact the hikikomori, those young Japanese men (and most appear to be men) who sequester themselves from society, and their families, since in the complex and subtle modes of Japanese interaction, there is less shame in speaking to an outsider about these matters than to a neighbour; Zielenziger's status also permits him to provide comparative examples of other Asian societies, and how they seem to have avoided the problem of hikikomori.

Shutting Out the Sun offers many intriguing insights into Japanese culture, some banal (such as the apparent unwillingness to make extensive use of computers and electronic networks in business) and some fundamental (such as the social concepts of ijime (widespread bullying which appears endemic to Japan) and tatamae (or "face"), on the way to making Zielenziger's broader point: that Japan is in the midst of a profound societal stagnation, arising from the structural rigidity of the culture and the torrents of globalization washing around it.  The hikikomori phenomenon is, on Zielenziger's account, simply a manifestation of an impulse to withdraw and self-isolate which is a reaction to the failure of the Japanese economic model.  There is an enormous amount to be learned here, and while not everything should be taken as gospel truth, it provides a fascinating starting point for anyone wishing to inquire more deeply.

For the first third of the book, I was a bit confused as to how he was going to maintain the "story" of the hikikomori for three hundred pages (once you get past the initial strangeness of "how" hikikomori function, there isn't an awful lot left to say about them, since no one seems to have anything but the vaguest ideas as to the "why") - but the book then becomes an insightful tour through Japanese history and, especially, a comparison between the divergent vectors of Japan and South Korea.  The only complaint this reader was left with was that the editing could have been tighter: certain phrases, facts and anecdotes repeat themselves throughout the text, which can end up feeling like an attempt at padding.  Other than that minor quibble, though, this book is highly recommended.

Grade: A

Recommendation: Borrow (on the Buy/Borrow/Don't Bother metric)

BT Review: Empire

Empire, by Orson Scott Card (2006) (Publisher: Tom Doherty/TOR)

Maybe there's a great novel out there which chronicles a new American civil war fought not on lines of North and South, but Left and Right.  This book isn't that novel.  Spoilers below.

BT Review: Terror and Liberalism

Terror and Liberalism, by Paul Berman (2003) (Publisher: WW Norton)

I finished this book a couple of weeks ago and I've been trying to figure out how I feel about it ever since - which is a good sign, I think: any book that poses questions which actively stay with you past the turning of the last page has something going for it.  I also have to confess a certain fondness for the book which arises from personal nostalgia: reading Berman reminded me of nothing so much as readings from my time as a philosophy undergraduate.  The book attempts to be an intellectual history of a totalitarian strain in Islamist theology (derived from the writings of Sayyid Qutb), and an argument for why and how liberals (in the American political sense of the term, i.e., let's call them "left-of-centre") should be opposed to said strain.  Since many only seem capable of reading books like this through the prism of Iraq, in the final chapter Berman expresses at least a skepticism, shading into opposition, with regards to that war - which is somewhat odd, since I could have sworn he was at least mildly in favour on liberal interventionist grounds.  But my tone in the first part of the preceding sentence should betray the fact that I think the book is best appreciated without reference to Iraq whatsoever.

BT Review: The Way It Works

The Way It Works - Inside Ottawa, by Eddie Goldenberg (2006) (Publisher: Douglas Gibson Books - McClelland & Stewart)

At some point, I will recover the discipline necessary to sit down and get started on another book (fiction, in case anyone cares).  In the meantime, however, I'm content to satisfy myself with finishing the greatest videogame, like, ever (Splinter Cell) and getting through various books I've been meaning to read.  One of which was The Way It Works, by Jean Chretien's senior policy adviser, Eddie Goldenberg.  The experience wasn't quite what I was hoping it would be.

BT Review: Mindscan

Mindscan, by Robert J. Sawyer (2005) (Publisher: Tor - Tom Doherty Associates)

I've been debating for a while whether or not to write this review.  As you can tell, I've decided to do so - and so for the first time since I began writing up my thoughts on some of the books I've read (more than twenty, spread over the now-defunct Let It Bleed and here at the new blog), I'm going to give a near-failing grade to a fiction book and tag it a "Don't Bother" (on the "Buy/Borrow/Don't Bother" metric).  Spoilers after the jump.

BT Review: Midnight in Sicily

Midnight in Sicily, by Peter Robb (1996) (Publisher: Vintage Books)

I really can't recommend this book enough.  It's almost sui generis: history, travelogue, memoir, literary criticism... frankly, some of the writing borders on poetry.  Robb writes an account of that slightly sinister island off the southern tip of Italy, the mafia, Italian politics, Italian history, food, books, painting... it's exceedingly difficult to categorize what you hold in your hands when you pick up Midnight in Sicily.  Suffice it to say that this is an incredibly dense book, not just in the sense of the volume of material and information that is imparted, but in the work that is involved in enjoying Robb's prose.  And it is work, but it's immensely rewarding.  I can't recall the last time I've read a book where almost each sentence was a morsel worth savouring.

BT Review: Right Side Up

Right Side Up - The Fall of Paul Martin and the Rise of Stephen Harper's New Conservatism, by Paul Wells (2006) (Publisher: Douglas Gibson Books)

I'm about as big a fan of Paul Wells' political writing as you'll find (we'll need to ignore his taste in music...), but I admit I was somewhat skeptical about his ability to keep my attention over the course of an entire book.  Biting wit and sharp turns of phrase make for excellent blog posts and columns, but was that going to be sufficient to sustain three hundred pages?  Turns out I needn't have worried.

BT Review: Writing for Comics with Peter David

Writing for Comics with Peter David, by Peter David (2006) (Publisher: Impact Books)

Rumour has it that a new high water mark has been hit for Hollywood screenwriters: $4 million for the sequel to The Da Vinci Code.  Peter David repeatedly makes the point in this tome that comic books have increasingly adopted the idiom of motion pictures, so pointing out what the top of the market is in terms of paycheques seems appropriate.  Paycheques also come into play when reading this book, or at least the echo of them does: most of what needs to be said about this book can be gleaned from the fact that the name of the author is about three times the size of the title on the cover.  Impact Books has also published Draw Comics with Dick Giordiano (boasting a much more plausible author-to-title font size ratio), so clearly we're looking at one of a series of books aimed squarely at that segment of the book-buying market desperate to obtain "inside" information on how to break into the comics industry.

BT Review: A Feast for Crows

A Feast for Crows, by George R.R. Martin (2005; paperback 2006) (Publisher: Bantam Dell/Spectra)

It really, truly, deeply, pains me to say this, but if this book is any indication of the future of this series, A Song of Ice and Fire has become Jordanized.  Anyone who has read epic fantasy over the past decade or so hopefully trembles a bit in abject terror at the allusion: Robert Jordan's squandering of the enormous reservoirs of goodwill he had built up by writing what was, until the advent of Martin's series, the leading contender for the modern fantasy masterwork - The Wheel of Time.  WoT (as us nerds call it) was breathtaking in its scope and riveting in the execution... for about the first three or four books.  Then it sprawled into an unholy mess of endless pointless sequels, populated by increasingly annoying characters who accomplished a decreasing amount as the page-to-interesting-reading ratio plummeted precipitously (WoT is tentatively scheduled to shudder to a much-deserved end with Book 12, ferthaluvofgod).  After reading A Feast for Crows, there seems to be a real danger that Martin is treading the same path.

There's no getting beyond the fact that Martin is a grandmaster at this craft.  The attention to evocative detail, the richness of the backstory, the finely drawn characters - all are joys to read.  Each chapter adopts the point of view of one member of the recurring cast of characters, and watching Martin's style shift from chapter to chapter to match the circumstances (intellectual, moral and emotional) of the character is fascinating.  But compared to previous installments, the story-telling itself is turgid beyond belief.  978 pages gets us... well, not much farther ahead than we were before.  Sure, various threads of the plot have advanced some, but not nearly enough given the wordcount.  Entire characters could have been excised from this text without the readers being any worse off: Brienne's story in particular is mostly pointless.  New characters are introduced, and while normally this would be cause for heightened interest among readers as we get to follow one more thread in the tapestry, at this point, for this reader, this is just frustrating: now we have to wait that much longer to get back to characters we care about, and more importantly, to some sort of resolution for the larger story.  (For those keeping track, there's more than fifty pages of appendices which just list the characters and their relations to one another.)

At this point the series reads like it needs a firm editorial hand.  Martin himself describes the book simply as one-half of the volume he actually wrote - the next installment (A Dance With Dragons) will contain the stories of all the characters who were squeezed out of this one due to space constraints.  Martin appears to be projecting three more volumes before the series is concluded, but on the evidence presented by A Feast for Crows, that seems optimistic.  This has become a case of too many characters with not enough compelling story to fill the pages - there's more than enough story here, but I'm not sure there's enough interesting story.  Someone needed to pull back Martin's hand a bit, in terms of both content and style: the gritty rococo which he spins so well has become an end unto itself, serving neither the story nor the reader.  A minor quibble: there's way too much use of the word "fuck" in this book for no apparent reason.  Anyone who knows me can attest to the fact that I liberally sprinkle my speech with swearing, but the omnipresence of the word in this volume (unlike in its predecessors) seems nothing more than laziness (that, or someone took the eye-rollingly lame Detroit Free Press blurb on the back cover ("a fantasy series for hip, smart people, even those who don't read fantasy") a bit too much to heart).

No one can begrudge either Jordan or Martin giving in to the temptation they face: a string of massive bestsellers, a dedicated fanbase, an open-ended world which lends itself to freeform story-telling - it would be tough to draw the strings closed on a money-maker like that.  But if the notion of a story having any sort of integrity in and of itself is to have any meaning, it means that the reins need to be pulled a little tighter and this story needs to be ended sooner rather than later.

Rating: B-