The King is Always Above the People: Stories by Daniel Alarcón

Hardcover, 256 pgs, Pub Oct 31st 2017 by Riverhead Books, ISBN13: 9781594631726, Literary Awards: National Book Award Nominee for Fiction (2017)

One assumes from the title that the king spoken of is revered and placed in a position of honor. Very shortly we learn that the king is actually hanging by his neck, above the central square, the people looking up at him swinging there. Many things are different from the perspective of those on the flip side of north.

Alarcón is Peruvian-American, and his voice is strong (having seen poverty), male (having known brutality), and distinctive (not being North American). His biography is fascinating. He is an investigative journalist; he teaches both broadcast journalism and writes novels. He collaborated with partners to establish a Spanish-language podcast, Radio Ambulante, telling Latin American stories for NPR.

This collection of stories may be a perfect way to be introduced to his work. Some stories have a knife hidden somewhere in the folds. We are reading along, interested and engaged, and suddenly we remember the world is not kind. We might have moments of carefree pleasure but it is not too long before the reality comes flooding back. Until then, however, there is a sense of release most intense.

“The Provincials” is the longest story and it is something altogether new. A father and his son return to the town the father had fled some years before. He is now working at a job unimaginable to those people in the town—Head Librarian of the Rare and Antiquarian Manuscripts division of the National Library—and has one son in America. The son traveling with him is an actor. Because the townspeople mistake him for his cross-border brother, he accedes to this role. He discovers there is, in fact, something of value here in this tired town they’ve left.

“República and Grau” may be my favorite story, a story of a wily blind man begging for coins. He is accompanied by a ten-year-old who is being pimped by his father to bring home half the take. Life is hard. The begging blind man seems happy to share his income, such as it is, with the neatly-dressed boy. One day, after his father beats the boy for such a small take-home, the boy’s bruised, bloody face and uncaring demeanor earns the two beggars more.

The second-longest story in the bunch, “The Bridge,” is as filling as a novel. There is so much to think about, so much alluded to, so much desire and despair in it that one has to pause, and pull in the oars. Let’s just think about what he is saying, if you don’t mind. It won’t hurt you to know the story ends with a recording of an audience roaring back at an opera performer who left them momentarily speechless.

In the best of all possible worlds, I would read this collection slowly, allowing time between stories as though each were a square of bitter chocolate. But I am a traveler, too, and fear I will lose the opportunity to share in this strongly South American-flavored story-telling so must finish it quickly. All the way through we sense the movement of individuals, tied in some mysterious psychic way to the mother country but mostly adrift, seeking rest. The North, when it is perceived at all, is “other.”

The final story, “The Auroras,” couldn’t have come at a more opportune moment, considering the state of discussion around the world on the subject of sexual relations and exploitation. The story pained me. While we experience a curious role-reversal in the sexual arena, we also have a queer example of the effect of social groups on attitudes…something like the Facebook effect. The main character was influenced to find his inner malice and express it, only later understanding how thoroughly he’d been manipulated. It was a distressing story to end on.

Alarcón is interesting enough that I set out immediately to see if this set of stories is representative of his work. He has two earlier novels, his debut called Lost City Radio (2007) about a radio show that recounts for families the status of victims of a war in a nameless South American country, and At Night We Walk in Circles (2013) featuring people with names and backgrounds the same as those in his story mentioned above called “The Provincials.”

But there is more. Alarcón collaborated on a graphic novel and several story collections. He is a journalist, and just kind of endlessly fascinating. He appears to write in English: no translator is listed. He teaches or has taught at several universities in the United States. You must sample his work if only because South American writers are too scarce—for whatever reason—in North America, and I presume, in Europe and elsewhere. South America is simply too often overlooked in our hurry to discover larger targets or exotica.



Tweet

So Much Blue by Percival Everett

Paperback, 236 pgs, Pub June 13th 2017 by Graywolf Press, ISBN13: 9781555977825

Percival Everett blows the doors off with this beautifully constructed novel that holds secrets and mysteries in each of its three stories centered about Kevin, an oil painter living in Rhode Island with his wife and two children. I do wonder about Everett, who so gradually has become one of America’s most reliably exciting and unique novelists that his anonymity lasted long enough for him to enjoy some walking-around time without celebrity recognition. That’s probably well over now, if this enormously assured work of fiction garners the attention it deserves.

The work is studded with recognizable truths in the way of great literature but the writing is plain enough that we spot these easily, following his trail eagerly. Describing the way his children looked at him when he was drinking regularly and too much:

“No, I never flew into rages or stumbled late and noisily into dance recitals or yelled a little too loud and made inappropriate comments at soccer games, but I became acutely aware that I wore a sickly-sweet late evening cologne and I noticed how my children looked at my eyes, holding them for too long and looking away too quickly.”

There is a paragraph less than fifty pages in which describes what happens in Paris when Kevin is visiting a museum on a day his wife is traveling. He happens upon a young woman, a watercolorist, who recognizes him and invites him somewhere they can talk comfortably.

“Very close of course was Victoire’s flat. She was, after all, a watercolorist and her apartment was full of them. Thankfully they were not portraits of cows, but there was a preponderance of empty parks and stark river scenes. There was a large window that overlooked a garden. In the middle of the garden was a broken birdbath and I felt a little guilty when I realized I was paying more attention to it than to the many works of art. I turned my attention to her work and found them well done, but ordinary.”

This paragraph with all its conflicted feelings describes a true thing; I know this because it happened to me. I can’t remember now if I was the young woman or the older man. Perhaps I was the younger woman with the eyes of an older man.

Everett does this to us regularly: holds up our experience, or maybe his own, for us to acknowledge. He is always surprising and exact yet comfortable and intimate with us. Sometimes his sentences remind me of the clipped noir of Raymond Chandler or the deeply funny seriocomic social commentary of Joe Lansdale. But Everett is unique. Not only that; each novel is unique.

Almost every novel by Everett is different than the one preceding it, making it seem as though he were reveling in the breadth of the form, trying out methods, working a style. One has the sense of an oeuvre not unlike a fiction chapbook which showcases many forms of popular fiction but which is infused with a self-conscious humor, even parody, always within the realm of literature. It is American literature at core, worthy of study for the pieces Everett chooses to highlight. That standing outside the form is almost missing in this novel, but Everett is sly.

The novel's three strands, each thread in a different country, are widely spaced in time yet carefully braided into one narrative so that no one strand seems dominant nor gets lost as the other stories unfold. The interleaving is so well done it is a model for writers. The only overlap in all the stories is the main character, Kevin Pace; married, living in New England, two children, a painter.

Blue, the color blue, cerulean, cobalt, “the color of trust, loyalty,” ultramarine, blue leaning to green, Guillet green, emerald green. Kevin saw one painting done by the young French watercolorist which was outside her usual style, all done in blues and green running into blue, with a splash of blood red in one corner. It made him cry. It should have been done in oils. Blue was a color he could not control, and it reminded him of something, a secret.

This novel is about secrets, and upheaval, and finding a safe place, and the how paint can reveal truths we cannot speak. Everett is a painter besides being an author, and in 2010 he collaborated with the novelist Chris Abani to produce a journal of Abani’s poetry and Everett’s paintings.

This novel, coming after thirty or more earlier works, seems to bring all that earlier experimentation to glorious fruition. It’s a beautiful novel, full of energy, movement, truth, and color. So much blue.



You can buy this book here: Tweet

Coyote America by Dan Flores

Dan Flores has done something fascinating in this book, rehabilitating the image of a persecuted carnivore lowest on our opinion roster of animals, including cockroaches and rats. He makes the case that coyotes should be America’s national avatar, displacing the bison or buffalo. Extremely clever, adaptable, and pioneering, the coyote was designated a principal deity by American Indians--North America’s oldest deity, responsible for creating all of North America.

Flores tells us that coyotes live within a couple miles of us at all times now…even those of us in major metropolitan areas. Coyotes are cosmopolitan, and have been living in urban areas since the time of Columbus at least. They are perceptive, wily fellow-travelers with us.

”Suffice it to say here that as we humans head off into an uncertain and probably dangerous future of our own making, it might be wise to keep an eye on [coyotes]. I, for one, am going to be very interested in how coyotes cope with the twenty-first century and what insights we might draw about our own circumstances from a coyote history that so often seems to mirror ours.”

Coyotes are predators, feeding mainly on small mammals, birds, or fruits. They are sociable, hunting in packs. Contrary to the notion that coyotes were responsible for cattle kills, they were nearly always scavengers of large animals as befit their position in the ranking of predators in the larger ecosystem. Very nearly killed off as pests since the end of the nineteenth century, they have none-the-less persevered.

Flores suggests we look to the Indian coyote stories, of which there is a rich seam, to understand human nature: “who better to illustrate that than self-centered, gluttonous, carnal Coyote?”As we began to understand our own animal natures, the study of other social animals leaves “little doubt that…canines also understand equality and inequity…and experience both a rudimentary form of empathy and some basic theory of mind…an essential sense of what in human terms we would call 'right and wrong.'”

Employees of the Wildlife Services’ Predator Research Center, whose greatest advocate is the American sheep industry, is responsible for killing by aerial shooting roughly 35,000 coyotes from the air annually. Even they readily admit that coyotes have personality: “They’re individuals. Like people, some get into trouble.” Sheep farmers claim to lose some percentage of lambs to coyote packs every year. The federal government spends an equal amount of money (the cost of the lambs) to kill or sterilize coyote. Hmmm...a good use of federal tax dollars?

This book is a wildlife biologist’s dream. Readable, eloquent, well-argued, it looks at coyote history from many angles and leads even those of us with reason to dislike the disruptive canines to a grudging admiration and wonder. Of course, sport hunters probably don’t read peer-reviewed ecological articles, but Flores points out that ecosystems tend to develop some balances in response to threats and flourishing in their environment. Trying to kill coyotes takes natural balances out of the equation.

Flores ends with examples of coyote in art, and reminds us again how the animal is portrayed as a caricature of human nature, for example Wile E’s comic overconfidence (remind you of anyone?), unswerving obsession with a goal, and unfailing faith in technology. (Even that swath of red-gold hair has something of the coyote about it.) But I don’t want to carry the metaphor too far. After all, coyote in modern day parlance means a person who sneaks illegal aliens into the U.S. from Mexico.

NPR's David Greene interviewed Dan Flores about this book on coyotes.

Dan Flores is a historian, A.B. Hammond Professor Emeritus at University of Montana-Missoula, who has written several books about the American West and the animals who reside there. This year he also published a book called American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains, perhaps in conjunction with the movement by Sean Gerrity, president of American Prairie Reserve, committed to wildlife conservation and hoping to create the largest wildlife complex ever assembled in the continental United States. "When complete, the reserve will comprise some 3.5 million contiguous acres (more than 5,000 square miles) of native grassland in northeastern Montana, with a goal of restoring the wildlife abundance the landscape once contained." [National Geographic bio].

Here is Dan Flores addressing the 32nd National Cowboy Poetry gathering about the history of America's Serengeti, and here is Sean Gerrity at an Aspen Institute gathering to elicit donations for his project.


You can buy this book here: Tweet

The Complete Guide to Contemporary World Fiction by M.A. Orthofer

Orthofer lives in New York currently and was founder in 1999 of the complete review, a website dedicated to reviews of recent literature from around the world. In 2002 Orthofer included a blog, The Literary Saloon, which carries news from interviews, reviews, and notes on awards, publication, items of interest from around the internet. Orthofer has been updating it nearly every day.

The reach of Orthofer’s interests is nothing short of astounding. In this compendium of contemporary world literature he tries to include short mention of the work of leading litterateurs around the world and includes dates of publication and translation when a work is mentioned. This is an indispensable guide for those interested in world literature for it introduces readers to new authors and commonalities among authors either in genre or style that allow us to find what suits our own voracious reading habits.

This work can be read for itself, but it is more likely to be used as a reference text for readers interested in contemporary world literature. It can be downloaded as an ebook or referenced from the hardcopy. Continents are broken into constituent parts and each countries’ authors are mentioned with reference to their major works. While I have always thought myself interested in “world literature,” the range of this work makes me realize how parochial my reading has been, mostly limited to the overseas imaginings of writers of English. I note a recent entry in The Literary Saloon claims there has been a huge outpouring of translations of contemporary Arabic literature, a trend surely long awaited.

North American literature is not included in this work because the author is pointing to the need for American readers to vary their diet and expand their horizons:

”Because American authors provide an enormous amount and variety of work, American readers are arguably spoiled for choice even without resorting to fiction from abroad…In almost every other country, foreign literature occupies a central and prominent position, but in the United States it seems to sit far more precariously on the fringes…foreign literature can offer entirely new dimension and perspectives…great literature knows no borders.

When I founded the Complete Review (complete-review.com) in 1999, one of my goals to to take advantage of the Internet’s tremendous reach and connectivity…Ironically, though, one of the shortcomings of this and most other Internet resources is its tremendous scope…[This book] provides an entry point and more general overview various nations’ literatures, as well as a foundation to help readers navigate what is available on the Internet.”
—from the Introduction

Orthofer has attempted something most of us might consider impossible, and he has done a convincing job of it. If it lacks anything, it is up to us to help straighten it out. I highly recommend everyone have a look at this book to see what you are missing. If it seems overwhelming, I sympathize. Imagine how Orthofer felt when he began.

You can buy this book here: Tweet

Does America Need a Foreign Policy? by Henry Kissinger

Hardcover, 320 pages Published June 14th 2001 by Simon & Schuster (first published 2001)

Kissinger wrote this book in the spring of 2001, and in a very short period of time it was completely out of touch. Kissinger berates the American public in Chapter One for being unable to find other countries on a map, and for being so consumed with ourselves. Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski did the same, in 2008 in America and the World: Conversations on the Future of American Foreign Policy. They are probably right. The map looks differently in two dimensions, and certainly we can be self-obsessed. One wonders if they would be pleased if we formed opinions on their conduct of foreign policy on our behalf.

Kissinger nowhere mentions the challenges that faced us later in 2001, an indication of how closely he was paying attention to world events. In a way, this book is a dry run for his later, shorter, more historically distant, and better received World Order (2014). While in that later book Kissinger talks about the long history of foreign relations, in this 2001 book he talks about the continuity of U.S. foreign policy after the collapse of the Soviet Union. At one point he suggests that Germany might align its interests with Russia, often historically powerful allies, showing how hard it must be for an old cold warrior to lose his traditional enemy and to admit that thinking of the world in large strategic chess pieces may cause us to overlook important details.

Kissinger does a better job of looking at Latin America and Africa than these types of books usually manage, though the only thing he praises about the “maladroit” handling of foreign affairs by President Clinton is NAFTA, the “fair trade” deal which we are reconsidering now. (Conversely, he praises the “wisdom” of President George W. Bush.)

“…it would be an irony if the new millennium’s most distinctive achievement were to turn into a vulnerability…the very process that has produced greater wealth in more parts of the world than ever before may also provide the mechanism for spreading an economic and social crisis around the world. Just as the American economy has been the world’s engine of growth, a major setback for the American economy would have grave consequences transcending the economic realm. Depending on its magnitude, it could threaten political stability in many countries and undermine Americans international standing.”

He got that right.

Regarding China, he makes the observation that Deng Xiao Ping “had been perhaps too daring in his economic reforms and surely too cautious in the political reforms his policies made inevitable—ironically, the opposite mistake of his contemporary, Mikhail Gorbachev.” Later he says

“American foreign policy became increasingly driven by domestic politics…[like when] early in his administration [President Clinton] made the granting of Most Favored Nation status to China dependent on Chinese demonstrations of progress on human rights within a year…Nothing illustrates better the collapse of the Westphalian notion of noninterference than the proposition that freedom of speech and the press, which has never existed in the five millennia of Chinese history, could be brought about through legislation by the American Congress…”

I guess that’s a “no” on tying cooperation to human rights.

One of Kissinger’s last arguments, disagreement with the “Responsibility to Protect” U.N. mandate adopted in 2009, was one which shows how far out of step with the world he was becoming.

”The United States has come a long way since John Quincy Adams warned against going abroad in search of monsters to destroy…On one level the growing concern with human rights is one of the achievements of our age and it is certainly a testament to progress toward a more humane international order…There is irony in all this when one recalls that, during the Cold War, the Wilsonians [the ideological Left] had argued that excessive concern with security was leading to strategic overextension and an illusion of American omnipotence. Yet now, in the post-Cold War era, they are urging a global mission for the United States and on behalf of humanitarian and moral values, which risks an even more sweeping overextension.”

I grudgingly concede he is right about that, which has led me to an in-depth study of foreign policy at this time. If we must lead by reason of our role as the world’s sole superpower, how can we best to do that? Even as I write this, I wonder if there might be some unexpected and enlightened leadership from an unlikely source, not a superpower, considering our domestic disarray and our navel-gazing populace. Whatever we decide will have to include some accommodation with the massive changes that will come when water rises around the globe and the dislocations resulting from that and changing weather patterns. How can we best face those pressures with dignity, grace, and that insistence on human rights?

At the end of this book is a remarkable polemic on universal jurisdiction, or the concept of submitting international politics to judicial procedures.

“The doctrine of universal jurisdiction asserts that there are crimes so heinous that their perpetrators should not be able to escape justice by invoking doctrines of sovereignty or the sacrosanct nature of national frontiers. …But any universal system should contain procedures not only to punish the wicked but to constrain the righteous. It must not allow legal principles to be used as weapons to settle political scores…”

Kissinger sounds horrified that Americans, in particular Americans in leadership, could be judged by such international standards of justice, when they were only pursuing a foreign policy that was for their exclusive benefit. Kissinger tries to explain his role in the CIA overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile and the installation of the notorious Pinochet regime. In any case, he should have known better. When the International Criminal Court later wanted to convict some of the leaders in the former Yugoslavia for “crimes against humanity,” an American judge put in place significant roadblocks which had the effect of raising the burden of proof involved in convicting political leaders. Thus Americans were not indicted for a range of activities that came awfully close to such definitions.

As usual, what Kissinger says is more reasonable and palatable than what he does.



You can buy this book here: Tweet

Blackwater by Jeremy Scahill

Paperback, 550 pages Published July 1st 2008 by Serpent's Tail (first published January 1st 2007)

One can draw a straight line from Tim Weiner’s extensive report on the CIA, Legacy of Ashes and this book by Jeremy Scahill on the outsourcing of American military, security, and investigative duties. Scahill centers his work around the event that transfixed the world and brought awareness of Blackwater to the fore for those of us not immediately engaged in military operations: the 2004 murder of Blackwater employees in the city of Fallujah wherein the victims were killed, dismembered, and hung from an overpass to remind Americans that in Fallujah at least, Americans were not welcome.

What Scahill shares with us here is his report of a Christian army of for-profit soldiers headquartered in North Carolina who have grown in size and weaponry to rival national militaries around the world. Begun in 1997 as a private advanced training facility for active-duty soldiers and police, Blackwater grew during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to supplying weapons-trained military “security personnel,” receiving lucrative contracts from a U.S. government unwilling to face the political backlash from a public unhappy with military losses overseas. Blackwater marketed its services by saying it could accomplish more with less, though it is difficult to see how their proffered services cost us less.

As profits grew for the corporate organization, Blackwater sought cheaper and cheaper contracts with mercenary soldiers in South American and Latin American countries, as well as Eastern European, African, and select Asian countries. Sometimes when they cut corners on equipment, training, or staffing they found themselves embroiled in lawsuits in the U.S. as a result of tragic and allegedly preventable deaths.

What was particularly shocking to me was the overt tone of the speeches and promotional material produced by the leadership of the organization, in that it completely resembled ISIS rhetoric about holy wars, and fighting for the will of God. Far right wing religious groups with which Blackwater founder Erik Prince is affiliated were writing in the 1990’s that the Christian community might need to face the possibility that the “regime” (our government!) might force their Church into confrontation ranging from “noncompliance…to morally justified revolution.” It is in this context that the largest privately-held store of military grade weapons was begun. Their god is a Christian one, but they stand allied with Israel, and trace their religious roots back to the Crusades, which was medieval in its very concept and reflected the fanatic religious warriors now terrorizing the Middle East.

Scahill is scrupulous in his reporting on the effect of Blackwater forces in the Iraq and Afghan wars, and when it seems he might be getting off the point by describing, for instance, the Chilean mercenary contingent that became a part of Blackwater, he is so vastly interesting that I’m glad he left the material in. Scahill also details the use of Blackwater forces in the catastrophe that was Hurricane Katrina, in 2005, providing property and force protection for FEMA officials. It seems appropriate somehow that Bush was more concerned with property than with residents.

More importantly, perhaps, is the fact that these contractors do not operate under the same restrictions and set of rules that govern national troops, and their contracts often leave them free of liability or of obligations in terms of insurance that we commonly find acceptable. Critics decry the rise of heavily-armed mercenaries as “killers for hire,” suggesting that their contractual freedom from culpability and their for-profit motive may lead them to start conflict rather than prevent it.

The growth of Blackwater was exponential during the years of a Republican government and was not curbed enough under a Democratic president. “In 2008 the number of private contractors in Iraq was at a one-to-one ratio with active-duty U.S. soldiers,” according to Scahill. This book was published in 2007 and updated in 2008, but a June 2010 article in Nation magazine written by Scahill brings us up to date:

“Blackwater is up for sale and its shadowy owner, Erik Prince, is rumored to be planning to move to the United Arab Emirates as his top deputies face indictment for a range of alleged crimes, yet the company remains a central part of President Obama’s Afghanistan war. Now, Blackwater’s role is expanding…

...Earlier this year, Schakowsky and Senator Bernie Sanders reintroduced the Stop Outsourcing Security Act, which would phase out the use of private security contractors by the government. Ironically, Hillary Clinton was a co-sponsor of the legislation when she was a senator and running for president. Now, as Secretary of State, she is the US official in charge of most Blackwater contracts. Blackwater is also bidding on a contract potentially worth up to $1 billion to train the Afghan National Police.”

It is difficult for me to accept the concept of a religiously-motivated army and I am not comfortable with a extra-legal military force that operates for profit.

Scahill won the George Polk Award for his reporting on Blackwater. The book is beautifully written and though a big book, it is an engrossing read. I listened to the Blackstone Audio production audio read by Tom (not Tim) Weiner and thought it terrific.



You can buy this book here: Tweet

Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner

Audio CD, 17 pages Published June 28th 2007 by Blackstone Audio Inc. (first published January 1st 2007)

Tim Weiner deserves enormous credit for amassing such a huge and detailed body of information for us to look at and judge the CIA. He writes history the way I prefer to read it: chronologically. When characters appear before or after their moment in the limelight, Weiner tries to keep them in context of events happening contemporaneously. This is a huge aid to both our understanding and to our judgment. That having been said, this was a difficult book to read/listen to because of the poor assessment of the Agency, because of the accretion of evidence of mistakes and incompetence, because of the massive amount of information readers get about how the Agency operated at different times under different leaders with different mandates.

The easy solutions to repairing or overhauling the Agency when they have done something spectacularly inept--or not done something, like prepare us for 9/11--have all been tried, each unsuccessful in its own way. Weiner has given us the material with which to begin to understand what we as citizens have tasked (and funded) the Agency to do and to ask ourselves if this is still a valid and do-able goal.

Soliciting secrets held by foreign governments can be very difficult work. Most of the time those secrets are revealed because individuals have a reason for wanting to impart the information, a reason that may have little to do with money, though money often does grease the wheels. The information could be disinformation. It takes an unusual person who is willing to use their language skills and familiarity with other countries to live overseas undercover, to deceive, steal, and manipulate their way to secrets. “It’s a dirty business.” [Richard Helms] It would seem the very nature of the work would predicate a small clandestine field arm, therefore limiting the size of the analyst arm.

Weiner starts with the genesis of the Agency, an outgrowth of the Office of Strategic Services which parachuted agents behind enemy lines in WWII Europe to sabotage the enemy and influence the course of the war. While it was put about when speaking with the American public that an Agency that could understand the intent of hostile nations would be better prepared against attack by those nations, really its model was not merely listening, but acting. Immediately upon its conception, a result of the predilection of Agency leaders and because powerful men, including presidents, found the secrecy aspect of the Agency irresistible, the Agency became an instrument, not simply of “intelligence” but of covert action. And every president sought to change (even wanted to abolish) the Agency when its failures became politically unbearable.

The truth is that a spy agency that operates in secret has also often withheld their secrets from the president and his council of advisors. Worse than that, sometimes they tailored the information they gave to the president to suit his predilections.

Weiner gives examples of successes amidst the roster of failures of intelligence. The CIA muscled the Taiwan government into abandoning its plan to develop a nuclear weapon; they managed to cripple the Abu Nidal organization through disinformation; the CIA stymied Soviet attempts to steal corporate software by implanting bugs into targeted software. And Weiner seems to admire, or at least not coruscate, certain CIA officers like Robert Ames, the Arabist scholar-spy memorialized by Kai Bird in The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames and who was killed in the Beirut embassy bombing in 1984. Weiner also gives a pass to Robert Gates, former CIA director and Secretary of Defense under two presidents. Weiner acknowledges the extraordinary patriotism and selflessness of certain agents in the field, who tried to accomplish their missions despite the dysfunction at home.

It is easy for us to forget that the Agency was only started after WWII, in 1947. Before that, we used to get intelligence through journalists, businesspeople, and embassies. We did not usually attempt to influence events except through pressure at national levels, among statesmen. When it began, the Agency was obsessed with Soviet power around the world and a balance of that power. Even then our intelligence was faulty, subject to political jostling, and influenced by the fears of our government. Although revolting to learn, it does us no good to turn away from Weiner’s assessment of these years, since millions of Americans before us have made their indignation known and demanded better. It forced changes in an Agency decimated after the fall of the Soviet Union, an event which caught the vast arsenal of analysts completely by surprise.

The Agency underwent several RIFs in its history, and it was even thought that outsourcing to private contractors would provide better intelligence. The result was higher prices for intelligence and less control over agents. Weiner talks us through the failures of several directors, and their determination to make the Agency great again: Charges of too big, too small, too old, too young, too restrained, too wild have all been dealt with in the way one might expect a large bureaucracy might try to change its image. None of the changes have really worked. Finally, because presidents have had difficulty relying on the CIA for accurate information, they now call on a plethora of different agencies for intelligence which are run mostly by current or former military men, and much of the CIA's capabilities are outsourced.

What is undeniable is the secrecy of the organization has come close several times in its history to ruining us. Outside threats are one thing, but many times the Agency was operating to contain threats we created through fear-mongering. The reason our democracy has succeeded as long as it has is because we have managed to maintain some kind of public accountability through transparency. Weiner asserts that Soviet leaders knew before the Berlin Wall fell that the lies and secrets their government kept from their people ultimately ruined them. A large and secret bureaucracy takes on a life of its own that cannot have adequate oversight. It becomes a danger rather than an aid.

Despite his dire assessment of the Agency and its current capabilities, Weiner does not advocate its abolition. He acknowledges it may have an important role to play in spite of the difficulty of its mission and the difficulty of finding the right personnel. He suggests that it may one day be refashioned to fit the needs we have with a leadership that can shape and control it. Until then, however, it is a liability we rely upon at our peril.

The fact that we now experience violence and terror from non-state actors might predicate more changes for the CIA. More agents has been the simplistic solution loudly proposed by at least one presidential candidate (Marco Rubio), but we already know that is hardly likely to produce the desired results. The CIA has always been plagued by its inability to recruit and retain good personnel because of its image and history but also because covert work is very hard to accomplish successfully. It may be time to reduce the size of the Agency once again, which may seem counterintuitive in this time of diverse threats. Getting vast numbers of analysts or agents unsuited to the task is probably not going to yield the kind of information we wish we had.

I remain skeptical that a large bureaucracy can produce intelligence beyond what a large news organization can organize and analyze. I wonder that we have the hubris to influence events in allied countries, or to organize the defeat of leadership in countries with which we are not allied. I have no argument with obtaining information, as long as that information serves to better prepare us for changes which affect us. I note that the largest changes which are bound to affect us profoundly in immediate years, e.g., climate change, do not seem to have registered a blip on the government radar while we scurry to contain events which will not have as great an impact on us. It looks like a kind of overheated masculine-style delusion predicated on fear rather than the rational measure of risk.

Therefore, before eliminating the organization entirely, perhaps we should bring it back to its earliest roots during this time of terrorist insurgency. Keep the organization small and flexible and covert, like our enemies’ organization. Covert undercover work may have been useful during WWII, but it didn’t work well after that. The CIA did real damage to countries around the world by involving themselves with regime change predicated on fear whipped up by our leaders. Surely the American people have progressed beyond that, even if some of their self-proclaimed leaders are still caught in the dark ages.

Weiner told us nearly everything, but he didn’t tell us what became of the analyst(s) who were responsible for the U.S. bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, reporting that it was a weapons cache.

I listened to the Blackstone audio production of this book, read by Stefan Rudnicki. It was beautifully produced and read, and though Rudnicki mispronounced some people and place names, those mistakes did not obscure understanding. This is a real masterpiece of journalism.


You can buy this book here: Tweet

Dismantling The Empire by Chalmers Johnson

Hardcover, 224 pages Published August 17th 2010 by Metropolitan Books (first published August 1st 2010)

Looking for the philosophical underpinnings of the necessity for U.S. leadership in the world, I came to Chalmers Johnson through Perry Anderson’s book, America’s Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers. This series of essays Johnson wrote from 2004 through 2009 for TomDispatch.com, a website that features very loud criticisms of the government (and everything else), mainly describe Johnson’s distaste for U.S. militarism around the world, including massive numbers of bases on foreign soil. About three-quarters of the way through these repetitive essays I was exhausted with Johnson’s shrill argument. He has an academic’s surety of the correctness of his own ingrown opinions. That’s not to say I disagreed with him completely.

First, I learned a few things that I didn’t know before: I wasn’t aware, for instance, that the CIA has largely outsourced the operations part of its intelligence collection. Why then, I wonder, does Republican candidate for President Marco Rubio spout on about “increasing the size of the CIA to improve intelligence”? If intelligence collection is run largely outside the Agency, that would just put more power and money into the hands of the corporations that do the work, e.g., Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) headquartered in San Diego, Booz Allen Hamilton, and CACI International.

I knew protection and fighting (to some extent) had been outsourced. I wasn’t aware that intelligence was outsourced, though I would have thought that was a “neat idea.” I agree with Johnson that the CIA should be dismantled, but some intelligence can and should still be collected, compiled, and analyzed. If large corporations are merely recreating an extensive bureaucracy that mirror what the government did in the past but at greater cost and less accountability, it doesn’t seem such a wise idea. We would have even less oversight and guarantee of institutional depth and knowledge. Certainly there have been documented abuses by these groups during Iraq’s Abu Ghraib chapter which indicate problems with execution of U.S. intentions, and adherence to U.S. values. Johnson’s proposition is worth considering: that we leave intelligence analysis within the purview of the State Department, and collection within the myriad other organizations set up now to do that very thing.

Another thing Johnson has pointed out which I did not know is that most countries in Latin and South America (and South Korea!) apparently loathe America and want nothing to do with their military bases or anything else. Johnson says it is a result of people in those countries learning of “dirty tricks” played there by U.S. agents in the past to influence elections and business decisions. Abuses committed by the CIA have largely been tasked to them by the White House in various administrations, which just goes to show that power, especially secret power without oversight, can have a pernicious effect on values.

Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter (1977-81), whose books I have reviewed lately, was so focused on Russian containment during the lead up to Soviet involvement in Afghanistan, that Brzezinski ordered the sale of arms, missile launchers, defensive weapons, etc. to the Afghan mujahideen, which gradually evolved into Al Qaeda’s strongest allies and foot soldiers there. A number of other secret coups and involvements by the CIA have changed the course of many countries’ histories, usually for the worse. We have to ask ourselves if the outcomes had been equally bad without our involvement, would that justify those illicit actions on behalf of our government? I think it is just wiser to stay on the side of our values.

It is easy to forget that the United States only created the CIA in 1947 after WWII as a result of the successes of the OSS behind enemy lines. A recent film by the son of CIA Director William Colby, “The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby” (2011), dramatically illustrates the origins and almost immediate problems issuing from secrets created and held at the highest levels, to say nothing of the enormous damage done by double agents. We owe the organization nothing. We tried it and it did not work well. There is no reason we must perpetuate a bureaucracy that fails so spectacularly (witness the exquisite failures of the organization under the leadership of George Tenet during Bush II).

Johnson reminds us that Tim Weiner spent twenty years researching the CIA for his book Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, which I suppose I need to read before I condemn CIA's bones to the dust heap of history. That’s next up, along with Johnson’s earlier trilogy starting with Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, his bestseller originally published in the year 2000. It has gone into a second edition, with updates dating to 2003.

In closing, I wish Johnson was less of an academic in his writing and more of a reasoned scholar, if all he is going to do is talk about what needs to be done. If he were making the decisions, I wonder how he would manage. I dislike his tone intensely, even when I agree he has made a point. And I heartily disagree with his notion that Andrew Bacevich, another slaphappy and shrill academic, should be Secretary of Defense. If that’s the best he can come up with, may he retread old arguments ad nauseam to his band of the converted.


You can buy this book here: Tweet

The Cartel by Don Winslow

This is a huge book in every way—for its effects on people’s thinking and actions, in its implications for drug policy worldwide, and in the scope of its historical documentation. It is very up to date. In the remarkable interview at Politics & Prose, the Washington, D.C. bookstore published online by Slate magazine (07.13.15), Winslow describes the genesis of this book and his writing process.

For writers, this downloadable Soundcloud podcast is a must-listen for how one approaches a critically relevant subject with large amounts of historical data. For U.S. residents, this is a must-listen for its implications on recreational drug use, U.S. spending on the drug war, and Winslow's take on U.S. policy on drugs. It is worth noting that no government official contacted Winslow when the book came out, though he got plenty of response from cops--supporting him. Winslow didn’t want to write this book but he gradually came to realize he “felt like a deserter from a war” and that he could no longer turn his face away from, and neglect to speak of the violence against the innocent residents of Mexico.

“If I were south of the border, looking north, I would have questions about corruption.” [Winslow @ Politics & Prose]

Winslow’s fictional account of the drug wars in Mexico and the United States is the longest and most important of his work to date, and it is sensational in every way. Winslow has long been recognized for his ability to catch a fascinating slice of the California community, a subset of surfers relaxing into their ‘fun in the sun’ lifestyles. In this huge, sprawling duo of novels, first The Power of the Dog followed by The Cartel, we have a much more sustained effort of imagination, research, and writerly skill that aligns so closely with headlines, a reader might be forgiven for mistaking Winslow as an intimate of the Mexican drug wars. It is also a song of praise for the journalists who risked everything to cover the story. Winslow used news reports to fictionalize events in a way that gets at the motivations and the darkness and corruption on both sides of the border. This is fiction, but what fiction!

“You do not revenge a murder by killing. You revenge it by living.”

The story itself revolves around the fictional DEA cut-out Art Keller, and the head of the Sonoran [Sinaloan] cartel, Adán Barrera [Joaquin Guzman]. They had been pursuing one another for years and when Barrera escaped jail in the United States to return to his drug kingdom in Mexico, Keller came out of hiding to find him and bring him to justice. Winslow ties in actual years of drug trafficking over the U.S. southern border with a very intimate portrait of both men and their organizations. A reader will be familiar with many of the gruesome violence recounted here—so violent it doesn’t seem believable—and will be grateful to Winslow for making it personal.

“Americans take their strength from victory. Mexican strength derives from their ability to suffer loss.”

Winslow does not fail to highlight the role of women in communities throughout Mexico, demonstrating for protection by the police and army. Women often went on record about attacks against their families in a brazen attempt to shame the leaders and the cartels and to show a kind of solidarity with their community. “I have no way of accounting for that kind of courage, for that kind of moral backbone, for that kind of grace,” says Winslow [Slate]. This is a novel about the extremes of human depravity, corruption…and goodness.

“There is such a thing as evil…[and] the world holds horrors…”

Winslow’s deep immersion in research for America’s border war on drugs has led him to hold an opinion and to become a public spokesperson for a point of view on how we are managing: “things are worse than ever before.” The cartels are now advertising their violence, like ISIS, in order to spur recruitment and in order to intimidate. In the last section of this book, the cartels move from narcotrafficking to narcoterrorism, the two phenomena borrowing from one another.

In an interview in Esquire with Tom Junod, Winslow talks about his thinking on whether or not the legalization of marijuana in the United States will tamp down the cartel’s power in Mexico:

"Look, here's my stance, if that's what you're asking for. I think all drugs should be legal and I wish nobody used any of them. I have no problem with people smoking a little dope. But it always amazes me where people who are so persnickety about buying fair trade coffee, and farm-to-table beef, and about where their chicken was raised, think nothing of buying marijuana, which in all likelihood was raised by murderers, sadists, sociopaths, and in a lot of cases harvested by slave labor. So I don't want to harsh anyone's buzz, but I think that's something that we need to look at because we really are in so many ways responsible for the violence in Mexico through our schizophrenic attitude toward drugs, including marijuana. We spent billions of dollars trying to keep it out and we spend billions of dollars buying it—and it's that conflict that allows the cartels to survive. So as marijuana is legalized, the cartels are getting ready for that in terms of trying to go legit. But on the other hand, you have to understand that the cartel's product is not the drug. The cartel's product is control of the trafficking routes. It doesn't matter what the item is, whether it's marijuana or coke or meth or heroin or blue jeans or bottled water, their product is the plazas, it's the neighborhoods, it's the ability to control those trade routes, okay? So, once marijuana becomes actually legal and starts to grow more in the United States and there's no problem getting it across the border up from Mexico, there will be other products. Because the product doesn't matter."

Winslow points out that the “product” now is, in fact, stronger opiates like cheap heroin. Regarding ‘corruption’ on this side of the border, Winslow cites our incarceration problem and how that relates to racism. Drugs weren’t regulated until black people got in on the action. Then we went after them with a vengeance. Winslow sounds Pynchon-esque in his insistence that we think.

This novel doesn’t seem to be getting the critical attention it deserves. It doesn’t look, feel, or sound like a genre novel, except in its pace. If it is not on the lists of important novels published this year, it should be--should have been--in contention for the major prizes. It is a terrific work of imagination that targets important societal issues, is based on historical events, and it challenges us to do better, in our drug habits and in our spending on drug wars. What more can a reader ask from literature?

I listened to the Blackstone audio production of this book, read by Ray Porter. It is a primo listening experience, but I had a look at the book, and that’s good also. Get either, or both. You can’t go wrong here. Buy yourself and your friends a Christmas present you will never forget. Inform yourselves.


You can buy this book here: Tweet

Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera translated by Lisa Dillman

In a few pages we discover a new kind of language: "an intermediary tongue that Makina instantly warms to…malleable, erasable, permeable…something that serves as a link." It is not latin, nor anglo but in a "nebulous territory between what is dying out and what is not yet born."

Herrera immerses us in a cross-border search for a lost brother, not heard of nor heard from for too long. Makina, the sister, goes to find him, and does--but "only when [she’d] stopped looking." The journey should be terrifying, but neither brother nor sister are afraid. Their lives hold terrors enough at home: Makina survives a sinkhole on her first steps of her journey, heels backward pedaling to avoid being sent to the deep, underground.

"Slippery bitch of a city," she says to herself.

She carries little—she is coming right back—but she has a lipstick "more long-lasting than it was dark" which another woman uses without asking. "You look very pretty," Makina says to the other woman.

In the scrub from a distance Makina mistakes a bloated body with its eyes pecked out for a pregnant woman. From a distance, the corpse looks like a good omen. The crossing has ogres, the border ranchers who carry heavy pistols and angry attitudes. She is coming to look for her brother—she is coming right back.

"I don’t know what you think you lost but you ain’t going to find it here," declared the irritated anglo.

The brother is not easy to find. He has moved on but in one café the proprietress recognizes Makina: "Told me he had a sister who just by looking at her you could tell she was smart and schooled." A new direction, a slip of an address, another false lead, until finally, when she was ready to give up hope, there he was.

He has no intention to returning home, of reading his mother’s crooked scrawl saying "Come on back now, we don't expect anything from you." Makina moves then in a direction away, anywhere away but is led back to the underground space that nearly swallowed her at the start of her journey.

Deceptively slight, this novella has the weight of character unafraid and unbowed. Makina does what she needs to do and she's a smart girl. She takes opportunity when it drifts by. Issues of migration and immigration, seen from this ground level (really, underground) have a claustrophobic feel. How could it be otherwise? The language used seems a mixture of latin and anglo but understandable and perhaps more descriptive for that.

& other stories is a press I did not think I’d come across before, but this group has published Deborah Levy’s outstanding novel Swimming Home and a number of other Levy titles. The exciting author list for & other stories include important literature and writers from around the world who wish to support the non-profit philosophy of this publishing house. Check out their webpage.

A WWNO radio interview with Herrara.


You can buy this book here: Tweet

The Snowden Files by Luke Harding

Radio and TV coverage of the Snowden leaks were spotty. This book helped to fill in the details, background, and what happened since Snowden showed up in Moscow. Snowden himself, and his girlfriend Lindsay Mills, are fleshed out a little more, and I learned why an American would go to British journalists, the Guardian, with the information he had purloined. It turns out the British, specifically their top-secret telecommunications monitoring arm, GCHQ, collaborated with the NSA: “We have the brains: they have the money. It’s a collaboration that’s worked very well.” [Sir David Omand, Former GCHQ Director] No shortage of egoism and despotism to go around, then.

Snowden was a right-wing libertarian in early writings on the web as a user he called ‘TheTrueHOOHA’. It was frankly unsettling for me to read/listen to his thinking as a teen, and see his progression to action. To use his words, he would like to be viewed as a patriot who believes in the right to privacy enshrined in the U.S. constitution. When I’d first learned of his leaks, I was startled. Listening to his first interview on TV, I was admiring. After reading this book, I am unsettled.

Luke Harding, a Guardian reporter, outlines the Snowden action for us with a minimum of sensationalism but with some incredulity at the scope of the revelations. And the news is pretty sensational. Harding gives a little background into Snowden’s early development, and his foray into working as a U.S. government contractor specializing in the protection of U.S. government communications. Snowden’s amazed and amazing reach into the lives of others via their private data transfers must vindicate the paranoid. While I have my doubts that any world leader or business executive thought their telecommunications were truly secret, Snowden’s revelations are startling in the scope of the data collection and in the holes in the system, e.g., a relatively low-level contractor had access to the material.

I should probably state from the get-go that I do not fear my government. I grew up in an age where inaction was much more to be expected than action; incompetence and bureaucratic bungling was much more common than overreach. I was not subject to the kind of totalitarian control experienced in Eastern Bloc countries, the Soviet Union, or China, but we have those examples to know it can happen. I believe the president and his minions who claim that the government is not listening to the communications of private citizens. They simply do not have the capacity, nor the interest, to do that. However, they now apparently have the means, and individuals within governments can have a deleterious effect upon the stated objectives of government. Snowden has shown us a place where an individual might have an outsized effect to his purported role.

Knowing just what I know now, if I had to make a judgment on Snowden’s fate, I might say he should go to court congruently with the leadership of the NSA and the GCHQ. I don’t think it would have been possible for him to “go up the chain of command” to protest this data collection. It is ridiculous to contemplate that anyone would have listened to him, given the reaction from our fearless leaders upon learning of his revelations. But I wish things had gone differently…for him and for us.

I listened to the Random House Audio version of this title, very ably read by Nicholas Guy Smith. I had a look at the paper copy as well, and found it concise enough that the momentum never lagged. Since Guardian reporters were the ones that initially broke this story, it is reasonable that they are the ones to write the details of what happened and the follow-up. I can’t imagine there is a person out there who wouldn’t be interested in this topic. Inform yourselves. This is going to be a political topic for some years to come.


You can buy this book here: Tweet

The Book of Unknown Americans by Christina Henriquez

This fictional story recounts the immigrant experience of a vast array of Latinos on the eastern central coast of America, in Delaware. It moves in for close-ups of two families in particular, one Panamanian and one Mexican. Both families are legal immigrants, one coming to the United States for medical care, the other for opportunity.

Christina Henriquez manages to make the experiences of these two families ring true and universal. Especially interesting was the voice of Mayor Toro, teenager and younger brother to a high school soccer star. He had a lot to live up to, and his vulnerability was everywhere apparent. His interest in a beautiful but brain-damaged young woman, Maribel, in a nearby apartment led to unforeseen and tragic consequences. The chain of events had a kind of logic to them that began in ignorance and fear, and were sustained by the well-known uncommunicativeness of teenagers.

Henriquez’ use of first-person narration, changing the ‘voice’ from one chapter to another, gave the piece immediacy and truthfulness. Often we can hear an individual thinking and speaking; the overlapping points of view give the story tension and the listener can see a crisis foreshadowed long before the conclusion is revealed. The final chapter is given finally to the father of Mexican family who reveals his pleasure in the struggle they have undergone, despite its many disappointments.

The language Henriquez uses for each voice in her narrative is distinctive and reveals cultural underpinnings. The reading of the novel by an array of narrators gives the work an authenticity to which all listeners can relate. We may not have made the same decisions, but we can understand the circumstances of arriving in a land where everything is confusing and in which language is a barrier.

I listened to the audio of this book produced by Random House Audio. I was offered this title by Random House in exchange for an honest review.


You can buy this book here: Tweet

The Childhood of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee

This strange and absorbing fiction from Nobel Prize winner Coetzee has a post-apocalyptic feel. We meet a five-year-old boy, David, and a man, Simón, who have been given names as part of their relocation from where and to where, we never learn. We know only that they are refugees and that they stayed some time in a camp called Belstar where they learned Spanish in preparation for their move by boat to Novilla. People in Novilla can’t remember the past and appear to have no curiosity about it. They are kind, generous even, but appear emotionally and physically anesthetized.

The young boy David has lost his documents on the boat from Belstar so Simón determines to help him find his mother (“I will know her when I see her”). One day Simón finds a woman and offers the boy to her. She is not perfect: she has strange child-rearing techniques and is too liberal, but under the guidance of both Simón and Inès the mother, David grows a year older, learns to read, and enters school.

At this point we start to realize vivid parallels with the life of Jesus Christ as told in the Bible, for the boy begins to seem extraordinary in his grasp of or rejection of the written word, the number system, philosophical arguments, perhaps even commonly accepted ‘truth’ itself.

This slim novel demonstrates Coetzee’s mastery. The novel is both gripping and involving: who among us does not have firm child-rearing opinions? We are curious about the place David and Simón have landed and sympathize with Simón’s half-remembered passion for something outside the ordinary. The novel is almost completely dialog and yet we have a sense of the landscape, the people, and the dilemma they face. Coetzee raises important religious, philosophical, and ethical questions that have been debated over the ages but he dresses it in simple allegory rich with allusions.

From within the story we might recognize pieces of a worldview, perhaps a statement about the world today, another place where history is irrelevant.

"'I have not let go of the idea of history,' says Simón, 'the idea of change without beginning or end.' [Simón is then challenged by his workmates. Climate is acknowledged, but history is not:] 'Consider now history,' counters Eugenio. 'If history, like climate, were a higher reality, then history would have manifestations which we would be able to feel through our senses.' He looks around. 'Which of us has ever had his cap blown off by history?'"

What is Coetzee really telling us? That Jesus is a myth created by ideas, ideas from a childlike sensibility?

"‘Forgetting takes time,’ says Elena. ‘Once you have properly forgotten, your sense of insecurity will recede and everything will become much easier…Children live in the present, not the past. Why not take your lead from them? Instead of waiting to be transfigured, why not try to be like a child again?’"

Consider again Paul Murray's, author of Skippy Dies, extensive rant against today's "kidult."

Simón, the man who still remembers remembering, who remembers passion, wanting, and something more, finds himself explaining to David the meaning of a book and is caught in his own explanation: “you don’t need love if you have faith.” Ah, so.

This is a book one reads quickly and ruminates long. Remember Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil? It is an opening to the soul of an author. “Why is he continually asking himself questions instead of just living, like everyone else?”


You can buy this book here: Tweet

The Hot Country by Robert Olen Butler

Olen Butler tries something unique with this wartime spy novel set in Veracruz, Mexico in 1914. World War I was beginning in Europe, Mexico was in the midst of the Mexican Revolution, the United States occupied Veracruz after a diplomatic dispute, and Germans used money and influence to encourage the Mexican government to respond militarily to the U.S. Reporting on all this was “Kit” Christopher Marlowe, newspaper journalist and son of an aging Hollywood actress.

Using a style made famous by Humphrey Bogart in ”Treasure of Sierra Madre” and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, this noir novel follows Kit as he digs for stories in the German connection. He ends up meeting Pancho Villa and falling for a beautiful and talented muchacha but the story only seems to be getting going when this episode ends. With so much political intrigue in Mexico in the early twentieth century, it’s ripe for novelistic exploitation. This series could live a long life.

I listened to the HighBridge audio of this book, read by Ray Chase. Chase does a wonderful job of speaking Chandler-ese with a Bogart swagger, and accelerating with the action so that some chapters of fighting and tension raced. The Kit character is a likeable one, but in the beginning his journalistic seen-it-all irony and sarcasm made it difficult for me to sympathize and identify with him. The story itself was intriguing enough to pull us along until we could see Kit’s other talents.

Kit’s other skills involve the other meaning of “Marlowe,” which would be a reference to the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe. He can fight and he can act, all of which he needs before the end of the novel. There is character development to spare here, which is why I imagine it to the first of a series. Olen Butler has chosen his area well, as it is underserved in the literary mystery series market and there is as much intrigue as in any major port during wartime.


You can buy this book here: Tweet