Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi

Paperback, 288 pgs, Pub Jan 23rd 2018 by Penguin Books (first published March 2013, ISBN13: 9780143128793, Lit Awards: الجائزة العالمية للرواية العربية (أي باف) / International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) (2014), Man Booker International Prize Nominee for Shortlist (2018)

It won’t come as any surprise to anyone that this novel is about the war in Baghdad, the one which has gone on relentlessly since 2003. Saadawi won the 2014 International Prize for Arabic Fiction for this work about the people trying to—literally—piece their lives together amidst endless bombings and heavy doses of despair.

The diversity of Iraqi culture is one highlight in this novel, the first people we see in any depth being one of the large numbers of Christians, not Shi’ite, Sunni, Yazidis, Ahl-e Haqq, Mandeans, Shabak, and Bahá’í, or any other of the many religions that were commonly found in Baghdad before the war.

"I’ll tell you something. I don’t think my family were originally Arabs…I think [we] were Sabean who converted to Islam,” said Mahmoud.

Mahmoud is a journalist in a struggling newspaper. The owner doesn’t seem to care enough about news and is instead, like the rest of the city, looking for opportunities to make money. The city’s population has a large contingent of people who no longer trust in their god but have revived an interest in the astrology of their forbears.

Mahmoud gets a scoop, a digital audio archive of the man thought to be terrorizing the city’s citizens. The man, called Whatsitsname, had been created by a grieving junk man, Hadi, from the bits of people left after bombings. Whatsitsname was meant to be memorial to all the people who died but who have no bodies to bury. Hadi had meant no disrespect, and certainly never anticipated Whatsisname would come to life in the midst of a terrible electrical storm…

Lightly told, the story’s humor saves it from a reality too terrible to contemplate. Originally composed of body parts from ‘innocents,’ Whatsitsname gradually found himself replacing bits and pieces of those people he’d already avenged, eventually using parts from terrorists themselves, or criminals and crooks. This made his psychic paybacks much more fraught and complicated.

“…who’s to say how criminal someone is? That’s a question the Magician raised one day. ‘Each of us has a measure of criminality…’”

More importantly, we begin to question what it means to share destinies with others, some we do not like or do not trust, and even some people we barely know. If the coarse and criminal ‘get the girls,’ what does it mean to be chaste? As for the Frankenstein, Whatsitsname, “they have turned me into a criminal and a monster, equating me with those I seek to exact revenge on.” But he continues to exist, changing features and nature, reflecting those whose parts he attaches.

As an examination of the fragmentation that has taken place in a diverse but harmonious society when death is sown recklessly and nonsensically, this novel is a window. As a novel in the Western tradition, it manages to convey a complex psychological portrait of a city, not merely of individuals. Were it a painting, it would feature a lot of red and black. It is definitely an indication that life has not been extinguished yet, that confusion sowed is being digested, and the city may rise again.



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Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell

Hardcover, 192 pages Pub January 10th 2017 by Riverhead Books (first published 2014) Orig Title Distancia de rescate ISBN13: 9780399184598 Literary Awards Premio Tigre Juan (2015), Man Booker International Prize Nominee for Longlist (2017)

Dream is the right word for what we think we observe in this novel. Something poisonous is going on involving two mothers, their children, and pollutants that have entered the soil and water in a countryside that should nourish farmers, ranchers, and vacationers. The cycle of life has been profoundly disrupted and neither residents nor visitors can or will speak of the horror in the vacation wonderland. It looks as though some kind of paranormal witchery is being considered a kind of cure.

Americans lived through a history of environmental pollution and subsequent corporate denial for years in the 1950s-1960s until regulations put a halt to the most egregious flaunting of public health. The public became savvy, protesting when agriculture, methane, coal, oil, gas or other byproducts left a mark on their communities. But we rarely saw what happened in other parts of the world where the legal infrastructure was not as developed and the public not as well-educated in the ways profits become manifest.

Schweblin has made an extraordinarily intimate small novel speak for a national catastrophe. She has captured the somewhat insular way a mother observes and protects her child—how intimately she is familiar with every gesture and each learned behavior, connected by some psychic string, or in Schweblin’s words, ‘the rescue distance.’

The story is told in a unique way. The action is all past; a woman, Amanda, is in the hospital. She has a young boy speaking to her in imagination if not in actuality. The young boy encourages her to remember…to remember the sequence of events that led to this moment. Amanda and her child are staying in a vacation home in the country; while waiting for her husband to come on the weekends, they invite an interesting-looking local woman, Clara, and her son over to talk, play, and drink maté.

The strangeness comes from the juxtaposition of the hospital setting with green fields waving in a warm breeze, a cool creek, the hot sun sparkling on an outdoor pool, the languid slap of a screen door, a gold bikini, a young daughter chortling and repeating to herself, “we adore this.” There is unspoken menace in everything recalled by the woman now lying in the hospital, and the young boy she speaks to makes it sound almost as though she still had a choice…a choice she could make to prevent her imminent death.

A review from the Los Angeles Times talks about the introduction of genetically modified soybeans into the farming culture of Argentina. In an interview with Bethanne Patrick in LitHub, Schweblin is more explicit:

"This story could be set anywhere. In fact, the first time I heard about pesticides and their terrible consequences was through a documentary about this subject in France. But, mainly because of corruption, Latin America has the worst agrochemical regulations and agreements. And Argentina, in particular, is one of the biggest importers of soya—one of the products more related with pesticides. We spread this soya all over the world; it is the base of a lot of our food. Soya is in everything: cookies, frozen fish, cereal bars, soups, bread, all kinds of flour, even ice cream!"

The pollution already permeates the soil and water, is what Schweblin is telling us. It’s not like stopping now is going to change anything, but the tension in this novel may indicate there may be a way to forestall an inevitable end.

Originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, Schweblin apparently now lives and writes from Berlin. Fever Dream is her first novel, originally published in 2015 and winner the Tigre Juan Prize which serves to draw attention to a worthy lesser-known author. She has three story collections besides this book.


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The Invisibility Cloak by Ge Fei translated by Canaan Morse

This wonderful short novel, Ge Fei’s first translated to English, has just been published by NYRB as a Classics Original. The cover copy calls it a “comic novel” and it is...in the sense of the straight man in a comic duo undergoing relationship trouble, family trouble, and job trouble in a fast modernizing Beijing. Our hero—we only ever learn his surname, Cui (pronounced Ts-wei)—plays the straight man role to the end, never quite losing his nerve, though he comes close, while we watch helplessly.

Cui is not completely destitute, except in terms of money, love, and friendship. He has skills. He can put together hi-fi sound systems that audiofiles want to buy. When forced to move from his sister’s unused apartment one winter, Cui develops a sound system that should qualify as “the best in the world,” for any discriminating buyer in China, in hopes that the profit will give him enough to buy a small courtyard for himself to live in.

What elevates this novel is the ordinary man quality, the sense we have of a human fleck bobbing on a wind-tossed sea over which he has no control. The bad things that happen are outside of his control, and though he makes plans and efforts to extricate himself, there is a certain inexorable flow to his outcomes.

This novel is not especially dark, though it has delicious elements of horror and mystery. We become genuinely terrified when a mysterious wealthy stranger offers to buy the "best sound system in the world," but who exudes a hard inflexibility and sense of ferocity when challenged...or when asked to pay. There is some evidence that he has done damage to those that oppose him.

Who wears the invisibility cloak in this novel? Cui tells us that

"In the 1990s, Mou Qishan, the celebrity tycoon, was a household name in Beijing. He liked calligraphy, climbing mountains, and hanging out with female movie stars—all an open secret. Other rumors, however, told of his eccentric and often unpredictable behavior. The wildest story I heard was that he could show up at any event unseen because he wore an invisibility cloak…"

When Mou died, Cui bought a pair of hexagonal Autograph speakers from Mou’s estate. He used them to construct the “best sound system in the world.” It could be the invisibility cloak passed from person to person with ownership of the speakers.

When Cui’s childhood friend Jiang Songping played a joke on Horsewhip Xu, an old man in his neighborhood, Cui had a personal revelation:

"...the best attributes of anyone or anything usually reside on the surface, which is where, in fact, all of us live out our lives. Everyone has an inner life, but it’s best if we leave it alone. For as soon as you poke a hole through that paper window, most of what’s inside simply won’t hold up to scrutiny."

What do we take from this? If you are wearing the invisibility cloak, you not only cannot be seen, there isn’t much worth seeing? It does seems as though once ownership of the Autograph speakers changed hands, the “freed man,” as it were, becomes once again visible, and able to express himself “on the surface,” without us having to look through “the hole in the paper window” to their inner thoughts.

One of the more intriguing things Ge does in this novel is debunk the integrity of Jiang Songping, Cui’s best and only friend, and he does it using a pomegranate. Jiang Songping was a clever boy, but Cui’s mother could see right away he was going to be the kind of person who owned people. Jiang had a way of sounding authoritative, even when he spoke rubbish. All of us come under his spell to some degree when he states categorically that all pomegranates, no matter how big or how long they've grown, contain the exact same number of seeds, 365 to be exact. Our eyes pop a bit with this news, for who has ever actually counted pomegranate seeds, and who could dispute this entrancing fact? Later, we learn with the chagrin we share with Cui’s sister that, in fact, Jiang lied on this occasion, and perhaps on many others.

One of the more poignant moments in the book was when Cui returned to the neighborhood where he grew up and discovered it much changed:

"Human memory really is unreliable. I could clearly remember this alley being long, wide, submerged in green shade or sprinkled with white locust flowers, and nowhere near as cramped and seedy as it looked that day…As I sat on the stoop and surveyed the cluttered street under the setting sun, I felt vaguely alienated from everything."

Not all change is good...but memory is unreliable.

This is a delightful addition to the canon coming out of China today, having none of the syrupy schmaltz that earlier, more severely censored works demonstrated. Terrific translation by Canaan Morse, and many thanks to NYRB for picking this one out to share with us. Kudos to all on this one.



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Scary Vampire Stories from Simon & Schuster - HAPPY HALLOWEEN

Oh, boy, you’re in for a treat. Simon & Schuster has published a book of scary stories from our most popular fiction writers that will put you in the mood to sit around all weekend, munching through the candy meant for trick-or-treaters, and terrifying yourself enough to turn off the TV and keep your eyes peeled until the daylight brings friends to save you.

The collection starts off with Scott Smith’s “Up in Old Vermont” about a thirty-three year old waitress at a small town diner in Vermont looking to make a new life out of her broken dreams. Invited to do light housework and some cooking for an old couple she calls The Hobbits, Ally moves to the woods…far into the woods.

Sherrilyn Kenyon has a six-pager, “The Neighbors” that revives preteen terrors and parents who will not listen. In “On the Dark Side of Sunlight Basin,” Michael Kortya treats us to winter in Montana/Wyoming, where an experienced hunting guide has a Californian loser in tow, looking for a kill…Charlaine Harris gives us a couple of middle-schoolers, Susan and Taylor, a dead schoolmate, and a terrifyingly-composed teacher in “Mrs. Fondevant:” “Susan read more about vampire lore than a girl her age, of any age, should ever read.”

Kelley Armstrong takes on the vampire-doubters in “We are All Monsters Here.” Dan Chaon and Lynda Barry collaborate on a short story that is truly gut-wrenching: two single mothers living across yards of broad country meadow from one another have some weird psycho-sexual predator thing going on for each other’s children.

Rio Youers was a new name for me, but this British-Canadian writer recreates the strangely shallow cosmopolitan view prevalent in today’s plane-hopping culture. In “Separator,” an ambitious Canadian land developer hopes to cash in on a typhoon-devastated landscape in the Philippines while paying insufficient attention to the myths surrounding the customs of the country. Very creepy.

Those of you familiar with the work of John Ajvide Lindqvist will be delighted to find a story translated for you here, called “What Kept You So Long?” One is uneasy from the first sentences.

This terrific collection is edited by Christopher Golden, the American author of Horror, Fantasy, and Suspense novels for teens and adults. Someone managed to get these busy authors to pony up for a volume of uncommon perception about our fears, showcasing individuals’ talents and giving us a lasting opportunity to scare ourselves silly. Big. Bold. Vampiric.


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King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild

This book begins with the assertion of evil. It made me uneasy. I prefer to hear the facts and draw my own conclusions. But I am far less willing to grant King Leopold’s side another instant of attention after realizing that the facts had been obscured for a century or more by repression of documents relating to the case in Belgian state archives. Better that we finally uncover the ugly truth and take its lesson: unbridled greed may be the ugliest, most unforgivable, most unnecessary sin of all.

How can we not have known this horrible history? It happened only a hundred years ago. Though I am embarrassed I did not know the anguished history and perpetuation of evil in the Congo, I stand in good company. Hochschild tells us of a Belgian diplomat serving in the 1970’s Congo who learned of the atrocities by a chance remark from a chieftain recalling “the first time” of rubber collection. This diplomat-turned-historian, Jules Marchal, spent decades after his retirement from civil service investigating and documenting King Leopold’s personal fiefdom in the Congo and its long list of crimes there at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.

What does become amply clear from Hochschild’s account is how it is possible to mount a resistance to a great evil. Resistance requires exceptional people willing to bear witness, but also organization and persistence. Edmund Dene Morel, the shipping clerk who recognized in the 1890’s what was happening in the Congo, immediately called out the injustices he saw there and never hesitated in his mission to publicize it in the years that followed. Fortunately, he was an articulate man with a convincing speaking style and he had enormous drive. He managed to gather like-minded folk to himself to voice a larger protest.

The life of Irishman Roger Casement, the gay man knighted by the Queen for his work as a diplomat and later hanged by Britain as a traitor to the crown for his work as an Irish patriot, stands as an example of the strange dissociation countries in power display when someone challenges their economic and political interests. I fell in love with him a little, Sir Roger Casement, as a man of great courage and vision: he saw what men are and did not despair, though one might say that, in the end, he died of it.

Black Americans who spent their adult lives speaking out against the horror happening in Africa, the Reverend William Henry Sheppard and George Washington Williams, have finally found their way back into history. Many Christian missionaries, though notably, not Catholic missionaries, did their part in publicizing crimes in pursuit of endless demand for rubber.

What I liked most about the book was the way Hochschild brought us past the period of the Congo revelations to the present day, telling us how we could have been ignorant of the time and the period. He followed the lives of Morel and Chapman to their ends, and introduced us to Ambassador Marchal of Belgium. He follows the Congo after Leopold through its Belgian colony status to the demand for self-rule and the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the Congo’s first legally-elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He tells us of Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, Congolese President who continued crimes against his country that Leopold had begun, this time with American support.

I began to realize that some of the surviving chiefs of Leopold’s crimes were sometimes collaborators. Their behaviors have been perpetuated over the generations until there is nothing but misery left in that place. Now I understand better how a country so rich in natural resources could be so socially impoverished. The crimes continue to the present. What can be the solution to this kind of moral destitution?

I listened to the Random House Audio of this title, read by Geoffrey Howard.


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The Inferno of Dante translated by Robert Pinsky

This is far and away the best and most accessible translation I have read and I looked at several since 2010. But best of all is that it can now be listened to, as Pinsky's 1995 translation is read with great cognition by Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, Nobel Prize Winner Seamus Heaney, Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize Winner Louise Glück, and Bolligen Prize Winner Frank Bidart, in a new production cosponsored by Penguin Audio and FSG Audio. It doesn't take long to listen to, and it packs a punch, just like the original should have.

Dante's The Divine Comedy is an epic poem in three parts and was written in the 14th Century, at a time when oral traditions in storytelling were still prevalent. One benefits from hearing the work spoken aloud, as in all poetry. But in this audio presentation we get only Part I, The Inferno and not Purgatorio and Paradiso. How I yearn to learn that the latter parts will also be translated by Pinsky. I have read Part I many times, Part II once, and never Part III. I'd like to see what Dante has to say about heaven. The whole work was originally entitled Commedia, and in later centuries other artists added the "Divine." The meaning is the same: our God plays with us humans...setting us difficulties and seeing how we manage. Many of us fail.

I came away wondering if this is the version of hell that the Catholic Church promulgated and has adhered to for centuries. Wikipedia says it is, and that in fact, Dante drew on St. Thomas Acquinas' Summa Theologica from medieval Christian theology. It is grim. It is horrible. It is hell in every definition. It is so similar to what I was taught that I wonder now how it is possible that so little has changed in Church teachings and at the imaginations of our religious leaders that no one has come up with a more hellish (or even a different) scenario. How little ignorance is excuse for wrongdoing in Dante's eyes. We have only ourselves to blame, he says. How clear our human moral conundrums seem from this fiery pit.

Remind yourselves of moral wisdom, and listen, just listen to our greatest living poets read Dante.

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Mystery Girl by David Gordon

Gordon has written two novels that I know about. In each the main character is a failed or failing novelist with characteristics that range from gullible to gleefully, monstrously domineering. What am I supposed to think? About halfway through this second novel, [stomping about in rubber boots] deep in descriptions of satanic porn films, I get the distinct impression I am in some kind of weird therapy session—but not for me.

”In A Difficulty in The Path of Psycho-Analysis (1917). Freud introduces the concept of the Third Wound to describe the repeated assaults that scientific knowledge had inflicted on human conceit: first, Copernicus discovered that the sun does not revolve around the earth and that man is not in fact the true center of the universe. The second blow was delivered by Darwin: man is not set apart from the animals, not formed by a creator in His image, but is in fact a creature among others, a variation on a theme, and no longer the center of life on earth either. The final, vanquishing blow, was of course Freud’s own: his discovery of the unconscious—that immense internal sea, full of fears and wishes, memories and fantasies, whose depths remain largely unsounded—revealed the truth, that our inner world is as alien as the universe without.”

Amen to that.

Gordon could probably write anything he wanted but he decided to write a mystery novel centered on a beautiful, sexy, and mysterious mixed-race woman who, after copulating with our narrator, disappears. I am not kidding. I am not going to tell you what to think about that, but he does spend much of the book alternately dreaming about her and looking for her. Along the way we get deep in [his subconscious] Black Arts films and murders and arson.

And oh, by the way, his wife is also beautiful, sexy, mysterious, and mixed race, and she has disappeared also. And no wonder. Our failed novelist, whose taste in literature has devolved to the “funny, violent, dirty, and fast…[of] crime novels, newspaper, fashion magazines, comics and porn” serves only as breeding material but not as provider or protector. It seems he doesn’t have the goods to hold onto a wench of her proportions.

“Why can’t you write normal stories, that people want to read?” queries one of the several mixed-race babes that our unpublished novelist fantasizes about: “Why not write regular realistic stories?” Ah, but life is not realistic, our novelist argues. “Does your life have a plot?” Does time shift and “does the past erupt into the present?” Good point.

But the argument continues, this time from another character: “Let’s face it. No one was ever going to read [your novels.] People need hope and comfort. Real stories that give them a sense of meaning. Boring books like yours just upset and confuse people…” The novelist concedes this character critic has a point, but concludes that one has “to do something to fill one’s time on this planet,” and since he would not do well doing anything else, some “suicidal car salesman or lonely oncologist…would come across something I wrote in a dusty, bankrupt used bookshop, and recognize the message I left just for them…”

Well, maybe not just for me, but I get the gist. And I like it. I like him. I like this writing. He’s crazy, and funny, and has some very strange tastes in movies, but sitting in on a therapy session with him, just me and the page, is a little like watching a peep show of the human heart…its weird desires and fears. We have here a man, a novelist, at his most vulnerable. He is published but not yet “successful” in the commercial sense. And he insists on telling us how it feels. It sounds pretty realistic to me.

Keep your eyes on David Gordon. He is sui generis.


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The Serialist by David Gordon

Here’s something I haven’t done before: read two books by the same author one after another. I’d never heard of David Gordon until I came across a very funny essay by him in the NY Times Magazine one Sunday this January. In the essay he explains that his debut novel was mostly ignored in the U.S. but was widely admired in Japan, where he won three literary prizes and sold the film rights. Gordon, bewildered and mute in a country where he didn't speak the language, was hosted in Tokyo when the film came out and ushered about by adoring fans.

Gordon’s main character, Harry Bloch, is the quintessential hack writer: he did his research into what kind of fiction is selling at the bookstore chains and decided to incorporate those elements in the writing he did for different publications. Vampires and werewolves. Serial Killers. True Crime. Mystery. Urban. Soft Porn. Whatever. He’s got it all going, with ideas to spare. He even created new names and faces (!) for each authorial persona.

Harry Bloch is contacted by a serial killer, Darian, to be the ghost writer of his story before Darian is executed. Bloch acquires a teenaged “agent” and, after meeting some of the relatives of the murdered victims of his serial killer, acquires a friend and lover called Dani.

Interspersed throughout this story of the process of ghost-writing are examples of some of the work Bloch had been doing to keep food on the table. It is here we encounter vampires and soft-porn, keeping readers laughing and awake to the author’s next move. Bloch also addresses the reader directly, making them complicit in his writing: He suggests that he is trying to “establish the intimacy of first-person voice, so you’ll follow me anywhere,” and “I don’t know about you, but I hate coming to the end of a mystery.” Throughout the novel he prods us: we readers “should have figured it out by now” because he “gave us enough clues.”

Well, Gordon’s novel succeeded in this: the clues, the shifting identities, and incredibly detailed knowledge of the murders led to me suspect David Gordon/Harry Bloch, our erstwhile first-person narrator, is a serial killer while he claims to be ghostwriting for someone else.

Gordon/Bloch shows us his versatility, his charade, his cover and then led us with these asides, quite willingly, to a most grisly final couple of chapters about the reality of crime and its depravity. He wipes the smile off our mugs. I almost can’t forgive him for that. It seems unfair, somehow. We give our attention and faith to a novelist, not expecting that they will blindside us with the gruesome possibility of truth.

In the final pages, Gordon/Bloch gives us some of his philosophy about writing and life, which is: it’s not the beginning or the end of a novel (or life) that is most difficult. It is the middle. And I guess that flies in the face of most author interviews I have read, but it may be true in the case of real life. We’ll see.

Gordon reminds me a little of Jess Walter, endlessly inventive, determined to appeal, and laughing with (at?) us the same time. And he is really funny. But Gordon has an edge that bleeds.

I had to read Gordon’s second novel, Mystery Girl to see if Gordon betrays my confidence as he did in The Serialist, and if his sense of humor still keeps me rapt. Review here.


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Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright

Hardcover, First Edition, 430 pgs, Pub Jan 17th 2013 by Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN13: 9780307700667, Lit Awards: National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee for Nonfiction (2013), Andrew Carnegie Medal Nominee for Nonfiction (2014), National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction (2013)

This 2013 National Book shortlist nominee for the Nonfiction Award is in many ways a classic of investigative journalism. There is practically nothing Wright left out about the ways and means the Church of Scientology was established and how it continues. Considering the Church is shrouded in secrecy and its documents confidential, this was a strenuous bit of digging. His thoughts at the end of the book are enlightening, especially the bit about art—how this church seems deficient in artworks, though one could reasonably argue that it is based on the most convincing fiction ever written. And what is good fiction if not art?

I am not going to deny that listening on audio to this book was almost unbearable. It wasn’t the delivery nor the writing that overwhelmed me, but the subject matter. Wright begins this massive investigation with an introduction that concludes with the following paragraph:

”I have spent much of my career examining the effects of religious belief on people’s lives—historically, a far more profound influence on society and individuals than politics, which is the subject of so much journalism. I was drawn to write this book by the questions that so many people have about Scientology. What is it that makes the religion alluring? What do adherents get out of it? How can seemingly rational people subscribe to beliefs that others find incomprehensible? Why do popular personalities associate themselves with a faith that is likely to create a kind of public relations martyrdom? These questions are not unique to Scientology, but they certainly underscore the conversation. In attempting to answer them in this book, I hope we can learn something about what might be called the process of belief. Few Scientologists have had a conversion experience—a sudden, radical reorientation of one’s life; more common is a gradual, wholehearted acceptance of propositions that might have been regarded as unacceptable or absurd at the outset, as well as the incremental surrender of will on the part of people who have been promised enhanced power and authority. One can see by this example the motor that propels all great social movements, for good or ill.”

What we find, after reading or listening to Wright’s testimony, is that many people find a group, a type of acceptance, and a structure of belief that gives them guidance on how to act. Most are normal, everyday people who want to be good, and perhaps want even more—celebrity, for instance, since the Church places celebrities in an enhanced position of authority in their hierarchy. They want to be better people, to be leaders, to be listened to. Just as people flocked to read Dale Carnegie in “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” people flocked to hear Hubbard, who used many of Carnegie’s tenets in his own writings, among other things. He also used his own research to create an elaborate step program for believers, promising more power and authority the higher one rose in the levels.

Hubbard comes across as delusional, or a clever illusionist who struggled all his life to find a way to achieve the glory and attention he thought he deserved. According to documents uncovered by Wright, Hubbard lied about his military record and the illnesses he suffered. He was a science fiction writer of some repute before his stint in the military, and could research and write easily and with some coherence. He sought stability in his financial income and managed to put his skills to work creating an elaborate “religion” that required both paying for the “step” materials as well as unquestioning fealty and obedience on pain of punishment—not in the afterlife as the Christians do, but in the here and now—by imprisonment and slave labor.

It didn’t take me long to understand that Hubbard was not someone I would believe to get me across the street safely, let alone allow him to tell me how to think. But Wright goes on and on, piling fact upon data until finally he concludes that religions are seldom built on strict truth anyway but beliefs, and that most religions, when examined for their grounding in historical fact come up short. (Disclaimer: I was a Catholic once. I came to think the Catholic Church was a large, empty mitre, but that was back after I’d stopped being indoctrinated daily in my near-teens.)

No matter what Scientologists believe, Wright’s book is a damning assessment of the Church of Scientology, pointing out instances of criminal behavior and flagrant abuse still going on. These activities are so egregious that I barely had the stomach to listen to it. When we get to the part about Tom Cruise and his Church activities and behaviors, it read like a gossip column but with the libelous parts still in. Cruise denies all of it, but we get a picture of what his life must be like as a superstar. If you needed reminding never to envy someone else his/her life, you’ve got it here.

The Church probably should be stripped of its designation as a religion which, because of its tax status, keeps the church alive. The wealth mostly goes to keeping the top ranking officers in handmade shoes and designer clothes. But I just can’t bear to spend another minute thinking about Hubbard and his team—it feels like a sin.


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The Troop by Nick Cutter

I am reading this mystery way early from its publication date early in 2014 because I thought I wanted to read a horror story for Halloween. Many folks have already posted their reviews of this title, so I don’t feel like I have to wait to tell you about it.

This book would be the perfect vehicle to scare the living daylights out of an adolescent boy, since it captures many of those fears we all share but which an adult might recognize for what they are: simply fears rather than truths. Ordinary-seeming events turn toxic in this story very quickly.

A Boy Scout troop plans a weekend learning survival skills on a small and remote island off northeastern Canada. The Scout Master is the genial town doctor, and he insists the boys leave their cell phones and other electronic gear behind on the mainland so that they can concentrate on the task at hand. Unfortunately, the one shortwave radio available for the scoutmaster’s use is wrecked early on by an unforeseen visitor to the island. Things rapidly deteriorate from there.

Paralleling and periodically interrupting the straightforward action of the story are a series of documents explaining and relating the series of events on the mainland that led to the circumstances facing the boys on the island. We are even given the outcome of the weekend long before the end of the story, but read on to see how it played out on the ground.

The grisly and graphic details of the deaths that occurred are sure to keep young boys reading far into the night, for they will be able to see their friends and enemies portrayed as character types and will be able to guess who will survive and who will not. They may not be right in their guesses, which I expect will thrill them all the more.

One thoughtful Goodreads review posits that this title is targeted to juveniles and that this title would more likely appeal to boys rather than girls. She is very probably right in this, as girls have a tendency to mature slightly earlier and being the physically weaker sex, usually do not like to dwell on the ways they can be harmed. But I don’t think our reviewer gives enough credit to the author for having successfully winkled out those things that scare us (all of us) silly, for instance, worms swimming up your pee-hole. I have never met the man (or woman) for whom this is not terrifying.

That having been said, there were holes enough in the thinking or actions of the characters that the story did not keep me awake at night. But as a catalogue of those things that scare us, yes, our author did a fine job. Nick Cutter is a pen name for a popular Canadian author, Craig Davidson, who writes books that have been compared to Chuck Palahniuk. This year Davidson was longlisted for Canada's most prestigious and monied literature prize, the Scotiabank Giller. Cutter was likewise successful with this title, and has produced a popular cult novel that will be passed from hand to hand and whispered over late at night.

I thought the book entirely appropriate for 13-18 year olds. There is some bullying behaviors but the violence is occasionally so over-the-top that it can be classified in the "fears" category rather than taken for reality. There is precious little attention paid to girls or sex since this is a camp for the manly arts and the boys are focused on staying alive on an island, so their thoughts rarely stray off-site.


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