Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, by Amy Chua

What happens when an irresistible force encounters an immovable object?  This book.

The kerfuffle over Amy Chua is starting to die out, as the actual book is available.  It is now obvious that "The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" is not a parenting advice book, but more of a memoir and there is a degree to which Amy Chua "gets" that some of her parenting decisions were--how do we say this--not the Best Choices.  Arguably, some of her more obvious excesses might be excused as being her "sense of humor," which is admittedly dry.  Dry, like the topsoil of the Dust Bowl.  So dry as to have shriveled up and blown away without a trace.  Dry to the point of being not actually funny at all.

Clearly the woman is nuts, and as you read her accounts of her battles with her strong-willed daughter, you have to wonder if she likes to run head-first into brick walls as a hobby, because Sister!  She sure resists learning anything from her own experiences! 


The signs are obvious early on.  Amy Chua wants to introduce her younger daughter, Lulu, to piano when Lulu is about two years old.  Amy puts one finger on one key, plays the note three times, and then asks Lulu to do the same.  Lulu splays her hands as wide as she can, hits as many different keys as hard as she can, as fast as she can, as long as she can until Amy physically removes her from the piano.  At that point, Lulu begins thrashing and screaming and flailing.

So Amy "decides" (not clear that she's actually using any higher brain functioning at this point, but there's no word for that) to put Lulu outside into the cold to shock her into obedience.  Lulu is put outside into 20 degree weather with only light indoor clothing on. And then--did you see this coming?--refuses to come back inside, forcing her mother to self-flagellate about the fact that her tiny daughter is outside in inappropriate clothing.

At this point, it is apparent to me that the whole "Chinese mother/Western mother" thing is a distraction.  What we have is the same battle almost every family faces--when a strong-willed parent is confronted with an equally strong-willed child.  One of them is supposed to be the adult.

But Amy Chua doesn't want to learn this lesson.  As self-reported, she has a theory about the "best way to parent" and she's not going to let actual failure dissuade her from her pet theory.  Geez, this is the kind of towering intellect we want to encourage--the facts don't fit the theory, so we ignore the facts and just scream the theory louder.

Actually, that might be exactly what makes for a successful law professor at Yale Law School.

Things escalate until the inevitable moment when the child figures out the exact Perfect Storm of circumstances to humiliate her parent.  After all, the odds are in the kid's favor, since the mom has to win every argument, and the kid only has to win one.  Chua never figures out this math either.  So the stage is set for a horrible show-down in a restaurant in Moscow.  Amy orders caviar and Lulu refuses to eat any.  This is not a fight Amy can win, and most parents I know have figured this out well before our child reaches the age of 13.  In fact, this is a lesson that is often learned during the struggle to potty train.  Your kid has more control over excretion than you do.  Same with food.

So Amy tries to make Lulu eat caviar.  She orders, she threatens, she shames, and nothing works.  She stakes her entire parental authority on making Lulu eat one egg.  Who think this is ever going to work?  Only someone caught up in her need for control would fail to recognize the way she has created a zero sum situation over a single caviar egg--something that is literally the size of a pin head.  Amy is hissing at her daughter, and makes the classic novice blunder.  "People are looking at us."

Well, you might as well turn the gun on yourself and pull the trigger at that point, because if you let your kid know that you don't want people to look at you, you have given her a powerful and deadly weapon.  Which Lulu uses.  She starts to scream.  "I HATE you and I HATE being Chinese and I HATE this family and I HATE violin and if you don't leave me alone I'm going to smash this glass."  If people weren't looking before, they certainly are now.

At this point, I am trying to figure out how to get into a poker game against Amy Chua, because this woman will raise the stakes with nothing in her hand.  Because when Lulu threatens to start smashing restaurant glassware, Amy Chua says "I dare you."

So Lulu does.

And Amy Chua is the one who runs out of the restaurant in humiliation.  As she should have.  Because what she was doing wasn't parenting, it was brinksmanship, it was posturing, it was a desperate struggle for supremacy.  With a child.

Most appallingly, Amy Chua learned nothing from this experience.  Sure, she let Lulu cut back on her violin commitments and take up tennis instead, but once Lulu showed any aptitude for tennis, she started back in on her over-investedness.  And then she published this book, in which she once again exposed her bad parenting in public, and failed to realize that people would look at her and judge her, just as they did in that Moscow restaurant.  Since the publication of the excerpt in the WSJ, Amy Chua has gotten a great deal of pushback--bloggers, op-ed writers, Chinese-American parents and children, have pointed out many different ways in which Chua has perpetuated racial stereotypes and failed her children.  Apparently, she has been surprised by this.  Really?

The Mommy-sphere is a tightly wound and exquisitely sensitive environment, full of smart, articulate, successful women who worry that whatever we do is never Good Enough.  Take that group of conscientious and worried women, and surround them with contradictory and harping media about what they "should" be doing: pre-natal foreign language, Baby Einstein, breast vs bottle, cloth vs. disposable, homeschool vs. public vs. private school, daycare vs. staying at home.  Every decision, every purchase, every life choice is potentially damaging to your child's future!

Then throw in a "Tiger Mother" who comes roaring out of the pages of the WSJ to deliver a verbal bitchslap and declare her way is The Only Way.  Face it--who reads articles like this?  People (usually mothers) who care about doing a good job.  Who are then both assaulted and battered by Amy Chua's broad smear of all their efforts.  She doesn't even acknowledge that they have even tried to do right by their children.   Once again, Amy Chua has set up the perfect ingredients to create a temper tantrum.  We don't like Amy Chua and her dictums.  We don't want to be part of her family, we don't want to be like her, and we take glee in finding her weak spots and errors and tearing down her so-called "successes."

Her daughter played at Carneige Hall.  My daughter (definitely NOT raised by a Tiger Mother) has sung a requiem at Carneige Hall.  Did you know that Carneige Hall can be rented as well?

Guests at her home listened to her daughter play piano and gushed about her talent.  Well, quelle surprise!  They then went home and rolled their eyes when telling the story of the pushy woman who trotted her daughter out to perform for dinner guests.

"Tiger Mother" is not a scalable program.  If your girls were in a classroom with 20 children of Tiger Mothers, they could not all be the top of the class.

What's the logic behind pushing the music--and the dismissal of drama and gym?  Why should "be the best in everything" exclude being "the best" at a sport?  Especially since sports have things like tournaments where who is "the best" can actually be determined?

How many college applicants already have perfect GPAs and perfect SATs?  If you want your girls to actually get accepted in many of the "most elite" colleges, then they have to stand out from all the other "perfect GPA/perfect SAT" applicants.  Oh wait.  They'll get into Yale, because both their parents work there.  So I guess the whole "best in their class" thing doesn't really matter.  Cf. George W. Bush.  Legacy happens.

It's not clear to me what Amy Chua thought she was doing when she wrote this book, and what sort of reception she expected it to have.  Again, it's not clear that "thinking" is what she does.  Instead, the book reads like childbirth triggered some irrational impulse that she followed with only minimal consideration; a pattern that she repeated when she got the idea that writing it all down would be a good thing to do.  You know what Amy Chua needs?  A chill pill, and a Sassy Gay Friend.

After all, the book is selling.  But not to me.  I made the specific point of going to a bookstore and reading this specifically so there would be no financial benefit to anybody associated with this.  Plus, I'm not going to buy her husband's books either.

The Laughter of Dead Kings, by Elizabeth Peters

 Elizabeth Peters is justly best-known for the Amelia Peabody mysteries--a series based around a husband and wife team of archeologists who work in Egypt during the golden age of archeology, from the 1880s to the discovery of Tutanhkamun's tomb in 1922.  Despite all indications, this book is not from that series.

Instead, it is one of a series of contemporary mysteries staring a character named "Vicky Bliss" who is some sort of art historian, who also solves mysteries, usually involving some form of art theft.  Sadly, this book is not as well crafted as the Amelia Peabody series--Vicky Bliss doesn't have a personality so much as she has either an eating disorder or a tape-worm.  Many many scenes are of people sitting around chewing over plot developments (or lack thereof) while being fed. It's the go-to solution for ending a scene: "I'm starving. Where shall we eat?"  "We can discuss what to do next while drinking beer!"

The plot: somebody has stolen the mummified body of Tutanhkamun from his tomb in the Valley of the Kings, and Vicky's boyfriend (and former art thief) John Tregarth is the leading suspect. The two of them, plus Vicky's boss Schmidt and their Egyptian friend Feisal set out to discover the thieves and retrieve the body. There is a lot of running around Europe finding nothing before they set off for Luxor, where they still find nothing.




Eventually, however, even these clumsy characters have to stumble over some sort of clues, but for the most part they believe they have to keep their deductions secret from each other so they literally end up stalking each other until they finally all end up in the same room with the criminal.  Who turns out to be a minor, off-stage character with a long-simmering resentment of John Tregarth and so planned the whole thing to look like something John would have done.  Not sure why that was satisfying in any way, but whatever.






The best part of the book is clearly the setting in Egypt, and the best part of that is the scene in the temple of Luxor at night.  While the "detectives" can't seem to keep track of who they are following, the image of the colossal columns and statues seen by moonlight is irresistible.  In the end, the book is mostly notable for being competently written, and having an interesting enough plot to highlight the exotic location.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, by David Mitchell

I'm sure this is a great book, but frankly, I didn't like it much. Like a bad wax museum, the book poses life-like figures in attitudes of historical verisimilitude but utterly fails to give the scene life. I struggled to get through this book. It was literally work.

Jacob de Zoet is a young clerk newly arrived in Japan in 1799, with plans to work for six years to earn enough to marry the girl back home in the Netherlands. At this time, Japan remains closed to the Western world. Somehow, the Dutch East India Company has managed to arrange a single trading port outside Nagasaki--the artificial island of Dejima.

Roughly the first third of the book sets up the characters and protocols of Dejima: the company directors, the clerks, the slaves and servants, the interpreters, the Japanese magistrates and functionaries, the hangers-on. Technically, only Dutch are allowed on Dejima, but the Company takes anybody it can get, and the Japanese can't really tell Irish from Prussians from Dutch. All the Europeans are crude, obnoxious, corrupt and angling to maximize their profit from the Company by whatever means they can find. Poor Jacob de Zoet is hired to reconcile the accounts and root out the rampant embezzlement, which means everybody hates him and he is totally going to get set up to take a fall.  So, the score thus far: Decency--1; Manipulation and Venality--Everybody else.

There is probably a lot of meaning and nuance in this section, but frankly, I couldn't tell most of the characters apart from each other, and their shifting alliances and crude self interest meant that I never cared to make much of an effort. Lots of bad people, trying to outmaneuver the Japanese who don't like them anyway.  And the Japanese are racist and controlling and equally corrupt.  The sheer amount of payola that passes in each transaction--plus the all the fictional accounting entries--it's no wonder the Dutch East India Company goes bankrupt.

So, there's really nobody to root for on either side of the Dejima trades.  Jacob de Zoet is criminally naive, and so he stands out from everybody else who is trying to use him to advance their own financial crimes.  There is the Japanese midwife, Aibagawa Orito, who is at least doing something other than trying to make a fortune in trade.  So of course Jacob falls in love with her, and spends a great deal of (boring) time wrestling with the (boring) complications of cross cultural infatuation. There is also an orangutan named William Pitt.  Don't ask.

The middle section of the book takes an abrupt turn from turgid discussions about freight costs and interest on loans, and becomes schlock melodrama.  Or speculative fiction, if you are being charitable.  Poor little Aibagawa Orito. she has a burn on the side of her face after a childhood accident, and is officially considered unmarriageable.  Even so, Jacob wants to "marry" her, in the traditional way of Europeans taking "Dejima brides" and then abandoning them when they return to Europe.  Jacob is too conflicted or naive oridealistic or racist or shy or something, so he never asks.  Anyway, her family was too high status and wouldn't have allowed it.  There is also a young (Japanese) interpreter wants to marry her, but his family forbids it.  When Orito's father dies, it turns out that he was in significant debt to the Abbot Enomoto, and so Orito is sold to his monastery and spirited away to a mountain shrine which has a Terrible Secret!

Mitchell tries to heighten the mystery of the Terrible Secret by dribbling out the facts, but they are pretty easy to guess.  Fifty monks and twelve nuns live in the compound.  Two of the sisters are "chosen" each month for "engifting," meaning five to ten different monks come over five nights and try to impregnate them.  The subsequent infants are taken away, ostensibly to be given to foster families.  Instead, they are killed to allow the monks to drink their essence and live forever.  There is much Maguffin-ing around the fact that the sisters serve for 20 years, and then are allowed to descend the mountain and live with their children.  The graveyard of unmarked stones just downhill is not really a surprise, is it?  Also, there is some monk whose job it is to write annual letters that purport to be from the babies as they grow.  Orito discovers all this during her escape attempt, conveniently stumbling on the forged letters and then overhearing a particularly damning conversation, and then discovering the Top Secret Shrine of Death as well!

Plus, she escapes the monastery, but then voluntarily returns because (what a coincidence!) also that night her friend goes into labor with twins--a certain death sentence without a trained midwife.  Really, it's kind of a creepy Japanese Death Cult/Vampire story crossed with a Bruce Willis movie, and a far cry from the stultifying financial plot of the first third of the book.

Which is not to say that this section does not itself suffer from being over-written.  Orito's escape laboriously winds through nearly every room of the entire monastic compound before she gets over the wall.  Simultaneously, the poor rejected interpreter/suitor from the first third of the book is informed of the abominations at the monastery, so he too mounts a rescue mission with his old martial arts master and 10 masterless samurai.  This gives Mitchell a chance to be boring about each of the different bridges between Nagasaki and the mountain, to detail each minute alteration to the flora and fauna of the terrain, and generally make a midnight ninja raid on a Temple of Doom into a boring lecture on natural sciences.

As a sign of Mitchell's resolute insistence on making everything tedious and unexciting--just before he enters the temple to rescue the fair maiden and claim her as his bride, the poor schmuck takes a drink that turns out to be drugged, and he wakes up to find all his samurai and his old dojo master were in the Abbot's pay all along.  So there was not actually any rescue mission, there was no fight, there was no triumphal entry. . .just a drowsy little man who gets killed for his pains, and even that scene takes place off stage.

So, two thirds of the way through the book we have--venal back-stabbing and gossip on Dejima, leading to nobody actually making any money or getting off the island.  We have Japanese Creepy Secrets which are all related second hand.  We have an action sequence that isn't.  If the vulgar inhabitants of Dejima were to review this book, they'd assume that the author had difficulty sustaining his manhood--all build up, no climax.

De Zoet is still toiling away in unappreciated honesty in lonely Dejima.  Orito is still stuck up on the mountain.  The interpreter is dead.  So what the book clearly needs now is a gouty British ship's captain with delusions of forcing open Japan to British trade.  Done!

All of De Zoet's financial hygiene has resulted in only one person getting caught and removed from Dejima--a foul insect named Snitker.  Snitker has managed to worm his way into the notice of this delusional British captain, and convinced him to sail (with only one small ship) to Dejima.  By flying a Dutch flag, he can take advantage of the fact that Dejima doesn't know that the Dutch East India Company has dissolved into bankruptcy.  The ship can enter the harbor, commandeer the shipload of copper that is bound to be anchored there, and declare Japan for England.

There is much tedium about the causes and effects and treatment of gout in 1800, the specifics of which sails get raised and lowered in which order, and other boring details of ship's life.  Nobody on board the ship is particularly likable either--they are all gunning for glory or riches in one form or another, and are basically as unlikeable and venal as the Dutch and Japanese we have met so far, but with fewer syllables to their names.

Seriously, that's about the only difference.

But once the ship gets to Dejima, there is no copper to commandeer.  The negotiations with the Japanese have broken down, and the Company never sent a ship to carry it anyway.  So there is a desultory bombardment of Dejima, and some bad feeling between Snitker and all the rest of Dejima, and then the British go away and Jacob De Zoet ends up in charge of the port.  Again--lots of build up, but no pay-off.

Except!  The magistrate of Nagasaki has been humiliated by the British encroachment and prepares for is ritual suicide.  He asks the Abbot Enomoto to assist him, then cleverly poisons himself, his chamberlain, the Abbot and the Abbot's acolyte as his judgment on the Abominations at the Temple of Doom!  And they all slump to the floor while monologuing about the justice of their positions!  And thus the temple will be brought down!  And the women freed!  And immortality no longer bought at the price of murdered babies!

 Then we get some epilogues.  Jacob spends another eleven years as the head of Dejima, but since there is no trade, it's not clear what he does other than father a son and eventually meet Orito again and apologize.  Eventually he gets banished from Dejima and he goes back to the Netherlands, marries some nice girl and dies an old man the end.

To be fair to Mitchell (and I loved Cloud Atlas, so I want to find merit in this book) there are some potentially nifty metaphors that are played out in parallel.  Orito is isolated in her monastery just as Jacob is isolated on Dejima.  The secrets of the monastery are eventually made public, just as Japan has to be opened to the rest of the world.  Enomoto might be 600 years old, but the cost of keeping him alive is not worth it--just as the culture of Japan cannot be preserved because the costs of that preservation are not sustainable.

It's a novel of ideas, perhaps, and an impressive recreation of a time and place that are not well known.  It was carefully observed and the writing was well-crafted.  It was just so much work to get through this book, and I didn't enjoy it, and even in retrospect I can't endorse it.  The pain-to-pleasure ratio is way out of whack.  If you want to know about the history of Japan from 1799-1800, get a history book.  If you are looking for a ripping good read, get Mitchell's book Cloud Atlas instead.

Naked Once More, by Elizabeth Peters

I listened to this* because I love Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody series--fun mysteries steeped in the the minutiae of archeology and Egyptian history.  This is the first book of a different series, featuring former librarian turned novelist Jacqueline Kirby, and it's just not as good.  The mystery is entirely reliant on the arcane feuds of authors and agents, and is set in a rather loosely sketched contemporary "small Southern town" it lacks the exoticism of location and time that Amelia Peabody books have going for them.

The plot starts with the discovery of a car accident crime scene in this small Southern town, and the missing body of an author named Kathleen Darcy.  Darcy wrote a best selling debut novel called "Naked on the Ice"--a sort of "Clan of the Cave Bear."  After seven years,Darcy is declared legally dead and a sequel is authorized by her heirs.  Jacqueline Kirby is chosen over several other authors considered for the job, and she moves to Pine Ridge (or whatever it's called) to research Darcy's remaining papers and to start the writing process.  Things start going badly: anonymous threats, break-ins, and clumsy attempts on Jacqueline's life.  When a book seller is found dead under a toppled book shelf, Kirby finds she has to solve the murder and the mystery of  what happened to Darcy seven years ago.

Peters assembles a large cast of characters, or as they are known in the business, "suspects."  Before we even get the the question of the author, we are introduced to Jacqueline Kirby, her old agent Christopher, her new agent Bouton (or "Bootsy" as she calls him), the subordinate assigned to Kirby named Sarah, the other four authors who are competing to write the sequel, and Patrick O'Brien, a cop and former lover of Kirby's.  There are the Darcys--Mom, who has gone completely potty; Kathleen's siblings St. John, Sherry and Laurie, and Laurie's husband and three kids; as well as the the family's lawyers--three generations of Craigs.   There are Tom and Paul, the models for the rival hunks in "Naked on the Ice."  Tom and his wife Molly run the inn where Jacqueline stays, Kevin the busboy, Mrs. Sheridan annoying deaf woman who is a "regular" at the inn, and a few townspeople with walk-on roles.  None of them ever snaps into focus as a real character, so there's really no reason to try to guess whodunit--they are all fungible.

Approximately two-thirds of the book goes by before there is any sense of urgency or plot.  Jacqueline has to get selected, do publicity, move to Pine Ridge, read through Kathleen Darcy's papers, begin to draft a book outline, and meet all the characters/suspects.  Sure, there is something fishy about Kathleen Darcy's disappearance, which has been ruled a suicide, but Kirby's too busy meeting deadlines and fending off unwanted dinner invitations to look into it.  There is also a lot of ink devoted to the logistics of how she will get her mail without tipping off media about her location--this is just as boring as it sounds.

Things don't actually get going until poor Jan Wilson, the book store owner, is found dead.  The bookcase on top of her body was heavy enough to have killed her, but it had been secured into the floor with three inch bolts.  And Paul calls her "Kathleen."  Yes, there is reason to believe that Kathleen isn't dead--or wasn't until this happened.  And Kirby has to figure out who tried to kill Kathleen seven years ago in order to solve this murder and keep anybody else from being killed.

This is where the esoterica of publishing gets to be important.  Kathleen Darcy left a will, made two weeks before her "death" with elaborate instructions for how a sequel should be pursued, and something about the percentages of sales constitutes a motive to kill her before she wrote the sequel. It turns out that Kathleen planned her own disappearance and planned to be the writer who was chosen to write her own sequel.  But since her new identity as an author didn't use Bootsy as her agent, she got tricked out of the assignment.  So she was mad and wrote threatening letters to those who manipulated the process.  So, it turns out that Bootsy was the one who tried to kill her back in the day because she had warned him she was going to fire him as her agent.  So he cooked up some elaborate plan (?) to kill her before she fired him (?) so he could keep getting his percentage of her book sales (?) and then use one of his own writers to develop a sequel.  But for some reason he panicked and thought the book store owner was actually Kathleen Darcy so he killed her before she could reveal what he had done?

I don't know--I was hoping it was the ditzy, pregnant inn-keeper's wife who would turn out to have been jealous of the successful writer who had used her husband as the model for her Main Hunky Character.  That would have been more interesting in my opinion.

Competently written, with some interesting insights into the workings of literary business, the book suffers from an abrasive main character, few memorable characters, and a meandering plot where pages go by but little seems to happen.  Not Peters' best work.
 
I wouldn't endorse this book, but I can endorse another Jacqueline Kirby book: The Murders of Richard III.  That one was fun.
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*See how I did that?  Got it from Audible.com, read by Barbara Rosenblatt, who is generally delightful and has been known to improve a book with her gifted acted.  Can't say she succeeded this time, however.

The Passage, by Justin Cronin

What makes this the "go to" book of the summer? Why is this book the hyped product it is? A more perceptive question might be "why is this even a book?" I ask, because it reads like a recap of a television mini-series. That is not a compliment.

This monster book clocks in at over 800 pages on my nook, and at that is only the first of a projected trilogy. The book skips around to many stories. Ideally, this gives us multiple perspectives on the action; in reality, it just forces us to meet and attempt to care about a bunch of two-dimensional characters with all but predictable back stories who get killed.

Of course they get killed--it's a vampire book.

At least, it's a book which contains vampire-type former-humans. Sometime in the near future, a professor's wife died. So instead of trying to cure or prevent the disease that killed her, he chooses (as so many people do) to travel to South America and find a virus or immortality. Because that does--what does that do for him? I mean think about this for a couple of seconds. Professor Lear lost his wife, and he doesn't want that to happen again? Well, she's already dead and this doesn't bring her back. If Lear becomes immortal, then he would get to watch everybody he knows die--again, not really the outcome one would be looking for, given his back story. So, what if he finds the key to immortality, and makes humanity immune to death and disease--Paging Dr. Malthus. Dr. Malthus, please answer your page!

I mean sure, Harvard-trained medical personnel can be arrogant and oblivious, but surely this guy thought about this for a couple of seconds. I mean, he had to have filled out some paperwork to get a grant, right? Surely there was some time he had to fill out a form that asked him the purpose of his research, and simply saying "immortality" is not going to be enough.

But Cronin doesn't go beyond the glib armchair psychologist explanation to create anybody who might be a nuanced and recognizably human character. No, Lear has a dead wife in order to conduct the mad experiment so the book will have vampires. And in approved movie cliche fashion, the military gets involved. And all does not go well.

This fall into cliche is so disappointing, because Cronin started off with such delicacy and nuance. Two of the stories in the beginning of the book are heartbreaking and exquisitely crafted stories of desperate humanity that totally absorbed me.

In the first section, Cronin gives us a moving series of vignettes about a slipping down life--a young woman named Jeannette who had a brief affair with a traveling salesman and wound up a single mom. Without a high school education, Jeanette ended up working poorly paid jobs, forced to leave her daughter at home alone since she couldn't afford child care. Barely making it by working two jobs, she loses one when her co-workers find out she leaves her very very young child unattended. After losing that job, she can't keep up her rent payments, and ends up living in a crummy hotel and turning to prostitution to keep herself and her daughter fed and housed. A snotty frat boy picks her up, clearly intends to have her service the entire fraternity, won't take no for an answer, so she makes a (another) bad decision and pulls a gun to get away. Of course, she kills him, and that's all she wrote. Even Jeanette can see the writing on the wall.

So she goes back to the hotel, takes her little girl (named Amy) to a convent, and pretends that she's coming back in a couple of hours. Even at age 6-ish, Amy knows she's not coming back.

That was excellent writing--sensitive to the harsh realities of a life out of control, articulate about Jeanette's deep love for her daughter, and the cruel way life can turn out. So I had some real investment in this book, because Cronin had shown me what he could do--he quickly and deftly sketched the arc of a desperate life, capping it with the heart-breaking scene of a young girl who knew she had been abandoned.

But suddenly, we are reading a cryptic series of emails from Lear who is somewhere in South America on an expedition searching for something that isn't really explained. The military gets involved, and is doing some security for the academics, as well as having some hidden agenda that Lear isn't smart enough to pick up on. And here I was a little sceptical, but not yet jaded--because I knew this was a vampire book, but it was light-years from sparkly emo kids moping around the Forks High School. This was cynical--the military wasn't involved out of the goodness of their hearts after all. Vampires as super-soldiers! If you could get a rapid-healing immortal soldier, you wouldn't have to keep recruiting and training new soldiers! It would make warfare more cost efficient! As a reader, I was enjoying thinking about all the ways this could go bad--because really, there was no way that a clueless academic trekking through rain forests with military escort wasn't going to go wrong.

Then we get the story of Carter, a man on death row. Another desperate, slipping-down life with a hint of hope that is dashed. The scene where Carter meets the woman he is accused of killing is wry and smart about the toxic mix of race, sex and class. Carter is begging at a busy intersection in Houston (I think?), holding a sign that says something like "Anything will help, and God will bless you." A white woman in a shiny SUV pulls up and opens the window. Cronin deftly contrasts the blinding heat where Carter is standing with the cool interior of a leather covered SUV. But the woman can't find any cash in her purse, and is clearly at the end of her own emotional tether. She NEEDS to give this man some money because she NEEDS God's blessing.

As she continues to fumble, the traffic light changes, and the drivers behind her get impatient. Carter can see the disaster brewing: a poor black man talking to a rich white woman is not going to get the benefit of any doubt. And indeed, as soon as the first white male driver gets out of the car to investigate the delay, the cry goes up "That man is trying to carjack that woman! Get him!"

So much about the worst of our own instincts is in play in that scene, and yet everybody is not only recognizably human, but arguably trying to do the right thing. And yet it all goes so horribly wrong--the disaster is inevitable. It is Cronin's skill with these scenes that made me so excited about this book, and the fact that he abandons this excellent writing and substitutes "competent TV quality thriller writing" that so disappointed me about this book.

As the story develops, we learn that some Agency guys are recruiting death row inmates for the secret vampire/immortality experiment, and Carter is one of them. One of the Agency guys is losing his taste for this work, and completely loses it when he's sent to pick up a little girl--Amy. (Of course, he has to have a back story about losing his only child to a terrible disease, because without some sort of traumatic history like that he wouldn't be bothered by turning an orphaned six-year old over for military medical experimentation, right?) But Amy isn't just any little girl. Apparently she has some unexplained ability to talk to animals or something, and her first trip to the zoo results in animals escaping their cages trying to get close to her. And despite the fact that this is the first time she's ever been near animals, she knows what happened, and it has to do with "what I am." And this is BEFORE she gets injected with vampirism.

There are some nicely done touches about the progression of the American Security State, and some nice atmospherics in the Sooper Sekkritt military station in Telluride, but really the point is to get the vampires created and then loosed on the population. And poor, sad, little Amy with her Peter Rabbit stuffed animal for poignancy. How many Secret Military Vampires are there? There seem to be twelve (or "Twelve" for maximum Biblical resonance), although there is a subject "Zero" who might have been one of the scientists who originally went to Bolivia, and Amy as well, so fourteen?

The expected disaster happens, the nasty vampires get loose and turn every tenth victim into a minion vampire, exponentially decimating the population and increasing the number of vampires. Nuclear weapons are deployed. Amy and the Agency guy with a conscience ride out the first year of vampire mayhem in an abandoned camp in the Cascade Mountains. This allows Cronin to show us only glimpses of the massive upheaval caused by the vampire virus. The plot then skips ahead some 93 years into post-vampire apocalyptic society.

This is potentially a major problem, because once again, we are forced into learning about a whole bunch of new characters who are all likely to get killed off. Again. If not by the vampires this time, then by the fact that the technology that keeps their little enclave safe is starting to wear out. That and the nasty way small towns have of forcing people into too much intimacy. So in this section we get a narrative of WWII-style evacuation of the children, followed by post-apocalyptic social structure and survivalism, lightly seasoned with Sinclair Lewis social analysis. This is where I'm thinking Cronin must have watched Lost.

Events transpire, and it doesn't much matter what they are, but they result in a Small But Hardy Band of young people set out on a Quest, along with Amy. That Amy. Yup. Same one. Because remember when I said we were forced to learn about a whole bunch of new characters? We are, but we are also constantly meeting the old characters from the first third of the book. In fact, time after time, people disappear or die, only to pop up again later. Amy is the first one, but not the last.

[This gets so bad, that at one point Our Small Band of Heroes recognizes somebody, and I can't even remember who he is or why I should care about him. He was just one of the many many people who had disappeared earlier in the book, and I decided not to bother going back, since this time he died for real anyway.]

Do we care about the members of the Band of Heroes? There is the boring guy with mother issues who is the leader (one reviewer called him "as exciting as a Sears shirt model"--nice!); a weapons expert who happens to be female; a pregnant woman looking for her lost baby-daddy; a younger kid in silly sneakers (comic relief, I think, although he's not actually funny); a mechanical whiz who can fix anything; a nurse who's pining for the shirt model; some dude with a beard; and Amy, (who now looks to be about 15), the psychic vampire whisperer. And none of them really rise about their cliches. And once they are on The Road (with apologies owed to Cormac McCarthy), we get all the brilliance of cliffhanger TV writing.

Using old maps from pre-Vampire days, Our Heroes head out to Las Vegas. The experience is a West Coast sort of Planet of the Apes, where Cronin can show us the ruined remains of the landmarks we know, only less movingly, since who's going to get verklempt over a 1/2 scale Eiffel Tower with views of the airport?

Once in Los Vegas, they end up trying to find safety from the vampires who infest the city. So of course they don't go find a defensible industrial kitchen in the basement of a mega-casino hotel--you know, some place with limited entrances as well as bright lights that will keep the vampires away. No, instead they go up several floors to a large suite with floor to ceiling windows, because there's no way a vampire won't break in dramatically through the glass and snatch one of their number away.

Oh wait. That's exactly what happens.

Not only does it happen, but it happens as the climax to some emotional drama between members of the Band. Accusations, emotional conflict, resignation, resolution of the confl--oh no! Vampires! Our Heroes are lost, alone in the dark, almost certainly going to be attacked by swarms of vampires when--hello! What's this? A para-military vehicle with bright lights appears out of nowhere in the nick of time and scoops up Our Heroes, saving them from an almost certain death! I can see the way it would look on screen, because we've all seen it so many times: ominous situation, bright light appears out of the gloom, hazy figures moving behind the bright light. Are they friend or foe? Tune in tomorrow!

We go to a compound of several hundred people living in an old prison. They are all nice, and smile all the time, and all the women are pregnant. Our Heroes are convinced there is something off about this situation. Of course there is! There are old men, young girls and pregnant women--it's a polygamist outpost of LDS!

Well, maybe it is that too, but it turns out that it's also a sort of human farm for one of the original Twelve. Once a month, Babcock requires the people of The Haven to give him four cattle and two humans, and Babcock protects them from all the rest of the virals. It's a Faustian bargain, perhaps, but it's kept this group of humans alive for a hundred years.

Our Heroes have nothing but contempt for this system, of course. These people aren't human, they're collaborators! But wait a second--what gives them the right to any sort of moral high ground? Because within a few pages, they find the two humans being offered to Babcock are friends! One is the missing Baby-Daddy who is also the brother of Sears Shirt Guy! The other is somebody who I can't even remember who he was before he showed up here! So they move in with weapons and kill several of the Haven residents in order to save their own friends.

Let's do the math. Haven residents offer 2 humans (and 4 cows--does no one care about the cows????) in order to save the lives of the remaining hundreds=BAD. Heroes kill 2 humans in order to save their 2 friends=GOOD? I mean, one could have a principled belief that if Haven didn't have this arrangement, they would all have died a hundred years ago, and hundreds of people would never have been born. If the calculus is 2 lives versus 300 lives, clearly the Haven solution is not completely unconscionable. But instead of exploring the moral quagmire living in such a system entails, Cronin goes for the Captain Kirk/Star Trek level of moral examination and declares this is BAD and so anybody who gets killed in Our Heroes' escape deserved it anyway.

And just to heighten the melodrama, the 4 cows and 2 humans don't just get thrown outside the walls, or tied out by people who skulk away and refuse to examine their actions--which would force the reader into an examination of how far a human being will go to survive. No, that wouldn't be sufficiently cinematic. So Cronin writes up a sort of Thunder Dome, where all the hundreds of people of Haven stand around a rigged up Coliseum, chanting in unison and calling for blood. You're getting tired of me saying this, but we've seen this before!

But have we seen anything like when Our Heroes come down from the ceiling vents and throw a grenade, only to be tossed back by the explosion? Why yes, yes we have. It's like outrunning a fireball--good guys don't explode, no matter how close they are to the epicenter. It's all about the visual. Or how about the part where somebody tries to stop A Hero from disrupting the event, and so shoots--only to hit her in the leg, which doesn't slow her down at all? Bad guys = bad aim, check. Bad guy + bad aim + bad decision of not taking a second shot? Check, check and check. So Our Hero, only minimally slowed down by a bullet to the thigh, manages to rescue her Hero Boyfriend, maneuver through a stampeding crowd, climb onto a train that doesn't stop, and only later gets even a compress to stop the bleeding.

Oh yeah, notify the Nobel committee--because this is literature.

We've seen it--sure, it's competently written, and it's somewhat engaging, but it's kind of like Lost with blood-suckers instead of smoke monsters. Episode after episode of people trying to survive, facing various threats to their existence, salvaging what they can and trying to survive in the wild, with some added mumbo-jumbo to make the story seem larger.

I have a few questions about this sequence that are not answered.

• Babcock and the dreams--Apparently, Babcock projects dreams about the woman he killed that got him onto death row back in the olden days. Somebody spends days and weeks trying to get Baby-Daddy replicate the murder in his own dreams: to pick up the knife and kill the fat woman the way Babcock had. He refuses to do so--and we're lead to believe that B-D was unique in his refusal to do dream-murder. Is this why he becomes one of the sacrifices? But the other sacrifice is also originally from the Colony--so why did the dream matter, since outsider status is apparently enough to make him the victim?
• Why does the rebel leader trying to escape from Haven give a powder to Fix-It Guy when she takes him out to repair the escape vehicle? There is some discussion about how it will eliminate the fat lady dreams, but it's not like he was going to be sleeping anytime soon--he's supposed to be going to fix a train.
  
• Sex with willing young women makes you immune to being a sacrifice? How do they find anybody who qualifies then? What are the selection criteria anyway?

Okay, now seriously? Seriously? Justin Cronin is going to have Our Heroes drive a car alongside a speeding train so they can jump into the engine? How many westerns have this scene, where somebody is trying to match the train speed by riding a horse? Same thing, only with a Hummer. I think I even remember something like this in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

Then there is a Damsel in Distress who is too afraid to make the jump and gets dragged off by the virals? The technique is supposed to heighten the suspense--will Our Heroes suffer the same fate? The problem is that the damsel was actually a Star Trek red shirt. There was never any question that the Heroes were all going to jump successfully. I won't even mention the uncoupling of all the train cars, so that only the people in the engine survive, but I do have to mention the fact that hundreds of people just died BEFORE YOUR EYES and all Cronin does is give us a Bad Ass Action Figure Quip: "They were already dead, long ago."

Then, after all Our Heroes make the jump, the train manages to travel unimpeded for 400 kilometers on century old train tracks. Frankly, I find that unbelievable--nobody has been maintaining the rails for a century, and you get 400 kilometers without a popped spike, a silted over or decayed track that would cause a derailment? Oh, no, Cronin can't afford to have that kind of obstacle, because he's got to get his Heroes to Telluride before winter, and he needs them to cover that distance. But just in case that seemed too easy, he has one of the characters suddenly notice a hatch.

The dialog goes something like this:

Comic Relief Guy in Silly Shoes: Wow! We just escaped from a literal cloud of vampire virals with no losses of Main Characters and now we are ostensibly safe! Now we are going to abandon this train and head off on foot to the mountains. So of course, since it doesn't matter, I'm going to do something that I have no reason to do, and I'm going to notice that there is a hatch here on the underside of the train engine. Since I'm not the Fix-It Guy, I have never taken the least notice of anything remotely mechanical, and there is no reason I should notice this particular hatch. So I'm going to. What's that hatch?

Fix-It Guy: (shrugs) Don't know, don't care, doesn't matter because we are abandoning this train and going on foot to the mountains. But I happen to have a wrench if you are curious, although there is no reason you should be curious, especially after just narrowly surviving a cloud of vampires and sending hundreds of people to their gruesome deaths so we could escape.

Bad Guy (with gun pops out of the hatch): BOO!

This is literature? This is what an English professor with an MFA from Iowa actually put into his novel? A Bad Guy who jumps out of a hidden spot and kills one of them? I swear to god this is an exercise in how many TV Tropes Cronin could fit into one book. When will we get the "Cool Guys Don't Look At Explosions" scene?



Then we are back to the "Wagon Train West" storyline--eight people (about--it's hard to keep track of how many paper thin characters are on this journey) are headed on foot to Colorado. Cronin does some desperate vamping to account for the number of days this takes, until they inexplicably find a nearly intact farmhouse, where the Pregnant Lady and her Baby Daddy decide to go no further. I think there was a scene like this in Lonesome Dove, where two people separate, uncertain that they will ever see each other again in this life. You can imagine the mixed emotions on both sides--the people who are staying not certain if they will survive the coming Colorado winter, the ones traveling on not certain if they will come back this way again.

Cronin give us: Peter has a hissy fit that his brother didn't stand on the porch and watch them all the way out of sight.

A small thing, but it had seemed important to Peter that Theo remain where he was, standing on the porch, until the six of them were out of sight. But when Peter looked again, his brother was gone; only Mausami was there.

When the sun was high they stopped to rest.

That's it. That's the epic emotional scope. I guess Peter was wearing his whiny underpants that morning. Geez, the McKenzie brothers showed more genuine distress over separating in Strange Brew. Too bad I can't find a clip of that.

The book goes on. There is a Lost Garrison that feels like something lifted from Dances with Wolves and F Troop. Female Weapons Expert becomes a member of the military, hunting out nests of vampires, Fix-It Guy joins the motor pool, Nurse gives up pining for Sears Shirt Model and falls in love with Bearded Guy. Lots of meals eaten in the mess tent as winter approaches. Eventually, Sears Shirt Guy and Amy go alone to the mountain where the original experiments took place, and they find. . .Ancient Magic Black Woman who just happened to be the nun who took Amy in over a century ago. She can explain all the missing plot elements, plus she has both a vampire antidote AND a small nuclear bomb!

Our Heroes use both, and it turns out when you kill one of the original Twelve, all the vampires they created die as well! So now humanity can be saved if they only find the original Twelve (or Thirteen? How many were there--do we count Zero?).

But it might be less than Twelve. See, it's starting to occur to people that maybe it wasn't such a good idea to give vampire super-powers to homicidal maniacs. But Zero was a scientists, so maybe he's different? And Carter wasn't actually a murderer (it turns out), but a victim of "Texas justice." Plus, Female Weapons Expert got bit, got the antidote, and she's mostly still human but super strong, so maybe there's a cure? Except that Amy destroyed the other vials of antidote, so what was that all about?

And then Our Heroes all re-unite and head to Roswell, where the Lost Garrison winters. Even New Mom (formerly Pregnant Lady) and Baby Daddy leave their idyllic Little House on the Prairie existence and join them. And the book ends with the information that Nurse's journal was found at the site of the Roswell Massacre. Because there's got to be a cliff-hanger.

There are about four cliff-hangers, actually, none of which I find myself caring about.

In the end, this is a book I felt betrayed by, because of the bait-and-switch. If it had all been Lost, with Bloodsuckers I would have been less irritated, because I would have gotten a perfectly serviceable summer thriller. I tend not to read many of those, but there is definitely a place for well-executed adventure novels. But when it started out as so much more, I was fooled into expecting that I was getting something really wonderful--like maybe a Michael Chabon-level genre-bender: the Kavalier and Clay of vampire novels. As it is, I got something that will doubtless be incredibly successful, but ultimately fails to live up to the promise I had been lead to believe would be there.

Before I Fall, by Lauren Oliver

Is there a particularly rich seam of YA fiction available just now? Because on the heels of 13 Reasons Why and When I Reach You I met this book, which also struck me powerfully.

Snarkily billed as Groundhog's Day meets Mean Girls, this is the story of Sam Kingston, one of the "it" girls of her high school. She has three Very Best Friends, is dating the "it" boy, and has decided to sleep with him the evening of "Cupid Day"--a version of Valentine's Day. It is not a spoiler to say that she dies, however--the prologue explains it. The first chapter chronicles the last day of her life, before she knew it was going to be the last day.

As one of the popular girls she describes herself and her friends as (paraphrasing here) "we laugh too loud, we play too hard" but she feels that she's living life to the fullest. She goes through the day collecting Cupid Day roses, and goes to the Big Party that night. Her boyfriend drinks too much, which turns her off and she goes home with her friends. On the way home, they are in a car accident, but she wakes up the next morning in her own room. Sam is surprised, since she doesn't remember anything after the accident--and then she finds out its Friday. Again.

Oliver does a nice job of taking us through each of the next seven reiterations of "Cupid Day" without repeating--she gives us several events that serve as signposts so we know where in the day things happen. Yet Sam doesn't just repeat the day--for several days she tries to avoid the accident, including by not even going to the party at all. However, while she is safe, she finds that another girl in her class has committed suicide that night--and she still wakes up on Friday morning.

The lessons Sam has to learn are not anything new--appreciate your family, your actions affect other people, sometimes the right boy is NOT the boy you think it is. Oliver delivers these lessons in a way that makes them feel like Sam is really learning them for the first time, and the repeated day allow us to see all the ways Sam might have become a different girl based on her choices on that single day.

I really enjoyed this book, as it is clever, well written, and offers an unsentimental look at a believable teenager and her life. At the same time, Oliver deftly sketches out the better human being Sam could have become, and actually does become, if only for a few hours on the last day of her life. Thought provoking and worth a look.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, by Steig Larsson

And so we come to the end of this "Millenium Trilogy," the oddest international publishing sensation of the last few years. It started with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which I hated, continued with The Girl Who Played With Fire, which I hated fractionally less, and finally resolves with this most recent entry. Yes, I read it. Yes, I felt like I was buying the literary equivalent of Twinkies when I picked it up. I read it for the sake of completeness, because if I'm going to hate on it, I should at least get the full story.

Did I hate it? No, actually, I didn't. But I still don't get why this is so damn popular.

Word on the Internet has it that Larsson considered this a single novel, and it was his publishers who broke it into three separate books. Larsson's name for it was "Men Who Hate Women," which has the advantage of being accurate at least. Viewed as a single work, it is clear that the story is really about Lisabeth Salander and how an unconventional woman systematically runs afoul of a conformist society. Part of the "problem" is that she is a woman, and in Larsson's world, there is an awful lot of violent misogyny. However, it isn't clear that Salander's story would be any different if she were a man: after all, there is a lot of violence generally throughout these books, and while I felt there was a special nastiness in the treatment of women, pretty much everybody gets beat up one way or another.

In Dragon Tattoo, Salander is a secondary--and probably more like a tertiary--character. She assists Mikael Blomkvist solve a mystery using her mysteriously excellent computer skills. Oh, she's a hacker? And that's how she gets personal information on suspects? Quelle suprise. Except not.

In Played with Fire, we learn that Salander is the off-spring of a violent criminal who is protected by the Swedish government because he defected from the USSR, and was considered to be a valuable source of counter-espionage. So whenever his violent and criminal dealings became public, someone from a super-secret branch of government would come and cover it all up. One of the things he did with horrible frequency was to show up and beat Salander's mother--the final time so badly as to cause permanent brain damage. Salander couldn't get anyone to help them, so she tried to kill her father with a home-made Molotov cocktail. She was about 12 at the time.

Via the hush-hush machinations of the super-secret spy department, Salander was declared mentally ill and locked up in an asylum where she may have been sexually abused. She was eventually released, but placed under guardianship in order to keep her from revealing anything about the super secret spy club. Even after the fall of the USSR, the spies couldn't allow her to say anything that might jeopardize their organization, so when her (nice) guardian had to retire for medical reasons, she was placed under the care of a Spy Doctor, who did sexually abuse her.

Hornet's Nest picks up where Played with Fire ends, after Salander has attempted to kill her father before he kills her. Both of them end up surprisingly not dead, and placed in hospital rooms very close to each other. Salander remains the primary suspect in multiple murders and is kept from her computers, but oddly isn't actually guarded in any way for quite some time. This raises the odd plot device where her father tries to finish her off while the night shift nurses aren't watching. As an American, I can only marvel at the trusting nature of Swedish law enforcement depicted here. They don't even seem to be afraid that she might escape.

Once she is safely locked into her hospital room, Larssen mostly just leaves her there while the book follows an ungodly number of different groups of people investigating the mayhem that trailed in Salander's wake. At least two different groups of police officers, the super secret spies, the prosecuting attorney's office, Blomkvist and I don't even know who all else are all running around trying to eavesdrop on each others' conversations to find out who knows what about what really happened. I actually found this the most enjoyable part of the books--people began to act the way normal people act, with a whole lot less of the gratuitous hyper-violence of the first two books.

Not that the violence has completely disappeared. No, there is the sickening story of illegal Russian immigrant women who are simply locked in a room and left to starve to death, and there is the continuing saga of the thugs of the motorcycle club who do a lot of dirty work for whoever will pay them. But there is so much less of it, and hardly any of the extended sequences that should have left everybody dead! It's almost refreshing.

I'm pretty sure no one will be surprised to find that Salander is vindicated by the end. There is some slimy trial work in which the head of the asylum where Salander was imprisoned tries to get her re-committed: he's also in the pay of the Super Secret Spies. He attempts to smear her with her claim that she was abused by her guardian--since that obviously couldn't have happened. So Salander's attorney gets to show the video Salander made of the last attack--one that was so violent, and lasted so long, that Salander passed out during it. Thank god the judge is sickened by it--given the kind of men who live in Larssen's Sweden, he might have thought that was perfectly normal behavior.

There is an entire subplot about Erika Berger that seemed unnecessary to me. The editor of Millenium, and Blomkvist's life-long "friend with benefits," Berger is offered the position of editor at a large and prestigious newspaper. She takes the job, and of course experiences push back from the Old Boys (there are no girls at all?)--not because she's new of course, but because she's a woman. While she's getting accustomed to her new job, over at Millenium somebody's doing an investigative piece on why toilets cost so much in Stockholm. Turns out that Erika's new boss is grossly overpricing his imported toilets, so that's why real estate is so expensive.

Yeah, I didn't follow it entirely either.

Anyway, Erika's friends at Millenium show her the piece so she's not blind-sided. She steals the piece to publish in her newspaper, confronts her boss who won't roll over for her high-minded ideals, so she quits and goes back to Millenium. And everybody lives happily ever after. Blomkvist gets a new girlfriend--a weight-lifting Amazon who just can't get enough of him. Salander goes back to her old girlfriend; Erika is still married to her husband and still sleeps with Blomkvist when he doesn't have a girlfriend. The super secret spy network is dragged into the light, and Millenium finds something to fill the space other than expensive toilets. And the people of Stockholm are once again safe.

So, now I've read the whole thing, and I have to say I don't know why this has been such a break-out hit. I mean, of all the books published in the last three years, why is this the series that everybody is reading? You see these books plastered all over airports and book stores and even grocery check-out lines, and I just don't understand the global passion for these books.

So, I don't recommend these at all, and if you know anybody who wants to know if they are worth reading, send them over here and I'll tell them how they end. After all, life is too short to read worthless books.

Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell

This is a Very Popular Book with a Big Message. Gladwell purports to study outrageously successful individuals--those who are "outliers" from the main sequence of humanity--to try to discover what makes them successful. Surprise! It's not just talent!

As you might expect, I am underwhelmed.

When you get right down to it, Gladwell comes to the astonishing conclusion that success requires talent, plus hard work, plus opportunity and luck. Sometimes it requires picking the right ethnic/cultural background. Sometimes it requires being born at the right time. Sometimes it's being good at something that turns into a growth industry after you are already good at it.

Basically--it's out of any one person's control.

But Gladwell isn't interested in drawing that message. Instead, he tries to draw lessons from the stories he tells in order to create a moving call to social change. Many people who are successful are the lucky recipient of opportunities. So let's make sure everybody gets opportunities! Or, as Gladwell puts it:

We cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don’t matter at all.

Really? Does anybody really think that Bill Gates might still be The Richest Man In The World if he had been born into an illiterate nomadic tribe of Mongolian sheep herders? Does anybody think that the incredible run of Victorian era robber barons might have had something to do with being in the right place at the right time to exploit vast natural resources in a period before environmental and business regulation? That your brilliant kid will still win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry if he goes to the local vo/tech community college instead of Harvard?

I didn't think so.

Gladwell misses the real point. It's not that we don't believe that the rules don't matter, so much as we can't predict which rules will generate which successes. Sometimes rules have to be arbitrary, because we need some rules. And if those rules happen to advantage Kid A over Kid B, well, that's maybe unfortunate for Kid B, unless Kid B turns out to be perfectly placed as a result of that rule to take some advantage Kid A can't take--maybe even decades later.

We can't really predict a priori what the "right rules" are, after all. Sure, in retrospect, a Gladwell can pick out a year--say 1955--when it might be advantageous to be born, if one wants to be a computer billionaire like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. But what about all the millions of babies who were born in 1955 who didn't turn out to be either Gates or Jobs? And can society really write rules that will guarantee another Bill Gates? After all, it's not like we can require that all babies in the country be born in 1955.

Which is the essential problem with Gladwell's "method"; there isn't one. He has a rough sort of thesis, and then he cherry picks his way through pop sociology and history to locate anecdotes that support it. There is no critical examination of whether his ideas are actually true; rather, because they are good stories and generally well told, they feel like they must be meaningful. In the end, however, this book hardly creates a blueprint for a better society.

Start at the beginning: the first chapter describes a small town in the mining hills of Pennsylvania--Roseto. The town is insular and almost entirely populated by emigrants from a single village in Italy. Despite adopting American diets and work habits, there is almost no heart disease in this town. Nearby towns have disease rates equal to or exceeding American averages, but sure enough, in this town of Italian emigrants, there is zero incidence of heart attacks below the age of 65. A pair of medical researchers studied this town, and ran through myriad theories as to why this might be, but by the end of the chapter, the conclusion is that the only factor must be that the nature of this particular community is the protection against heart disease.

To which one can only mutter a skeptical "really?" Do we really think that there is absolutely no other possible explanation for this anomaly? That it's a "magical Italian" way of life that involves strolling around in the evenings talking to your neighbors that is the silver bullet? How can we know that every single other explanation has been tested--do we really think that medical science is so complete that we understand what every last cause of heart disease might be, and that each one was tested? Personally, I am more likely to consider that there is some factor we don't understand and so can't control for than I am to believe that this small town is just magically immune from heart disease.

Plus--even if this is true--how is it even reproducible?

We then move to Canadian hockey players. Gladwell sets up a straw man assumption: that no matter where you are born in Canada, if you are a great hockey player, the system will find you. Does anyone really, actually believe that? I have some great ocean-front property in Haiti to sell you if you do.

Anyway, lo and behold, Gladwell discovers that Canada's youth hockey leagues have a January 1 age cut-off, and that kids born in January are generally bigger by that date than kids born in December. So the bigger, more mature kids get funneled into more elite teams, where they get better coaching and more ice time. The end result is that a staggering 40% of kids on national championship teams are born between January and March, while less than 10% of kids are born in the last three months of the year.

Gladwell asserts that if Canada had two leagues, with the second cut-off date being June 1, they would have twice as many hockey stars to chose from! But wait--that assumes that Canada could simply and easily double the resources it has to support elite teams: rinks, coaches, audiences, ice time, etc. Nor does Gladwell consider the social costs--whether having twice as many hockey players chasing the same limited number of professional spots (because the NHL is also not likely to be economically feasible at twice the size) isn't rather a waste of lives that could be better spent pursuing some other goal.

It's not that an arbitrary cut-off date has no effect, it's that there has to be some limit of some sort, and January 1 is no more or less arbitrary than any other date. Why have one cut-off date rather than two? That's an idea, but why stop at two? Why not twelve different leagues, so kids never compete against anyone more than a month older than they are? I can think of at least two reasons: 1) there's just not enough resources to support that fine a distinction (as I suggested above), and 2) there are some benefits to kids testing themselves against others who are bigger, stronger, etc.

Or, maybe Gladwell's "insight" has already been adopted, just at a different level. After all, the fact that Canada has leagues for each year means that Canada has three times as many elite hockey players than there would be if leagues grouped by age, such as "under 5," "6-8," "9-12," etc. Why does it need to double that number again?

The point is, in order to run a viable hockey league, the line has to be drawn somewhere. Gladwell doesn't really quibble with the fact of a cut-off date, merely about where that cut-off is made. Even if there was suddenly a second league, with a cut-off date of June 1, what could we expect would happen? The next "Malcolm Gladwell" could come along and note that the new system now discriminates against kids born in May and December, so there should be additional leagues with cut-off dates of April 1 and September 1.

There is also the risk that the quality of "elite" coaching might drop, if there is suddenly twice as much demand for it. Rather than adding opportunities for more kids, we are taking those opportunities away from the ones who currently have it. Do we have a better, more vibrant league if more kids are mediocre and fewer are exceptional? How many hockey geniuses are there, really? Maybe the December born kids are the real phenoms, while the kids who are born January-March are just winnowed out later? Who are the actual losers in a system where kids play hockey--or don't play hockey anyway. Gladwell doesn't ask any of these questions; he's moved on.

Gladwell uses Canadian hockey to segue into another theme--the 10,000 hour expert. It is the contention of at least one scientist that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at anything: music, hockey, computer programming. For example, the Beatles were invited to Hamburg when they were young, where they played seven days a week, 8-10 hours a night. Gladwell contends that this is what made them into The Beatles as a phenomenon, and it wouldn't have happened without all those hours of playing.

Okay, but what about all those other bands who played in Hamburg who didn't become The Beatles? Or what about the Rolling Stones, or the Beach Boys, or Led Zeppelin, who didn't play Hamburg? Or what about the fact that The Beatles actually didn't become The Beatles until after they brought on Ringo Starr, who hadn't been in Hamburg? Gladwell doesn't gloss over those criticisms so much as he just doesn't even acknowledge that there is any such criticism possible. The Beatles were famous. The Beatles played in Hamburg. Therefore, the Beatles became famous because they played in Hamburg. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. And, I guess it means that all rock bands should go to Hamburg in order to get famous.

It ain't necessarily so.

Gladwell's thesis starts getting even squishier after this point, as he considers the genesis of Bill Gates. Prior to 1968, computer programming was an arduous and boring process of creating punch cards that had to be turned into a mainframe administrator and run in a batch. If there were any errors in the punch cards, the entire batch would be rejected, and the programmer would have to go through the entire batch to find the error, correct it, and resubmit the cards. Even without errors, a single batch could take hours to run, and there were always errors. (For no good reason, my college roommate, who was majoring in accounting, was still running these damn punch cards at the University of Minnesota in 1984!!)

However, around 1968, a couple of American universities discovered a way to bypass the damn punch cards, and developed a method of using terminals to program. Bill Gates happened to live near one of these universities, and also happened to go to a school with a well connected parents' organization that got one of these terminals for the school's computer club. Gates was immediately obsessed, and through a couple of other lucky breaks, he managed to spend thousands of hours in middle and high school with this new technology, programming computers.

Gladwell seems to think that he is breaking new intellectual ground: Bill Gates wasn't just a gifted computer programmer--he also had unusual opportunities to program, he had his 10,000 hours young, and he got them at the dawn of the personal computing era. More obviously, he was lucky to be at the right place at the right time, with both interest and talent for computers. How innovative is this? All the rest of kids in that computer club aren't the Richest Man in the World after all--there was something unique about that kid in that place with those opportunities. Giving every kid in America unlimited access to computer programming in 1968 wouldn't mean every kid in America would become the Richest Man in the World.

What Gladwell doesn't acknowledge is that there really aren't universally applicable lessons to be gleaned from his anecdotes. Every kid simply cannot have every opportunity, nor does every kid who has any particular opportunity become an Outlier. Would Bill Gates have founded Microsoft if he'd been forced to play hockey in Canada? Would the Beatles have become famous rock stars if they'd been keying in computer code all through eighth grade?

In fact, we can't predict which opportunities will be seized by which kids, nor can we predict which things are actually opportunities. Gladwell takes us to the mean streets of early 20th century New York, where recent Jewish immigrants developed their own garment shops. The grandchildren of these garment workers often grew up to be doctors and lawyers. The anecdote for this section is the story of Joseph Flom, the first associate hired by the firm that became Skadden Arps. As a fat Jewish boy, Flom was not going to be hired by the white shoe law firms of 1950s New York. So he worked for the start-up firm of Skadden Arps, doing whatever work came in the door. Some of that work was hostile corporate take-overs, which the white shoe firms refused to touch. So he spent years perfecting this recondite area of law, which suddenly became very lucrative in the 1980s. By the time the white shoe firms decided they could touch this area of law, they simply couldn't catch up.

Gladwell goes on to point to a number of factors that positioned Flom to become the mergers and acquisitions shark he became: factors that were outside anybody's control. He was born in the 1930s, when birth rates had dropped due to the Depression. As a result, the schools he attended were not overcrowded, and were comparatively new. The quality of teaching was especially good, as there were highly educated teachers who simply couldn't get college jobs and so taught high school. He was able to get into law school and support himself because there were more jobs than workers. The white shoe firms didn't realize how lucrative M&A could be. M&A got lucrative before everybody else caught on. None of these factors is reproducible generally, and not every fat Jewish kid born in 1930 became Joseph Flom.

But look how much depended on luck. M&A became the money bubble of the 1980s, and Flom happened to do that. But he could just as easily been practicing divorce law, which white shoe firms also didn't touch, or DUI, or criminal defense, or any of a number of other things that wouldn't have become a license to print money. Joseph Flom didn't start doing M&A law because he saw there was a lucrative future market in it--he just happened to be the guy who was in the right place at the right time, with the right experience. He could just as easily not been--the 1980s could have been about derivatives rather than hostile take overs. In which case, Skadden Arps would not be the firm it is today, and we wouldn't be reading about Flom at all.

Gladwell has an appealing writing style, and he teases out interesting stories. He also seems to only ever see the rosy side of whatever story he is writing, and so one gets the sense that he honestly believes his insights into Canadian hockey will easily double the number of Wayne Gretzkys produced every year. Yet his steadfast refusal to examine his "findings" with any sort of critical eye means that they remain so many rainbows and unicorns--lovely to imagine, but without any role in the real world.

An Echo in the Bone, by Diana Gabaldon

Is there any point in trying to summarize this book? Or even review it? As the seventh doorstop sized novel in this series, there is so much incident, so many characters, that either you know the series and love it enough to make it this far, or you don't. In the latter case, this review will probably not be helpful.

Where to start? "Outlander" was the first book in this series, and Gabaldon's debut. It tells the deeply Scottish story of Claire Beauchamp (pronounced "Beecham") Randall, an English woman in Scotland of 1946. Reunited with her historian husband Frank after they both served in WWII, they are enjoying a second honeymoon when Claire finds herself amid a circle of standing stones on Midsummer's day. Turns out that the stones are a time portal, and Claire is thrown back some 200 years to a very different Scotland, one on the verge of rising against England in hopes of returning the Stuart kings to the throne.

This summary does absolutely no justice to the craft of the book, however. These things happen, but they happen slowly, after Gabaldon has meticulously accumulated so much detail that as a reader you find you don't even have to suspend your disbelief. Gabaldon manages to make this science fiction premise seem plausible, and even rational. Claire is an ex-Army nurse, hard-headed and practical, and not the kind of character who would easily accept this weird happening. As such, she is a wonderful guide to the 18th century--tart tongued, skeptical, well-educated enough to know her history and to experience the way history leaves out all the details that MATTER when one is trying to stay alive.

It is here in the 18th century that she meets Jamie Fraser, the man who turns out to be her soul mate. There are some romance novel machinations in which Claire finds herself forced to marry this younger man--but again, the novel uses the plot as a frame on which to hang something far more engaging than a mere romance. The bulk and appeal of the book lies in the relationship of the characters and in the way a 20th century woman comes to experience the past as its own country and culture, and things that seem incomprehensible to a modern sensibility come to make sense in the context of the past.

Much happens plot-wise in the six books before An Echo in the Bone, which themselves cover some 35 years of history and range from Scotland to France to America. (Not to mention the Lord John Grey novellas that augment the Fraser story.) Claire and Jamie age as well, and at the start of this book are living mostly obscurely (if not exactly quietly) on their homestead at Fraser's Ridge, North Carolina. But the American Revolution has started in Boston, and the ripples are disrupting lives even so far away. Jamie determines that his best option is fetch his printing press from Scotland and publish pro-Revolution documents. It will come as no surprise to fans of the series that while Jamie does manage to make it to Scotland and back to America, the trip is neither straightforward nor easy, and by the end of the hundreds of pages of this book, he still is not printing anything.

So much gets in the way, and the sheer number of characters is almost impossible to believe, much less keep track of. Jamie and Claire have a daughter, Brianna, who was concieved in the 18th century, born and raised in the 20th, then came back to the 18th century to meet her father. At the end of the previous book in the series (A Breath of Snow and Ashes), Brianna, her husband Roger MacKenzie and their two children return to the 20th century and buy Jamie's ancestral home Lallybroch. Their lives are not uneventful either, and by the end of the book, it appears that Roger may have gone again to the 18th century. This is not clear, however, and remains one of many cliffhangers that makes fans of the series rabid for the next book.

Many other characters are also given significant narratives. It is my recollection that the earlier books were primarily first person narration by Claire. While Claire continues to serve as our primary guide, her sections are nearly equalled by the third person sections that follow her nephew Ian Murray, Jamie's illegitimate son William Ransome (Lord Ellsmere), and William's stepfather and Jamie's ontime jailer-now-friend Lord John Grey. As so we see the Battle of Fort Ticondaroga both from the view of the Frasers inside the fort, and of William Ransome as a British soldier. It provides a fascinating view of the American Revolution to see it from the perspective of both the enemy and the accidental participants.

There are a few weaknesses, of course, but those are far outweighed by the many many delights. I could have done without having Lord John meet Benjamin Franklin in France, and would have happily not had Claire run into Benedict Arnold while he was still an American general and patriot. There are a few too many events and coincidences--both Ian Murray and William Ransome meet and fall in love with the same Quaker woman, while never meeting each other, for example. And the farce of piracy and counter-piracy that constitutes the Fraser's trip from North Carolina to New York takes far too long to tell, and made it hard for me to believe that they could ever make a longer journey over to Scotland.

But then balanced against those quibbles are the deep delight with which Gabaldon writes of things like Claire getting spectacles, because both she and Jamie are aging. Or the complicated character of 20th century Rob Cameron, a hydro-electric employee who works under Brianna in modern Inverness--he plays a nasty hazing trick on Brianna, but seems genuinely pleased when she foils it. He is both a damaged man who triggers sympathy, and a dangerous man who kidnaps young Jemmy after reading the McKenzie's papers about hidden gold.

The gold--dates back several books to the chests that King Louis sent to aid Charles Stewart in his attempt to reclaim his throne. It came to Scotland far too late, and a significant portion ended up in the illegal possession of Jamie's aunt, Julia Cameron. It was stolen from where she had hidden it on her own plantation by Arch Bugg, one of the homesteaders on Fraser's Ridge. He apparently hid it under the foundation of Jamie and Claire's house, where it was guarded by a white sow so bad tempered it was commonly held to be possessed by demons. When the house burned down--a burglary attempt by another time traveler seeking gems to protect him in his trip back to his own time ended up with spilled ether and Ian unknowingly lighting a match--Arch and his wife attempted to retrieve the gold. Mrs. Bugg threw a hatchet at Jamie to prevent him from stopping her, and Ian shot her with an arrow that killed her. Arch, already a fanatical Jacobite who seemed to want to take the gold back to Scotland to renew the rebellion, went entirely mad and swore to stalk Ian until he took a wife, and then Arch would kill her.

So, while a crazed and murderous stalker would seem to be unnecessary to create dramatic tension in a book that puts its characters into the middle of Revolutionary battles, one has to give Gabaldon some credit for the intricacy of her work. Arch Bugg (and his wife) first appeared two books ago, in The Fiery Cross as a factor for Jamie's farm, and they served as solid tertiary characters for comic relief and plot advancement for years before they turned into villians in this book. That's why it's hard to even review this book as a book, rather than as part of the larger saga to which it belongs.

So, in brief--yes, this book is as good as its predecessors, and worth the time. The entire series is more than a guilty pleasure, and deserves the devotion it has from its fans. The audio book is delightfully read by Davina Porter, and the time spent listening feels like time spent with a good old friend.

Tithe, by Holly Black

This is one selected by one of the members of the Mother-Daughter book club, and by the time we read it and met, not even she thought it was a good book. It is the debut novel by the writer who went on to write the much more popular Spiderwick Chronicles, and is targeted to an older, YA audience. It is a mash-up of Irish folklore in a grimy New Jersey setting, with cardboard characterizations and an unrelievedly bleak outlook.

Sixteen year old Kaye lives with her mother Ellen, who is getting too old to keep chasing her rock and roll dreams. Kaye is the parent in the relationship, and has dropped out of school to deliver Chinese food full time for the income. She also loads band equipment, drops cigarette butts into her mother's beer bottles, and holds her mother's hair as she vomits into the toilet. Her life is like a bad Kesha video, actually. They are in Pennsylvania at the beginning of the book, when Ellen's boyfriend tries to stab her with a knife. Ellen makes the only good decision in the entire book and decides to move out, taking Kaye back to her own mother's house in New Jersey.

Back in New Jersey, Kaye reconnects with an old friend named Janet, who mentions that Kaye used to have some imaginary friends that she used to talk about all the time. It turns out that these were fairies, and Kaye herself turns out to be a changeling--a fairy child substituted for a human baby. Kaye starts to discover all the magic that underlies her existence, and ends up inside the sithen in the Unseelie Court in America. There is a wounded Seelie knight she saves the life of and falls "in love" with, and a complicated intrigue involving a "tithe." Every x number of years (I forget exactly--seven makes sense, but it might have been more) the Courts of Faerie require a human sacrifice which binds all the solitary fay to the court's rule. Kaye's childhood fairy friends want her to be the sacrifice, because she isn't actually a human and thus will negate the sacrifice. The fay will then not be bound to the courts, and free to live independently. They convince Kaye to join this plan.

But things are not so easy--because there is a power struggle between the Seelie and Unseelie courts (which concepts are not explained--you have to already know a fair amount about Irish folklore to get the full impact of these alliances and conspiracies) and some of the fay know Kaye isn't human, and some of them are lying about aborting the sacrifice, and some of them are maneuvering for their own power. In the end--after a lot of plot machinations that don't make a whole lot of sense, Kaye's wounded faerie knight is on the throne of the Unseelie Court, and she is positioned to be his consort. But she also has to go home to her mother and grandmother, so I'm not certain what Black was trying to do here.

There are some real weaknesses in this book, not the first of which is the grotty life Kaye lives as a human girl. When her actual life is that unpleasant, it's hard for Black to paint an Unseelie Court that is more repulsive than what her life is like living in New Jersey. A nasty "party" with some high school kids in an abandoned warehouse is every bit as off-putting as the underground sithen of the fay. Kaye's "friend" gets drunk, tries to make her boyfriend jealous by hitting on another boy--who turns out to be a kelpie who drowns her. So she's dead, but no one seems to be bothered much by her death. Her life was pretty grim anyway, living in a trailer home with her older brother who worked the night shift at a gas station. . .all so dreary and dirty and unhappy that there was really no sense that any of the characters stood to lose anything either by chosing to remain in Faerie or in leaving it.

So, in short--don't bother.