A brilliant Indian novel about the 19th Century opium trade

A review of River of Smoke, by Amitav Ghosh

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

Balzac (and lots of people after him) thought that “Behind every great fortune there is a crime.” Nowhere is that aphorism more baldly illustrated than in the 19th-Century opium trade that enriched England, Scotland, and the United States and created a score of hereditary fortunes that have left their mark on the world for nearly two centuries since. After all, when Europeans introduced China to the practice of mixing opium with tobacco in the mid-18th Century, the one-sided trade in Chinese porcelain, tea, silk, and other goods was rapidly draining Europe of silver and reinforcing China’s position as the world’s richest country. The opium trade reversed that trend. Early in the 19th Century, with the Industrial Revolution gathering force in Europe, China’s nearly two-century-long decline  was underway. Meanwhile, massive profits from opium enriched the endowments of Harvard and Yale, helped build Princeton and Columbia Universities; launched the fortunes of the Astors, the Delanos (FDR’s grandparents); and bankrolled the Bell Telephone Company, antecedent of AT&T.

River of Smoke is the second book in Amitav Ghosh’s planned Ibis trilogy set among the momentous events of the massive 19th-Century opium trade between India and China. The first book in the trilogy, Sea of Poppies, set the scene with an in-depth look at the harvesting and manufacture of opium in India. River of Smoke details the life at sea and in the foreign enclave in Canton of the immensely rich men who dominated the trade, principally Britons.

Ghosh’s sprawling novel spans the years 1838 and 1839, detailing the events in South China that led to the First Opium War. The central plot-line follows the journey of a poor Indian Parsi (Zoroastrian) named Bahram who had risen to lead the trade division of a celebrated Mumbai shipbuilding company owned by his wealthy in-laws. Though not yet rich himself, Bahram has become the dean of the Indian opium traders, realizing profits for the family as great as those of many of the British and Americans but, in the racist fashion of the times, he is looked down upon as “inferior.” However, he comes to play a principal role in the traders’ increasingly tense and threatening dealings with the newly energized Chinese government, which has resolved to end the opium trade. (Bahram is the author’s invention, but the English and American traders depicted in the novel come straight from the pages of history.)

Any lover of language will find the writing of Amitav Ghosh irresistible. I certainly did. Both the dialogue and the narrative text in Sea of Poppies were enchanting. Ghosh had immersed himself in contemporaneous dictionaries and wordlists of 1830s India and Britain to reproduce the language and the vocabulary of not one but several English dialects. In fact, a great many of the novel’s characters are historical figures who left behind memoirs, letters, parliamentary testimony, and other records, and as Ghosh notes in his acknowledgments, “Much that is said in this book is taken from [the characters’] own words.” Even more colorful is the hybrid language that emerged from the marriage of English and Hindi and surfaces in dialogue throughout the book. But in River of Smoke, it’s the pidgin of 19th-Century Canton that stands out, and wonderful it is to behold!

The 5 best novels I’ve read in 2012

Truth to tell, I haven’t read all that many trade novels during the past year, and, anyway, in general I tend to stay away from the literary “masterpieces” trumpeted so loudly by the likes of the New York Review of Books and the New York Times Book Review. More often than not, I find the darlings of the literary set are writing not for me but for, well, the literary set. I’ve seen far too many impenetrable tomes lauded as fine literature. Give me a good, gripping story any day of the year, and I’ll gladly forego pretty much any one of the Booker Prize winners of recent years. I truly enjoyed reading all five of the books listed below.

1. They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?, by Christopher Buckley

Political satire of the highest order. I found myself laughing hysterically, sometimes for pages at a time. But, like all superior satire, this book isn’t just funny — its droll treatment of politics in Washington and Beijing is spot-on accurate.

2. The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi

One of the best science fiction novels I’ve ever read. Set in Bangkok in the 23rd century, this wildly inventive story examines humanity’s plight once the oceans have risen twenty feet, and most of the human race in in thrall to the American and Chinese “calorie companies” that have killed off virtually all traditional sources of food with genetically engineered plagues.

3. The Fear Index, by Robert Harris

A chilling novel set in Geneva, where a brilliant and eccentric American physicist has teamed up with an unscrupulous English financier to use the scientist’s breakthrough techniques in artificial intelligence to manipulate the financial markets.

4. The Orphan Master’s Son, by Adam Johnson

The Orwellian story of a North Korean “tunnel rat,” trained in kidnapping and hand-to-hand combat in the tunnels leading under the DMZ to South Korea, who briefly becomes a confidante of the country’s elite military commanders and of the Dear Leader himself, only later to find himself confined to a prison mine, where citizens who run afoul of officialdom are worked to death underground.

5. Incendiary, by Chris Cleave

A deeply unsettling novel structured as an open letter to Osama bin Laden from a devastated young mother whose husband and young son have died in a massive terrorist attack on a soccer game in London.

A fresh and thought-provoking view of world politics and current events

A review of The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate, by Robert D. Kaplan

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

Geopolitics — the subject of this fascinating book — has literally been on my mind  almost throughout my life.

I had recently turned three when the Allies invaded Normandy, beginning the long, last phase of World War II in Europe. I have no active memory of the invasion, but I’ve been told that I learned to read by studying the news about the event and its aftermath. My father read the newspaper at dinner, and I sat opposite him, leaning over the table so I could see the headlines — upside down — and ask him to tell me what the words meant. I loved the maps, too, those sketches of Europe and the Pacific with broad arrows pointing this way and that to indicate the movements of troops and ships at sea. Geography was long my favorite subject in school, and it’s probably not a stretch to think that my life-long fascination with the world outside the USA began with that experience.

Through a geopolitical lens, Planet Earth, and the machinations and foibles of earthly leaders, look a lot different than they do in most history books. Stand a few feet away from a globe and squint: if the globe is properly positioned, what you’ll see is one huge, three-tentacled landmass (Asia-Africa-Europe); a second, much smaller one that consists of two parts joined by a narrow connector (North and South America); and several even smaller bits of land scattered about on the periphery (Australia, Greenland, Japan, Indonesia). That’s the world as the Joint Chiefs of Staff must view it. Has to view it.

Understanding the globe from that perspective, current events become a lot easier to understand. Take, for example, the object of American preoccupation today: the Middle East.

The true geopolitical center of the Earth lies in the Middle East, a region consisting essentially of three sections: the Iranian Plateau, running from present-day Iraq to Afghanistan and dominated by a resurgent Iran, the latest incarnation of the Persian Empire; the Anatolian landbridge (Turkey) that connects Asia and Europe, successor to the Eastern Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires; and the oil- and natural-gas-rich Arabian Peninsula, unsteadily governed by the extended Saud family and a congeries of coastal emirates. Nestled between them and extending westward along the North African Maghreb is a long line of generally flat, low-lying states that are experiencing various degrees of instability, only a handful of which have a solid historical and demographic basis for nationhood (Tunisia, Egypt, Israel). Given the geography of this region, its perennial instability is no surprise. Constant turmoil is practically guaranteed, with the dominating Iranian and Turkish highlands above, and virtually flat, featureless plains below, divided among mostly weak states with arbitrary borders inherited from British and French colonial masters. As Kaplan notes, “the supreme fact of twenty-first -century world politics is that the most geographically central area of the dry-land earth is also the most unstable.”

Of all the states in the Greater Middle East, the strongest of all, and most likely to dominate at some point in the decades ahead, is Iran, with a proud history (“Iran was the ancient world’s first superpower.”), a population of 75 million, a literacy rate of 80%, an industrial base, and an extensive network of universities. Iran is situated in an enviable position, straddling the region’s two principal oil-production areas (the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf), not to mention its own abundant hydrocarbon reserves. Is it any wonder, then, why Iran captures headlines with such frequency?

In this fashion, geopolitics yields important insight about how the world works. To cite another example, Kaplan asks “Why is China ultimately more important than Brazil? Because of geographical location: even supposing the same level of economic growth as China and a population of equal size, Brazil does not command the main sea lines of communication connecting oceans and continents as China does; nor does it mainly lie in the temperate zone like China, with a more disease-free and invigorating climate. China fronts the Western Pacific and has depth on land reaching to oil- and natural-gas-rich Central Asia. Brazil offers less of a comparative advantage. It lies isolated in South America, geographically removed from other landmasses.”

The Revenge of Geography is crammed with thought-provoking analysis — about the influence of geography on European history, about the role of megacities in our future, about changing demographic patterns, about the impact of latitude on the fate of nations. Oh, and do you remember Sacha Baron Cohen’s satirical treatment of Kazakhstan? Kaplan informs us that “Kazakhstan is truly becoming an independent power in its own right” (and proves it). Who knew?

A word of warning, though: unless you’re familiar with both world history and ancient history, you may find The Revenge of Geography to be tough sledding through the innumerable mentions of long-lost empires and forgotten kings. Kaplan grounds his analysis not just in geography but also in history, and his knowledge of both clearly runs deep.

Kaplan begins wrapping up his book with a troubling discussion about recent U.S. foreign and military policy: “while the United States was deeply focused on Afghanistan and other parts of the Greater Middle East, a massive state failure was developing right on America’s southern border, with far more profound implications for the near and distant future of America, its society, and American power than anything occurring half a world away. What have we achieved in the Middle East with all of our interventions since the 1980s? . . . Why not fix Mexico instead?”

“America faces three primary geopolitical dilemmas,” Kaplan concludes. “[A] chaotic Eurasian heartland in the Middle East, a rising and assertive Chinese superpower, and a state in deep trouble in Mexico. And the challenges we face with China and Mexico are most efficiently dealt with by wariness of further military involvement in the Middle East. This is the only way that American power can sustain itself for the decades to come.”

Must reading about global poverty and the contrasting approaches to ending it

A review of Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

Public debate about the way to combat global poverty has ricocheted between two extremes. One was summed up in 2005 in The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia economist who spearheaded the UN Millennium Development Goals. The other was laid out by former World Bank economist William Easterly the following year in The White Man’s Burden. Sachs advocates massive government-to-government foreign aid. Easterly deplores foreign aid, convinced that it does more harm than good.

In Poor Economics, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo seek a path between these two extremes, emphasizing the Randomized Controlled Studies they and their colleagues had conducted to ascertain what works and what doesn’t. (As of 2010, they had completed more than 240 studies in forty countries around the world.)They characterize Easterly’s approach as demand-driven, since he believes that poor people must seek their own solutions — a conservative, free-market attitude. By contrast, Sachs’ approach is supply-driven, reflecting Sachs’ conviction that a government must provide for its people based on consensus thinking about what poor people need — a liberal, top-down attitude. (I find myself bemused that I’m on the right side of this debate.)

Banerjee and Duflo report that their observations and research results support each of these two approaches — and sometimes both — depending on what issue they study. Hunger, health, education, financial services, family planning, business development, policy options: each field offers up a unique picture of success and failure attributed to one or another of the two approaches. In other words, circumstances and details matter, all of which may vary from one country to another. There is no silver bullet, they assert, no panacea to eliminate poverty.

Poor Economics focuses on the overarching question of whether there is such a thing as a “poverty trap.” Sachs contends there is: poor people will be stuck in poverty unless and until they are given the resources to release themselves from the trap. In many circumstances, Banerjee and Duflo find scant evidence to support this assertion. In others, however, they see the need for government intervention in the lives of the poor because otherwise they will perceive no reason to act for themselves.

Rather than identifying a simple, unitary explanation why Sachs’ approach often fails, they emphasize “ideology, ignorance, and inertia — the three I’s — on the part of the expert, the aid worker, or the local policy maker.” These three I’s, they claim, “often explain why policies fail and why aid does not have the effect it should.” Banerjee and Duflo explain further: “The poor often resist the wonderful plans we think up for them because they do not share our faith that those plans work, or work as well as we claim.”

It would be difficult to find two scholars better prepared than Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo to forge a middle course through the opposite poles of thought about global poverty erected by Jeffrey Sachs and William Easterly. Banerjee, an Indian economist who is also the son of two economists, holds an endowed chair in economics at MIT. He co-founded MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab with Duflo, a French economist and a former MacArthur Fellow (recipient of the “genius” award).

For anyone who seeks deeper understanding of global poverty and the ways and means of fighting it, Poor Economics is must reading. This book is the latest I’ve read in my ongoing effort to study world poverty. For a list of additional books on the topic, go to my reading list.

Organ trafficking, prostitution, and drugs in the underbelly of Asian society

A review of Vulture Peak: A Royal Thai Detective Novel, by John Burdett

@@@ (3 out of 5)

When I read John Burdett’s first novel, Bangkok 8, I was hooked, and I couldn’t wait to learn more about its fascinating protagonist, the incorruptible Thai homicide detective, Sonchai Jitpleecheep. Bangkok 8 offered up a feast of intimate knowledge about Buddhism as practiced in Thailand, the local brand of animist superstitions, and the corruption that pervades every nook and cranny of Thai society, all revealed in the context of a spectacular murder mystery. In three subsequent novels featuring the detective — Bangkok Tattoo, Bangkok Haunts, and The Godfather of Katmandu — Burdett gradually shifted the emphasis of his writing from Sonchai Jitpleecheep’s exotic inner dialogue to the grisly details of the homicide case at hand. In Vulture Peak, the fifth novel in the Royal Thai Detective Series, Burdett has gone the distance. The local color of Thailand’s red-light districts is still there, and the plot is, if anything, even more convoluted, but the detective has grown tired and his worldview is verging on cynicism. The result is less than fully satisfying.

Vulture Peak — the place, not the title — is the palatial hilltop home outside Phuket on the Thai coast where three bodies have been discovered, so badly mutilated that their gender can’t be determined at first. Heart, liver, kidneys, lungs, genitals, face have all been surgically removed, the bodies left on an oversized bed in the deserted home. Detective Jitpleecheep is ordered by his boss, the famously corrupt policeman, Colonel Vikorn, to learn the identity of the murderer. If the detective solves the case, the colonel can take credit and boost his campaign for Governor of Bangkok — a campaign no one would ever have expected him to undertake. Here is the proverbial mystery wrapped in an enigma, and Jitpleecheep must use all his wile and intuition to unravel the threads of the case.

As the detective sets out with his katoey (transgender) assistant, mystery piles on mystery. Why is Colonel Vikorn running for public office when he is already making billions from the drug trade? Who owns the house on Vulture Peak, and what is it used for? Is the colonel’s bitter rival, General Zinna, involved in organ trafficking? Does he own the house? As new characters crowd onto the scene, the plot grows ever more intricate. To understand what’s going on, you’ll have to read almost to the very end of the book.

Don’t get the impression from anything I’ve written above that Vulture Peak doesn’t erupt in startling prose from time to time. Here, for example, Burdett comments on Christianity (with apologies to you, Dear Reader, if you’re a believer): “Of the world’s three universal religions, one is based on a profound insight into human psychology and one is based on a profound insight into the kind of social structure that is necessary for people to live in peace and harmony . . . The former is Buddhism, and the latter is Islam. The other world religion is an insane collection of primitive magic and mumbo-jumbo, with cadavers resurrecting and walking around with holes in them, lepers suddenly healing and the blind suddenly seeing, virgins giving birth and snakes that talk.”

And again, commenting on Western civilization: “The discovery of nirvana is the psychological equivalent of the invention of zero but vastly more important. Think of where mathematics was before zero, and you have the level of mental development of the West: good/bad, right/left, profit/loss, heaven/hell, us/them, me/you. It’s like counting with Roman numerals.”

John Burdett was born in the UK, became a lawyer there, spent a dozen years practicing in Hong Kong, then left the law to write crime novels. He now divides his time between Thailand and France.

A survivor’s eye-opening tale of life in the North Korean gulag

A review of Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West, by Blaine Harden

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

Americans’ sources of knowledge about life in North Korea are limited to journalistic accounts of the diplomatic antics of the ruling Kim dynasty, which reveal practically nothing, and a tiny number of credible and highly readable books written by Westerners with rare access to the facts. In recent years, two stand out: Nothing to Envy, by Barbara Demick, and, amazingly, a novel, The Orphan Master’s Son, by Adam Johnson. (Links lead to my reviews of these two excellent books.) With Escape from Camp 14, veteran reporter Blaine Harden has contributed the latest of these reports, and in many ways the most revealing.

Escape from Camp 14 chronicles the life of Shin Dong-hyuk, only of only three people ever known to have escaped from a North Korean labor camp and made it to the West. Shin was born in the camp, his mother “assigned” to his father by guards to bear children. Both were prisoners. A superficial reading of Shin’s story might suggest that he is a monster. Reading the book will help you understand how he could commit unforgivable acts as natural and necessary steps in a ferocious day-to-day struggle for survival. “His context had been twenty-three years in an open-air cage run by men who hanged his mother, shot his brother, crippled his father, murdered pregnant women, beat children to death, taught him to betray his family, and tortured him over a fire.”

As one of Harden’s North Korean expatriate sources explained, “‘guards were free to indulge their appetites and eccectricities, often preying on attractive young women prisoners, who would usually consent to sex for better treatment. ‘If this resulted in babies, women and their babies were killed,’ [the source] said, noting that he had personally seen newborns clubbed to death with iron rods.”

When Shin fled Camp 14, it was not a vision of freedom that gave him the extraordinary courage required. It was thoughts of grilled meat. To understand this extraordinary statement, you’ll have to read the book.

Blaine Harden appeared recently in San Francisco at the World Affairs Council of Northern California in a conversation with Philip Yun, Executive Director of the Ploughshares Fund, a former U.S. diplomat who is Korean-American and has studied the peninsula for many years. Harden’s soft-spoken, sometimes light-hearted presentation underlined the surreal quality of Shin’s experiences inside the North Korean gulag. Responding to Yun’s questions, Harden spoke at some length about the many steps he had taken to verify Shin’s story.

As Harden relates, “North Korea’s labor camps have now existed twice as long as the Soviet Gulag and about twelve times longer than the Nazi concentration camps. . . There are six camps, according to South Korea’s intelligence agency and human rights groups. The biggest is thirty-one miles long and twenty-five miles wide, an area larger than the city of Los Angeles.”

The author asks why there is so little awareness in the West about the North Korean camps, and why nothing has been done about them. As the Washington Post editorialized upon publishing Harden’s first account of Shin’s life: “High school students in America debate why President Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t bomb the rail lines to Hitler’s camps. Their children may ask, a generation from now, why the West stared at far clearer satellite images of Kim Jong Il’s camps, and did nothing.”

Blaine Harden’s journalistic credits include the Washington Post, the Economist, the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, and PBS Frontline. He reported for many years from Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia for the Washington Post, and it was on assignment to write the unwritten stories about North Korea for the Post that he encountered Shin Dong-hyuk.

Another great sci-fi novel from one of the most gifted young talents in the field

A review of The Drowned Cities, by Paolo Bacigalupi

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

The time is the not-too-distant future, about a century from now. The rising seas have proven to be the most drastic effect of runaway global climate change, with most of the world’s coastal cities now under water up to at least the second story of the towers that dominate them.

The action takes place in and around the ruins of Washington, DC, now part of the Drowned Cities that lie on the mid-Atlantic and southeast coasts of what used to be the United States of America. Everywhere in the region, private armies roam about in constant warfare with one another, their ranks dominated by the child soldiers they have forcibly recruited from the area’s surviving population. In the eye-for-an-eye society that has emerged, few live to adulthood.

Most of the world’s population ekes out a primitive living in places such as this. Only the relative few who live within the confines of Island Shanghai, Beijing, Seascape Boston, and a few other cities continue to flourish behind sea-walls, protected from invasion by the genetically enhanced armies ranged around them.

Years ago, the people of China sent a peacekeeping force to the Drowned Cities to forge peace among the warlords’ contending armies. The effort failed. Left behind when the peacekeepers evacuated Washington, DC, was Mahlia, the teenage daughter of a Chinese general and a local woman — a “half-breed,” a “castoff,” a “war maggot.” This is Mahlia’s story.

Not long after her father abandons her and her mother, Mahlia is set upon by soldiers from the Army of God and, simply because she is who she is, her right hand is cut off. A younger boy, hiding nearby, creates enough of a distraction to allow her to escape with her left hand intact. She calls the boy Mouse.

Together, Mahlia and Mouse encounter one of the “half-men” — a monstrous, bioengineered soldier named Tool, a blend of superior human intelligence and body shape with the face of a dog and the strength, speed, cunning, and ruthlessness of the world’s most able predators. Their meeting proves fateful, and is the pivot on which the plot turns in this beautifully written and fully realized post-apocalyptic novel.

Marketed as a book for young readers, The Drowned Cities is science fiction at its best for fans of any age. The only way in which this novel falls short through adult eyes is that it avoids obvious references to sex. (Is that a bad thing? I don’t think so.)

In a relatively short writing career to date, with just five published books to his name at age 40, Paolo Bacigalupi has won every major award in the science fiction field and was a Finalist for a National Book Award. His is an extraordinary talent, with great promise for many more enthralling stories to come.

The best books I’ve read so far this year

You have to wait until December to see a list of “best books” in The New York Times Book Review, but right here in this space you can see my list for the first six months of 2012! Of course, it’s a short list, and quite specialized, since there are lots of categories of writing that hold no interest for me. And I don’t limit myself to books that were published after January 1, 2012 (though most were). After all, I’m not The New York Times. But, for what it is, here goes, in no particular order . . . with links to my reviews in this blog.

Nonfiction

The Passage of Power, by Robert A. Caro. Volume 4 in The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Robert Caro’s masterful portrait of Lyndon Johnson’s early days as President.

Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, by David E. Sanger. Barack Obama’s foreign and military policy viewed from the inside.

The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World, by John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan. The power of unreasonable people, and how they’re changing the world.

The Self-Made Myth, and the Truth About How Government Helps Individuals and Businesses Succeed, by Brian Miller and Mike Lapham. A brilliant contribution to the public debate about politics and the economy.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander. One of the most important books published in English so far this century.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, by Katherine Boo. A searing look at poverty in India that reads like a novel.

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World, by Daniel Yergin. Daniel Yergin’s superb new book: a brilliant survey of energy issues.

Infinite Vision: How Aravind Became the World’s Greatest Business Case for Compassion, by Pavithra Mehta and Suchitra Shenoy. Aravind: A social enterprise with scale and impact to match Grameen Bank.

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann. Astonishing new evidence about the Americas before Columbus.

Trade Fiction

They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?, by Christopher Buckley. Washington and Beijing get what they deserve in this satirical novel of politics and diplomacy today.

The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi. One of the best science fiction novels I’ve ever read.

The Orphan Master’s Son, by Adam Johnson. An unsparing tale of life in the living hell of North Korea.

Incendiary, by Chris Cleave. A wrenching portrait of the human cost of terrorism.

The Fear Index, by Robert Harris. A taut thriller about the world of multibillion-dollar hedge funds.

A Theory of Small Earthquakes, by Meredith Maran. A first novel from a brilliant nonfiction writer.

Mysteries and Thrillers

Mission to Paris, by Alan Furst. A truly superior novel of espionage at the dawn of World War II.

The Midnight House, by Alex Berenson. The Pentagon and the CIA take a lot of punishment in this novel of rendition and torture.

Harbor Nocturne, by Joseph Wambaugh. Joseph Wambaugh’s latest paints Los Angeles in many clashing colors.

The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection, by Alexander McCall Smith. An exceptional tale of Botswana’s #1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.

Buried Secrets, by Joseph Finder. A thriller that explores the intersection of high finance and high crime.

The Ghosts of Belfast, by Stuart Neville. A grim story of war and betrayal in Northern Ireland.

The Bridge of Sighs, by Olen Steinhauer. A fully satisfying murder mystery set in post-war Europe.

Breakdown, by Sara Paretsky. Sara Paretsky’s latest detective story hits home.

Believing the Lie, by Elizabeth George. Elizabeth George’s latest Inspector Lynley novel, unpredictable as always.

The Silent Oligarch, by Chris Morgan Jones. A refreshingly original new thriller that explores international intrigue with minimal violence.

Agent 6, by Tom Rob Smith. A superb suspense novel set in the USSR, Afghanistan, and the U.S.

Barack Obama’s foreign and military policy viewed from the inside

A review of Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, by David E. Sanger

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

When I voted for Barack Obama in 2008, I expected a great deal from his Presidency — much too much, it’s clear in hindsight. What I didn’t expect was that as President he would exercise U.S. military power almost as aggressively as George W. Bush. As the subtitle of this excellent book hints so broadly, the apparently anti-war candidate Obama quickly morphed in office into a resolute, hands-on Commander in Chief.

In his campaign, Obama had “promised to restore traditional American ‘engagement’ by talking and listening to America’s most troubling adversaries and reluctant partners. His supporters saw a welcome turn away from the ‘with us or against us’ black-and-whites of the Bush years. His critics saw naivete and softness. Both have been surprised. This is a book about those surprises.”

In practice, Obama learned that his brand of engagement yielded little more than vitriolic rhetoric from Iranian mullahs, North Korean generals, and the Pakistani military. What has proved far more effective are the actions he could take consistent with his more sophisticated view of American power: a massive increase in drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia; the country’s first-ever (known) use of cyberwarfare in a targeted attack on Iran’s nuclear program, along with increasingly brutal sanctions on the country and its government; the ever-growing use of Special Forces in operations such as the murder of Osama bin Laden; and a pronounced “pivot” from Europe to Asia in combating the rise of China, as exemplified by the opening of a new military base in Australia. While ending U.S. participation in our “war of choice” in Iraq and beginning the pullout from Afghanistan, President Obama has sharply stepped up our use of the weapons of war in a growing number of undeclared and sometimes undercover hostilities.

Make no mistake about it: Barack Obama has made an idelible mark on the U.S. military and intelligence services, sharpening their missions and reshaping their priorities, and all while forcing them to live within more limited means. And anyone who might be tempted to think that Obama acted this way out of weakness needs to understand that great extent to which he made decisions at crucial times in the face of opposition from nearly all those around him — in giving the green light to the Navy SEAL mission to kill bin Laden, and in deciding to ask Hosni Mubarak to resign. As Sanger writes, “‘He personally basically overrode just about his entire government,’ said one official in the room, noting that Gates and Clinton were still actively opposed, ‘Look, this is what I’m going to do,’ Obama said, according to notes of the meeting. ‘I’m going to call [Mubarak] now.'”

All this, and more, comes to light in the five sections that form the backbone of this book. Sanger writes about each of the leading hotspots in turn: Afghanistan and Pakistan; Iran; Egypt; China and North Korea. This is truly world-class reporting, informed by sources at the very highest levels of the U.S. government.

Sanger concludes, “It is too early to know if the emerging Obama Doctrine — a lighter footprint around the world, and a reliance on coalitions to deal with global problems that do not directly threaten American security — will prove a lasting formula. His effort at ‘rebalancing’ away from the quagmires in the Middle East toward the continent of greatest promise in the future — Asia — was long overdue. But it is a change of emphasis more than a change of direction. Obama proved her was adaptable to new realities, what James Fallows rightly called ‘the main trait we can hope for in a president.'”

If you’ve ever wondered what it might be like to be a 30-year veteran of The New York Times and serve as its Chief Washington Correspondent, read this extraordinary book with an eye on those sources, both named and anonymous, and their revelations, which pop up seemingly on every page. You’ll see, then, how very deeply embedded in the fabric of official Washington is this one newspaper — a newspaper that serves as the source of an extraordinary proportion of the stories that make their way onto evening news broadcasts and the front pages of other papers around the world. In laying bare the pattern of Barack Obama’s surprisingly aggressive use of military power, Confront and Conceal is just as effective in revealing David Sanger’s unusually high-level access at the White House, the CIA, and the Pentagon.

Washington and Beijing get what they deserve in this satirical novel of politics and diplomacy today

A review of They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?, by Christopher Buckley

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

Put yourself into this picture (as you might if you were reading this book and identifying with its protagonist): Your name is Walter “Bird” McIntyre. You are the leading Washington lobbyist for Groepping-Sprunt, a major arms contractor for the Pentagon. A Senate committee is meeting to consider a huge appropriation for your latest weapons system — an ocean-liner-sized drone aircraft armed with every manner of destructive weaponry known to the military-industrial complex. Testifying on the company’s behalf will not be easy. “On top of the ‘funding factor’ (Washington-speak for ‘appalling cost overruns’), Bird and Groepping-Sprunt were up against a bit of a ‘perception problem’ (Washington-speak for ‘reality’).” After embarrassing you with hours of pointed questions, does the committee approve the appropriation? No, it does not. And that, for all intents and purposes, is where this tale begins.

With Bird’s job now on the line and the company’s future in doubt because of the huge sums poured into R&D for the oversized drone, Bird’s boss forces him to raise the stakes: find a way to gin up widespread public hatred for China and thus scare Congress into springing for some other overpriced weapons system. Enter Angel Templeton, a mashup of Ann Coulter and Mata Hari; Bird’s fetching young trophy wife, an equestrienne who is bankrupting him with her passion for thoroughbred horses; Bird’s feckless younger brother, Bewks, who wanders around Bird’s house in a Confederate general’s outfit, channeling George Armstrong Custer (sic!), ready for a reenactment of the battle of Gettysburg at a moment’s notice; Rogers P. Fancock, the Boston Brahmin who is reluctantly serving as National Security Advisor; and Chris Matthews of Hardball (yes, by name). Those are the key characters on the U.S. side. A similarly comical collection of Chinese players — mostly the members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party — rounds out the cast.

In between the two sides is the 14th Dalai Lama (yes, the current guy). You’ll have to read the book to find out how he gets into the story.

They Eat Puppies, Don’t They? is political satire of the highest order. I found myself laughing hysterically, sometimes for pages at a time. But, like all superior satire, this book isn’t just funny — its droll treatment of politics in Washington and Beijing is spot-on accurate. For example, “Fancock scowled at the top-secret cable from the U.S. ambassador in Beijing alerting him to the development that had been announced on CNN twenty minutes before.”

Christopher Buckley knows whereof he writes. He is the son of the late William F. Buckley, Jr. and has held a number of positions in Washington, including a job as chief speechwriter for Vice President George  H. W. Bush. (I will forgive him for all that.) They Eat Puppies, Don’t They? is Buckley’s ninth satirical novel. He has also written several other books, including two travelogues and a biographal portrayal of his parents.