Christopher Buckley: Funny ha-ha, and funny strange

A review of No Way To Treat a First Lady, by Christopher Buckley

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

Humor is a funny  thing. Not long ago I introduced Christopher Buckley to an audience of about 100 people in Berkeley. (No, I didn’t go to Yale with him. This was solely on the strength of having given favorable reviews to several of his novels.) Buckley spoke off the cuff rather than read from his writing, and I found him hilarious. So did about half the audience. Some seemed to be on the verge of falling off their chairs from time to time. But the other half of the audience sat stone-faced, often with arms crossed and eyes darting right and left, apparently waiting for a chance to sneak out of the room.

All this is to say that I read No Way to Treat a First Lady, laughing all the way — and maybe you won’t. Whenever as a child I told my mother that something was funny, she would ask, “Funny ha-ha, or funny strange?” Well, this one is a little of both. No Way to Treat a First Lady tells the tale of a philandering President and a long-suffering wife who has, apparently, murdered him in his sleep. See what I mean?

Christopher Buckley’s humor is grounded in such situations, not too many steps removed from reality. Don’t get me wrong. The leading characters in this novel in no way resemble two recent residents of the White House. And the supporting cast would be a better fit in a Marx Brothers film than in today’s Washington, DC: the best criminal defense lawyer money can buy, who incidentally was the jilted law-school lover of the First Lady; a blonde Court TV superstar, who is the current, much-younger squeeze of the self-important defense lawyer; bumbling rival trial attorneys; and a motley assortment of FBI and Secret Service agents and White House hangers-on. Even so, you can practically see them behind today’s headlines.

I won’t spoil the story by summarizing the plot, which is deliciously complex and as full of surprises as a best-selling thriller. You deserve the chance to discover it on your own.

Forewarned, then, that I think Christopher Buckley is one of the funniest writers currently walking the planet, I commend you to my previous reviews of his books: Little Green Men, Florence of Arabia, The White House Mess, and They Eat Puppies, Don’t They? If you read (or have read) these reviews, you know that I don’t think they’re all equally good — Florence of Arabia, for example, was just a little too real for me.

Pretty soon I’m going to run out of Buckley’s books, and I’ll just have to start reading them all over again.

Enough already! An open letter to Janet Evanovich

A review of Notorious Nineteen, by Janet Evanovich

@@@ (3 out of 5)

Dear Janet (if I may be so bold),

Maybe it’s me, but I doubt that. After you’ve written — what is it? 50? 51? — novels all told, I think you’re losing steam. Notorious Nineteen is, of course, the 19th in your Stephanie Plum series, and it shows. Here are a few of the most prominent signs:

• Not one but two cars Stephanie is driving are blown up;
• Lula consumes at least 8,000 calories of junk food in a single day;
• Ranger rescues Stephanie from imminent death not once but twice;
• A really bad guy gets blown up trying to kill Stephanie; and
• Morelli and Stephanie still aren’t ready to get married after talking about it for 10 years.

Truth to tell, some of this is funny as it happens, which is why I kept reading this series of comic novels so long. But the humor is fast fading, and so is the guilty pleasure I’ve taken so long in this series.

I don’t know about you, Janet, but I’m ready to put Stephanie out to pasture at last. Appearances notwithstanding, she’s really pushing 60 now, right? Isn’t it time to lay off the staff on that assembly-line writing factory of yours and see what you can do on your own again?

Think about it. You may not be able to write anything original, but you won’t know unless you try, no?

Your erstwhile fan,

Mal Warwick

The Tea Party may not be what you think

A review of Steep: The Precipitous Rise of the Tea Party, by Lawrence Rosenthal and Christine Trost

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

If you know nothing about the Tea Party other than what you’ve picked up from the daily news and a magazine article here and there, chances are excellent that you’ll learn a great deal from reading Steep. Here are just a few of the insights I gained from this superb collection of scholarly articles that examine the Tea Party from the front, the back, upside down, and sideways:

• There is, really, no such thing as “The Tea Party.” The term encompasses thousands of organizations at the national, statewide, and local levels that at any given time may well be found squabbling with one another about ideology, tactics, or just plain personality differences. I knew about the proliferation of groups but not about the diversity of views among them.
• The Tea Party phenomenon first surfaced less than a month after Barack Obama’s inauguration as President in 2009 — yes, less than four years ago — as what one scholar calls a “test marketing” campaign backed by money from the Koch Brothers and mainstream Republican operatives such as former Congressman Dick Armey, which we all knew very well at the time. However, the movement spawned by this intentional investment in destabilizing the fledgling Obama Administration grew so quickly and with such spontaneity that its original backers soon lost control. Whatever else it might be, the Tea Party is a grassroots phenomenon.
• Unlike the Christian Right before it, the Tea Party brought few new voters into the Republican column. As several of the authors in Steep make clear from their studies of a wide variety of poll results, the Tea Party is populated largely by Right-Wing Republicans who usually vote, anyway. (They also tend to be white males at or nearing retirement age.) The Tea Party brought passion to the Republican grassroots base, providing the necessary motivation to draw more foot-soldiers to the conservative cause.
• The old John Birch Society, which we all thought had gone the way of the Cult of Isis in the 1960s after William F. Buckley, Jr. consigned it to purgatory, somehow managed to resuscitate itself and become engaged in Tea Party activities. So did former leaders of the White Citizens Councils, the militia movement, and other assorted cranks, kooks, and eccentrics and the delusions they brought with them. Since nearly one-half (44%) of Tea Party adherents professed to believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim and was not born in the United States, using the term delusional is not out of line.

The most intriguing chapter in Steep is University of Michigan political science and women’s studies professor Lisa Disch’s, in which she “advances a counterintuitive argument: The Tea Party movement is sparked, in part, by the threat its supporters perceive to their share in two key programs of the liberal welfare state [i.e., Social Security and Medicare]. Tea Party politics is conservative, but its supporters’ material commitments and even aspects of their rhetoric place them in a liberal genealogy.” Disch argues that, during its first two decades, Social Security was explicitly racialized — farmworkers and domestic workers were specifically excluded from benefits (and guess who they meant by that!) — and that for decades afterward Social Security was seen as largely a benefit to white people, even after the coverage was broadened. “This makes Tea Party mobilization a ‘white citizenship’ movement: action in defense of material benefits that confer ‘racial standing’ in a polity that purports to deny precisely that — special standing based on race . . .  [T]he Tea Party movement belongs to liberal America even as Tea Party rhetoric denounces liberalism and liberals denounce Tea Partiers.”

Since I’m not bound by the strictures of academic “objectivity” (whatever that is), I can sum up all this information with my own conclusion: The Tea Party is the latest and the most extreme expression of the Right-Wing Republican movement that has been growing since its inception in the 1940s and 1950s in McCarthyite anti-Communism, the John Birch Society, and Southern opposition to civil rights, and in the backlash to the New Left, feminism, and the anti-war movement. Though the Tea Party is heterogeneous in many ways, and its focus nationally has been on advancing the Republican agenda of small government and rolling back taxes, the overwhelming majority of its adherents also embrace the social politics of the Christian Right (anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-women’s rights) and the suppressed but all too real racial resentment that has been the centerpiece of the Republican Party’s Southern Strategy since the days of Richard Nixon.  

As I write this, however, I wonder whether anyone but historians and political scientists will care much about the Tea Party five years, or even a year, from now. It remains to be seen what impact the Republican losses of 2012 will have on the spirit and the cohesion of the Tea Party.

Steep is a product of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies at the University of California’s flagship campus, edited by Lawrence Rosenthal and Christine Trost, the Center’s director and associate director, respectively. More power to them!

Ever wondered where those UFOs come from? Christopher Buckley has the answer

A review of Little Green Men, by Christopher Buckley

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

Perhaps it requires a rarefied sense of humor to appreciate Christopher Buckley, but you wouldn’t know it from the sales figures on his books. Anyone who can write a book with endlessly eccentric characters named Sir Reginald Pigg-Vigorish, Col. Roscoe J. Murfletit, General Tunklebunker, and Deputy FBI Director Bargenberfer may be reaching the pre-adolescent in me, but he makes me laugh, dammit, and I’m not going to apologize for it, so there!

In Little Green Men, not only does Buckley make me chuckle and wheeze with immoderate glee, but he also solves the mystery of the UFOs! Could anyone possibly wish for more?

Like so many of Buckley’s satirical novels, Little Green Men tells the story of a hapless (though in this case willing) victim of the absurd circumstances surrounding him — circumstances caused in large part by a witless supporting cast with names such as those listed in the opening paragraph of this review. Buckley’s antihero here is John Oliver Banion, a pompous Sunday-morning public affairs television talk show host with a pedigree that looks just a little bit like Christopher Buckley’s (including Yale, of course!). In fact, Buckley is never better than when skewering People Like Us, and he does it with such skill that I can almost imagine him cackling in the background as he types away.

One fine day John O. Banion is slicing into the rough on his exclusive country club golf course when he is abducted and “probed” by aliens — not Little Green Men, actually, but silver ones whom UFO taxonomists call Tall Nordics. The action that radiates from this inexplicable event is far too complicated, and far too unlikely — not to mention funny — to sum up, so I’ll leave it to you when you read this beautifully crafted little book.

Little Green Men is the fourth of the nine satirical novels Christopher Buckley has published since 1986. I’ve read most of them and reviewed two in this blog. You can see my previous reviews by clicking on these titles: The White House Mess and They Eat Puppies, Don’t They? I also found Boomsday and Supreme Courtship hilarious, though I read them before starting this blog.

Set up your own religion, and make a billion dollars

A review of Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion, by Janet Reitman @@@@@ (5 out of 5)

When L. Ron Hubbard died in 1986 at the age of 74, one of the world most confounding and controversial public figures passed from the scene — though not from memory.

• Borrowing a 19^th-century approach to mental therapy from psychiatrists Sigmund Freud, Josef Breuer, and others, as the basis for his own self-help method, Hubbard had become psychiatry’s most prominent critic for its dismissal of the therapeutic techniques he claimed could be administered by anyone without the benefit of training in medicine or psychology.
• Having declared in 1945 when flat broke that he would found his own religion, by the time of his death he had built a worldwide “church” through which he amassed an estate of $400 million—$826 million in 2012 dollars.
• Never having graduated from college, he styled himself as an explorer, a nuclear physicist, and a philosopher with advanced degrees to match, all the figments of his fertile imagination.
• A second-rate writer of pulp adventure fiction in the 1930s and of science fiction in the 1940s and 50s, he attained a ranking on the New York Times bestseller list only through his self-help book, Dianetics, published when Hubbard was approaching age 40.
• Upon his passing, Hubbard had achieved a semblance of immortality, elevated to spiritual sainthood by millions of followers around the world who treated his every written word and every utterance as unchallengeable truth.

Adding to the irony of Hubbard’s existence, this champion of mental health and outspoken opponent of psychiatry spent his last several years, by all accounts, an abusive and paranoiac lunatic whose erratic behavior was moderated only by the very anti-psychotic drugs he had crusaded against for more than three decades.

Thus ended the life of the founder of Scientology.

Since Hubbard had failed to name a successor, a vicious struggle for power in the “church” ensued upon his death. In hindsight, however, the victor in this struggle had been foreordained. Beginning four years earlier, once Hubbard had gone into seclusion, his whereabouts a secret from all but a handful of his staff, a 19-year-old named David Miscavige had begun forcing out all those in Scientology’s leadership who stood in his way. The process resembled nothing so much as the purges launched by Josef Stalin in the 1920s following the death of Lenin. By 1988, the 25-year-old Miscavige stood at the pinnacle, the undisputed leader.

To judge from Janet Reitman’s exhaustively researched and detailed reporting in Inside Scientology, Miscavige has run the multi-faceted Scientology establishment for nearly a quarter-century now with a style that is at once obsessive, rigid, humorless, unforgiving, and dedicated almost exclusively to the pursuit of profit. He appears to exhibit virtually none of L. Ron Hubbard’s good qualities—irresistible charm, a forgiving nature, managerial ability, and a lively imagination—and all of his bad ones, including extreme litigiousness and a tendency to strike out at those closest to him. In recent years, Reitman reports, Miscavige has even demonstrated a clear pattern of severe paranoia much like what drove Hubbard into seclusion, sometimes attacking aides and senior executives with physical violence, at other times submitting them (or anyone else who so much as utters a hint of criticism) to humiliating punishment.

Just as he had engineered the “first Exodus” from Scientology on his drive to power in the 1980s, Miscavige’s extreme behavior led to a second Exodus in the middle of the last decade, driving away most of the senior executives who had managed the far-flung business, in some cases for decades.

As you’re no doubt aware, the Internal Revenue Service classified the Church of Scientology as a religion, exempting all its innumerable affiliates and subsidiaries from the payment of Federal taxes and allowing them to receive tax-deductible donations. However, what you may not be aware—I certainly wasn’t, before reading Reitman’s book—is that the agreement signed by the “church” and the IRS in 1993 came about because the then-Director of Internal Revenue cried chicken in the face of literally thousands of lawsuits filed by the Scientology establishment under Miscavige’s direction and its constant use of private detectives to harass and apparently even blackmail IRS agents and staff.

Janet Reitman’s book began as an article in Rolling Stone magazine but took years to complete. It’s a stellar example of the reporter’s craft, balanced and objective. Yes, balanced: Reitman quotes Scientology officials and long-time faithful adherents at length — and even in the book’s closing thoughts — demonstrating that for some, perhaps a great many, who give over their lives to Hubbard’s “technology” (as he styled it), life can be rewarding. However, there are far too many former Scientologists who have spoken out, especially in recent years, blasting Miscavige’s administration if not the core ideas of Scientology itself, to think of this now six-decade-old movement as anything other than a diversified, multinational business built by a movement that operates precisely like the cult it is so often accused of being.

Like McDonald’s, which earns more revenue from its real estate than from Big Macs and Chicken Nuggets, the Church of Scientology now derives the lion’s share of its income from its real estate holdings around the world. Other businesses contribute additional funds. And yet the “church” itself seemingly continues to gush money, even as the faith is in decline: one of its centers alone, in Clearwater, Florida, the movement’s spiritual headquarters, reportedly was grossing more than $1 million a week as recently as a decade ago. If that’s the case, and hundreds of other Scientology centers in cities and towns around the world remain in business only because they’re profitable (the yardstick the “church” applies), I can’t begin to imagine how large is the asset base ruled today by David Miscavige. If he began 24 years ago with the equivalent of the $826 million that Hubbard left to the movement, surely the “church” today possesses wealth in the billions.

If you like weird stories about eccentric people, you’ll love this novel

A review of Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, by Maria Semple

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

Whenever I needed an excuse for something questionable I’d done as a child, I made up a story. Some of those stories — there were a lot of them — were colorful, detailed, and complex, based on the theory that the more I talked, the more likely it was that my parents would get bored and hence the less likely I would be punished. That actually seemed to work. Often as not, instead of moving to do something tragic, such as confine me to my room for a day, they would roll their eyes and say, “A likely story!”

Now, you may not be able to hear the intonation in that phrase, as I do, but I hope you get the point: the tale I’d told was beyond the realm of credibility, since my imagination had run away with me.

In that same sense, Where’d You Go, Bernadette? is a likely story.

I picked up this book because so many of the reviews I’d seen had labeled it “hilarious.” Sadly, I didn’t find it hilarious. Amusing, yes, even genuinely funny at times. Unusually well written, to be sure. Cleverly plotted, without question. And imaginative — to the max.

The Bernadette of the title is a 40-something suburban mom in Seattle who is anything but typical (if, in fact, there is such a person). She is a refugee from a former life in L.A., where by happenstance she was awarded a McArthur “genius” grant for her bold, unconventional work in architecture. Bernadette was “green” before there was green, or so the story goes. However, shortly after the national recognition she received as a result of the grant, Bernadette went off the rails and fled to Seattle with her husband, Elgin, who had conveniently sold his artificial intelligence company to Microsoft and secured a senior position to continue his work there.

Cut to Seattle, where the tale begins. Bernadette and Elgin have purchased a cavernous former “school for wayward girls” on a hilltop overlooking one of the city’s exclusive, high-income suburbs. Their 15-year-old daughter Bee (nee Balakrishna) narrates the unfolding story of Bernadette’s protracted nervous breakdown and later disappearance, interspersing her commentaries with email messages and official documents.

Author Maria Semple, who lives in Seattle, has practically nothing good to say about the place, and Microsoft bothers her, too. In fact, Semple doesn’t seem to like much of anything or anybody, as absolutely no one in this cockamamie novel comes off as completely sane and desirable — except for Antarctica, which possesses the rare virtues of being home to lots of penguins and very few people. You’ll have to find out for yourself how the story gravitates from Seattle to Antarctica.

Operation Double Cross: a new spin on why the Normandy invasion succeeded

A review of Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies, by Ben McIntyre

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

Americans’ views of the Second World War have been dominated by films, books, and television specials about the role that U.S. troops played in the fighting. Even today, more than half a century after the war ended, we tend to believe that it was our ingenuity and industrial might and the sheer guts and persistence of American soldiers and sailors that defeated Nazi Germany — and, to borrow a phrase from the preceding Great War, “made the world safe for democracy.” This is just one of a great many signs of our insularity and the widespread belief in the so-called exceptionalism of our nation.

However, serious historical studies have long since established the truth that Stalin’s Soviet Union carried a much larger burden than ours. It was the German defeat at the monumental Battle of Stalingrad (July 1942 – February 1943) that was the true turning point in the European war. That victory alone cost the Red Army more than 1.1 million casualties; in the war as a whole, 26.6 million Soviets died. (U.S. deaths totaled 418,500.) And research in more recent years, as hitherto secret archives have been opened to the public, has revealed the seminal role of the British Secret Intelligence Services, both MI5 (counterespionage) and MI6 (foreign intelligence) that made possible the success of the U.S.-led Normandy Invasion on D-Day (June 6, 1944).

If you have even a cursory knowledge of World War II, you’re probably familiar with the names George Patton, Omar Bradley, and Dwight Eisenhower. It’s highly unlikely, however, that you’ve ever come across any mention of Elvira Concepcion Josefina de la Fuentes Chaudoir, Roman Czerniawski, Lily Sergeyev, Dusko Popov, Juan Pujol Garcia, and Johnny Jebsen. In their own way, these six European double agents who were “turned” or recruited by the British played roles as large as those of any American general in the success of the invasion that opened up the Western Front.

Because British intelligence, working through these six extraordinary individuals in the Double Cross System, managed to mislead the Germans about the date and place of the invasion, McIntyre writes, it “was a military sucker punch. Senior German commanders were not only unprepared but positively relaxed.” Everyone in a key position on the Nazi side, including Hitler himself, had bought the elaborate deception that kept powerful German forces locked up elsewhere, expecting Anglo-American invaders in Norway, the French Atlantic coast, and, most of all, in the Pas de Calais peninsula in Northern France, convinced that the Normandy action was simply a diversion. As we all know, of course, the real Normandy invasion was a desperate and bloody battle nonetheless, anything but a certain victory for the Allies. Eisenhower and Montgomery, who led the invasion force, later acknowledged that if the Germans hadn’t been fooled, if they had reinforced their troops on the line in Normandy, the invasion might well have ended in a massacre of Allied troops.

As Ben McIntyre writes in Double Cross, “the D-Day spies were, without question, one of the oddest military units ever assembled. They included a bisexual Peruvian playgirl [who was heir to a guano fortune], a tiny [and fanatically patriotic] Polish fighter pilot, a mercurial Frenchwoman [who loved her little dog Babs more than any person], a Serbian seducer, . . .  a deeply eccentric Spaniard with a diploma in chicken farming,” and a Danish-German Anglophile whose sideline business of currency and commodity manipulation would have put Catch 22‘s Milo Minderbender to shame. What is most astonishing about the highly unlikely stories McIntyre tells in this detail-filled account is that they’re all true.

Double Cross is McIntyre’s third book about British intelligence during World War II. His previous books — Operation Mincemeat (reviewed here) and Agent Zigzag — relate equally improbable exploits, which are nonetheless also completely true. The earlier books, both bestsellers, were fascinating to read, filled with all the tension of superior thrillers. In Double Cross, McIntyre attempts to tell a vastly more complex tale, encompassing a veritable army of characters, both British and German, and a bewildering sequence of interconnected events. He comes up short. There’s simply too much going on for any but the most retentive reader to follow all six threads. I was nearly two-thirds of the way through the book before I could even keep all the spies straight, let alone the ever-changing cast of their handlers on both sides.

Although Double Cross is a little difficult to follow at times, it’s still a thoroughly enjoyable and often surprising read. You can be the life of any party for months, retelling the story of the British carrier pigeons who played a special role in Operation Double Cross, or the one about the Spanish chicken farmer working for MI5 who fabricated the identities of an army of sub-agents, fed the Abwehr with thousands of pages of entirely fictitious reports — and received a German Iron Cross for his courageous and resourceful efforts to defend the Fatherland.

A funny story by a veteran British playwright and novelist

A review of Skios, by Michael Frayn

@@@ (3 out of 5)

You may have heard of Michael Frayn without remembering his name. The successful British playwright and novelist is best known for the stage plays Noises Off, a frequently produced farce of mistaken identities, and Copenhagen, which portrays a meeting in 1941 between two of the giants of 20th Century physics, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, at a time when Heisenberg was thought to be working on an atomic bomb for the Nazi regime.

In Skios, Frayn develops two intersecting stories based on the premise that one protagonist — a philandering nutcase who lives by impulse alone — inhabits the identity of the other, an internationally renowned author and lecturer on the subject of the scientific management of science. The expert is scheduled to deliver a lecture on a Greek island, Skios, to an exclusive audience assembled by a foundation dedicated to the preservation of the highest aspirations of European culture. Need I say that monumental complications ensue both for the expert and for the imposter, not to mention the foundation, its staff, and its guests? Might I add that, by the end of this little book, the body count numbers more than a dozen — and that no reader is likely to miss any of the deceased?

Skios is much closer in character to Noises Off than to Frayn’s more thoughtful work but is much less successful. Frayn’s humor comes through loud and clear — the story is frequently hilarious — but the utter absurdity of the plot unravels at the end, where Frayn lays out not one but two possible endings for the book. (One of them, perhaps the author’s original conclusion, is presented as conjectural. The other is presented as “real.”)

I loved Noises Off. I laughed until I was hoarse. And as a child I read Frayn’s first novel, The Tin Men, and loved that, too. Though I enjoyed Skios enough to finish it, I was disappointed.

Before Silicon Valley, Bell Labs was America’s hub of innovation

A review of The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, by Jon Gertner

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

Ask yourself why the United States of America has remained the dominant economic and military power on the planet for nearly a century now. Is it the superior universal public education system we used to brag about? Is it the wealth of our natural resources: millions of acres of rich, arable land and bountiful mineral and petroleum wealth? Is it the peculiar American ability to build and manage efficient large enterprises? Is it the size and the demographic richness of our population, constantly renewed by the influx of resourceful people from other lands and cultures?

Jingoistic rhetoric aside, it’s most likely that your list of reasons — even, possibly, your only reason — is “American know-how,” the homegrown phrase that points to what seems an unusual national talent for creative thinking and innovation. In fact, it’s difficult to overlook the disproportionate presence of the United States on the lists of Nobel Prizewinners, industrial patents, and other markers of forward thinking in science and engineering throughout much of the 20th Century.

In The Idea Factory, Jon Gertner examines one period and one place where the evidence of American know-how was most pronounced: the time from the end of World War II to the late 1970s in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where AT&T’s Bell Laboratories was headquartered. There, an extraordinary assemblage of brilliant scientists and engineers, guided by a succession of equally brilliant managers, invented or developed into practical form the fundamental advances in science and technology that have shaped the world we live in today: the transistor, the laser, quality assurance methods, communications satellites, mobile telephony, digital photography, fiber-optic communications, and a number of much less well-known but equally important technological advances as well as a long list of innovations in weaponry and spy technology that many of us would prefer not to know about. (In fact, the relationship of Bell Labs to the Pentagon, especially its National Security Agency, remained close throughout the period studied in this book.)

It’s difficult to exaggerate the impact of the work at Murray Hill and its outlying sites following World War II. The transistor — the brainchild of three Bell scientists, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley — is frequently cited as the single most important invention of the century. Certainly, the transistor lies at the heart of all things digital today. Even more fundamental to the world we inhabit is the information theory of Claude Shannon, who explained how computers might communicate with one another long before anything resembling today’s computers existed.

As Gertner explains in great detail, most of Bell Labs’ work was carried out in service of the growing AT&T telephone network. (If you’re young enough to confuse that AT&T with today’s business of the same name, be advised that AT&T was America’s government-regulated telephone monopoly from the 1920s through the 1970s.) Those familiar with the network called it the biggest and most complex machine in the world. “The system’s problems and needs were so vast that it was hard to know where to begin explaining them,” Gertner writes. “The system required that teams of chemists spend their entire lives trying to invent new, cheaper sheathing so that phone cables would not be permeated by rain and ice; the system required that other teams of chemists spend their lives working to improve the insulation that lay between the sheathing and the phone wires themselves. Engineers schooled in electronics, meanwhile, studied echoes, delays, distortion, feedback, and a host of other problems in the hope of inventing strategies, or new circuits, to somehow circumvent them.”

Gertner makes absolutely clear, however, that “this book does not focus on those tens of thousands of Bell Laboratories workers. Instead, it looks primarily at the lives of a select and representative few,” chiefly scientist-managers Mervin Kelly, Jim Fisk, and William Baker and scientists John Pierce and William Shockley. Every one of these individuals was exceptional, and Gertner does an excellent job giving us glimpses of their eccentricities and missteps as well as their extraordinary lives and character and their accomplishments.

I can fault this exhaustive study in only one way: it’s exhausting, expecially in its concluding chapters, where Gertner spends far too many pages dwelling on the eulogies offered up by the managers who ran Bell Labs when it was alive and well, before the break-up of the old AT&T that was consummated in 1983.

An historical thriller with an insider’s view of Communism in Eastern Europe

A review of The Confession, by Olen Steinhauer

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

1956: Nikita Khruschev’s Secret Speech denouncing Stalin’s crimes; the Hungarian uprising and unrest in Poland it triggered; the British, French, and Israeli invasion of Egypt following Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal; Sputnik’s launch. It was a watershed year, somewhat comparable to 1968 more than a decade later. In The Confession, we view the world of 1956 through the eyes and the troubled mind of Ferenc Kolyeszar, a policeman in a fictional Eastern European country somehow nestled among Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania.

However, Kolyeszar is a novelist as well as a policeman, having published a well-received novel about his experiences as a soldier resisting the German occupation at the outset of World War II. Now 37 years old, he is writing The Confession to chronicle his shattering experiences at home and at work against the backdrop of fateful world events.

Kolyeszar’s story involves the unraveling of his marriage to Magda, the disappearance of a senior official’s young wife; the sometimes rocky relationships among Kolyeszar and Stefan, Emil, Leonek, and Brano, his fellow police officers in the District; Stefan’s reopened investigation into the murder of his partner immediately after the War; and the visit to the District of a KGB Colonel from Moscow named Kaminski. These parallel story lines weave in and out of one another, converging in a climactic end-game that brings a just conclusion to The Confession. Along the way we become immersed in the endless strain as Communist rule solidifies in Eastern Europe with mounting ferocity. This is an engrossing and skillfully written story.

Olen Steinhauer’s The Confession is the second in a cycle of five novels set a decade apart from one another about the men of the District. Its predecessor, The Bridge of Sighs, was written from the perspective of Kolyeszar’s colleague Emil Brod and took place in 1948-49. The subsequent three novels carry the story forward to the fall of Communism in 1989. To my mind, judging from what I’ve read so far, this five-book cycle is as insightful a history of Eastern Europe under Communism as any history of the period.