Land on Fire

"The closer we look, the clearer it's becoming that wildfire -- 

which has long exerted an enormous impact on western lands -- 

is becoming a bigger force than ever before."

Above is the opening observation of an interesting new book that gives perspective on last month's fires in Northern California and the puzzlement I described in a September post about the smoke I had seen in my native Pacific Northwest.

People who live and work near the western forests are well aware that there have been more fires, and more really big fires, in recent years. For the rest of us, author Gary Ferguson, a Montanan, provides a thoughtful, well-written study of the phenomenon in a handsome book full of great illustrations. 

The story starts in 1905, when Theodore Roosevelt established national forests by executive order and the US Forest Service to manage those properties.

In those days, forests were national treasures, and the plan for dealing with fires was to Put Them Out.  Over time, foresters learned that fire had its purposes, including clearing dead vegetation and allowing for forest regeneration.

Before people came along, fires were set by lightning.  But today, most fires are caused by unintended human action -- power tools, dropped cigarettes, contained burns swept along by wind -- and a few by arson.  In fact, more Americans than ever live near western forests in what is called the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) of small-density housing developments that make forest management, and fire management, more challenging.

Climate change factors include rising temperatures and variations in rainfall and snow accumulations.  These have led to shorter winters, longer burning seasons and more really big fires, which Ferguson describes generally as ones that consume 100,000 acres or more.  He emphasizes his point when he notes that fire containment costs rose from $600 million in 1995 to $3 billion in 2015.


Other associated costs are replacement of structures, lost timber, reduced water storage and electrical grid repair.  And then there is the accumulating damage to forests, from which we derive half our water and whose trees absorb a significant amount of carbon dioxide.  

By way of example, the author discusses the healthy regeneration of a lodgepole pine forest in Yellowstone National Park following a big 1988 fire, and then a different case in Colorado, where a 2001 fire destroyed a Ponderosa pine forest that had not even begun to recover 14 years later.  The book includes photographs and information about other major fires from across the region.

Two essential points are that many factors are at work and that much research is being done. Ferguson discusses what has been learned from tree rings, satellite photographs, patterns of pine bark beetle infestations, the movement of fire based on wind and leaf observations, the changing composition of post-fire understory and the vulnerability of dry and dead trees following years of drought.  The more that is learned, the more the process of fire management seems to become one of micromanagement.

But there is always more to know.  The author quotes plant ecologist Frank Egler, who said this in the 1980s:  "Ecosystems are not only more complex than we think.  They are more complex than we can think."

Books: The Call of the Wild

This short novel about the life of a dog has been in continuous publication since 1903.  It functions as an adventure novel, as a travelogue about a little-observed moment in the American past and as a meditation on how personal character is forged by survival against adversity.  

Generations of young people, mostly boys, have been raised on the book.  Its writer seems clearly to have been influenced by Rudyard Kipling, and in turn to have shaped and inspired 20th-century American writers from Ernest Hemingway to Jack Kerouac to Hunter Thompson. 

Here's how the story begins:

Four-year-old Buck, a St. Bernard/Scotch shepherd mix, is separated from his comfortable  life on a California farm and sold by a family servant to settle a gambling debt.

The year is 1897, and large dogs with thick coats are in demand as sled dogs in the Alaskan wild, which has attracted 100,000 ambitious prospectors after a gold strike in the Klondike.  (This setting is factual, by the way.)

Buck is caged and sent by train and without food and water to Seattle.  When released, he attacks the first man in sight and in return is clubbed repeatedly until he learns that the clubbing will stop only when he stops fighting.  From the book:

"That club was a revelation.  It was his introduction to the reign 

of primitive law, and he met the introduction halfway.  

The facts of life took on a fiercer aspect; 

and while he faced that aspect uncowed, he faced it 

with all the latent cunning of his nature aroused."

Thus begins Buck's transformation.  He is sent by boat to Skagway and hitched to a sled team carrying mail thousands of miles north into the Yukon in the early days of the gold stampede.  

Over time, Buck's body hardens, grows stronger and adjusts to the snow and ice.  He observes the behavior of other dogs and of humans.  He learns to choose his fights, and he earns the respect of other dogs and the French Canadians who run the team.  

At the end of the 2,500-mile mail journey, Buck and the other dogs are sold to a trio of lazy and stupid people who all but run them to death.  The story proceeds from there.

Through these experiences, Buck continues to match his actions to his circumstances.  He comes to understand the nature of his ancestors, wolves, and adopts their ways.  The old formalities of civilization are replaced as he hears and answers -- yes -- the call of the wild.

This is a fine adventure story with a lot of respect for its lead character and insight into the character of individual dogs as well as human characters in the story.  Its themes and lessons obviously are meant for human readers.

The book still reads well, and I recommend it to people who can absorb the violence that shapes Buck into the creature he was meant to be.  My only quibble, and it's a small one, is that the writer's transliteration of his French Canadian characters' dialog is a bit klunky.  

The Author

"You can't wait for inspiration.  You have to go after it with a club."

Jack London was born in 1876 in San Francisco.  He was a rebellious sort and dropped out of school at 14 to become a hobo and small-time thief.  Later, after a year at UC Berkeley (as it is known today), he dropped out again to head north for the Klondike gold rush.

London returned without having staked a claim but with material for "The Call of the Wild" and many short stories.  Perhaps the most famous of those is "To Build a Fire," a nicely rendered piece that French filmmakers turned into a good animated feature last year on the centenary of London's death.

As hinted above, London saw himself as a man of action.  He traveled broadly, lectured often (he was an iconoclastic, of course) and wrote continually, publishing dozens of books of fiction and nonfiction.  But his health was poor, and he died at 40; it hardly needs saying that he worked full-tilt until the very end. 

No One Cares about Crazy People

The cover illustration of this book -- the title words at the bottom of a dark empty box -- struck me as odd until I started reading.

The story documents, in personal and societal terms, the suffering and costs of psychosis in America today.  As I read, I realized the illustration is a metaphor for the profound isolation of people with serious mental diseases.

Author Ron Powers ("Flags of Our Fathers," "Mark Twain: A Life") has switched from his third-person perch to write a book that is personal and historical and somewhat clinical.  

He and his wife, a scientist, raised two bright sons, each of whom developed schizophrenia in late adolescence.  Early on we learn that one of the sons hanged himself and died alone in the family basement one night, only to be discovered the next morning by his father.  

This is powerful and painful stuff, but Powers uses it to good effect, talking about the boys' joyful early years and then the parents' discoveries that their children's thinking had strayed from reality.

Interspersed with the family tale are historical recounts of how people who are different have been treated through history, particularly in the U.S. since about 1960.

Psychotherapy Today

I always had heard that insane asylums began to be shut down in latter part of the 20th century.  Powers explains how and why it happened.

First, he says, the FDA approved Thorazine, the first drug for treatment of psychotic disorders, for use in the U.S. in 1954.

This was a perhaps naive period.  After the introduction of antibiotics and the polio vaccine, Americans may have believed that science soon would yield treatments, or even cures, for every imaginable disease or disorder. 

Unfortunately, Thorazine wasn't a magic bullet.  Its effect, making more dopamine available in the body, did not address the causes of mental disease.  It also had unpleasant side effects:  dizziness, drowsiness, anxiety, sleep problems, weight gain, swelling of hands and feet, blurred vision and, worst, permanent involuntary tics and muscle twitches.

No matter. Within 10 years, 10 million Americans were taking Thorazine.  Then came lithium and many other anti-psychotic medications.   Some are helpful, but each case of mental illness is unique, activated by different brain reactions as well as individual life events and stresses.

Then, in 1961, psychiatrist Thomas Szasz published a groundbreaking book “The Myth of Mental Illness” that questioned the legitimacy of his field and provided intellectual cover for generations of anti-psychiatry activists, including L. Ron Hubbard, the sci-fi writer who founded the Scientology religion or movement or whatever it is.

(My note:  In 1962, author Ken Kesey published "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest," a novel set in an insane asylum where residents were treated with lobotomies and stupor-inducing drugs designed to enforce passive conformity.  The story became a popular movie in which a gleeful rebel played by Jack Nicholson battled with a mean nurse.) 

All this noise about magic medications and individual freedom caused legislators and insurance companies to de-institutionalize masses of psychotic people. 

Over time and as the national population increased -- by more than 100 million between 1960 and 2000 -- the number of beds for psychiatric inpatients declined by 95 percent.

Since then, we have not created the promised small group homes or communities that would have offered refuge and, ideally, steady support for psychiatric patients to live more independent lives.   

Jails and prisons, stressful places for all but particularly for the emotionally fragile, now have replaced insane asylums as the institutions that house our largest populations of psychotic people.  The asylums may have been bad, but the prisons are more expensive and much, much worse.

Anosognosia 

As Powers winds up his book, he introduces a term that I had not encountered before: anosognosia. 

Anosognosia is the diagnosis when a sick person is unaware that he is sick -- not in denial but detached utterly from reality. 

Powers tells of receiving a phone call early one morning from a son who announced that he had received a great honor in the middle of the night and that he was on his way to pick up his prize.  The parents, heroically committed always (and who wouldn't be?), scrambled to intervene.  This was not the first time one of their children needed such help.   

It is not unusual for psychotic people, once stabilized on medications, to become convinced their medicines are no long necessary and to stop taking the medicines; the resulting deterioration in their situations is challenging even for those with fully involved families and well-organized support systems.  

Powers applies the word in a broader sense.  As a country, he suggests, we also suffer anosognosia.  We willfully ignore the problems suffered by people whose brain chemistry is causing them great pain.  His book is a scream for his children and for others like them, a scream to the rest of us to take these matters seriously.

Next:  

Books That Don't Work:The Devil and Webster

Many books are being published these days, and it is difficult to find the ones that are worth reading.  I rely generally on book reviews to help me separate the wheat from the chaff. Sometimes this works, and other times it doesn't.  

In the last month, I have read three highly praised books that were pretty darned bad.  So today I'm going to talk about one of them.  Book reviewers, take heed:  We readers are paying attention.

This book has received many laudatory reviews and is seen as a thoughtful observation of identity politics in colleges today. A typical reaction, encapsulated in the subtitle to a Wall St. Journal critique, was this:  A "sharp and insightful account of the current explosion of student discontent, (that) ought to set off a golden age for the campus novel."

Well, hahaha with that.  Here is my reaction.

The Devil and Webster
by Jean Hanff Korelitz

This book is set in a small New England town and at a fictional college, Webster, whose reputation has grown and changed in the 250 years since its founding.  Once a school for the boorish and disdainful sons of elite WASP families, Webster now is a highly desirable, broadly diverse liberal arts college ranked just below Harvard and Yale.  (It is difficult to explain to anyone outside the Northeast how obsessed people in that region are with this kind of signifier.) 

The person who has completed the college's resurrection is Naomi Roth, a former women's and gender studies professor who has been the school's first female and first Jewish president for a number of years.

Told from Roth's point of view but not in the first person, the book goes on at some length about Roth's history of campus radicalism, her pride at Webster's broadly inclusive student body, her identification with student radicals and her support for same.  She's also dismissive and scornful of people, mostly older white men, who don't share her point of view. Establishing Roth's righteousness takes up almost the entire first half of the book, which seems a bit much.  

When students begin a quiet occupation of the campus's main quad, Roth pays no mind.  As winter approaches and more students set up tents in the space, Roth seeks to learn the students' complaints.  She is distressed to find herself cast in the unfamiliar role of "the man" -- the oppressive campus heavy.

Eventually she learns the students' complaint:  Tenure has been denied to a popular, easy-grading African American professor of folklore.  In fact, the professor has plagiarized the single publication credited to him in his years at Webster.  This is discovered not by his colleagues but by a high school student who remembers reading the original source material in a social studies class. 

Because tenure discussions are confidential, Roth cannot explain the tenure denial.  For this she is reviled as a bigot and a racist.  The protest is led by a charismatic Palestinian student who has been mentored by the black professor and who has his own back story.  He refuses Roth's repeated email requests to meet and talk.  For some reason, she doesn't bother to go down and initiate a conversation at the protest site. 

Things go on and then get worse.  Everything gets knitted back up by the end, and everyone, including Roth, is found to be imperfect in one way or another.  Well, who isn't?


The Central Problem

Roth perceives herself to be powerless and does NOTHING.  She does not confront the Palestinian student or the plagiarizing professor.  She supports the demonstration by providing a luxury potty truck but does not assert that the school's tenure decision is an honorable one.  Some leader.

The Palestinian student has obvious problems, but she defends herself in her own mind by enumerating all the "programs" she has instituted that would have ameliorated those problems.  When things go very badly for the student, she is puzzled and detached, not curious about how she might have averted his sad demise.
        
When bad things happen -- bad things done by unknown, never-identified others -- Roth becomes a victim again and therefore sympathetic.  She even ends up a with a new boyfriend who looks white but happens to have Native American ancestry.  
        
Having learned very little from the whole experience, Roth takes up the presidency again. 
        
Maybe the point of the book is to critique the willful passivity of college bureaucrats today.  But readers and reviewers don't seem to take it that way.  And triumphant passivity is a pretty weak theme for a 368-page piece of literature.  


Note  

The book's title is a play on the title of a short story, "The Devil and Daniel Webster," that was a regular junior high reading assignment during much of the 20th century.  

In that book, Daniel Webster, perhaps the most prominent 19th century American never to have been elected president,  argues in a courtroom for the freedom of a farmer who has made a Faustian pact with the devil.  The themes of that story are patriotism, the evil of slavery and, to a smaller extent, acknowledgement of American settlers' mistreatment of Native Americans.  

The last point is shoehorned into the book under discussion here, apparently to establish the virtuous nature of the college president and her wonderful, wonderful inclusive agenda.  Said another way, the title "The Devil and Webster" is an unjustifiable literary appropriation.

Hit Makers

I wish I had read this book in a paper copy rather than on my Kindle.  Had I done so, the book would be marked up with highlighted sections, and many of its pages would be folded -- but at least I could go back without tap-tap-tapping, page by page, to find the parts I want to see again.  

Yes, it's that interesting.  You may have read about some of the great anecdotes in "Hit Makers:"  Why seven particular artists are regarded as the finest Impressionist painters, why "Rock Around the Clock" was the pop music phenom of 1955 and many others. 

But what is most interesting is the analysis of why certain pieces of music and art and even advances in science succeed while other, possibly better ones, do not.

One concept is "optimal newness," the idea that people like new things but only if those things include older, familiar elements.  In everything from pop music to scientific inquiry, people have a much easier time absorbing incremental change than revolutionary change. 

Here's a quote from physicist Max Planck:  "Truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

(This made me think about the Missoula floods, enormous events that carved out much of the Pacific Northwest at the end of the last ice age.  When I was in college, these were received as fact, but the high school teacher-turned-geologist who researched and established the facts early in the last century was a pariah in his field for decades because his conclusions seemed inconceivable to other geologists who never had visited that part of the country.)

Thompson refers also to Raymond Loewy, the 20th century designer who came up with successful new looks for cigarette packages, Sears refrigerators and Air Force One, among many others.  

Loewy coined the expression MAYA,  "most advanced and yet achievable." He understood that people could accept only a limited amount of change, and this understanding led to his remarkable success.

There are many ideas in this book, too many to cover here, but I want to mention another concept that interested me.


Viral Schmiral

Author Thompson notes that the few old news funnels -- radio and then television networks and major publications -- have given way in the digital age to millions of information outlets.

He notes further that we speak now of new ideas or songs "going viral," and he pretty much demolishes the idea.  From the book:

"In epidemiology, 'viral' has a specific meaning.  It refers to a disease that infects more than one person before it dies or the host does.  Such a disease has the potential to spread exponentially.  One person infects two.  Two infect four.  Four infect eight.  And before long, it's a pandemic."

Except "going viral" is not what happens.  Among the millions of information outlets are some with extraordinary reach. Many of these outlets have celebrities' names on them. 

Now I will bring up a discussion inspired by "Hit Makers" but not from the book itself.

Several summers ago, we read that the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge "went viral" and raised more than $200 million for disease research. The idea originated with a pro golfer who challenged a cousin to pour ice over her head and donate money to the ALS charity.  

But the result had nothing to do with viral spread.  
  
Instead of growing by twos and fours and eights, the Ice Bucket Challenge was spread by celebrity YouTube videos and Twitter challenges that were reported in the news and drew in non-celebrity participants. Some of the big names: 
           
           Bill Gates, who now has 34 million Twitter followers 
           LeBron James, 37 million Twitter followers
           Oprah Winfrey, 36 million Twitter followers
           Kim Kardashian West, 50 million Twitter followers
           Lady Gaga, 67 million Twitter followers
           Taylor Swift, 84 million Twitter followers
           Justin Bieber, 92 million Twitter followers

By contrast, the golfer who dreamed up the challenge has 236 Twitter followers.  His idea was smart, but its huge success relied on prominent people who broadcast it through their great big megaphones. 


Note

Derek Thompson, who graduated from college in 2012, has done a remarkable job with this book.  He draws from philosophy, psychology, science, history, business, popular culture and media trends to make thoughtful observations about little-discussed but interesting themes.  The book has a nice balance of interesting stories and explanations; it is sprawling in scope, but always readable.  I look forward to seeing more of this guy's work.  

Norwegian by Night

Here's the premise of this book:  An 82-year-old, possibly demented Jewish guy from New York City moves to Oslo and shortly afterward has an adventure in which he tours the country with a small boy who is being pursued by bad guys.

This is not the stuff of your typical novel, but it turns out to be a fine read -- well-written, carefully plotted and with a character for the ages.  

The book's star, Sheldon Horowitz, is invited by his granddaughter to join her and her husband, Lars, in Norway after the death of his wife.

His first reaction is what you might expect:  

"Get stuffed," he tells the granddaughter.  

He relents just a moment later when Rhea tells him she is expecting a baby, his great-grandchild.  

So Sheldon travels to Norway, arriving in the long days of the early summer.  He speaks no Norwegian and is bewildered by the upbeat, easygoing Norwegians, including Rhea's amiable husband.  

Here is what the reader learns early on about Sheldon Horowitz.

-- He was a Marine sniper during the American landing at Inchon in the Korean War.

-- His beloved son and only child, Saul, died fighting in Vietnam.

-- Everyone is worried that Sheldon has old-age dementia, although the grandson-in-law is not so sure.

These things may not sound like the stuff of great narrative, but they come back again and again and are fleshed out in much greater detail as the plot proceeds.   

-----

When the book opens, Sheldon has been in Norway for three weeks.  He doesn't speak the language, he doesn't like being one of only 1,000 Jews in the whole country and he complains frequently.  When he learns that his granddaughter has had a miscarriage, he goes to his room and sobs, alone.

Also during this period, Sheldon hears loud fighting between a Balkan man and woman in the apartment upstairs. 

One day, when Rhea and Lars are away, there is a particularly violent exchange. The woman leaves her apartment and winds up on Sheldon's doorstep.  He offers shelter to her and her small son.  When the woman's tormenter returns and kicks down the door, the woman refuses to leave or to hide.  Sheldon and the son listen in a closet as she is killed.  

Sheldon understands the child is in danger.  His mother's killer and several associates are outside the apartment complex, waiting.  Sheldon takes the boy out the back way, and they go on the lam.

-----

For a man who spent his career repairing watches in New York, Sheldon shows himself to be quite resourceful, getting the boy out of the neighborhood, then out of Oslo and then around the southern part of the country, first in a "borrowed" boat and then a tractor.  

The boy does not speak, and so Sheldon does the talking, rattling on about classic myths, the Torah, the New Testament (he calls the boy Paul) and Huck Finn's adventures on the Mississippi. 

Sheldon remembers and applies advice he heard as a young man from his drill sergeant. When he is perplexed, Sheldon has imagined conversations with his old friend, Bill, who needles Sheldon as he improvises his moves on the go.

In addition to the boy, Sheldon is accompanied by his regrets.  He blames himself for his failure to save the boy's mother, for the death of a friend in Korea and, most of all, for the loss of his son.  

Back at home, the granddaughter and her husband worry.  They leave their apartment with the battered door and head to their rural cabin, hoping to find Sheldon there.  

Meanwhile, a melancholy but careful police inspector studies the crime scene and begins her own search, assisted by a genial but less able colleague. 

For all his aching joints and crotchety manner, Sheldon is funny, deeply human and ultimately noble.  If he is succumbing to dementia, well, we all should hope to handle such decline so well. 


Note

Author Derek B. Miller studied the humanities in college and foreign policy afterward.  In his first book, "Norwegian by Night," he uses his unusual background to construct what is technically called a crime story involving Americans, Norwegians and Balkan refugees.  This is not the sort of expertise that your typical MFA-in-writing author can bring to a novel.

Miller's second book, pictured at right, was released this year.  It starts in the first Gulf War and then jumps 20 years with the return of an American soldier and a British newsman to Iraq.  This book also has been well-received. 

The Rage

If you enjoy the occasional police procedural, you could do worse than to pick up a copy of "The Rage," a well-written and deftly plotted story set in Dublin in 2010.  

The book's chapters alternate between the experiences of its two main characters.  One is Bob Tidey, a middle-aged Garda (police) detective whose life and career aren't as he expected them to be.  The other is Vincent Naylor, a young thug fresh out of jail with a short temper and an itch to pull off a big heist.

The book opens with a two-page prologue.  Tidey is puzzling about a fraught situation that he cannot resolve.  "The way things had gone, there was no good way out of this, no moral thing to do. . . . But something had to be done."

Well, what's this about, you think to yourself.  So you turn to the first chapter, and the clock is wound back to describe how Tidey's conundrum arose.  

In the early pages, the detective is tasked with figuring out who shot and killed an unscrupulous banker, a case that his supervisors want cleared because the dead man was prominent in the city.*  

Meanwhile Naylor and his pals find a security man with a drinking problem and detailed knowledge about the cash collection practices of a large company.  They blackmail him and use what they learn to devise an intricate plot.

Other elements and characters are sketched into both men's stories -- Garda officers, family concerns, an aging nun who sees something and says something, a reformed hood whose son is up to no good, and a bordering-on-stereotypical annoying reporter.  (Reporters are helpful in crime stories because they talk to various involved parties and share information via their publications.)  All play their roles in moving the action along. 

Author Gene Kerrigan is himself a longtime Dublin newspaperman, and his story's settings provide some interest for people who have visited the city or been accompanied/dragged through James Joyce's "Ulysses" in a college class.  

"The Rage" is Kerrigan's fourth book. It won the Golden Dagger prize for the U.K.'s best crime story of 2012.  

Note

* Evil bankers are stock characters in fiction and film, particularly since the Great Recession. They are particularly resonant in this book, whose full title, "The Rage (World Noir)," reflects the mood in Dublin in 2010.   

Here's a quarterly GDP chart for Ireland in the relevant period.  The low point is the fourth quarter of 2009.  

Ireland's history since the mid 19th century was bleak.  A famine that began in the mid 1840s starved at least a million Irish and led to the emigration of millions of others.  I read once that the sons of famine survivors who came to New York grew six inches taller than their fathers.

The Irish economy remained sluggish for almost 150 years, a period when generation after generation of young Irish adults left the country in search of better prospects. Fortunately for them, they were able to settle in other Commonwealth countries. 

Around 1995, things began looking up.  International businesses located in Ireland, which spurred domestic business development and rising real estate values.  GDP grew rapidly, and the young people stayed home. For a while, Ireland was called the Celtic Tiger.

Then came the crash, which must have awakened national memories and dread.  It is not surprising that a journalist like Kerrigan would weave this into a novel of that moment.  

The Vagrants

Here is a rare book, one that I recommend wholeheartedly.  The writing is excellent, the characters are vivid and the story is moving.

The author, Yiyun Li, was raised in China and came to the U.S. to pursue a graduate degree in science.  She stayed to study writing, and she adopted English as her language. This, her first novel, was released in 2011 to broad acclaim.  

The Story

"The Vagrants" opens on a day in the late 1970s when a young Chinese counter-revolutionary is to be executed for her failure to reform herself after 10 years in prison for doubting the precepts of the Cultural Revolution.

Interestingly, the young woman is not a character in the story; her fate is sealed before the book opens.  We first meet her parents and then various other residents of Muddy River, the fictional town where she was raised and will die.  

The writer has set up this dramatic situation and populated her story with other well-drawn characters.  What flows is how they react to the execution and how their reactions affect the rest of their lives.

Among the characters are a physically disabled girl whose parents treat her as a nuisance and a servant; an odd young man whose parents are gone and whose only relative, his grandmother, has died; a successful newscaster who has gratified her mother by marrying into a politically prominent family; and an aging couple who have spent their lives as wandering beggars.

As might be expected, an execution ordered for incorrect thoughts is a reflection of a totalitarian culture.  The condemned prisoner had been an ardent Maoist until, at 18, she began to question her beliefs.  Her boyfriend at the time reported her change of heart to government authorities, and for this he was rewarded with the opportunity to enlist in the People's Army.

Throughout the book we see great cruelty among people, even among family members, that we come to recognize as the personal cost of life in a regime that rewards obedience more than any human quality.  For the people in the story, the costs are profound.

In addition to a clear and skillful written style, the book is distinguished by the author's respect for the integrity of her characters.  While most fiction writers cut their characters to serve their plots, Li seems to work the other way around.  In this book, she lets her characters respond as they will to what is happening around them.  It enhances the effect for the reader.


Note

It is likely not a coincidence that this book was finished and copyrighted in 2009, 20 years after the Chinese government's violent suppression of popular demonstrations in support of democratic reforms. 

Since that time, the government has stifled discussion of the events in books or schools. The post below is from Human Rights Watch, an interview with an American journalist who covered the situation at Tianenman Square in Beijing.  

Red Notice

This book is an investor's first-person account of his experiences in the Russian economy in the 1990s and the early aughts.  What began as a satisfying and profitable undertaking turned over time into a nightmare and a cautionary tale about the nature of Russia today.

Bill Browder arrived in Russia as a young management consultant. He speaks of one assignment in which he was sent to advise the new owners of a Russian fishing fleet who were considering whether to borrow $2.5 million in order to buy $10 billion worth of fishing boats. (The answer, of course, was YES.)

Experiences like this convinced him that there was money to be made as Russia's economy was being privatized and where companies appeared to be drastically undervalued. 

Browder founded Hermitage Capital Management, which invested early in Russian businesses and did very well as stock prices ratcheted sharply upward.  At one point, he mentions that Hermitage's return on investment was 100 times, i.e., $100 for every dollar invested.  Hermitage was for a time the largest foreign investor in Russian markets.

Unfortunately, the rule of law did not keep pace with economic growth.  Ultimately, politically connected insiders used various means to enrich themselves at the expense of their countrymen.  

Here's a 2009 youtube video, made by Hermitage, that explains what happened when government agents and crooks set out to strip the fund of some of its holdings. 





Later in 2009, Sergei Magnitsky, the Hermitage tax lawyer mentioned in the video, was beaten to death in the last of several hellhole prisons where he had been starved and tortured.  Magnitsky, an honest and brave man, refused to his death to lie and take responsibility for crimes he had not committed.  We all should wish to bring such strength if faced with such circumstances.

Hermitage used Magnitsky's prison diaries to identify the authorities who punished and then killed him.  In a rare show of political accord, Congress voted in 2012 to deny U.S visas to those individuals and to ban them from participation in the American banking system.  (The Obama administration resisted for a time, fearing the bill would damage its Russian "reset," but it relented in the face of adamant bipartisan support.)


The Putin Record

The Russian economy is not nearly as large or as transparent as the American one, and its uneven distribution of wealth is much more striking than ours.  

In 2013, Credit Suisse reported that more than one-third of Russian wealth was held by about 100 individuals. The most wealthy of those was a man whose net worth was estimated at more than $11 billion.

Actually, the richest man in Russia is Vladimir Putin, the Russian president.  He began building his net worth after leaving the KGB (now FSB) and taking an administrative job in St. Petersburg.   When $100 million worth of raw materials were set aside to exchange for food for the then-hungry city, the sales were completed, but no food ever arrived.  A city council member, now deceased, said Putin pocketed the money as well as proceeds from other asset sales.

During his first presidential terms, Putin's government imprisoned an insufficiently servile oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then the CEO of Yukos Oil.  The action sent a message.  Afterward, according to Browder, other oligarchs cut Putin in for nice helpings of equity in exchange for personal protection.  (The New Yorker ran a 2015 profile of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was released and exiled after 10 years in prison.)

The lowest estimates of Putin's wealth run to $40 billion, but Browder believes the real total is closer to $200 billion.  Who knows or cares, except him?

Unfortunately, Magnitsky is not the only Russian who has died on the wrong side of Putin's regime.  The dead and disappeared include hundreds of journalists.  A non-cooperative former FSB agent was poisoned with polonium-laced tea in a 2009 meeting at a London hotel.  In late 2015, a prominent Russian politician was shot in the back and killed near the Kremlin; his most recent offense had been to oppose Russian adventurism in Ukraine.  

Browder himself was convicted of false charges in a Russian show trial and could have been extradited to serve a prison sentence in Russia if western European companies had not intervened to prevent Interpol from acting on the order. 

Our political system has wacky aspects, it is true, but we all are much more fortunate than the beleaguered citizens of Russia.


The Book

"Red Notice" is an interesting read because it has a good story to tell, but for a self-made billionaire its author is a bit full of himself.  (Does he mention that he graduated from Stanford Business School?  Why yes, yes he does, several times.) It's a little surprising that so much of the book is devoted to his personal bio and family life when the details of his improbable career and unfortunate persecution are the real substance of what he has to share. .  To his credit, he has devoted years to agitating for accountability in the Russian government and seeing to the upbringing of Sergei Magnitsky's two fatherless sons.  

Perspective in a Nutshell

The year just ended was a difficult one -- death and dislocation for many in the Middle East, tensions in Asia and Latin America,  and a bitter election season in our own country.  

As the new year begins, let's try to keep in mind how many things have gone well for us.  Consider the following from the latest novel of Ian McEwan:

            Pessimism is too easy, even delicious, the badge and plume of intellectuals everywhere.  
            It absolves the thinking classes of solutions.  We excite ourselves with dark thoughts in 
            plays, poems, novels, movies.  And now in commentaries.  
                   Why trust this account when humanity has never been so rich, so healthy, so 
            long-lived?  When fewer die in wars and childbirth than ever before -- and more 
            knowledge, more truth by way of science was never so available to us all?  When 
            tender sympathies -- for children, animals, alien religions, unknown, distant foreigners -- 
            swell daily?  When hundreds of millions have been raised from wretched existence?  
                   When, in the West, even the middling poor recline in armchairs, charmed by music 
            as they steer themselves down smooth highways at four times the speed of  a galloping 
            horse?  When smallpox, polio, cholera, measles, high infant mortality, illiteracy, public
            executions and routine state torture have been banished from so many countries?  
                   Not so long ago, all these curses were everywhere.  
                   When solar panels and wind farms and nuclear energy and inventions not yet known 
            will deliver us from the sewage of carbon dioxide, and GM crops will save us from the 
            ravages of chemical farming and the poorest from starvation?  When the worldwide 
            migration to cities will return vast tracts of land to wilderness, will lower birth rates, and 
            rescue women from ignorant village patriarchs?  
                    What of the commonplace miracles that would make a manual laborer the envy of 
            Caesar Augustus: pain-free dentistry, electric light, instant contact with people we love, 
            with the best music the world has known, with the cuisine of a dozen cultures?  
                    We're bloated with privileges and delights, as well as complaints, and the rest who 
            are not will be soon.... 
                    We'll always be troubled by how things are -- that's how it stands with the difficult 
            gift of consciousness.

-----

The above comes from McEwan's latest novel, "Nutshell."  McEwan is known for improbable plots -- think of "Atonement," which became an award-winning movie, or "Amsterdam," which won the Mann Booker Prize.

"Nutshell" takes the improbable and goes several steps further.   It is a first-person story told by a yet-unborn baby, whose observations include the one above.

Yes, really.

Strange as that set-up sounds, McEwan makes it work.

The book opens when the baby is about one month from birth.  His mother has thrown her husband, his father, out of the father's rundown townhouse in an expensive London neighborhood.   Now the baby's disreputable uncle, brother of the baby's father, is plotting with the baby's mother to kill the baby's father and to live well on the proceeds from the sale of the house.

The baby, dependent on his mother and loving her for his nurture, also feels loyalty to his father and not a little anger at his uncle or the prospect of growing up with the two of them.  

The title comes from an early passage in Shakespeare's "Hamlet."  Claudius, usurper to the Danish throne once occupied by Prince Hamlet's father, sends emissaries to find out why Hamlet is so blue.  

At that point, Hamlet knows that Claudius has married Hamlet's mother, but he has not yet learned that Claudius killed King Hamlet.

"I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space," Hamlet says in the play.

You can see the parallels between play and novel -- Claudius the murderous usurper/ Claude the murder-minded dumber brother. The baby of "Nutshell" is the king of his own small space.

He also shares observations not associated with small children, let alone children not yet born, as the plot spools out to its conclusion.

"Nutshell" runs to an economical 208 pages, and McEwan knows how to tell a story. Check it out.