James Fallows

In the new issue of the American Prospect, available online now (but subscribe!), I have a long review of Fred Kaplan's book The Insurgents. 

I really should have mentioned this in time for the long, book-reading-friendly "festive" period stretching from Thanksgiving to the New Year holidays, but, hey, I was reading the book myself then. And Inauguration Day, MLK Day, Chinese New Year, etc are still ahead, and it's still summer reading period in Australia. So:

If you're looking for a good, lengthy, high-end-diversion read, let me suggest The Twenty-Year Death, by Ariel S. Winter. Cover shown at right, when I was reading the book at Thanksgiving time. This is part of the "Hard Case Crime" series that I've discussed over the years, for instance here back in 2008  and here about a year ago. The series is a combination of resurrected noir classics, with 1950s-and-earlier cover art, and original works.

Twenty-year is in the brand-new category, and is quite a tour de force. It is long because it is actually three novels, with an overlapping set of characters. The first is in the style of Georges Simenon; the second, Raymond Chandler; and the third, the immortal (and amoral*) Jim Thompson. The Simenon story is set in France in 1931, and the Chandler and Thompson episodes in greater L.A., in 1941 and 1951 respectively. For my taste, Winter's evocation of each writer's stye and sensibility becomes steadily more effective as the book goes on, so that by the end the Thompson section could fit right along such bleak classics as The Killer Inside Me. If you're in the mood for this kind of thing, this is the thing to read.

This is Winter's first novel. Keep writing!
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* For later discussion: Why I am drawn to the noir writers who portray amoral-and-worse characters from the inside, ranging from Thompson to Patricia Highsmith to Gillian Flynn of Gone Girl. Hmm, maybe this is a question I should not ask.

What these have in common is only that I've read them recently and think they're good.

 

Yes, yes, you should read all the first-rate newspaper and journal and online entries you can find about the tangled relationships among the United States, Pakistan, the CIA, Pakistan's ISI, the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Tehrik-i Taliban in Pakistan, et cetera.

But if you would like to see those same themes explored in a very accomplished spy thriller, look for Bloodmoney, by David Ignatius, whose official publication date is a few weeks away but which, if the publisher has its wits about it, should be hustling toward the bookstores at this instant. Ignatius (disclosure: a longtime friend of mine, who doesn't know I am writing this, or even that I've read this book) has in his day-job incarnation been a reporter, editor, and in recent years a columnist for the Washington Post. He has also over the past quarter-century written what is now quite a long series of elegant spy fiction. To mention only a few of the best known: Agents of Innocence, his first; Body of Lies, made into a Leonardo DiCaprio-Russell Crowe-Ridley Scott movie; and the recent The Increment, which assumed great roman a clef significance when news of the Stuxnet virus and its effect on Iran's nuclear program was revealed.

If you're depressed by the devastating takedowns of Greg "Three Cups" Mortenson's versions of his exploits and philanthropy in Afghanistan, two days ago by the Los Angeles Times and tonight on 60 Minutes, here's something to boost your outlook. Rye Barcott's It Happened on the Way to War: A Marine's Path to Peace, a verified story unlike Mortenson's, is in its own way at least as inspiring as what we had understood Mortenson's to be.

The video below gives you the basic flavor, with much more info at the site of his charity, Carolina for Kibera. Gist of the story: ten years ago Barcott, then an undergraduate at UNC - Chapel Hill, went to Nairobi on a project as part of his study of Africa and Swahili. He was in the city's huge slum, Kibera, and formed a close connection with people there -- especially a nurse and a community-organizer. They conceived a plan of creating a community-development organization to promote schooling, sports, medical care, and general uplift for children and families in Kibera. On return to North Carolina Barcott began raising money for this Carolina for Kibera project.

But Barcott, whose father had been a combat Marine in Vietnam, had wanted to "serve his country" and had gone to UNC on a Naval ROTC scholarship. His last year in college was a mix of Kenya-related and ROTC activities, and after graduation in 2001 his active service as a Marine began. He was in the Basic School at Quantico during the 9/11 attacks, and over the next five years he served in Bosnia, the Horn of Africa, and finally Iraq. He left as a captain in 2006, having been an ABC News "Person of the Week" that year. He went back for MBA and MPA degrees and now works in North Carolina for Duke Energy company -- by coincidence the same one I mentioned in my story on clean-coal projects in China -- directing sustainability projects.

It Happened on the Way to War from Center for Global Initiatives on Vimeo.

There is more at the site and of course in the book -- which is detailed, vivid, earnest, and remarkable in rendering with equal intensity his interactions with poor children in Nairobi and his experiences at OCS or on patrol in Fallujah. I was struck by its epigraph, which is also the slogan of Carolina for Kibera: "Talent is universal; opportunity is not." That is one of the clearest lessons of my own experience around the world over the years. It is heartening, in the current political mood, that a young, talented, ambitious American would choose that as the theme he wanted to stress.

It is an interesting book, which has just been published, and an encouraging story. Check it out.

I generally dread year-end lists of anything, but the worthiness of the book business makes me happy to pitch in on "best book of the year" compendia. In my enthusiasm, I've contributed to three such lists:

- The Atlantic's "Best Book I Read This Year" slideshow feature, here. Happily I've already read many of the books recommended by my colleagues, but I'm starting on the ones I haven't, beginning with James Gibney's nominee, The White Tiger.

- Foreign Affairs recently compiled a list of suggested books for the years ahead; I weighed in with a bunch, all of which I heartily endorse.

- Today Salon had its list too, for which I recommended a book that one of my colleagues picked for the Atlantic list. The last one I mention here is my sentimental favorite of all the year's offerings.

Read 'em all! Enjoy.    

For the year-end issue of Foreign Affairs, also the last one under the editorship of James Hoge, its staff asked a number of people to recommend a book to put on a "Reading List for the 21st Century." I couldn't help myself and recommended a whole bunch. My own reading list is here -- and you have to scroll down to see them all, ending with the Rosales novels of the wonderful F. Sionil Jose. The all-hands compendium of suggestions is here.

I felt especially serious and worldly when I found that Richard Holbrooke had also chosen one of the books on my mini-list: David Fromkin's A Peace to End All Peace! (At right.) Surprisingly enough, another international worthy had a different recommendation from mine. If you're short on reading material, browse around.

I've mentioned several times my enthusiasm for Matterhorn, a novel of Vietnam by my long-ago grad-school friend Karl Marlantes. I caught him on CSpan just now, in an hour-long interview you can see here. I don't think the interviewer (Ralph Peters) is likely to replace, say, Terry Gross as an interlocutor  -- Larry King, maybe! --  but Karl Marlantes himself is impressive and charming. Worth watching. (Screen shot below; no embedded video available.)

A few months ago, I generously offered advice for those who found themselves in the UK and were looking for something interesting to read. Now I can extend this service to readers in the Western Hemisphere! Dreaming in Chinese is coming to America, and starting this summer you will be able to get it here.

1) Usually when I mention an item in a new issue of The Atlantic, I make sure to add "subscribe!" Half schtick, half serious - and the remaining half serious too. This month, I'll say for variety: check out the newsstand version of our May issue. It's a long book, which I have read obsessively this past week. It is truly a magnificent work.

The Pulitzer prizes, like most professional awards, are a real grab-bag by any real-world standard of merit. Half the awards make you think, "Of course!" The other half, "Huh???"

The choice today of Liaquat Ahamed's Lords of Finance as the prize winner in history was resoundingly in the "of course!" and "well deserved!" categories. I mentioned my enthusiasm for the book a year ago here. Probably more important is the sample mentioned here of the luminous and vivid explanation that makes the book such a success. As a reminder (quoting myself):

As the world financial crisis spread after the 1929 stock market crash, the flow of gold became highly unbalanced. The United States, with its undamaged industrial-export base (and its determination to collect on wartime loans to the Allies) was piling up gold. So were the French, for various reasons of their own. This meant big trouble most of all for England, which was losing gold and therefore had to imposes a domestic credit squeeze. You could put it that way -- or you could write this:

"Unknown to most people, much of the gold that had supposedly flown into France was actually sitting in London. Bullion was so heavy -- a seventeen-inch cube weighs about a ton -- that instead of shipping crates of it across hundreds of miles from one country to another and paying high insurance costs, central banks had taken to 'earmarking' the metal, that is, keeping it in the same vault but simply re-registering its ownership. Thus the decline in Britain's gold reserves and their accumulation in France and the United States was accomplished by a group of men descending into the vaults of the Bank of England, loading some bars of bullion onto a low wooden truck with small rubber tires, trundling them thirty feet across the room to the other wall, and offloading them, though not before attaching some white name tags indicating that the gold now belonged to the Banque de France or the Federal Reserve Bank. That the world was being subjected to a progressively tightening squeeze on credit just because there happened to be too much gold on one side of the vault and not enough on the other provoked Lord d'Abernon, Britain's ambassador to Germany after the war [WW I] and now [1930s] an elder statesman-economist, to exclaim, 'This depression is the stupidest and most gratuitous in history.' "

This paragraph is from Liaquat Ahamed's Lords of Finance, recommended here previously. There are many touches I love in this passage, from the "small rubber tires" detail and mot juste "trundling" term, to the vivid real-world description of how grand policies worked in practice, to the perfectly used quote at the end. No larger point here; just worth noticing admirable examples of explaining the world.

Well deserved, author. Good choice, prize committee!
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UPDATE: I have just seen that the prize for feature writing went to Gene Weingarten, for an article in the Washington Post magazine. As I have mentioned before in footnotes here and here, this is the most haunting and, in its way, horrifying magazine article I have ever read. You can find it here. Congratulations is not the right word for a project of this sort. It commands respect.

And congrats to ProPublica for its prize too.

Twice recently, here and here, I discussed whether the Obama Administration's health-care reform victory was likely to spill over into broader or longer-term legislative accomplishment. The obvious maxim to apply here (and I didn't resist!) is from the late Richard Neustadt, in Presidential Power, about success today improving the odds of success tomorrow. This might sound like nothing more than "momentum matters" or "them that has, gets," but it actually is more interesting and complicated in Neustadt's telling.

Just to round out the point, here are several recent nice references to Neustadt's premises and principles in Obama's age. Michael Nelson, of Rhodes College, has a Chronicle of Higher Education essay here;  and Matthew Dickinson, of Middlebury, has a blog entry here. Three  years ago Dickinson co-edited a book of analyses and appreciations of Neustadt by many of his students and colleagues, here. All of this material is highly recommended and is useful in thinking about the power of our current president.  Cover photo from the 2007 book:

A look just now at the preview of Sebastian Junger's rave review in this Sunday's NYT Book Review filled me with happiness, comradely pride, anticipation, and a note of chagrin. The review is of Matterhorn, a new novel of the Vietnam war, by Karl Marlantes (below), which Mark Bowden of the Atlantic had also extolled in a special Amazon commentary. ("There are passages in this book that are as good as anything I have ever read," etc.) Junger's version is that the book may be "one of the most profound and devastating novels ever to come out of Vietnam -- or any war."  The author:



The book:



Happiness, because of the appearance of what is by all reports a great new book. Comradely pride that a project now more than 40 years in gestation has come to such a successful conclusion. Marlantes, who was from a tiny coastal town in Oregon, had gone to Yale in the mid-60s and then to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, in the class just before Bill Clinton's. He left to join the Marines and saw intense combat in Vietnam. His citation for the Navy Cross is here. He then went back to Oxford in the early 1970s. I met him there, where he tried to explain what he had seen to those of us who hadn't - and had mainly opposed the war. He said he knew he would have to write the story out. Eight* U.S. presidents have come and gone, socialist Vietnam is increasingly hard to tell from a capitalist bazaar; and now Karl Marlantes has finished and apparently perfected his book. This kind of long-run saga does not always turn out so well.

My anticipation is of course to see what is in the book. The note of chagrin? I actually have a copy of the book at home but had not yet started reading it -- and didn't bring it with me on a current long trip. Drat. But -- ahah! -- I see that it's available on Kindle! [Thirty seconds later:] I see the first page now.

UPDATE: A good interview of Marlantes with Steve Scher of KUOW in Seattle, here. Among other things it clearly conveys his affability and good humor.
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* OK, we're on our eighth US president during Marlantes' time with the book, from Nixon through Obama. But since one of them is still in place, it's not quite right that eight have come and gone. Still, it's been a long time. Also, pending the time that our "category" feature is revived and I can link to others in the "Book List" series, I'll give a gentle reminder for this book.

... let me humbly but enthusiastically suggest:

Rachel DeWoskin's Foreign Babes in Beijing -- a memoir of her unlikely career as a vampy soap opera star on Chinese TV in the 1990s -- is deservedly on the list of books that expats in China tell new arrivals they should read for a pop-culture feel of the place. My own reaction, when newly arrived, here.

DeWoskin's new book, Repeat After Me, is different: novel rather than memoir, set half in New York and half in Beijing rather than all on-scene in China. But the voice and nervous/sassy sensibility are similar, and similarly memorable. When I was reading it this summer, I marked a few passages that made me miss Beijing (no small achievement, just after I'd left) or that rang particularly true. The book's not at hand at the moment, so I'll just say: a book worth finding out about for yourself.

Nicholas Thompson's new book The Hawk and the Dove has received admiring reviews and was the subject of a wonderful feature story this past weekend in the New York Times. It's a very good work -- not least because it takes a gamble on a "high concept" for the book, and pulls it off.

Actually there are two high concepts here. One is that a paired biography of two often-contending figures of the Cold War era -- Paul Nitze and George Kennan (left and right, respectively, in the photo, often with the opposite orientation in their policies) -- will work in literary and intellectual terms. The other is that the author's relationship to one of the subjects -- Nitze was his grandfather -- will give him extra insight without warping his perspective. It succeeds on both counts.

Nicholas Thompson is 34 years old; I first met him a dozen years ago, when he was part of a student group pressuring US News to change its benighted college-ranking system. (I was then US News' editor. Story for another time.) Since then he has worked for great magazines -- the Washington Monthly, Legal Affairs, now Wired -- and been part of the New America Foundation. With all the woes of journalism, it's encouraging to see ambitious and talented people giving it their best.

If you were engrossed by today's NYT saga about Timothy Geithner as head of the NY Fed -- and even if you skipped past the story or didn't hear of it at all -- please make haste to read the saga of a previous incumbent of the job. Lords of Finance: The Bankers who Broke the World, by Liaquat Ahamed, tells the story of Benjamin Strong, head of the NY Fed through the 1920s, and of his central-banker counterparts in England, France, and Germany who, together and unwittingly, helped bring on the Great Depression.

Lords of Finance as it appeared to me on the trusty Kindle1 here in Beijing; physical copy not easy to get locally.
 

Economic theory has its place (and for me its place was grad-school classes). Well-done economic history is often far more illuminating. This is extremely well done history, and is worth mentioning now because of the obvious resonance between this tale of cleaning up after a bubble and today's predicament. Sample passage, about the 1920s but somehow sounds familiar:

Watching other people become rich is not much fun, especially if they do it overnight and without any effort. It was therefore inevitable that all this frenetic activity -- the thriving stock market, the new issues, the ballyhoo about a new era, the buying and selling of Florida real estate -- provoked a chorus of voices demanding that the Fed do something to stop the "orgy of speculation," a phrase that would become so commonplace over the next few years as to lose all meaning.

As it happens, Liaquat Ahamed and his wife Meena are friends of mine and my wife's, but I would recommend this book even if we'd never met.

Thanks to all who wrote in with suggestions about why the elusive book Typhoon had apparently vanished into a black hole rather than reaching me in China, and what I might do about that. Among the things I have learned in the last few hours are:

- It's on sale at the moment at the Hong Kong Book Centre on Des Voeux Road;

- It's will be available six weeks from now, as a £7.99* paperback, direct from Penguin Books in the UK;

- It can be found in various overpriced hardcover versions, and not-yet-available paperbacks, via this Bookfinder site (and some others);

- Amazon.de will have the German paperback edition late next month too (hardback out of stock);

- It's been selling well in hardcover at Filigranes, a leading bookstore in Brussels;

- Large-print and audio editions are available from this site in England, for £17.95 and up; and (in addition to other reports)...

- It's in stock, and cheaper than any of the alternative in-stock sources, from Amazon.ca in Canada, for the equivalent of $18.62 USD.

So what have we learned here? That it doesn't make sense to try to have books shipped to China (expensive and uncertain). That Amazon.ca is probably the way to go, unless I want to wait six weeks. And that -- while I am grateful for many offers from people to mule the thing in on their next visit to Beijing -- it makes most sense to order one and have it shipped from Canada to the US, then pick it up on my next trip not too long from now.

Also, a consensus hypothesis that the UK hardcover publishers sold more books than they expected; that they didn't have a further press run -- especially as paperback date drew near; and that they have been lethargic about producing a US edition. What I learned when working in the White House decades ago is that blunder, misunderstanding, or miscalculation is usually the explanation for things, as opposed to hyper-sophisticated secret plans. That's probably why this book is so hard to find, as opposed to a deliberate suppression scheme.

What's left to the realm of mystery: whether the book I originally ordered just got lost or was detained; why the publishers didn't try to sell more hardbacks after the initial batch sold out; and why on earth the used copies on Amazon are listed at $75 up to $247.87.

Most important mystery: whether after all this, the damned book will be any good. At least I can count on being able to answer this question at some point.

Sincere thanks to all who volunteered their tips, info, and help.
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* Yes, since previous post on this topic have found the right symbols for Pound and Euro.

This is a small thing, but intriguing (to me) because of the various strands it potentially connects. Background:

This past June, I heard about a new spy thriller called Typhoon, by the well-established UK writer Charles Cumming. It was set in China, so I put it into my "here's another way to learn about the country" mental in-basket. Its fictional time frame was the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. Since that was the real-world time frame in which I then lived, it moved up on my mental  "books I should read soon" list.



Better still, the plot apparently involved something I'd been reading and thinking about, and which was an important ongoing theme in internal Chinese news coverage: the possibility of separatist or disruptive activities by the Muslim Uighur population of China's far-northwestern Xinjiang region. The Chinese press portrayed this as the main "terrorist" threat to the Olympics, justifying tight security measures. In the novel, apparently the CIA was working with the Uighurs to stir things up. Hmmmm!

Could I buy this at a book store in Beijing? Not likely -- less for censorship reasons than because of the limited number of books that ever make their way here. So I checked online. I didn't find it from any of the normal US sources. But it was being published in England first, and Amazon.co.uk had it in stock.

I ordered a copy: 9.99 pounds for the book, 7.98 pounds for postage, and that when the pound was worth about $2. Part of the cost of expatriation. Order confirmed, book shipped to Beijing. And then... it never arrived.

Amazon.uk said it had indeed sent the book. The Royal Mail tracing service seemed to confirm that fact. Yet on the Chinese end, nothing got here. Hmmm again. But this is not so unusual with mail in and out of China. Things just get lost

Amazon.uk issued a full refund. Gracious of them. And I thought, I'll get this the next time I travel to the outside world.

So I went to America that autumn -- and still didn't find the book in any US stores or sites. Had no trips planned to England, so didn't try to pick it up there. For family reasons, kept going back to the US every few weeks. Kept checking. Never saw it.

Today I thought: let's find this book! And now I see it in stock on the Amazon.uk site for 42 pounds (ok, 41.99) and two copies on the main US Amazon site for either $75 or $247.87. What the hell???

I'm almost curious enough to buy the book at these inflated prices to get a clue about what is going on. Almost. But I can't help wondering why this book's marketing history is so odd.

Why, despite generally positive comments and reviews, has it seemingly vanished from circulation? Why, unlike numerous other books by the same author, did it never successfully cross the Atlantic to be published in the US? Why on earth are re-sellers now offering it for 4x to 10x its original price? None of this makes apparent sense.

I am very skeptical that mailroom censors would have kept the book from reaching me in Beijing. Far more obviously "sensitive" printed matter - in English - comes into the country every day. I had been reading the highly controversial Jon Halliday-Jung Chang Mao biography on one interminable Newark-Beijing flight. I absentmindedly kept it in my hand as I walked through the customs and immigration gates in Beijing. No one gave it a second glance. (General point: the authorities don't really care what non-Chinese citizens are reading in languages other than Chinese. More here.) Casual screwup is the more likely explanation.

But the book's fate in the English-language markets is puzzling to me. Has it been, in some way, suppressed? Did US or UK officials somehow signal that it would make trouble if left on the market? That's hard to imagine, but other explanations seem farfetched too. If anyone has the book and can offer a hypothesis, I'd be glad to hear it. And I'll buy it from you on my next trip home, for something less than $247.87.

From Kate Atkinson's chilling new novel When Will There Be Good News?, in a scene where a man drives through the hinterland in a rented car:

There was no signal on his phone, and the radio had given out nothing but crackle and hiss for some time now. The CD player contained one disc accidentally left over from the previous rental, and Jackson wondered in what circumstances he would feel so desperate for the sound of another voice that he would listen to Enya's.

(For Enya fans, this is just a little joke, occasioned by the view in our household that the most reliable gender marker is not in fact the Y-chromosome but rather an appetite for County Donegal's answer to Kenny G. No joke, though, Atkinson's book is remarkable.)