Book Review: Cave of Bones

Cave of Bones: A Leaphorn, Chee, and Manuelito Novel
Anne Hillerman
Mystery

[WARNING: minor spoilers.]

Cave of Bones nicely illustrates the difference between writing and storytelling. Anne Hillerman is a professional reporter. She can write perfectly good English, and does. It doesn't add up to a story, though.

Without going into exhaustive detail, here are some things that could have been fixed:

• Too much "X felt Y," instead of using dialog and description to show how X felt.
• Some leaden dialogue. Real people do not say things like "I'll make sure that's undisturbed. We want to find a living man, not the ancient dead" unless there's video rolling.
• Several plot threads that don't really reinforce one another.
• An idiot plot, wherein two professional police offers fail to thoroughly search the single most obvious place where they should have searched--or even ask anyone else to do so.

Most importantly, Cave of Bones contains a total lack of pacing. In chapter 2, a man disappears. For the next half of the book, nothing happens that sheds any light on his disappearance. Instead, we get Variations on a Theme of We Still Don't Know Anything. This is one of the worst sins a mystery writer can commit, because mysteries tend to be long on talking and short on action. 

Furthermore, when we do get some movement, it's just random thrashing-around. A previously-minor character contacts the cops, passionately tells them nothing in particular, for no rational reason suddenly runs out and gets lost in the snow. Subsequently, for even less rational reason, he tries to shoot someone. Finally, for absolutely no reason whatsoever rational or otherwise, he manufactures a fake hostage situation. All of this adds up to a certain around of churn, but plot and pacing require directed action.

Perhaps the most vexing, if minor, point in Cave of Bones comes at the end--in the Acknowledgements section. Hillerman thanks "my writer friends, the Literary Ladies," which is gracious and appropriate. And yet . . . the problems here are very obvious, and very few of them are subjective judgments. Anyone could have pointed them out. Why didn't they?

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Anne Hillerman is, of course, the daughter of Tony Hillerman, who famously created the Navajo detectives Leaphorn and Chee and their world. Tony Hillerman isn't my all-time favorite author, in substantial part because most of his books are police procedurals and my first love is the whodunnit. He was a gifted writer, though, with enormous powers of description and an intimate knowledge of the Southwest's native cultures. Among his better books are Thief of Time and The Wailing Wind. Don't watch the PBS adaptations unless you want your intelligence insulted, though.

Book Review: Berlin 1936

Berlin 1936: Sixteen Days in August
Oliver Hilmes
History, biography, sports

Berlin 1936 is a rather unusual book. I can imagine it might not be to everyone's taste. I liked it a lot, though.

"The Nazi Olympics" are famous as the occasion of Jesse Owens's on-field heroics, which are (and were) widely understood as having giving Hitler the metaphorical finger. The rest of the scene is treated as background--or reported in the newspaper-like tones used for any sporting event. Berlin 1936 flips all of this around. The book is a series of vignettes, told in the present tense and taken from a broad swath of lives both famous and obscure. Some of the actors appear once and vanish. Others weave into and out of the story: the American author Thomas Wolfe, Joseph Goebbels, the club owner Leon Henri Dajou. Owens is there, but he's one among many.

The theme of the book is not athletics, but contrast. Hilmes does a rather fine job in showing Berlin as the visitors saw it, as the Nazis wanted it to be seen--and then showing the ugly, underlying truth. The spectacle--not only of the games, but of Berlin itself--was deliberate: bait for the gaze of the world. Dangled in front of the visitors and the newsreel cameras, it pulled their eyes away from such nasty facts as Hitler's recent treaty violations, the race laws, and the burgeoning concentration camps. It worked, too.*

I can't say that Berlin 1936 is a book for everyone. It's novelistic (and should appeal to lovers of historical fiction). The present-tense prose makes the book more immediate--there's a sense of not knowing how it all comes out--but it's obviously a stylistic device. Substantively, while the book is well-researched and end-noted, it makes no pretense of completeness; it's no substitute, for example, for a straight, rigorous history book. There are no hard numbers and not much in the way of historical context. Ordinary Berliners are present, but they're at the margins, and they fade away entirely as the book continues.

. . . which, I think, is part of Hilmes's point. In Hitler's Germany, ordinary individual German didn't count for much. They were just grist for the mill--obscured by Olympic razzle-dazzle--and ultimately mere fodder for armies. In much same way, the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer was kept off the streets for sixteen days, the rhetoric was muted, the press coverage was orchestrated in fine detail, the swing bands were given plenty of leeway, the nightlife was permitted to roar. Hilmes does a nice job in showing the frothy surface, while periodically puncturing it. To complain that this book reads like a guide to Berlin glitz (as one or two reviewers have done) completely misses the point.

*Comparisons with the current World Cup in Moscow are left as an exercise for the reader.

Book Review: The Matter of the Heart

The Matter of the Heart: A History of Heart Surgery in Eleven Operations
Thomas Morris
Medicine

What's astounding about heart surgery is how quickly it became routine. Thomas Morris opens with a scene in World War II in which a bevy of top-flight surgeons are absolutely agog to watch Dr. Dwight Harken remove some shrapnel from a living heart. At the time, my uncle would have been about twelve. Last year he had a pacemaker implanted, then went out for lunch.

It's not just the technical difficulties. In Morris's eyes, at least, the heart had a uniquely long-lingering mystique. Even into the twentieth century, many surgeons seem to have regarded tampering with it as faintly sacrilegious. The Matter of the Heart is a more-or-less sequential overview of how the transformation.

It's mostly a smooth journey, well worth the read if you're not too squeamish. Morris doesn't entirely solve the conundrum of how to manage a large and overlapping cast of characters: the eleven operations he picks out are all children of many parents, and it's sometimes hard to remember whether Dr. Soandso appeared in a previous chapter or not. Also, while Morris's explanations are outstanding, the book suffers from a dreadful lack of illustrations. There are exactly two, in the opening pages--one of the heart's exterior, one of its interior. Would it have killed the publisher to have put in a couple of diagrams showing exactly what each operation entailed?

That said, this is inherently dramatic stuff, and Morris does a good job with it. He doesn't go overboard, thankfully--this isn't a TV drama--but then he doesn't have to. He also does a good job with exploring the many false starts, blind alleys, partial successes, and setbacks that have led us to where we are today. Finally, he's got some fascinating peeks at where we might be going tomorrow.

There's one thing I should stipulate, though. Everything that the surgeons have accomplished, they've accomplished through extensive animal experiments, mostly on dogs. If that thought makes you squirm, don't read this book. For my part, I understand why it had to be done that way; I can't argue with the results; I have every intention of benefiting from the results if necessary. Nonetheless, if that aspect of the book doesn't make you at least a little heartsick, there's something wrong with you.

Book Review: Graphene

Graphene: The Superstrong, Superthin, and Superversatile Material That Will Revolutionize the World
Les Johnson, Joseph E. Meany
Science, engineering

Graphene is crazy stuff. It's incredibly simple--a repeating plane of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal latice. It's one atom thick. It's phenomenally strong: if plastic cling-wrap were made of graphene, you could support a car on it. It's a near-supercoductor. It's basically weightless. Plus I'm a sucker for the single-word-title biography-of-a-substance book. What could possibly go wrong?

Answer: the writing. Johnson and Meany have good intentions, but their writing skills show more enthusiasm than discipline. Graphene is written in a golly-gee-Mister-Wizard tone that set my teeth on edge from the first chapter. It also contains random anecdotes stuck in unhelpful places, repeated bits, a digressive and disorganized structure, and not nearly enough critical thinking. There's only a limited amount of graphene hagiography that I can stomach before I start feeling contrarian, and Graphene exceeds it early on. The worst part is a section imagining our glowing graphene-enhanced future which reads like somebody watched "Zinc Oxide and You" without realizing that it was funny.

The authors do manage to slip in many fascinating facts. There are also some remarkable graphs showing, for example, the growth in graphene-related patents. None of this, however, adds up to anything more than wishful thinking. Our Friend Graphene is the scientific miracle of the next decade? So is fusion, and it has been for fifty years. So were high-temperature superconductors. So were fuel-cell cars, a bit more than a decade ago. Who knows? Graphene is too long on passion and too short on analysis to let me make any kind of reasoned judgment on its eponymous material. And that's a missed opportunity.

Book Review: The Year of Lear

The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606
James Shapiro
Literature, biography, history

A more recent book by the author of this excellent 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, and similarly thought-provoking. Shapiro combines conventional literary criticism with a deep knowledge of what was happening around Shakespeare when he was writing. The result is really illuminating: however "timeless" the Shakespeare plays may seem, in reality he was writing for a contemporary audience who would see reflections of contemporary events.

Some of the information seems obvious--in retrospect. In 1606, James I--newly-installed on the throne of England, but already king of Scotland--was trying to effect a union between his two kingdoms. Lear deals with the disastrous division of a kingdom; Macbeth deals with an ambitious Scottish king. It's inconceivable that people at the time wouldn't have noticed the parallels.

Other pieces are new, at least to me. I hadn't registered, for example, that Shakespeare's Stratford-upon-Avon and its surrounds were heavily involved in the aftermath of the Guy Fawkes plot. As to how that may have worked its way onto the stage . . . read the book! We can never know what Shakespeare was thinking. But we can know what was on his mind, which is perhaps the next best thing.

Book Review: The Knowledge

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm
Lewis Dartnell
Science, engineering

In the absence of an actual cataclysm, it's not clear what function this book serves. It's mildly interesting, if you're interested in this sort of thing.

Book Review: The Square and the Tower

The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, From the Freemasons to Facebook
Niall Ferguson
History, politics

I've liked some of Ferguson's previous books, particularly The Ascent of Money, but The Square and the Tower is too long for its content. The first portion, describing some of the basics of network theory, is interesting but largely disconnected from the remainder. Said remainder consists of sweepingly vague statements, interspersed among a plethora of fairly unremarkable examples, delivered in orotund (read: pompous) prose. Also, Ferguson wastes chapters delivering long, thunderous denunciations of things that everybody is already against. (Apparently Stalinism and Islamic terrorism are both Bad Things. Who knew?)

A title like this begs for a strong theoretical spine. What we get is a monologue to the effect that there are networks, and there are hierarchies, and here are some examples of each. At 592 pages, that's a lot of book for a very unremarkable observation.