BOOKS' REVIEWS

City of Thamesis

There's a great tradition in fiction of providing alternate reality versions of worlds we know. In Britain, the likes of Orwell's 1984 and Alan Moore's V For Vendetta have satirised and critiqued our society with warped parallels. City Of Thamesis joins this sub-genre, but does so through a series of short online Flash episodes, backed by a website that provides a thorough background.

The world of Thamesis is one where Britain (Albion) is run by a powerful corporation which has developed "psychotronic technology" that augments natural human abilities. Psychotronics equate to our computing, communications and arms technologies, but also to drugs, and have resulted in a plague. Into this mess steps a new king.

The first six episodes of Thamesis feel very much like a prologue to something bigger, wider and more elaborate, involving potentially more interactivity, even some of the aspects of ARG. It's proof that with a domain, Flash and a small team you can start to create an intriguing fictional scenario with a deceptive sense of grandeur. Bring on the follow-up series. D. Etherington

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This is not a book about celebrities, stars, the rich, or the famous. Of course, many of the people included in this book had achieved such status - but the status is the least important part of their lives. Rather, this book is about living people of our time who matter so much, who contribute, invent, create, cure, or nourish our souls and our minds, that we know that our world would not have been the same if they did not exist.

The author had been innovative in his approach. Instead of uniform, traditional style that is highly informative but somewhat dry, he allowed the people in this book to speak for themselves. They are worth listening to, as they describe their lives, their parents, the love of their spouse, the joy of raising their children, even the bonding to their beloved pets. The personalities we view as titans become endearingly human.
It covers so many fields, that it should be a wonderful treat to jump from one subject to another, learn new things, and enjoy the ones we already love. Zoology, art, human rights, medicine, science, physiology, music, peace, literature, cinema, philanthropy, media, theater, poetry, architecture, and languages are just a part of it. It covers all human endeavor; it is indeed a gigantic biographical encyclopedia. To the young, it is a learning tool, to the scholar, it is an essential reference.
Surprisingly, there are so many people in this book. Every page you will open at random will show you a story that will warm your heart, lift your spirits, and inspire you to be all that you could be. And I believe that it is also eminently suitable as reading matter for any teen-age boy or girl; it will lead the young person to the right kind of road.
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Trial of the Middle Ages

Julian of Norwich was quite a woman (yes, woman). Despite spending much of her life voluntarily walled up in a cell, the 14th-century anchorite mystic developed a strikingly optimistic philosophy, writing "All shall be well; and all shall be well; and all manner of things shall be well."

Julian's saying lends itself to the title of the first novel by American writer Tod Wodicka. Its protagonist Burt Hecker may not be an anchorite, but he practises his own retreat as a medieval re-enactor, donning a tunic, humming plain chant and even brewing his own potent mead. Initially comic, Burt's insistence on avoiding anything OOP (out of period) soon takes on greater significance as the worldview of a melancholy widower whose distant, resentful children no longer want to join him in crafting medieval instruments and authentic food."There's a lot of me in Burt, I fear," Wodicka says. "I'm not a medieval re-enactor, but we're both impractical, obsessive, tend to drink a little too much and love music. Neither of us feels too at home in our own skin. But I don't think this is so uncommon these days.""I actually started the week or so after my now ex-wife kicked me out of our flat in Prague," Wodicka, now Berlin-based, explains. "I'd been researching for over a year before that though, trying to get into Burt Hecker's head. I read dozens of medieval history books, drank a lot, listened to medieval music and even went up to the Abbey St Hildegard in the Rhineland, where the novel begins." The research had its limits, though: "I don't actually like mead too much, believe it or not." Burt isn't the only character in All Shall Be Well… strongly drawn to the past. After the culture of her mountain-dwelling Lemko ancestors is wiped out, Burt's combative Polish-American mother-in-law, Anna Bibko, sets about reviving it with unhealthy single-mindedness. "It's a scary thing, thinking about temporality and life lived perpetually in the present moment, and history is a comforting, necessary thing," Wodicka says. "But it's problematic when our relationship with it obscures the 'now' buzzing all around us." For all his love of the past, Burt can currently be found tarting himself around cyberspace through his MySpace page. "There's still something in the back of my head that tells me the whole thing is sort of undignified, for me and for Burt," Wodicka admits. Such are the demands of book promotion, however. But the medievalist is in good company: "It's great for Burt Hecker to make friends with Wolf Eyes and Tolstoy and random dead Beach Boys." Now what would Julian of Norwich make of that? A. Bliss
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Adrian Tomine's
Shortcomings

The clean, Clowesian lines of Adrian Tomine’s illustrations are deceptive: in its chronicling of the breakdown and possible salvaging of the relationship between Ben and Miko, two Berkeley-dwelling Asian-Americans, Shortcomings rummages through love at its most muddled and recriminatory. Miko thinks Ben, the ambitionless manager of a university cinema, has an obsession with white women that goes beyond his porn collection. When she is accepted for an internship in New York she suggests they take a break from one another. So Ben awkwardly puts himself in the game, egged on by best friend Alice, a grad-school lesbian busily working her way through Mills College’s student body. Tomine’s ear for dialogue and the subtleties of his artwork are both excellent, managing to make an intensive study of Ben’s wallowing without making us resent his self-involvement. There’s plenty of humour, too, but most impressive is that Shortcomings is a story about love that doesn’t have a shred of sentimentality on its bones. C. Powers

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The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People under Siege. Author:  Kenneth Levin, Smith and Kraus Global 599pp., $35  Reviewed by P. David Hornik

Kenneth Levin, an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a Princeton-trained historian, has written a definitive, magisterial book about what went wrong during the Oslo era. The malaise, Levin argues, was not just an Israeli one but a Jewish one, typical of both Diaspora and Zionist history in the modern era. It was strikingly evident among pre-Holocaust German Jewry, many of whom attempted to win the favor of the surrounding anti-Semitic society via self-reform, and among American Jewry during the Holocaust, many of whom did not seek to aid their European brethren out of fear that such "nationalism" would offend Americans. This Jewish pathology, in Levin's view, resembles the psychology of abused children who seek to propitiate the abuser by becoming "good" and purging themselves of their supposed failings.

 

The syndrome often entails a "delusional grandiosity"—the idea that one can control one's environment by appeasing the aggressor. Surveying the history of the pre-modern Jewish Diaspora to find out why it was immune to this self-abasing syndrome, Levin finds the answer in the strong communal institutions that reinforced identity and pride despite hostile environments. Even among parts of Spanish Jewry that had secular educations and relatively high access to the surrounding society, the sturdy communal scaffolding prevented wide-scale defection. Similarly, much of East European Jewry showed resilience in the modern era even when religious institutions eroded, by replacing these with secular ones like Jewish labor unions and political parties. Among the Jews who led the Zionist movement, however, there were many who were scarred by Diaspora anti-Semitism and for whom Zionism meant, in part, purifying Jews of their alleged defects. Socialist Zionism sought to create a "new Jew"—a sunburned, virile laborer cleansed of the religious and bourgeois corruptions of the Diaspora. The circle of German Jewish academics surrounding Hebrew University's Martin Buber and Judah Magnes fervently opposed statehood and insisted that Judaism was strictly an ethical, universalizing mission that would win the Arabs' affection if so presented. A countervailing force was David Ben-Gurion, an energetic realist who was able to synthesize modern secularism with healthy pride in Jewish peoplehood, land and tradition. If this affirmative Ben-Gurionist nationalism basically prevailed in the first three decades of Israel's existence, there were two factors, Levin contends, that partially unraveled it. One was the persistence of the Arab siege, even after the victory of the Six Day War that to many, at the time, seemed decisive and final. The other was the triumph of Menachem Begin's Likud Party in the 1977 elections, which finally gave much of the Labor and Left sector a Jewish bête noire—in the shape of Begin's largely religious and traditional constituency—analogous to the "primitive" East European Jews whom an anxious German Jewry had once reviled and blamed for its woes. In the decade and a half leading up to Oslo, the self-blaming mentality quickly gathered steam among the sector susceptible to it.

Largely offspring of Zionist pioneers whose own Jewishness was wounded and ambivalent, lacking inner resources to cope with persistent Arab hatred and aggression, they now had the despised “Other Israel” of the Right on which to project the bewildered self-indictment that the Arab siege induced in them. As the more assertive, Ben-Gurionist trend within Labor Zionism was increasingly conflated with the Right, a school of New Historians arose who reinterpreted Zionist history to show the Jews as colonialist aggressors and the Arabs as passive victims suing for peace. Writers and artists increasingly expressed alienation and even loathing toward the Jewish state. Post-Zionist educators stripped curricula of Jewish content in hopes of producing deracinated, “universalist” Israelis whom no one would perceive as objectionable. Most significantly, and unlike in other democracies, the anti-nationalism of the elites found a wide resonance in the populace. Many Israelis, worn out by the siege, were eager to believe the peace camp's promises of an end to conflict achieved via self-reform—meaning, in this case, the relinquishment of all territorial claims, the suppression of specific Jewish-Zionist values, and the creation of a Palestinian state in whatever borders were demanded. They were enticed by the view that Arab hostility was a function of Israel's misbehavior, and thus within Israel's power to palliate.

Although the Labor Party, in winning the 1992 elections, still made the traditional Labor Zionist concerns about land and security a centerpiece of its campaign, this quickly emerged as political cynicism when Prime Minister Rabin—who had been portrayed as a holdover of the old, centrist realism—embraced the Oslo program of superdoves Shimon Peres, Yossi Beilin, and their comrades. The rest of the history is painful and familiar as Yasser Arafat and the PLO, perennial terrorists brought to the territories in the name of peace and reconciliation, lost no time turning them into staging grounds for brutal attacks while the Oslo camp blindly persisted in its delusions in the face of all evidence. It is a history, however, that Levin, with his consummate grasp of both the political and psychological dimensions and their interaction, traces with great eloquence and brilliance. Although not exactly picking up his earlier theme of the importance of strong communal institutions, Levin in his last chapter makes the related argument that, along with political pragmatism, the main remedy to the Oslo syndrome—the proneness to internalize the indictments of enemies and seek to prove one’s “goodness”—lies in imparting a stronger Jewish background to Israeli young people. This means “educat[ing them] in Jewish history, Jewish faith, Jewish ethics . . . Jewish culture. . . . Educating the young in their intellectual and spiritual heritage can go far to inoculating them against the depredations of the ‘post-Zionist’ institutions they encounter as adults.” Such education should not, Levin clarifies, be “comprehended in chauvinistic terms, nor [promote] a particular strain of Jewish religious practice.” This basically sound position does not, however, anticipate two possible problems: how an adult elite that is itself infected with post-Zionism could be gotten to institute such a program; and whether it could be successfully implemented in a society that categorizes its non-Orthodox majority as “secular” and hence to some degree separate from Jewish tradition.  If somewhat open-ended, Levin’s last chapter is still a thoughtful culmination of a great, indispensable book.

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How to Be Bad
By David Bowker (St. Martin's Griffin)

It's the rare book that the reader puts down simply because, like a favourite dessert, it's so enjoyable he wants to save some for later. Such a book is British author David Bowker's How to Be Bad, a mystery in the weird tradition of Carl Hiaasen, full of colourful characters and crackling dialogue. From page 1, Bowker plunges the reader into a zany world when mild-mannered Mark Madden, owner of a bookstore, is approached by a man who asks to see his "most horrible book." From there, Mark enters into a sort of twilight zone. He is madly in love with Caro Sewell. They were a couple when he was 18, but she dumped him for a teacher.

 

 

Caro promises to rekindle her passion for Mark in return for a favour. Knowing Mark's habit of writing lists, she gives him one with the names of the people she wants killed: her father, and two former lovers, one of whom is the bully who asked to see Mark's "most horrible" book. When corpses start piling up, Caro does again fall in love with Mark. She thinks he is a killing machine eager to please her, but that isn't quite the case. The reader will discover how chance plays with the characters in How To Be Bad. Bowker has a wonderful imagination and the ability to draw characters who start as stereotypes but end as human beings. This applies to Mark, although he should have been at least 10 years older (he's in his 20s) to be more plausible; and to Caro, who, after killing a woman, informs Mark that she is pregnant but didn't tell him sooner because she was "waiting for a special occasion." The story even has a happy ending of sorts. Caro and Mark take shelter in Switzerland, "the traditional refuge for rich scoundrels with ugly secrets." And while Caro seems to be in love with Mark, his interest in her has waned. As Mark explains, "You don't chase possessions when you're self-possessed." In the end, Mark, who has been the casual observer of murders, accidents and suicides, has learned only one thing from the experience: "I derive deep and lasting satisfaction from the deaths of people I don't like." By Mario Schizman.

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Fall of the Sun God
By Henye Meyer

Ages 12+ Set against the background of the First Crusade, the novel follows the development of Martin as he learns to navigate the treacherous highways and byways of ancient Constantinople, the seat of Christianity in the Middle Ages. After Martin’s parents are killed by bandits, he gives up his Judaism and goes on a pilgrimage to find himself. Ultimately, as Martin evolves, he finds a place for himself, a place he never thought existed, a place that holds an age-old message: The Torah is the ultimate shield and sword in a world filled with barbarism; it is the lamp and the staff that leads every Jew to his people.(336 Pages). Publisher: Pitspopany. The World Jewish News Agency said: "Brilliantly crafted into a captivating tale."- World Jewish News Agency.

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Alexandra Bruce's "BEYOND THE SECRET"

Powerful and Captivating

Rating: ISBN: 978-1932857-93-1. 304 pages.

Alexandra Bruce is known for her discussions on metaphysics, quantum physics, The Montauk Mythos, Tibetan vampirism, and UFOs. But her book "Beyond The Secret" explores different dimensions. The book is a rainbow of intelligent ideas, and in-depth visions of secrets that surround our life, ranging from technology and religion to society and science. Alexandra Bruce delivered a formidable book; a prism reflecting the most important thoughts and socio-cultural concepts in the history of humanity, and perhaps beyond...

Alexandra Bruce, a world-class author.

Her narrative style is clear, crisp and rich. Although the core of the book flirts with philosophical and sometimes metaphysical aspects of the human persona and fabric, the essence of the book remains a pragmatic guide to success, global understanding of the world that surrounds us at so many levels. Needless to say, Alexandra Bruce's exploration of empowered wealth, financial assets,  civic assets blended with with an astonishing varieties of laws governing attraction, randomness,  business and reality transmute her book into one of the most indispensable books of the decade. "Beyond the Secret" is a gem.  Bruce's readers will be surrounded by a fresh breeze of happiness and intelligent tranquility. Buy the book. You will treasure it for years to come. Rating: 5 stars out of five.

Reviewed by Maximillien de Lafayette