Book Review - The Dictator Pope by pseudonym Marcantonio Colonna

“Might we see the Italian state denounce the Lateran treaty of 1929 that made the Vatican a foreign state, thus creating the lawless, corrupt playground that it has become?’’

The answer to that question, posed in a book released this week, The Dictator Pope, is almost certainly no — after all, Italy is no paragon of propriety itself.

The blunt “lawless, corrupt playground’’ epithet, however, is apt judging by recent events.

The book’s website says its author, writing under the pseudonym Marcantonio Colonna (a Vatican admiral in the Battle of Lepanto against the Ottoman Turks in 1571) is an Oxford-educated historian living in Rome. 

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The book is purportedly “the fruit of close contacts with many of those working in the Vatican, including the leading Cardinals and other figures mentioned in the narrative’’.

It shows — especially in the accounts of Pope Francis’s close relationships with four Vatican cardinals and their underlings who have stymied sweeping financial reforms enacted mainly by Australia’s Cardinal George Pell, who uncovered 1.4 billion euros in various Vatican departments not previously entered in the balance sheets.

The man described as “the most scandalous’’ of the four, gun enthusiast Cardinal Domenico Calcagno, president of APSA, the body that manages Vatican assets, dines with Francis most nights. Calcagno is under investigation for real estate dealings in his previous Italian diocese.

Financial corruption has dogged the church for half a century, since Pope Paul VI called in a US archbishop, Paul Marcinkus from Chicago in the 1960s. 

Far from improving efficiency, Marcinkus engaged freemason Mafia bankers Roberto Calvi (known as “God’s banker”, who was found hung under Blackfriars Bridge in London in 1982) and Michele Sindona (who died from cyanide in his coffee in an Italian jail in 1986).

The current reform effort, designed to improve transparency and accountability, took a major blow in June when Vatican auditor Libero Milone, a former chairman and chief executive of Deloitte in Italy, was sacked after an extraordinary raid on his office by Vatican police and firemen. 

Despite the office being on Italian, not Vatican territory, the Vatican officials burst in unexpectedly, confiscating electronic equipment and forcing open the safe with axes and crowbars. Milone’s offence, it appears, was doing his job properly.

The Vatican’s notorious homosexual lobby also remains a problem. One of its players Monsignor Luigi Capozzi, emerged from the shadows in June. Capozzi, secretary to Vatican Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio — described as “the foremost of Pope Francis’s yes-men’’ – was caught running a drugs party in his Vatican flat. Cardinal Coccopalmerio had reportedly proposed his underling for a bishopric.

Despite the crime and color, Dictator Pope does not belong to the “Vatican potboiler’’ genre. It is sober, blunt and forensic. Four days after its release in English on Monday, Amazon listed it as an e-book bestseller.

The world it describes is a hothouse, in which gossip, secrecy, personal hostilities and the craving for power thrive. Free speech is barely tolerated.

The head of the Roman Rota (the Vatican court), for example, Monsignor Pio Vito Pinto — whose name appeared on a notorious list of alleged Vatican Freemasons decades ago — suggested last year that four cardinals who criticized a controversial papal document on marriage, Amoris Laetitia, were guilty of “grave scandal’’ for doing so and deserved to be stripped of their cardinals’ hats.

As the book’s name suggests, it is primarily about Francis, emphasizing the adroit political skills he employed in Argentina and Rome to win the papacy and build his image. 

His much lauded humility — traveling on the Buenos Aires rail underground and paying his hotel bill in Rome after being elected Pope, for example — has been conveniently captured on camera and disseminated by press secretaries. Such savvy media management, the author suggests, begs the question “to what extent the smell of sheep was applied aroma and how much the mysticism was part of the manifesto’’.

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Original review on: http://www.theaustralian.com.au

Book Review - ENDURANCE A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery By Scott Kelly with Margaret Lazarus

What will the future of human space exploration look like in the 21st century? If Scott Kelly has any say on the matter, we shall go to Mars and beyond, with the discipline and determination that fill the pages of his memoir chronicling the extraordinary life he’s lived on Earth and in space.

No overachievers are born without influences, and Kelly is forthcoming about the early motivations that led him on his unique career path. As an unfocused, unremarkable young college student, he read Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff,” a nonfiction classic on why anyone in his right mind would submit to the dangers of spaceflight. 

Wolfe’s portrayal of hotshot pilots was just one highlight of a star-studded career that would eventually take him beyond Earth’s atmosphere. 

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Another noted inspiration is the book after which Kelly named his own, and which he carries with him on multiple voyages to the International Space Station: “Endurance,” by Alfred Lansing, about Ernest Shackleton’s historic expedition to the South Pole, during which his crew cheated death after their ship became trapped in a polar pack ice, overcoming 850 miles of heavy seas on small lifeboats. 

Both of these literary homages set up the structure of Kelly’s own “Endurance.” While “The Right Stuff” captures the swagger — the daredevil aviators hell-bent on making it to the final frontier — Lansing’s account is a stark reminder that along with the rock-star image of the explorer comes the omnipresent specter of death. 

This horror of total isolation serves as a reminder that spaceflight, much like the sea exploration of olden days, isn’t all thrills; it brings human beings face to face with an at best indifferent and often hostile environment ready to crush any innocent traveler on a whim.

The book’s narrative is split between Kelly’s year in space — a zero-gravity journey of “unprecedented” duration — and his personal development from a child reading “The Right Stuff” into a decorated naval test pilot. One would think tales of space travel should overshadow any Earthbound life story, but in “Endurance,” Kelly’s humor and self-awareness when relating his experiences at home make them just as absorbing as those aboard the station..

That is not to say his extraterrestrial anecdotes fail to entertain. Kelly takes on the task of fixing the station’s toilet, one of the most crucial devices on board; against protocol, the Americans and Russians on board share garbage bags whose contents they then shoot into the atmosphere. 

(The descriptions of Kelly’s comradeship with his Russian colleagues are easily the most endearing parts of the book, and provide some hope in dire geopolitical times.) Other space chapters are grueling and stressful, as the astronauts wait for resupply ships that keep malfunctioning and exploding, exposing just how easily things can go wrong after months of calm.

Kelly’s sharp self-observation and narrative poignancy make for a fascinating tale of a life lived on Earth, too, and the value of the book is heightened by its glimpses beyond the astronaut’s veil. Behind the imposing spacesuit and perfect smile is a three-dimensional person, and “Endurance” offers brilliant insight into the human aspect of space travel by paying equal attention to the origin story as to its climax among the stars.

It is Kelly’s stark honesty that lends the book its pathos. He holds nothing back when discussing his battle with prostate cancer, the grief he felt over the loss of his colleagues to the Columbia shuttle disaster, or the emotional strain his year in space creates between him and his romantic partner, Amiko. 

The professional recollections could stand alone just fine without these intimate details, but the humanity behind them underlines Kelly’s dedication to the project of writing a full portrait of his life. He doesn’t hide behind the infinite achievements and fascinations he encountered in space; he readily acknowledges his failures, shortcomings and heartbreaks.

The military discipline that led to Kelly’s career can at times stifle his prose, resulting in occasional awkward rigidity and overwriting. But such moments are sparse, and they are compensated for with descriptive passages so lyrical they could put a career writer to shame. “One of my favorite views of the Earth is of the Bahamas — a large archipelago with a stunning contrast from light to dark colors. 

The vibrant deep blue of the ocean mixes with a much brighter turquoise, swirled with something almost like gold, where the sun bounces off the sandy shallows and reefs,” Kelly muses. In such moments the rewards of the book are clear.

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Original review on: www.nytimes.com

Book Review - The Landmark Thucydides by Robert B Strassler

The goal of Robert B Strassler’s Landmark series has been twofold and fairly simple since it started a decade ago with The Landmark Thucydides: create scholarly popular editions that are not only figuratively landmarks, drawing together important contributions from classicists, but also literally landmarks, since the series’ signature feature is the extensive collection of maps in every volume.

Many classical authors were travellers as well; by land and sea they saw great swathes of their world, and their books reflect that.

Scarcely anywhere in the classical canon is this more true than in the case of Julius Caesar, who travelled over the Roman world in both war and peace, and who had accounts of virtually all of those travels ghostwritten in great detail. 

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The accounts were created in order to massage public opinion in Caesar’s favour, and it’s the good fortune of posterity that they survive to give invaluable glimpses into the workings of one of the most pivotal individuals in the ancient world.

Those accounts – the Gallic War, the Civil War, the Alexandrian War, the African War, and the Spanish War – comprise the glorious new entry in Strassler’s series, The Landmark Julius Caesar, an oversized 800-page volume featuring the usual panoply of illustrations, diagrams and detailed maps, and also featuring a translation and copious new notes by Brown University classics professor emeritus Kurt A Raaflaub. 

Despite the stellar visuals throughout the book, Raaflaub’s translation is its standout feature. The first volume in the series, The Landmark Thucydides, used the creaky public-domain Victorian translation by Richard Crawley, but all the subsequent volumes have enlisted new translations of their central works, and in Raaflaub’s case, his version hews close to the spare narrative line usually favoured by Caesar’s amanuensis.

For hundreds of years, translators have perennially been tempted to add meat to the bare bones of of Caesar’s prose. Raaflaub consistently shaves off these excess words and lets Caesar’s more pointed sentences stand. 

S A Handford, for instance, in his 1957 translation of the Gallic War for Penguin Classics, writes up a tense combat-moment during Caesar’s seventh year of war in Gergovia this way:

“Fierce hand-to-hand fighting was in progress, the Gauls relying on their superior numbers and position, while our men trusted in their courage to see them through, when suddenly the Aedui, whom Caesar had sent up by another route on the right to create a diversion, appeared on our right flank. 

The similarity of their arms to those of the enemy gave our soldiers a bad fright; for although they could see that the newcomers had their right shoulders uncovered – the sign always agreed upon to mark friendly troops – they imagined that this was a ruse employed by the enemy to trick them.”

Raaflaub, in a dozen fewer words, translates the same passage with an ear to preserving the telegraphic effect that was Caesar’s way of signalling to his readers he was trying to be an unvarnished and impartial reporter of his own deeds: “In this fierce hand-to-hand combat, the enemy relied on their position and numbers, our men on their bravery.

Suddenly the Aedui were seen on our troops’ open flank – Caesar had sent them up the slope by another route, on the right-hand side, to divert the enemies’ attention. Their armour was like that of other Gauls, and this caused a great panic in our troops. 

Though it was noticed that their right shoulders were exposed, which was the usual and accepted sign, our soldiers nevertheless believed that the enemy had used this very sign to deceive them.”

In Raaflaub, fewer lines flow into each other, fewer points are co-opted into subordinate clauses of other points. These slight differences have a cumulative effect that’s noticeable; the reader comes to feel this is the closest thing to reading Caesar that English can provide.

The book’s lengthy Introduction (by Raaflaub and Cynthia Damon) is a comprehensive overview of Caesar’s life and times. He was born in 100 BC to a patrician family that had long been out of Roman public life. 

With the aid of carefully-cultivated political allies, he entered that public life, becoming first a military tribune, then a quaestor, then an aedile, all the while marrying and remarrying for political and social advantage and probing like a tailor at the weak seams of the Roman Republic.

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Original review on: www.thenational.ae

Book Review - When Now Begins by Elisabeth Asbrink

Elisabeth Åsbrink’s 1947 begins appropriately, in January. At the start of that year in the Palestinian village of Arab al-Zubayd, a 16-year-old girl is one of several children captivated by an itinerant entertainer’s tales and magic box pictures.

In the White House, President Harry S Truman writes in his diary and thinks about his predecessors, some of whom are “controlling heaven and governing hell”.

In New York, Eleanor Roosevelt convenes the first meeting of the first session of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. Thousands of Nazi fugitives stream into Denmark and Sweden, and then escape to South America.

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The Communists win a landslide victory in Poland’s elections. And in a rural town outside Cairo, a clockmaker’s son yearns to “turn time towards Islam”.

At the end of the book, and by the end of the year, the world has changed dramatically. The Cold War has heated up and Truman has created the CIA. Nazis continue to flee Europe but so too do Jews in search of their promised land.

The clockmaker’s son, Hasan al-Banna, has instructed his Muslim Brotherhood to prepare for jihad. Over the coming months the UN General Assembly will recognise genocide as an international crime, and the Palestinian village will be razed. The man with the magic box will not be back, Åsbrink explains: “there is nothing to come back to”.

The book’s subtitle is When Now Begins. Åsbrink – a journalist and author from Sweden – posits the argument that 1947 was not just a turbulent year to file and forget but a pivotal year marked by critical turning points which have shaped, or disfigured, our modern world.

Rather than cleave to convention and divide the book into chapters relating to specific upheavals – social, cultural, political, economic – Åsbrink has taken the original approach of proceeding through the year month by month and covering all areas in short, concise sections.

The sections come with a geographical heading and range from two-line summaries to eight-page reports; condensed vignettes to fact-filled episodes. This snapshot-type structure, together with the lively, lyrical and consistently fascinating content, makes for a unique history lesson.

Åsbrink’s main strands are not passing events but unfolding crises, whose developments and ramifications she monitors on a monthly basis. Most of them concern the rise and fall of nations and the clash between East and West. A UN committee is tasked with finding a solution to the problem of Palestine in four months.

A British lawyer is given five weeks – “no more, no less” – to draw borders separating India from Pakistan. The exploits of Swedish Fascist Per Engdahl and those of his other European counterparts are indicative of a resurgence in the Far Right (“a pendulum about to strike back”). And piece by piece, the mighty edifice of the British Empire starts to crumble.

Åsbrink impresses with her astute portrayal of post-war uncertainty and confusion, and her searing depiction of violence and mayhem – in particular the bloodbath of Partition and massacres in Palestine.

But her book doesn’t only follow attempts to divide and misrule, or cases of political ignorance and expedience. Åsbrink also tracks a number of significant steps and stages: the first computer bug is discovered, and production begins on the Kalashnikov; at his Paris “dream factory” Christian Dior creates the New Look, while on the Scottish isle of Jura, George Orwell works non-stop – “chain-writing, chain-smoking, chain-coughing” – on his masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four. Åsbrink shows world history as it happened seventy years ago, and history in the making.

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Original review on: www.thenational.ae

Book Review - Dead Man's Blues by Ray Celestin

This massive, mammoth, mesmerizing mystery takes place in Chicago in 1928 with its plethora of mobsters, murderers, millionaires, musicians and marginalized minorities. 

Race permeates everything, particularly with Chicago’s recent intoxication with jazz — and every alcoholic beverage during Prohibition. Al Capone runs a tight ship, and Louis Armstrong’s arrival from New Orleans in 1922 starts the town dancing.

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Celestin magnificently anatomizes Chicago from the Gold Coast to Bronzeville, complete with beer and brothels, corruption and the stink of the stockyards, steel mills and speakeasys. 

Race, regions and riches clash, collide and confront one another. Sex runs rampant. Jazz juices up the blood. Poisoned alcohol kills. Everything can be bought from the governor on down.

Three mysteries immediately surface. Why has Capone summoned Dante Sanfelippo, a bootlegger from New York, to Chicago? Can Pinkerton detectives Ida Davis and Michael Talbot help old-moneyed Mrs. Van Haren find her daughter Gwendolyn, who’s vanished along with her beau, Charles Coulton? 

And who’s the dead man in the alley that crime photographer Jason Russo, discovers? How will this triad merge? Who’s addicted to what? And why do more bodies end up in the sewer canal and by the old Pullman Ice Works?

Is there a traitor in Capone’s outfit? Who’s been sabotaging his liquor runs? Who’s been gouging corpses’ eyes? How is Randall Taylor involved, the black guy who treats rich whites to “slumming” in Bronzeville?

The novel’s divided into sections — cadenza, duet, solo, improvisation — that mimics Armstrong’s hit recording “West End Blues.” 

Celestin’s prose often waxes lyrical and poetic and makes this a terrific book to immerse yourself in. Chicago plays a major role, engulfing, killing, and entangling all comers. Social Darwinism rules with a bloody vengeance, and the stakes are literally available to the highest bidder.

This city of “chrome and speed” delights, appalls, terrifies and seduces. And so does Celestin’s ultimately majestic novel.

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Original review on: http://www.providencejournal.com

Book Review - Chronicles Of A Liquid Society by Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco died in 2016, and this book was published in Italy under the title Papé Satàn Aleppe in the same year. The original title (the English one is the subtitle in the Italian) refers to a very ambiguous line in Dante that no-one really understands. 

Eco’s last novel, Numero Zero, seemed to me to be a return to the form of The Name Of The Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum, after a number of works which might charitably be described as frolics of his own. 

His novelistic career had always run in tandem with his academic, non-fiction and journalistic work. But the reader can only leave this volume with a sense of disappointment and frustration. The book announces at the outset that it is a compilation of various articles which Eco wrote fortnightly for the magazine L’Espresso, in his column “La bustina di Minerva”. 

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Gleefully and shamelessly, he refers to them as “jottings”, “short notes” and “digressions on ideas come to mind”. Now, had I been sitting, once every 14 days, with an espresso and L’Espresso, I would probably have found much of the material interesting and provocative. 

But a column is not the same as a book. And a lot of columns put together do not make a book. Eco had at least tried to arrange them in some semblance of order, and included a rather faint-hearted apology for repetitions. 

But take page 147 in a piece on female philosophers: as well as the well-known Hypatia of Alexandria he mentions “Diotima the Socratic, Arete of Cyrene, Nicarete of Megara, Hipparchia the Cynic, Theodora the Peripatetic (in the philosophical sense of the word), Leontia the Epicurean and Themistoclea the Pythagorean”. 

Skip forward to page 153 and in a piece called “Husbands of unknown wives” we read about “Diotima the Socratic, Arete of Cyrene, Nicarete of Megara, Hipparchia the Cynic, Theodora the Peripatetic (in the philosophical sense of the word), Leontia the Epicurean and Themistoclea the Pythagorean”. Cut and paste? 

Will this do, Ed? Oh, and a few pages later we have another piece on Hypatia of Alexandria. While one might laud Eco’s championing of relatively little-known female philosophers, his tendency to refer to girls rather than women and make frequent analogies to prostitution, and a kind of salacious bass note in many of these thrown-off off-cuts, rather undermine the feminist credentials. 

Eco structured the book around topics – and they are very Eco concerns. There are five pieces on “cell phones” (how quaint!) and 13 on the internet. Both make Eco a bit grumpy. There are five on conspiracy theories in which he says conspiracy theories are foolish. 

There are 17 on mass media, even though some of them would have been better in the section “On Books, Etc”. Indeed, one of the best pieces is on the chronology of the Nero Wolfe novels by Rex Stout, oddly placed in the mass media section. 

Yet, at the same time, it reveals one of the aspects that mar the whole book. Widely renowned as a “semiotician” and public intellectual, I was surprised at the intellectual paucity of the article. So Nero and Archie, as well as Fritz, Theodore, Saul and Purley Stebbins, don’t seem to age over the 33 novels? 

One wonders what poor Eco would make of Oor Wullie, who must be due his pensioner’s bus pass by now. Eco knows a lot of things, but few of them deeply. When he turns to politics, he is blasé and enraged at the same time. 

There is a lot of “on one hand this, on the other that”. What really stirs his ire is when someone has said something about him with which he disagrees, and despite maintaining the old Voltaire line about “defending to the death your right to say it”, he harrumphs and flusters. 

His essays on religion are pretty anodyne stuff; yes, it would be nice if more young people knew the Biblical stories – it helps when you are reading Milton – and no, having a new Crusade is not a good idea. 

Well, blow me down with a feather. Terrorism is a terrible thing, but we have to admit we caused the conditions which allowed it to thrive. Crikey! Now there’s a new thought. There is almost an element of comedy in pieces like “No, it’s not pollution, it’s impurities in the air” – a satire of George W Bush’s linguistic mishaps – or “Conciliatory oxymorons” on political sleight-of-hand, since Eco repeatedly says he is not a prophet, but these fulminations seem almost sweetly naïve given the current incumbent of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

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Original review on: www.scotsman.com

Book Review - Big and Small: A Cultural History of Extraordinary Bodies by Lynne Vallone

A richly dressed woman glares regally out of her portrait. She is the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia. Her right hand pinches a miniature of her father, Philip II of Spain, while the left rests on the head of a woman whose small stature, advanced age and simple clothes place her in absolute opposition to her taller mistress. 

The smaller woman stands slightly behind the larger figure, her hands full with two tiny, wriggling monkeys. She is Isabella’s dwarf, Magdalena Ruiz.

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In Lynne Vallone’s persuasive reading, the dwarf serves as a foil to all her royal owner must be if Habsburg rule is to continue: noble, privileged, mature, reproductive. The women literally embody complex codes of similarity and difference; their bodies carefully styled to visually communicate ownership and power. 

Even the monkeys have a part to play, advertising Spanish possession of vast Amazonian territories. Like the monkeys, Magdalena is Isabella’s pet and must work for her owner. When extrapolated across Western cultural history, the painting’s power relations encapsulate the message of Big and Small – that extraordinary bodies are created, configured and controlled by the “ordinary” figures who outnumber them.

Big and Small is a compelling and innovative account of why size matters. It is one of the very first books – perhaps even the very first – to examine size as variously a sign of personhood, a marker of difference and a channel for social anxieties. 

Often, size is all three simultaneously. Thoughtful depictions of “people big and people small” reveal that bodily dimension is deeply, ineradicably engrained in Western society’s self-perception. They make for a significant achievement and a remarkable read.

Vallone roves through art, literature and science to offer striking images of bodies under the microscope, near the spotlight or accompanied by the fairground organ. Magdalena was far from the only court dwarf, while the “dwarf marriage” between Charles Stratton and Lavinia Warren delighted fashionable Manhattan in 1863. 

Tales of extraordinary creation demonstrate how society regularly uses size to mould anxiety into human form. Alchemists conjure thumblings with heretical recipes; at the other end of the scale, giant robots are pieced together with the guide of an atomic blueprint.

However, what sets this apart from other considerations of folklore or the freak is both the comprehensive research and a commitment to exploring bodily significance both then and now. 

The imperialist capture and ruthless exploitation of the “pygmy” Ota Benga, for example, is shown to be both the result of certain Victorian race myths, and the source of others. Placing each extraordinary individual at the centre of a complex social web shows sensitivity to the injustices perpetrated on bodies deemed either insufficient or excessive. 

The case of Anamarie Martinez-Regino, removed from her family due to concerns over her weight, is a breathtaking demonstration of society’s entitled attitude to bodies that do not fit.

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Original review on: www.timeshighereducation.com