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 - 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 - 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 - The Game Changer by Eric Naki

The title of Bantu Holomisa’s biography was not idly chosen. The "general", as he is often referred to, who has led coups and survived them as well as several assassination attempts, wants to change "corruption perpetrated at the highest level" in SA.

To this end, he is calling for a national convention, like Codesa, of all parties, and civil society, "to extricate the country from the quagmire it is in and change the negative image it has as a result of corruption".

Holomisa and the United Democratic Movement (UDM) that he leads, have already held a preconvention meeting, attended by nearly all the opposition political parties.

The ANC was invited but did not attend, "as the party was embroiled in its own leadership contests and political squabbles", says the peacemaker.

His biographer, Eric Naki, writes "it is clear that Holomisa’s strength lies in bringing people together. He has mastered the art of consultation."

Naki, a journalist with more than 30 years’ experience in print and broadcast media, has written this authorised biography in close collaboration with his subject. 

Yet he does not hesitate to point out Holomisa’s flaws, because the president of the UDM does not shy away from self-criticism — neither in our interview nor in the book.

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In 57 pages of appendices, we read a document entitled The Rise and Fall of Bantu Holomisa. It was produced by the ANC and extensively circulated locally and internationally — for Holomisa had a high public profile — after the governing party had expelled him.

Jeremy Cronin, the former first deputy secretary of the South African Communist Party, authored it and admitted in it that Holomisa, "emerged as one of the most popular of our [ANC] leaders". Cronin has since publicly regretted his role in the document.

Holomisa did not hesitate to hit back with his own exposition, called Comrades in Corruption. That was in 1996 and 21 years later, his words — "dark and ominous clouds are lurking on the horizon, signifying the worst intolerance this country has ever experienced" — were remarkably prescient.

This is particularly so when you consider that Nelson Mandela was president and our rainbow nation was basking in the glow of a negotiated (Codesa) settlement and the iconic international status of its leader.

But, if there is one word that sticks in Holomisa’s craw, it is corruption. He knew it existed in the ANC.

It was his submission against the ANC’s wishes to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission — in which he wrote about former Transkei prime minister George Matanzima’s acceptance of a R2m bribe from hotelier Sol Kerzner for exclusive gambling rights — that got him expelled.

When Holomisa and his generals discovered that the new prime minister, Stella Sigcau, was also bribed, she too was asked to resign and was removed, like her predecessor, in a bloodless military coup. Holomisa recounts that when he came to power, he "personally pursued Sol Kerzner and his associates". He asked the apartheid government to extradite Kerzner, but Pretoria refused  to do so.

He writes, "some top ANC politicians were bribed into silence too". Proof of this, he says, lies in president Mandela’s government withdrawing the (bribery) charges against Kerzner after he had "contributed heavily to the ANC’s election campaign funds".

The pain and humiliation of Holomisa’s expulsion in 1996 was underscored "when the ANC government suddenly decided to keep my retirement pension but gave it to all the other homeland leaders".

Holomisa struggled to make ends meet for his family, could not educate his children and his insurance policies lapsed.

His suffering was all the greater because the relationship between him and Mandela was so close that the icon referred to him as "my son".

Holomisa writes about visiting Mandela at his Soweto home after he was released from prison. Mandela’s wife at the time, Winnie, worried about his safety, so Holomisa dispatched two members of his Transkei Defence Force as bodyguards.

He accompanied Mandela on overseas visits and was sent abroad on missions for him. When people asked why Mandela had so much confidence in him, part of the reason, writes Naki, was Holomisa’s trustworthiness, "and his frank and honest opinion".

Holomisa became Madiba’s "battering ram" at the Codesa negotiations. When the National Party made proposals "that Mandela disliked, he would let Holomisa deal with it".

At a time when hostels were sites of brutality, the violence between migrant workers from KwaZulu-Natal and Soweto residents, often alluded to as Inkatha against the ANC, "was also being fanned by the apartheid security forces".

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Original review on: www.businesslive.co.za

Book Review - Rival Power: Russia in Southeast Europe by Dimitar Bechev

At a time when scrutiny of Russia’s overseas influence is growing worldwide — from the investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 US election to Moscow’s military intervention in Syria — Dimitar Bechev's exploration of Russia’s relationship with its near neighbours in Southeast Europe is highly relevant.

In “Rival Power: Russia in Southeast Europe”, Bechev examines Russian relations with the countries of the Balkan peninsular and Turkey since the fall of communism, looking at Moscow’s strategic goals in the region and how it has used the resources at its disposal to achieve them, and conversely the motives behind the states in the region in their dealings with the East European major power.

One of the key messages from “Rival Power” is the pragmatism and lack of idealism on both sides, which goes against alternative theories of engagement based on historic solidarity and pan-Slavism. This also contrasts with the ideologically-driven Russian foreign policy in both Tsarist and Communist times.

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Instead, “what transpires … is often crude opportunism”, writes Bechev, a research fellow at the Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies at the University of North Carolina and non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. He adds that “as long as there is a scope for the deal, the price is right, and the opposite party can deliver on commitments, Moscow is open for business”.

Similarly, the engagement of governments in regions such as the Western Balkans with Russia is motivated to a large extent by political gain and economic profit, and their leaders are “far from passive objects of Russian policies, much less Moscow’s pliant instruments”.

Bechev devotes sections of the book to the various countries in the region: the Western Balkans, EU and Nato members Romania and Bulgaria, Greece and Cyprus as “the core of the pro-Russia camp in the EU”, and — perhaps most interestingly — Turkey.

Winning over Ankara, says Bechev, is one of Russia’s most significant achievements in Southeast Europe, as he charts the “highly complex and ambivalent relationship” between the region’s two major economies that has combined rivalry within the post-communist space (a race early on and decisively won by Russia) and the Middle East, with “growing levels of economic interdependence, a partial overlap of strategic interests, and a shared love-hate relationship with Europe and the West”.

Under the two strongman presidents, Vladimir Putin in Russia and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, this relationship blossomed and while it was tested by their opposing views on Syria and Turkey’s downing of a Russian bomber, the recent rapprochement has proved the bond’s resilience.

One of the critical points made in “Rival Power” is that Russia has been in a relatively weak position in Southeast Europe vis a vis the Western powers, especially the EU. Governments across the region, even close allies such as Bulgaria and Serbia, have made no secret of the fact that they value their membership in or future accession to the EU above their relations with Russia.

Still, Russia has managed to claw its way back from its weak position after the end of the Cold War, and the scars left by the Yugoslavian wars of the 1990s, to make firm friends across Southeast Europe even in countries that are firmly in the Western camp.

To achieve this, the country that historically had an “unflinching belief in hard power” used a combination of tools ranging from the military buildup in the Black Sea, to less conventional levers such as using its position as the major gas supplier to the region and the use of soft power instruments to sway local populations in its favour. “The essence of [Moscow’s] policy is playing a weak hand the best possible way,” Bechev says.

“Russia is not in a position to challenge and roll back the EU, draw red lines for the United States, or control the foreign policy of other states, but it can manipulate and rally public opinion in its favour,” he writes. While this doesn't mean Moscow can achieve goals such as keeping countries from the region out of Euro-Atlantic organisations — witness the failed campaign to prevent Montenegro from joining Nato — Russia’s actions are “just enough to muddy the waters and put Europe and, to a lesser degree, the United States, under constant pressure”.

Looking at Russia’s position in the region over the last two and a half decades, Bechev argues that its influence reached its zenith with the planned South Stream project, a time when “the whole of Southeast Europe appeared to be Russia’s stomping ground”.

Not only would this have cemented its position as the gas supplier for the region, it would also have embedded Russia more deeply with local elites. “What works in Russia’s favour is not the development of strategic infrastructure but rather the pervasive state capture in the energy sector across Southeast Europe,” he writes.

After South Stream was scrapped, Russian influence started to wane, a situation that is likely to continue as more countries in the region edge towards membership of the EU. Yet Moscow’s influence in the region remains “real and easily observed”.

In the last two years, the West has also been weakened, creating new opportunities for Russia to assert itself, especially in the Western Balkans, thanks to both the fragility of democratic regimes in a region that has seen a slide towards authoritarianism in some quarters, and the “weakening pull of the West in the age of Brexit and Trump”.

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

Book Review: Star Wars: Canto Bight

This casino city is the latest stop on the Journey to "Star Wars: The Last Jedi."

"Star Wars: Canto Bight" consists of four very different novellas set in the Las Vegas of a galaxy far, far away, on the desert planet Cantonica, ahead of the city's first on-screen appearance in Episode VIII.

The first of these, "Rules of the Game" by Saladin Ahmed, focuses on Kedpin Shoklop, a seemingly guileless Wermal who has won a trip to Canto Bight.

However, his dream vacation gradually turns nightmarish as he runs into various con artists before his encounter with Anglang Lehet, a Caskadag assassin who decides to use Kedpin in his mission.

Ahmed employs a straightforward, clear writing style, but he manages to craft a nice introductory tale. Since Kedpin is an outsider, the reader learns about Canto Bight with him.

Additionally, the contrast between Kedpin's cheery naivete and Anglang's hardened cynicism creates a fun tonal shift as we jump between their points of view.

Mira Grant's "The Wine in Dreams" is a less typical tale.

Derla Pidys, a sommelier, is trying to purchase a legendary vintage from the mysterious Grammus sisters, who claim to be from a dimension beyond hyperspace. 

The sale is complicated when ruthless nightclub owner Ubialla Gerald tries to procure the wine for her superior.

Grant's writing is quite poetic, but needlessly long descriptive passages and flowery dialogue (mostly from the sisters) slow things down too much. The pace picks up towards the end, but it's hard not to get bored during the buildup to the deal.

Luckily, "Hear Nothing, See Nothing, Say Nothing" by Rae Carson more than makes up for it.

This novella introduces us to Lexo Sooger, a Dor-Namthian masseuse, and Lula, his human adopted daughter who works in indentured servitude. The pair appear to lead quiet lives until Lexo finds himself caught up on a power struggle between the elites of Canto Bight — something he has tried desperately to avoid.

Carson's story is the strongest of the four. It's fast-paced and thrilling, with an excellent main character. Lexo is easy to empathize with and he becomes increasingly fascinating as we learn more about him.

This tale also reveals the most about the hierarchy of Canto Bight, from its glamorous elites to those struggling to survive in its dark underbelly.

"The Ride," by John Jackson Miller, is the most fun of the four stories.

Here, we are introduced to Kaljach (Kal) Sonmi, a Heptooinian career card player with a debt and a tight time limit. He follows a system until he loses it all to the Lucky Three, brothers who make wild bets and win big.

Kal's seesawing luck and the Lucky Three's happy-go-luck attitudes make this an unpredictable ride. 

Gambling stories often hinge on the readers' understanding of games, but Miller — also known for 2014's "A New Dawn" — does a nice job of explaining the rules.

This collection's authors and editors also deserve credit for the subtle links between the four stories. 

These give us a satisfying sense of the Canto Bight community and some nice narrative threads for readers, but never to the detriment of the story being told.

It's unlikely that the events of this book will have a major impact on "The Last Jedi," but it will enrich one of the movie's locations and create some nice Easter eggs for fans who want to know about the background characters.

"Canto Bight" doesn't change the galaxy, but those who love all the small details and quirky characters of the "Star Wars" universe will enjoy at least three of the stories in this collection.

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Original Review on: http://www.nydailynews.com

Book Review - Strong To The Bone by Jon Land

Jon Land's Caitlin Strong thrillers usually have a "ripped from the headlines" feel, and the new one, "Strong to the Bone," features violent neo-Nazis, industrial robots, a lethal biological weapon, the international opiates trade and a creep who buys pharmaceutical companies to jack up the price of drugs.

For the uninitiated, Strong is a trigger-happy, insubordinate, fifth-generation Texas Ranger whose exploits always have a direct link to one of her ancestors' investigations. 

In this one, the ninth book in the series, it's her grandfather Earl Strong's pursuit of a Nazi who escaped from a World War II prison camp in Texas in the 1940s.

The series' other regulars, including Caitlin's long-suffering commander, D.W. Tepper; her ex-con lover, Cort Wesley Masters; and Masters' sons Luke and Dylan, all return. 

The oldest boy, Luke, who becomes more like his father with every book, initiates the action when he faces off against neo-Nazis who harass his Mexican-American friends.

The story also finds Caitlin coming face-to-face with the darkest moment in her past. Called to the scene of a nightclub brawl in Austin, she discovers that a young woman has been drugged and raped.

The circumstances are eerily similar to what happened to Caitlin when she was a college student — an assault Land reveals here for the first time.

Caitlin soon suspects that the girl's assailant and hers are one and the same. This makes Caitlin wonder if she's always been quick to pull the trigger because she harbors a deep-seated rage against male offenders.

Eventually, the Masters' struggle against neo-Nazis and Caitlin's pursuit of the rapist merge into a single, related criminal case. As always with this rollicking, entertaining series, the complex plot is resolved in a burst of righteous violence.

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Original review on: http://www.nzherald.co.nz

Book Review: The Stark Truth by Jayson Stark

Who’s the best first baseman ever? Who’s the worst second baseman of all time? What pitcher has a big name, but doesn’t live up to it? Which outfielder is unheralded, but always delivers in the clutch? 

These are the questions Jayson Stark attempts to answer in his book, The Stark Truth: The Most Overrated and Underrated Players in Baseball History (Let the Debate Begin!).

This isn’t just bar room talk—this is a definitive ranking of the most over and undervalued players at each position and don’t for a second think this list is ‘click bait’. 

As any lover of baseball will soon realize as they read through the first section of the book, Stark took his time and assignment of compiling this list seriously. There aren’t any hap-hazard choices. 

For each person, whether they be over or under-rated, Stark provides compelling reasoning as to his logic and guidance as to why a player ended up on either side of the leger.

As if reading through the top and bottom ranked players at each position isn’t enough, Stark also compiled a list of the three overrated and underrated players all time for each team at the back of the book. 

These lists are relatively brief, but each mention of a player does come with a short comment of Stark’s thoughts.

For each position category, Stark chose to go five deep on both sides of the scale. Here are the positions he rated:

• Right-Handed Starting Pitchers
• Left-Handed Starting Pitchers
• Relief Pitchers
• Designated Hitters
• Catchers
• First Basemen
• Second Basemen
• Third Basemen
• Shortstops
• Left Fielders
• Center Fielders
• Right Fielders

This reviewer found it particularly interesting that Stark chose to rate each outfield position and also divided starting pitchers up by which arm they used.

For an idea of how Stark went about picking these players, here are a few of the rules he came up with to help him decide (details for the rules will have to be found in the book):

• Book A Cruise Every October
• Beg for a Pay Cut
• Spend Your Career in the Central or Mountain Time Zones
• Take Boredom Lessons
• Demand to be Traded to the Royals
• Whatever You Do, Don’t Get Elected to the 
  Hall
   of Fame

This was one of the most enjoyable baseball books this reviewer has had the pleasure of reading. 

Read  cover to cover in one sitting, it is a page turner, unlike many non-fiction baseball books that are informative but tedious. 

Stark does a great job adding his perspective, yet relying on concrete statistic and real world situations to back his ratings. 

Each page that went by, I became more intrigued by whose name I would see pop up next on either side of the line. 

Add to this that I was pleasantly surprised to see my favorite player of all time, Omar Vizquel, listed as one of the most underrated shortstops of all time. This work is highly recommended for anyone who considers themselves a baseball guru or just even just a casual fan of the game.

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Original review on: http://baseballreflections.com

Comic Book Review - Mystik U #1

While the DC Universe is filled with colourful superheroes like Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman and the rest of the Justice League that save the world and fight a ton of supervillains, it is also filled with quite a few magical heroes who fight demons and other magical foes. 

They haven’t been given much of a spotlight lately, but DC’s new bi-monthly series by Alisa Kwitney aims to change that with Mystik U.

The first issue of Mystik U is like DC meeting Harry Potter and X-Men after Zatanna finds herself taken to Mystik University, a place where people could study and harness their magical and supernatural abilities. 

The first issue combines an entertaining cast of characters with an interesting premise as one of the new students is bound to become a powerful force called The Malevolence that will destroy the world in seven years time.

Kwitney writes a good take on Zatanna, one who is younger than she typically is in the DC comics. She’s an engaging character with a good sense of humour that readers can identify with with immediately. 

All she wants at the start of the story is to be recognized as a good magician and be equal with her father, who doesn’t think she has ‘the gift’. One odd beat, though, is how she transitions from mourning the potential death of her father to being wide-eyed and giddy about Mystik U. 

The change happens a bit too fast as her father is never really brought up again in the issue, but otherwise Zatanna’s characterization and relationship with her fellow students is pretty well handled.

The supporting cast is just as entertaining as Zatanna. Its nice to see Kwitney using less-known or almost forgotten magical DC characters, like Sargon the Sorcerer or Mister E. 

Sebastian Faust is a social rebel that looks more like James Dean than a wizard while Enchantress alternates between a sweet looking girl and a punk hipster depending on the dominant personality. 

Sargon provides a bit of comic relief as the socially awkward one of the bunch while the new character Pia is an interesting addition to the magical corner of DC, adding another fish out of water in the school.

Mystik U has Runaways‘ Mike Norton doing the artwork that compliments the tone of Kwitney’s script. He captures Zatanna’s youth pretty well and includes a nice amount of detail in his facial expressions and background. 

One example is the differences between Enchantress when she’s June Moone and the sorceress, particularly in a set of panels where Moone is changing into the Enchantress in the background and is putting on make-up, dying her hair and giving herself a new hairstyle.

Some of the magical entities are also drawn well, such as the horde of demons that captures Zatanna’s father to Plop, the school’s new slime monster. Jordie Bellaire makes good use of the colours on these creatures and characters as well, giving some of the school’s settings an eerie feeling whether its in the cemetery or Dr. Psyche’s office.

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Original review on: www.flickeringmyth.com

Book Review - THE SECOND COMING OF THE KKK by Linda Gordon

The cover of Linda Gordon’s “The Second Coming of the KKK” shows a procession of men marching in full Klan regalia up Pennsylvania Avenue, the Capitol dome looming behind them. 

It would be a disturbing image in any era, but in 2017 — after the attack on an African-American church in Charleston, S.C., after the neo-Nazi demonstrations in Charlottesville, Va., after the alt-right poured into Washington for President Trump’s inauguration — it is terrifying.

The photograph was taken in 1925, during the decade when membership in the so-called Second Ku Klux Klan — the first was put down during Reconstruction — swept the country. 

In all, 30,000 men participated in that parade. What the photo leaves out are the throngs lining the avenue: The Klan didn’t just march in the nation’s capital; it received a warm welcome. 

Unlike the first and third Klans (the third appeared during the civil rights era), the 1920s Klan was well integrated into American life. “The K.K.K. may actually have enunciated values with which a majority of 1920s Americans agreed,” Gordon writes.

One of Gordon’s tasks is to show that the 1920s we think we know — a Gatsbyan bacchanal of speakeasies, flappers and mob hits — was just an urban, coastal bubble. 

For most Americans, it would appear, the decade was more like something out of “Babbitt” or “Elmer Gantry”: a country turned inward against the world, small-minded and cruel. 

A country in which the Klan and its values — so-called Americanism, xenophobia, white nationalism and patriarchy — were the norm. An America, Gordon all but says, not unlike today.

The second Klan was national in scope, with a surprisingly small footprint in the South — its highest per-capita state memberships were in Indiana and Oregon. In New Jersey, Klansmen burned a cross in the black section of Metuchen, today a liberal commuter suburb of New York. 

The Klan was so powerful in Southern California that it nicknamed Anaheim “Klanaheim.” Its main focus was, as always, on spreading hatred against blacks, Jews and Catholics, but its agenda always fit the local context: In the Southwest, it turned its ire on Hispanics and Latino immigrants; in the Pacific Northwest, it took aim at Japanese.

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Original review on: www.nytimes.com

Book Review - Let Trump Be Trump by Corey Lewandowski

President Trump’s path to the White House was paved with fast food, conflicting egos and foul-mouthed rants, according to a new book by two former top aides.

The three-ring circus that was the Trump campaign is detailed in “Let Trump Be Trump,” which hits stores on Tuesday. 

In its pages, ousted campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, another top staffer, reveal juicy tidbits, according to The Washington Post, which got an advance copy of the tome.

Trump’s love of fast food, specifically McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken, is well documented. His standing, gut-busting order at the Golden Arches is “two Big Macs, two Fillet-O-Fish, and a chocolate malted,” the book claims.

The soon-to-be leader of the free world also threw curse-laden tantrums which included people getting their “face ripped off.” Lewandowski writes.

Disgraced former campaign chairman Paul Manafort may have come close to that, according to one anecdote.

Candidate Trump allegedly flew into a rage on a helicopter, ordering the pilot to drop to lower altitude so he could call Manafort and give him a tongue lashing. 

“Did you say I shouldn’t be on TV on Sunday? I’ll go on TV anytime I g--damn f---ing want and you won’t say another f---ing word about me!” Trump hollered, according to Lewandowski.

The novelty of working on “Making America Great Again” wore off for some beleaguered underlings. “Sooner or later, everybody who works for Donald Trump will see a side of him that makes you wonder why you took a job with him in the first place,” the writers explain.

Also chronicled are the moments after press secretary Hope Hicks got the Oct. 7, 2016 call from a reporter asking about the infamous “Access Hollywood” interview.

Trump read a transcript of the “grab them by the p---y” clip and said, “That doesn’t sound like something I would say,” the book claims, and the campaign hastily decided to brand the banter “locker room talk.”

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

Book Review - The Bengalis A Portrait of a Community by Sudeep Chakravarti

“But Gandhi arrived in Bengal, when so many others in India would not….There is no exact record of how many people died in Noakhali and in adjoining Tipperah district from October 1946.

Estimates range from 500 (Muslim League sources) to 50,000 (other sources)…..Even before he reached Noakhali, on his way from Kolkata, Gandhi was emotionally battered. 

The fires of Kolkata had spread to Noakhali and then on to Bihar…..Gandhi sensed it was as bad as it could get.”

“Is counter-communalism any answer to the communalism of which Congressmen have accused the Muslim League?” he asked of his colleagues. “Is it Nationalism to seek barbarously to crush 14 per cent of the Muslims in Bihar?”

While capturing some of those most poignant and dramatic days when Mahatma Gandhi was in Bengal to quell the ‘communal madness’ in the wake of the pre-partition riots, writer-author Sudeep Chakravarti, who had served in senior journalistic positions earlier, in this latest work, ‘The Bengalis – A Portrait of a Community’, was far from touching a raw nerve. 

The cycle of violence then until “finally cooled to embers”, was the culmination of a wider socio-historical process of which the community he has chronicled in this work played a big role.

Combining the nonchalance of a professional scribe with empathies for the suffering masses as someone who has also seen some of these ‘Bangla stories’ from within since his younger days, Sudeep Chakravarti dwells deep into various facets of what has gone to make up the Bengali identity over the recent centuries, not just through a nostalgic lens, but has been equally critical of Bengal society.

For the author, Gandhi may have been the ‘Brief Bengali’ as he puts it in the section from where the above quoted passage appears. Gandhi was at the receiving end of much criticism in Bengal, the land of the fiery patriot Subhas Chandra Bose.

After all, the modern Indian Renaissance, substantially a Kolkata-centric Bengal Renaissance had produced such dazzling array of figures from social reformers like Raja Ramohun Roy, the universalistic and austerely cosmopolitan Brahmo Samaj he had inspired, Ishwara Chandra Vidyasagar, Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, defiant contrarians  like Chittaranjan Das, M.N. Roy and Rash Behari Bose, genius of a physicist in Satyend-ranath Bose who was compared to Einstein, three Nobel Laureates so far – Tagore, Amartya Sen for Economics and Mohammad Yunus of the Grameen Bank microfinance fame in Bangladesh that has played a big part in women’s empowerment, to Satyajit Ray in film making,- it is said even C V Raman doing all his pioneering work in Kolkata made a big difference than if had got stuck in old Madras.

The list is a heady mix of variety and excellence to grab the crown of chauvinism. But Sudeep has commendably taken the ‘Bengalis’ story right up to Mamata Didi, to a higher, historically self-critical level, blending scholarship with lucid style, in drawing the big picture of a vibrant, linguistically bonded culture of romanticists, football lovers, foodies and travel adventurists.  

As the author says, “Gandhi was also breathtaking. This was a man from Gujarat, by way of South Africa,…charioteering of India’s collective nationalism…..At one stage, Gandhi had even said he had “become a Bengali for all intents and purposes.” 

Sudeep Chakravarti goes on to add: “I would put my neck on the line and say this Gujarati, who claimed for some weeks to be Bengali, whom many Bengalis still love to hate for his dislike of Subhas Bose-, did more for Bengal and Bengalis in those darkest months in 1946, than did millions of Bengalis who let their leaders mix rationale with religion.” …”50 years later, I went looking for Gandhi, that Brief Bengali, amid the detritus of history, to understand better his presence,” confides the author.

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

Book Review - THE BIG BOOK OF THE CONTINENTAL OP by Dashiell Hammett

Have I got a treat for those who prefer to celebrate their holidays in hard-boiled, rather than Hallmark, style. It’s a heavyweight of a collection called “The Big Book of The Continental Op” that gathers together the 28 short stories, two novels and one unfinished tale starring Dashiell Hammett’s first series detective, known only as “The Continental Op.”

For those readers who haven’t yet run into him, the Op is middle-aged, overweight and nameless. His moniker derives from his job: He’s an “operative” or detective, who works for the Continental Detective Agency. 

He’s easy to underestimate, but that would be a mistake. In the Op, Hammett revolutionized the traditional figure of the detective, strong-arming him out of his Sherlockian smoking jacket and into an American-made trench coat, shoving him out of his armchair and down those dark alleys where the most realistic crimes are waiting to be solved. 

Hammett paid tribute to his first great literary creation by referring to him as “a little man going forward day after day through mud and blood and death and deceit.”

Hammett wrote The Continental Op stories in the earliest years of his career, and to read them in sequence is to witness how Hammett slowly transformed the formulaic “gals, guts, and guns” action tales, the staple of pulp magazines like the Black Mask, into the stuff of literature. 

Even the early Op stories here give readers the chance to walk around the mythic San Francisco that Hammett created — a place of fog and furnished apartments, sinister Nob Hill mansions and Chinatown gambling dens.

This collection is edited by the distinguished Hammett scholar Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett, who is Hammett’s granddaughter. In a couple of short-but-substantive opening essays, Layman sketches out the sources of the Continental Op stories in Hammett’s own five-year career working for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. 

That career was interrupted by his Army service in World War I, where he contracted tuberculosis. In 1922, Hammett (by then on disability and a married father of a young daughter) took a course at the Munson School for Private Secretaries, with a “newspaper writing objective.” 

Layman suggests that journalistic training came in handy when Hammett began submitting stories to the pulp magazine Black Mask in 1923.

Those early stories were published under the editorial reign of George W. Sutton, a busy guy who wrote about cars and boats on the side. 

There’s little to suggest that either Sutton or Hammett realized that the popular Op stories were also remaking the detective fiction form. The first Op story, “Arson Plus,” is dated Oct. 1, 1923, and Hammett wrote it under the pseudonym, Peter Collinson, theater slang for “a phantom person.” 

The plots of “Arson Plus” and the other Sutton-era stories are simple and their pilferings from the more genteel British mystery tradition evident. For example, in “Slippery Fingers,” the Op is hired to solve the murder by penknife of a tycoon whose body is found in that mustiest of locales: the library. 

Hammett’s rougher Pinkerton experience, however, comes through in passages like this one, from “Crooked Souls,” in which the Op, who’s shadowing a suspect, describes a nifty bit of multitasking: “A touring-car, large, black, powerfully engined, and with lowered curtains, came from the rear. . . . Possibly a scout! I scrawled its license number down on my pad without taking my hand out of my overcoat pocket.”

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Original review on: www.washingtonpost.com