Book Review - The Go-Backer by Peter R. Decker

The crux of the conflict in Peter R. Decker’s novel The Go-Backer illustrates the frustrations of “those who moved west and followed the mandate of Manifest Destiny,” but who never succeeded in their efforts and returned to their homes back East. As Decker notes, “seven of ten of homestead seekers failed to attain their dreams.”

As is the case with Decker’s other two novels, Saving the West and Red, White, and Army Blue, The Go-Backer is well-researched and enriched by details.

In Saving the West, John Marlow – a fourth-generation Colorado cattle rancher – is engaged in a struggle for the ownership of his bankrupt family ranch, detailed by Decker’s specific and accurate knowledge of ranch life in Colorado.

In Red, White, and Army Blue, Hiram Marlow (same family) – the son of an Iowa hog and grain farmer – ends up homesteading in Colorado after serving in the army fighting Indians, detailed by Decker’s knowledge of military protocol and the rough demeanor of frontier army personnel.

In The Go-Backer, Calvin Marlow (the father of Hiram Marlow) – a small farmer from Vermont and a Civil War veteran – takes his family west on a wagon train to start all over in Colorado, only to give up and “go back” to where he came from.

Decker’s narrative of this adventure includes details about the route the family will follow on the wagon train west, the procedures to follow on the wagon train, even a comprehensive list of exactly what to take on the wagon train – a breech-loading rifle and a Colt revolver, wool clothing, woolen socks, heavy boots, blankets, quinine, opium, camphor, some cathartic medicine and brandy for snake bites.

Upon arrival at their destination, Decker suggests a substitute for the brandy might be a local product, “pilgrim whiskey”: “A concoction of raw alcohol, red pepper, molasses, and a touch of water.” “It takes a little getting use to,” they say, “but once you do, it’s like mother’s milk.”

Also included in Decker’s details are explicit instructions – laid out by John Ferguson, the “captain” of the wagon train – the rules to be followed in order to deal with any difficulties that might be encountered on the trail, particularly regarding any Indians they might encounter.

The only serious obstacles the pioneers actually do encounter, however, are the death from cholera of one of the wives on the train and the rape of one of the young daughters on the train, perpetrated by Ferguson himself. 

This atrocity results in the killing of the captain by Marlow – who discovered the act in process – putting Marlow in fear of the law for the rest of his stay in the West.

One of the most interesting characters Decker develops in the novel – aside from the dastardly captain – is the Oglala Sioux, “Loud Thunder,” who becomes a valuable help to Marlow once he settles in Colorado. Thunder demonstrates how to efficiently cut sod bricks out of the tough prairie soil, for instance.

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Original review on: durangoherald.com

Book Review - Schlesinger: the Imperial Historian by Richard Aldous

Writing from the White House in 1963 on the historian as political adviser, Arthur Schlesinger jnr suggested that “to smell the dust and sweat of battle, is surely to stimulate and amplify the historical imagination”.

Many people have wondered how the 43-year-old Schlesinger, a Harvard professor and award-winning historian, ended up working in the White House of John F Kennedy. 

The triumph of Richard Aldous’s new book is that it separates the myth from the reality, explaining both the seemingly inexorable rise of Schlesinger and how he contributed so much to the subsequent mythologising of the Kennedy era.

Born in 1917, the same year as Kennedy, Schlesinger was not a self-made man. Named Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger – his mother’s maiden name was Bancroft – he changed his middle name at the age of 15 to Meier so that he could imitate his father, the great Harvard historian Arthur Meier Schlesinger and become Arthur Schlesinger jnr. 

His father’s connections and influence certainly helped. His entry to Harvard was fast-tracked (he started two years before Kennedy) and his father played a major role in helping him publish his final-year thesis as a book in 1939.

There followed a prestigious fellowship at Harvard but despite his obvious abilities as a scholar, writer and original thinker, there were some awkward questions asked in 1942 because he hadn’t yet started on his PhD, something that was becoming increasingly necessary in the profession. 

Again Schlesinger snr came to the rescue, registering his son as his own PhD student and expediting the whole process. As Aldous notes, it “pushed the boundaries of academic propriety or even common sense to the breaking point”. 

The thesis was submitted later that same year, based on work that “Little Arthur” (as contemporaries sometimes called him) had been doing on US president Andrew Jackson. 

This later became The Age of Jackson, which won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1946, a remarkable achievement for the then 28-year-old historian, but helped greatly by the fact that his father sat on the advisory committee and only withdrew once it became clear that his son’s book was in the running.

This is not to deny the genius of Schlesinger jnr as an historian, just to note, as Aldous does, that he lived on the inside track, a placement that “served him so well throughout his rise to national prominence” and which so often “gave him a head start in an always competitive race”. 

The Age of Jackson was a ground-breaking work, described in the New York Times as “an original, brilliant and monumentally massive historical work”, and praised by the great historian Richard Hofstadter for its stylish writing and for making a “major contribution to American historiography”.

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Original Review on: www.irishtimes.com

Book Review - The Last Girl by Nadia Murad

In “The Last Girl,” Nadia Murad tells the story of her captivity along with other members of her Yazidi village of Kocho. It is an intimate account of what she calls “a slow, painful death — of the body and the soul.” 

As an insider, she is able to present a full portrait of her people as more than just victims. She writes with understandable anger but also with love, flashes of humor and dignity. 

In telling her story, Murad also offers glimpses of what has been wrought over recent decades in Iraq.

The Kurdish-speaking Yazidis live in northern Iraq, largely in underprivileged villages around Mount Sinjar. 

Most of their Kurdish and Arab neighbors view them with disdain, and they have long been persecuted for their religious beliefs. (Their monotheistic religion has elements in common with many other Middle Eastern faiths, including Zoroastrianism, Islam, Christianity and Judaism.)

The Yazidis inhabit disputed lands that Arabs and Kurds battle over, and they have often been caught between those competing nationalist ambitions. Murad writes that Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party and Masoud Barzani’s Kurdish Democratic Party pressured Yazidis to embrace identities as Arabs and Kurds, respectively, in their bids to assert claims to the land. (Both Arab and Kurdish nationalism imagine a basis for belonging in a most limited sense; their insistence on ethnic homogeneity, in a land where there is none, is doomed to leave out many.)

Internationally and in the region, very little attention was paid to the Yazidis — until the Islamic State came for them. Then they quickly became the subject of much reporting. 

The interest in the Yazidis, like stories about Middle Eastern Christians, perplexed many who had watched for decades as Iraqis experienced unrelenting horrors that traumatized much larger populations, with little global outcry. 

Resentment even arose over what seemed like an outsize focus on the suffering of minorities when, in absolute numbers, Muslims make up by far the most victims of the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, Shiite militias and others committing violence in the name of Islam.

Of course, it’s important to pay close attention to what happens to minorities in all nations: They are the canaries in the coal mine, a gauge of tolerance, inclusiveness and equality in any society. 

But many observers close to the region are wary of giving a platform to stories of minority persecution in the Middle East, out of fear that such tales can demonize Islam by pinning any shortcomings of majority-Muslim societies on the religion itself. 

Regrettably, these stories are frequently shared for just such purposes, and those who disseminate them lack a sincere concern for the victims. This is true of both Western Islamophobes and Middle Eastern sectarians.

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Original Review on: www.washingtonpost.com

Book Review - Collusion by Luke Harding

The new book "Collusion" is about what the author, my guest Luke Harding, says appears to be an emerging pattern of collusion between Russia, Donald Trump and his campaign. Harding also writes about how Russia appears to have started cultivating Trump back in 1987. 

The book is based on original reporting as well as on the Trump-Russia dossier compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele. Harding met with Steele twice, once before and once after the dossier became public. 

Harding had a lot of good contacts to draw on for this book because he spent four years as the Moscow bureau chief for the British newspaper The Guardian. During that time, the Kremlin didn't like some of the stories Harding was investigating, and in 2011, he was expelled. 

In Moscow, he learned a lot about Russian espionage partly through his own experience of being spied on and harassed.

Harding is now a foreign correspondent for The Guardian. He's also the author of books about WikiLeaks, Edward Snowden and Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian spy who fled to England, passed information to British intelligence about links between the Kremlin and the Russian mafia and then was assassinated with polonium-spiked tea.

Luke Harding, welcome back to FRESH AIR. So the dossier said that the Russian regime had been cultivating, supporting and assisting Donald Trump for at least five years with the goal of encouraging splits and divisions in the Western alliance. 

You write that the Russians had their eyes on Donald Trump as early as the 1970s when he married Ivana Trump, who is from Czechoslovakia. Why were they keeping an eye on him in the '70s? What were they looking for?

LUKE HARDING: Well, the KGB really forever has been interested in cultivating people, actually, who might be useful contacts for them, identifying targets for possible recruitments possibly to be agents. 

That's not saying that Donald Trump is an agent, but the point is that he would have been on their radar certainly by 1977 when he married Ivana, who came from Czechoslovakia, a kind of communist Eastern bloc country. 

And we know from Czechoslovak spy records de-classified last year that the spy agencies were in contact with Ivana's father, that they kept an eye on the Trumps in Manhattan throughout the 1980s. 

And we also know, from defectors and other sources, that whatever Prague learned, communist Prague, would have been funneled to the big guys in Moscow, to the KGB. So there would have been a file on Donald Trump.

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Original Review on: www.npr.org

Book Review - The Rules of Magic by Alice Hoffman

The almost supernaturally prolific American author Alice Hoffman has taken a busman’s holiday this year to pen a little fan fiction: a prequel to her own bestselling novel Practical Magic. 

The original book became the 1998 Hollywood romantic comedy starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as witchy sisters Gillian and Sally Owens. Now, in The Rules of Magic, set in 1950s New York, we are treated to the backstory of Gillian and Sally’s great-aunts, Frances and Jet.

Like all the females in the Owens family tree, Frances and Jet are witches descended from Salem escapee Maria Owens. More than 300 years ago, the teenage Maria was seduced and abandoned by Salem trial judge John Hathorne (real-life great-great-grandfather of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who added a “w” in his name to deflect the inevitable question).

The fact that Maria’s lover was a state-sponsored serial killer of women led the young witch to conclude – erroneously, one hopes – that all men are a bad thing. Thus before she went to her grave Maria decided to protect her female descendants by casting a spell to ensure that every male who loves an Owens woman will die, horribly and fast.

This spell makes life difficult for Frances and Jet, especially when they become sexually aware teenagers. In the summer that they go to stay with their Aunt Isabelle, at least four local lads – including an adorable pair of 17-year-old twins – come to shocking ends. 

Aunt Isabelle is sanguine about the whole thing, and encourages the girls to keep on loving boys anyway, saying wisely: “When you truly love someone and they love you in return, you ruin your lives together. That is not a curse. It’s what life is, my girl.”

The girls’ brother, the irresistible wizard Vincent Owens, has a different problem. As a youth, he breaks the hearts of endless girls, before realising that he is gay. Yet just as he’s starting to enjoy himself, he remembers that he too is cursed to die young.

Hoffman has a soothing touch, so we quickly get over the various horrific tragedies with which her latest book is littered – any one of which would pole-axe us personally for life. It’s all the great circle of death, we comfort ourselves, as we stroll through the scented garden of Hoffman’s prose. 

In the book, Aunt Isabelle trades love remedies for women’s diamond rings. Hoffman herself has a spell for which any writer would trade a crate of diamonds – the ability to turn out one enchanting bestseller after another, more than 30 novels to date, and probably more by the time I have finished this review.

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Original Review on: www.theguardian.com

Book Review - Artemis by Andy Weir

Andy Weir, author of The Martian, takes readers to another desolate world, but instead of the Red Planet it's the moon, in his new novel, Artemis.

Weir takes readers on an exploration of the colonization of Earth's nearest neighbor in outer space, and it's not too far into the future. 

Most everything needed for the modules of the city of Artemis can be reasonably manufactured on the surface, along with the occasional supply and tourist runs from home. 

Each living habitat is named for a prominent member of the original Apollo programs, but each has distinct features associated with it, whether it is for the affluent or those barely able to scrape by and survive.

Living in the poorer end of Artemis is Jasmine Bashara, aka Jazz. She has talent and is quite intelligent but chooses to skate by. 

She works as a porter for the tourists and the citizens who sometimes want their packages from Earth handled discreetly. She blows a field test that would have gotten her a job taking tourists in EVA suits to explore the area around the original landing site of Apollo 11. 

Upset and not thinking clearly, Jazz receives an offer that promises more money than she can imagine if she can successfully pull off a dangerous assignment. She has the skills and the knowledge, but does she have the luck and equipment necessary to keep her in the clear when damage control begins?

Jazz is a compelling character, both clever and sharp. Weir has created a realistic and fascinating future society on the moon, and every detail feels authentic and scientifically sound.

Weir knows how to make cutting-edge science sexy and relevant without losing the story.

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

Book Review - The Humanitarian Impact of Drones

The Humanitarian Impact of Drones is, as Chris Heynes says in the preface, “a most welcome contribution to a vital debate,” chiefly because it extends beyond the legal lens used to consider the rights and wrongs of particular targeted killings, often the criticism which dominates the debate on the use of armed drones. 

Instead, split in to two parts, the report covers broader humanitarian ‘impacts’ and ‘perspectives.’ It includes its fair share of discussion on the impacts of targeted killings and the legal perspectives on these actions but chapters range from the impact on peace and security and the environment, to gender-based and religious perspectives. 

Throughout, the chapters are interspersed with case studies from countries or regions, relating to the various topics covered. The report moves between practical, theoretical and legal frameworks to offer a comprehensive understanding of the nature of drone warfare in its fullest sense.

In this review I want to highlight a few of the issues that are not normally covered. This is not to suggest that the chapters on international law, humanitarian law and the case studies on countries like Yemen, where targeted killing has become an integral part of the US war on terror, are not important. 

They are, and remain central to the debate on drone use – the chapters in this report make for sobering reading on the extent of targeted killing and associated civilian casualties. However, it is the issues that are not so commonly covered in armed drone research and lobbying that make this report so critical.

Leaving numbers of those killed illegally or wrongfully aside, the report seeks to address impacts on issues that are less quantifiable. In a short chapter, Elizabeth Minor (Article36) and Doug Weir (Toxic Remnants of War Project) asks what the unique impact of drone strikes might be on the environment, since drone strikes are often conducted in more densely populated areas and contain new metals and components that have not been tested to assess their toxicity levels. 

Moreover, drone strikes are more likely to be used to hit “environmentally risky” targets in densely populated areas, causing contamination and harm to the civilian population. 

The environmental consequences of warfare of any sort are often ignored, or at least not measured, and this under-reported an unquantifiable harm has the potential to increase with the proliferation of armed drone use.

A problematic issue that is often dismissed by supporters of armed drones, but has been something that Drone Wars UK has consistently sought to address, is covered by Chris Cole in his chapter on ‘Harm to Global Peace and Security.’ 

The fallacy of the term ‘precision strike’, which has warped the public perception of the effectiveness of drone strikes, is unpacked, as it the increased potential for cross-border strikes. This is backed up by revealing statements from military personnel and lawyers in their support for drone warfare. We must take note of these issues and remain vigilant to the slide towards perpetual conflict.

Original Review on: dronewars.net