The novelist is the oldest son of writer Paul Theroux who featured in the authorized biography of V.S. Naipaul. This end-of-civilization genre novel is actually quite entertaining. Civilization and human industrial life is slowly coming to an end and one of last places where humans are struggling to survive is in northern Siberia.

The main character, Makepeace, is writing an account of this life, for whom we don’t know. Makepeace is born in Siberia of American parents from Chicago who become Quakers and move to Siberia in a small group to buy land from the Russians and start a new life. The father speaks six languages but is ill suited to the harsh pioneering life of the far north. Makepeace is a survivor, a skilled gardener and hunter and a constable dedicated to keeping the peace. Makepeace’s face is badly mutilated from a lye attack, a part of a feud between the father’s group and a rival family that has moved to town.

Siberia

After a few chapters, everyone in town has died or left and Makepeace is alone. Makepeace scavenges the abandoned town for books and garden seeds. Makepeace forges bullets for the many guns used. The books are locked in the armory for safe keeping. One day Makepeace spots a Chinese throwing books out a window. When the Chinese goes to draw, what Makepeace assumes is a gun, the Chinese is shot and wounded and Makepeace discovers the Chinese is a young pregnant woman. We finally discover that Makepeace is a woman who has a wiry build, a deep voice, cuts her hair short, and wears men’s clothes to make encounters with strangers less risky. The Chinese girl, Ping, practice tai chi and acupuncture. Ping dies in childbirth along with the baby.

Siberia From Air

A depressed and lonely Makepeace sees a plane fly overhead and crash near the town killing all onboard. She decides to travel East to try to find where the plane came from hoping to find a still functioning industrial society capable of the miracle of flight. Instead she encounters a village presided over by a mad preacher who trades her to a slave caravan. The slave caravan heads southwest and stops in a fertile region at an old military base where several hundred slaves farm, garden, and generally keep the place running. Everyone eats well and Makepeace stays for several years.

Occasionally a few slaves are selected for work in the Zone which is reputed to be a manufacturing center. It is considered a great honor to be selected. Makepeace is selected as guard on a trip to deliver workers to the Zone which turns out to be due north of the base in the old town of Polyn on the 66th Parallel. The Russian had built a modern center for secret scientific research in Polyn and when they abandoned the city they left behind a permanent anthrax contaminant so the city cannot be reoccupied or scavenged. The slave workers are instructed to scavenge in the city for 24 hours and bring back scientific discoveries like fuels, seeds, and other items. The workers are then shot (they will die soon anyway) and the things scavenged will be decontaminated and returned.

Yakut Horse

Makepeace has seen enough, she steals the head guard’s horse and escapes into the city knowing the guards won’t follow her. She encounters the last slave who has found a glowing blue jar. They wait for the guards to leave then leave the city themselves. The slave and horse soon sicken and die but Makepeace, though sick, survives. Later it is rumored that the anthrax has been targeted at males only so that women can survive to breed a new generation.

Air Base Siberia

Makepeace heads for home but spots another plane heading for the base. She can’t resist, returns to the base where her old family nemesis, now living in Alaska, is brewing ethanol to refuel his plane for a trip to Polyn followed by a flight back to Alaska. He wants Makepeace to find more of the glowing jars and takes her will him. After retrieving the jars, they assume Makepeace will die anyway so they leave for Alaska. Makepeace returns home and magically has a child for whom the journal is perhaps intended.

Louis Auchincloss

Louis Auchincloss, author of more than 60 books was named a Living Landmark of New York. For this reader, Last of the Old Guard is his first encounter with Auchincloss. Auchincloss died on January 26, 2010.

Rough Rider Teddy Roosevelt <> Henry Adams

This novel is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek look a New York Law firm from the age of the robber barons like the Vanderbilts and Goulds, of the late 19th Century through the New Deal. The two founding partners, one, Ernest, a Scotsman and one, Addie, a Knickerbocker are classmates at Harvard studying under Henry Adams. Another classmate is Teddy Roosevelt who Addie calls Thee. Embarrassed that his father bought his way out of the Civil War, Addie, almost 40 years old, joins Teddy and the Rough Riders in the Spanish American War and later serves in an administrative capacity in WWI.

Addie, descended from Peter Stuyvesant, who socially looks down on the nouveau riche 400 of the Astors, is the social and diplomatic partner with the old name contacts, and Ernest is the smart, tough, no holds barred lawyer, assuring their robber baron clients that the courts hold no fear or threat to their empires. The novel is written as a reminiscence of the Partner’s careers with accounts of famous, sometimes scandalous cases and family secrets.

Henry James

The partners are fond of the works of Henry James but Auchincloss’ own style is very matter of fact if old fashioned. Still, worth reading for the insight into the mindsets of some true masters of the universe.

Here is an update on the activities of Mortenson, the Central Asia Institute (CAI) and his self selecting “Dirty Dozen” following up on his previous Three Cups of Tea. Greg begins with an event from 1999 while he was visiting the Charpurson Valley. He had just met Sarfraz Khan, former mujahedin fighter with a disfigured hand who is making his living trading across the mountains into the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan (”no much success”) when they spot a group of 14 Kirghiz (nomadic Afghan) horsemen straight out of the 13th Century riding toward them. Their leader is the young son of the Kirghiz headman and he has heard that Mortenson is in the area and has ridden across the mountains to meet him and see if he would be willing to build a school for their children. Greg is so moved that he impulsively promises their school knowing full well he can’t go into Taliban controlled Afghanistan. It takes him ten years to keep his promise.

Video by Sarfraz Khan

Greg is so impressed with Sarfraz, who speaks seven languages and whose ancestors are Waki from the Corridor, that he hires him as his remote areas project manager. Thus begins what Greg calls the closest friendship of his life.

The promise of the school and the hiring of Sarfraz are the sort of impulsive decision making that make the CAI unique among NGOs. The other unique feature is their “last place first” philosophy, probably owing its origin to the first school Greg built in Korphe Pakistan a village so remote he first had to raise more money so he could build a bridge across a river in order to transport building materials to the village. Korphe was the village that rescued and nursed Greg after his failed attempt to climb nearby K2 and its headman Haji Ali is credited with Greg’s first and best education in the area (”After 3 cups of tea you will be friends forever.”). Haji Ali wanted a school for his grandaughter Jahan Ali, who became CAIs first high school graduate. The emphasis on girl’s education Greg acquired while growing up in Africa (where his father ran a hospital near Mount Kilimanjaro) and where he learned the expression “educate a boy and you educate an individual, educate a girl and you educate a community”. Greg has observed his girl students teaching their mothers to read and write proving to him the truth of this saying.

CAI offers scholarships to the smartest girls to continue their eduction. Once offered, these scholarships can be accepted at any time in the future. One girl was unable to accept a scholarship to become a health worker because of the opposition of the local headman. She married, raised children, and ten years later, the new headman asked her to accept her scholarship. She did, received her education, and returned to her village to help pregnant woman and their babies. Childbirth and infant mortality rates in her village fell to zero. She thinks that her own experiences as a wife and mother have helped her become a better trained health worker and she is grateful for the delay. This type of patience both by CAI and the students is one of the important lessons Greg has learned from his experience.

Wakhan Corridor

After 9/11 and the US displacement of the Taliban, Greg and Safran entered the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan and Safran began his education of Greg into Afghan “style“. Safran not only speaks the various languages of the area, but he adapts his accent to the specific region, speaking a fast, clipped Dari in Kabul, and slowing, softening, and rounding the language as he travels further into the Corridor until he morphs seamlessly into the next language of the region. He also adjusts his dress according to region and teaches Greg to follow him. Greg must have felt a little like Sir Richard Burton, the master of disguises. Safran also taught Greg about identifying the real decision makers during a Jirga (meeting of elders) just from their subtle gestures and body language. They develop close friendships with the leaders of the Waki and Tajik groups of the Corridor as well as the border security commander, Wohid Khan, who comes to their aid time after time. They build a series of more than 20 schools in the area. Safran also taught Greg the skills of avoiding kidnapping by never revealing your destination and changing transport frequently. This also assures that the driver is familiar with local conditions. They are constantly moving large sums of money from the Kabul bank to their remote schools to pay teachers, buy supplies and pay for construction. They are never robbed.

In 2005 the report that Americans had put a Koran down the toilet in an Iraqi prison set off riots throughout the Islamic world. NGO workers fled to Kabul and their offices and abandoned vehicles were destroyed. Greg stayed put as a guest in a house where he met for the first time the headman of the Kirghiz, Abdul Rashid Khan the father of horseman Greg and Safran had met in 1999. Abdul Rashid is returning empty handed from several months in Kabul where he had hoped to get help for his isolated people. Hamid Karzi made some half hearted promises which he had no intention of keeping. Abdul Radhid had spent much of his remaining capital to finance the trip. The government eventually sent one rusted out van to the Kirghiz who have no roads. Greg is able to again promise that CAI will build a school in Kirghiz so the old man can return home with some hope. The next day Greg traveled through scenes of destruction (the NGO offices) on his way to determine the fate of his nearby school. The school stood untouched because the village elders had stood in front of it explaining that the school belongs to the village. The rioters departed elsewhere. Greg credits the CAI strategy of making sure the local community takes full pride and ownership of their own schools with saving this school in the riots. The school was not viewed as international by the elders. Again on the NGOs, Greg comments that they insist on dressing in western clothes, drive the latest SUVs complete with nine foot satellite antennas, and generally just scream rich foreigners to the impoverished Afghanis. No wonder they find themselves targets of violence and resentment.

Greg is constantly approached by people wanting schools for their villages. Among those was the desk clerk at the Kabul guest house where Safran and Greg stay when in town. The clerk is a young Pashtun, Wakil Karimi, who grew up in Pakistani refugee camps and speaks several languages including English which is how he got the guest house job. Wakil persists about his school in visit after visit and Safran and Greg get to like him for his intelligence, energy, and persistence. They offer him a job as Afghan project manager and Safran begins Wakil’s boot camp training in Afghan “style“. Wakil’s village is in Taliban country but they visit and decide to let Wakil build his school once they see that the village elders really want it.

Azad Kashmir

Then, in 2005, a massive earthquake devastates much of Pakistani controlled Kashmir. The CAI rushes to the area to see what they can do. Most schools in the area have collapsed and many students have died. The CAI manage to get some tents for temporary schools and start traveling among their tent schools to give aid and pay the teachers. They can’t rebuild schools because people are on the move, farming terraces and drinking water springs have disappeared, the students are afraid to be inside buildings, and their usual stone construction would just collapse in the next earthquake. The CAI scrounged some PVC piping and found itself restoring water supplies so the girls could stop carrying water and return to school. This infuriated some NGOs who had lucrative contracts to restore water but CAI could care less. They just wanted to get their schools functioning again and the NGOs would probably never get the job done.

Greg is always emphasizing the importance of listening. His daughter asked him one day how the earthquake victim children played. Greg thought maybe they didn’t play at all so his young daughter launched a personal effort to round up jump ropes. Mothers joined in and soon he returned to Pakistan carrying hundreds of jump ropes. They were a big success in Kashmir and soon CAI is buying jump ropes locally. Greg starts thinking that while a couple of school have play fields (for soccer), none have a playground with slides, swings, and see-saws. CAI starts adding these to their schools. He relates a story on Bill Moyer’s Journal and in this book about a group of pro Taliban elders who come to see one of CAIs schools. They spend 30 minutes playing on the playground equipment and then started to leave. Greg asked them if they don’t want to see the school. They say no, they already decided they want CAI to build them a school like this one but they insist it must have a playground.

In another instance of listening carefully, Greg finally got one traumatized girl to relate the experience of the earthquake in her tent class. When Greg asked her why so few students had returned to class she said it was because there were no desks and it didn’t seem like a school. The students somehow associated having a desk with the learning and security of school. Greg immediately set villagers to work finding salvageable desks in the school’s rubble and building new ones. The students returned to school, some even without tents sitting under a tree once the desks were available.

Greg returned home to Montana to raise more money but Safran meanwhile uncovered some Chinese engineers in Pakistan who have experience building earthquake resistant structures in Xinjiang Province China. He arranges for the Chinese to design and fabricate three schools in Xinjiang, arranges transport for the materials from Xinjiang, and sets the logistics in place to compete the schools on site in Kashmir in only one month. Lastly, (after already committing CAI to the schools without authorization) he faxes Greg in Montana for the $54k needed for the schools catching Greg by total surprise. Greg takes the schematics for the buildings which are prefabricated from wood and designed to move in a quake to a civil engineering professor in Bozeman. they are to be assembled on a floating concrete pad which can also move in the quake. They are designed to withstand a magnitude 8.2 earthquake. The professor declares the designs sound and Greg gets CAI board approval, as always, to proceed. The schools are ready for occupation in 19 days. Just another typical CAI project.

The following link shows a video with one of these earthquake resistant schools, the Balseri Girls School, Patika, Azad Kashmir, Pakistan in the background.

Greg comments that they encountered very few NGOs in remote Kashmir but the extremists groups including the one that later bombed Mumbai were very effective at reaching the remotest villages and setting up madrasas, extremist Islamic schools often led by illiterate teachers who have memorized a little of the Koran. They feed most effectively on remote and ignorant villagers.

Greg and Safran are terrible at dealing with bureaucracies and are busy building schools throughout the outer regions of Afghanistan without any license or sanction from the central government. They initially tried to register CAI as a NGO with the government but quickly gave up. One official contradictorily claimed 1) there are already hundreds of schools in the Wakhan (there were none); 2) the Corridor is actually a part of China (never); and 3) no one lives in the Wakhan (there are three distinct ethnic groups in the Corridor, each with several thousand members).

Wakil took upon himself the task of getting CAI an NGO license. He spent a full month in the process, finally yelling and shaming the bureaucrats into stamping his final document. Unstated but implied is the refusal of CAI ever to pay a bribe to a government official even when it is clear all other NGOs have paid bribes to get their paperwork approved. CAI stretches their dollars and can construct a typical school and fund it for five years for about $40k. In this context, the cost of even a modest bribe would be intolerable to them.

Greg knows that some of the elders that support his schools make much of their income from poppies and the drug trade. He acknowledges that there are few other opportunities to make money in Afghanistan and praises those that give most of the proceeds back to the people in the form of low cost loans, seed, and other assistance. He regrets the some Afghanis become opium addicts, the cost of which further impoverishes them.

Greg discusses his strange relationship with the US military. He was initially opposed to the US military actions in Afghanistan while welcoming the removal of the Taliban from power, allowing CAI to operate to build schools in the country. As he saw it, a single US missile costing $850k could be used instead to build 20 schools which is a far more productive use of resources.

Then the earthquake struck in Kashmir and the US military loaned a number of Chinook helicopters from Afghanistan to transport supplies in and wounded earthquake victims out and Greg came to see the now popular crews in a new humanitarian light. The crews themselves, after Iraq and Afghanistan also came to see themselves in this new popular humanitarian light and liked it.

The other strange thing that happened was that military wives came across the Parade magazine article about the CAI and started reading “Three Cups of Tea” and discussing the book at their women’s clubs. Their enthusiasm spilled over and soon their husbands, serving or having served in Afghanistan started reading the book, particularly, counter insurgence soldiers. Pretty soon, “Three Cups of Tea” was required reading in counter insurgence academies. Greg discovered all this when forward base commander Christopher Kolenda asked if CAI could build a school near his base in Kunar Province. Kunar Province certainly fits the description of an “end place” but it is also Taliban country. Nevertheless, Wakil and Safran visit Kolenda then sat down with the village elders and decided to build the school.

Soldier Invites CAI to build school in Kunar Province

Thus began a major effort by CAI to build schools across the heart of Taliban country including Kunar Province and Nangarhar Province, the location of several Al Qaeda camps that includes the now famous Tora Bora caves where Bin Laden was thought to have hidden before slipping across the border into Pakistan. For one particularly vulnerable school they convinced a respected local Mullah to be headmaster. When warnings started appearing on the school, the Mullah went directly to Taliban leaders and convinced them to leave the school alone. They did. While CAI has had a little violence and threats at their schools, none have been damaged or closed unlike many other new schools that have been closed, students and teachers killed, and girls attacked with acid. Greg attributes the difference to the strong support the schools have had from the local elders and leaders. Even though CAIs schools are secular, they receive strong support from the local Mullahs.

CAI has by now received widespread recognition. Great Britain’s Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, visited one of the Kashmir earthquake resistant schools; Greg became the recipient of the Star of Pakistan the highest civilian award in Pakistan; Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, opened one of the Panjshir Valley schools; and Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. Stanley McCrystal are both Mortenson fans.

Admiral Mullen with Mortenson

Greg quotes Mike Mullen to show how far the military has come:

The Muslim community is a subtle world we don’t fully – and don’t always – attempt to understand. Only through a shared appreciation of the people’s culture, needs, and hopes for the future can we hope to supplant the extremist narrative. We cannot capture hearts and minds. We must engage them; we must listen to them, one heart, and one mind at a time.

Quite a contrast to the usual nightly news Neanderthal general spouting nonsense about getting the bad guys like he’s playing some kind of video game, which incidentally, is how young military minds are recruited these days – through video games.

Kirghiz porting their school

In late 2009 the nomadic Kirghiz finally got their school built on the very roof of the world at 12,500 feet. The logistics of getting materials and workers to the site required some miracle planning and an approach from three sides. Money and lighter materials like the door and window frames traveled across the Wakhan Corridor to the end of road where they were loaded onto Yaks for the three day journey to the site. Trained masons hiked over the mountain passes from the Charpurson Valley in Pakistan. A truck laden with cement, roof beams and other heavy construction material drove across Tajikistan to an old Soviet tank trail leading south toward a lake in Kirghiz. To get permission for the truck to cross Tajikistan, border commander Wohid Khan agreed to personally accompany the truck. From the lake, more Yaks and men transported the heavy materials the final 15 miles to the building site. Greg considers this his last best school even though illness has prevented him from seeing it. In fact fate has twice prevented Greg from entering Kirghiz. But after 10 long years, he has finally kept his promise.

For those wanting a good introduction of this region this book is one of the best. Greg furnishes a series of maps but it is hard to grasp the impact of all those massive mountain ranges. For a while Safran shuttled overland between Kashmir and the Wakhan Corridor to supervise his various building projects. Although the bird flight distance is only 200 miles. Safran needed to cross three different mountain ranges. For two he could drive CAIs 28 year old Land Cruiser across but for the third, into the Wakhan, he used his horse. His first horse died of exhaustion in 2006 and he acquired a new horse which is pictured in the book (They mistakenly identify the horse in the picture as the one who died, probably in the rush to publish. There are a few nonsense sentences in the book as well.). The most startling of the maps shows the ethnic distribution of the area (Pakistan and Afghanistan). There are 18 distinct ethnic groups shown here, one of which is “other” which implies there are even more groups. With the mountains and the ethnic diversity no wonder everyone is confused.

For an account of how the boundaries defining the various countries, including Afghanistan and Pakistan came to be and why Kashmir ended up in India (none of which has very much to do with ethnic boundaries) read the untold story of India’s Partition the tragedy that set off the chain of events leading to our current state. The “Great Game” between Russia and England, which contributed to the partition and boundaries predates the Cold War by a hundred years.

For a recent history of Afghanistan, the Soviet occupation, the CIA (Charlie Wilson’s War) and Pakistani intelligence backing of the Afghan mujahedin, followed by the abandonment of Afghanistan after the Soviet pullout giving rise to the Taliban read Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars.

A tight history of the Presidency since WWII as the American constitutional form of government was transformed, according to Wills, into an unconstitutional Monarchy that would have been the envy of England’s King George III, against whom America rebelled.

He puts the origin of this transformation in the Manhattan project that created the Bomb. The realities of the nuclear era meant the need for instant decision making in the event of a nuclear attack. Instant decisions can only be made by a single individual, not a committee or a congress, and that individual must necessarily be the President. Will argues that this single reality transformed the Presidency and led to all the other unprecedented changes in peacetime American democracy, secrecy, and the activities that must be kept secret from the public including assassination, overthrow of governments, bombing of peaceful countries (Cambodia and Laos among others), special rendition, torture, surveillance of ordinary citizens, etc.

Groves and Oppenheimer

He begins with an extensive review of the organization of the ultra secret Manhattan Project directed by Gen. Leslie Richard Groves (played by Paul Newman in the film Fat Man and Little Boy). Groves had access to virtually unlimited resources with his AAA priority, including all the leading scientists in the country. He existed outside the military reporting structure and no one in that structure was allowed to even know what he was doing. He created his own air force complete with secret military bases. His three central facilities at Hanford (Plutonium enrichment), Oak Ridge (Uranium enrichment), and Los Alamos, (where the scientists were housed and where the bomb was created and assembled), covered thousands of acres each, and employed hundreds of thousands of workers, yet only a handful of people outside the facilities knew of their existence. Grove’s only restraints were imposed by his chief scientist Robert Oppenheimer, who needed an environment in which the scientists could collaborate and live in a suitable environment. This project, according to Wills, laid the foundations for the modern security state and the imperial presidency. Its primary legacy, of course, was the Bomb.

James Forrestal with Truman <> <> <> <> <> <> George Kennan

Truman gets harsh treatment here. Almost all the secret apparatus of government post WWII was created under Truman. Truman and his administration, particularly George Kennan and James Forrestal, pioneered the use of fear tactics, overstating the Soviet threat, to push through changes expanding the military and powers of the President. W was to use the same tactics after the attack of 9/11. The Presidency since WWII perfected the state of permanent emergency. After the collapse of the Soviet Union ended the cold war many thought the state of perpetual emergency had ended. W and his administration cynically used the attacks of 9/11 to recreate this state of perpetual emergency telling us we must be in constant fear of future terrorist attacks and that only the powerful President can protect us.

A strange thing about this history which probably reflects the reality of the times is the absence of attention to China and its communist takeover. The focus was totally on the Soviet threat, even when massive Chinese troops poured across the border into Korea. Ironically, the insistence of the US that Taiwan represented China on the UN Security Council and the consequence boycott of the Council by the Soviets was what allowed Truman to get the UN resolution passed by the Council that he used to justify, unconstitutionally, the Korean war.

Korea was not a UN “police action.” It was not even a UN war. It was an American war, a President’s war, Truman’s war. And Truman found out what others would learn after him, that presidential wars may be easy to start, but they are almost impossible to end.

Korea was only the first in a long line of Presidential Wars, of which we are currently engaged in two simultaneously. The last war declared by Congress was WWII.

Wills spends a lot of time on secrets, mere possession of which is a source of power and authority. He quotes Max Weber:

Every bureaucracy seeks to increase the superiority of the professionally informed by keeping their knowledge and intentions secret…The concept of the “official secret” is the specific invention of bureaucracy, and nothing is so fanatically defended by the bureaucracy as this attitude.

The problem with intelligence secrecy is that it excludes information of the real experts who are not members of the intelligence priesthood. McNamara later admitted that the administration knew very little about Vietnam as they made their decisions. Obama is repeating the same mistake in Afghanistan. The real experts are outside the sacred priesthood. We previously reviewed an excellent account of secrecy in the CIA who missed virtually every important world event since its inception.

Bobby and Jack “Let’s Kill Fidel”

Will also spends much time demonstrating that the primary purpose of secrecy and secret classification has been to cover up government malfeasance and embarrassment, to cover up incompetence more often than illegal activity. Unless documents are destroyed as in the case of the CIA experiments with LSD, the secrets are usually revealed 50 or 60 years after the fact. Thus historians are getting their first looks at the top secret military plans for reacting to a nuclear attack. FUBAR doesn’t begin to describe the incoherent and inconsistent mess they are finding. This may keep historians busy, but it does little to stop illegal activities or reveal incompetence in time to correct things. The need for secrecy is always justified by the need for national security, hence Will’s “national security state”, as a state of secrets, a government conducted in the shadows.

Henry “Hit Man” Kissinger

After the Watergate and other Nixon excesses, there was Congressional push back with increased congressional oversight and a weak attempt to regain a share of war-making authority which is under the constitution the sole responsibility of Congress. Congress passed the the War Powers Resolution, CIA oversight, and constituted the FISA court of authorize surveillance. The administrations pushed right back. According to Kissinger:

It is an act of insanity and national humiliation to have a law prohibiting the president from ordering assassination.

Wow!

W Issues Signing Statement “The Law is what I say it is.”

Push back is now instantaneous, as when W simply issued a “signing statement” that he would not enforce the McCain Anti-Torture provision, even as he signed it into law. Take that Congress!

All this executive power is hard to resist as Dick Cheney (aka Darth Vader) proved on 9/11 when, without consulting W, he unilaterally (his favorite word) assumed the powers of the President and ordered the military to shoot down a civilian aircraft UA 93. There was never an inquiry into this action.

Will sites a study by Steven Kinzer, who counted 114 cases where the US denied a country the right to choose its own government. Some involved direct and indirect American assassinations. Kinzer says the long term results of these interventions were usually damaging to the US. Virtually every President since Truman with the sole exception of Jimmy Carter was responsible for these interventions. In each case the people in the countries involved knew exactly what was happening and who was behind it. The secrecy was only for the benefit of the American public.

Where is the real Leon?

He ends on a really bright note. The Obama administration has already demonstrated an unwillingness to give up the powers accumulated by past administrations. This includes continuing special rendition and interrogations. The powers just seem to swallow everyone who assume the office. An insider, commenting on the transformation of CIA’s Leon Panetta; “Its like Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

This is a love story set in Istanbul in 1975. The main character, Kemal has just entered his rich father’s business after having earned a business degree at an American University and served his military duty. Kemal is 30 and has chosen the girl he wants to marry, the Sorbonne education Sibel. Sibel has proven she is a modern girl by giving her virginity to Kemal before marriage. They occasionally make love in Kemal’s office after the other workers have left for the day. Kemal sees a beautiful young Turkish girl with bleached blond hair and miniskirt and realizes the girl is Fusun the 18 year old daughter of his mother’s seamstress. Fusun is working as a shop girl and has already gained notoriety for herself by entering a beauty pageant. Kemal seduces the willing Fusun and they make love 44 times before his engagement party.

Skiing in Uludag Turkey <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> Istanbul Yacht

We are introduced to social life for Kemal’s set including shopping trips to London and Paris; ski trips in Turkey and Switzerland; yachting in the summer; restaurants and clubs.

1954 Istanbul Hilton

The engagement party is an important part of Istabul social life for Kemal’s modern class. His family spends months planning the party and deciding on the guest list which is in the hundreds. They choose the contemporary Hilton as the appropriate site for such a modern group. The guests will expect to be served foreign liquor import of which is highly restricted and much effort goes into acquiring it. Kemal at the last minute adds Fusun and her family to the guest list. Fusun comes, perhaps to see if Kemal will really go through with the engagement. At the party Fusun dances seductively with several men including 23 year old Orhan Pamuk. It is a dance Orhan will never forget.

Istanbul Yali on the Bosporus

Fusun disappears after the party and Kemal’s obsession begins. He and Sibel move in together to a family summer Yali cottage. Kemal soon confesses and Sibel, thinking he is ill arranges for him to see Istabul’s only psychoanalyst. But Kemal loves his obsession and Sibel soon gives up on him, breaking off the engagement. This is difficult for her because she is no longer a virgin and everyone in their set knows she and Kemal were living together. For all their efforts to act modern, old prejudices persist. Kemal doesn’t see Sibel again for 31 years.

For more than a year Kemal doesn’t hear from Fusun then gets a letter inviting him to her parents home where they announce that Fusun is married to a fat young film industry screenwriter. Fusun hints that the rich Kemal should underwrite her husband’s career and that she wants to become a movie star. Realizing this is the only way he can continue to see Fusun, Kemal plays along beginning an eight year odyssey in which Kemal comes to have dinner and watch television four nights a week at Fusun’s family’s house. He does this exactly 1593 times. To sustain himself at other times he starts removing and replacing objects from the house that were touched by Fusun. He also collects her cigarette butts (1486, each annotated with what Fusun was doing as she smoked it).

First Turkish Best Foreign Film Nominee Yol

This obsession gets a little old after a few hundred pages but Pamuk compensates a little by capturing an image of Istanbul life during this 9 year period. Kemal starts going to Turkish films for the first time in his life (as an excuse to be with Fusun even though the husband is also in attendance). Foreign films are shown in the movie houses but Turkish films are shown outdoors in movie gardens in the summer. All are melodramas and Turkey boasts that it is the third largest producer of movies after the US and India. None have ever been shown outside Turkey. The industry is dominated by the board of censors and the major challenge of making movies is to get the censor’s approval. Movies may deal with rape or infidelity but must do so indirectly. Foreign films are likewise subject to censorship so that Lawrence of Arabia (anti Turkish) is never shown and Last Tango in Paris is so abbreviated without its sex scenes as to be unintelligible.

1956 Chevrolet

After Grace Kelly’s death, the state operated television ran a series of her films in the evenings. Fusun became fascinated with Kelly, particular when Kelly is shown driving a car. Fusun insists that Kemal teach her to drive. A major character in the novel is Kemal’s 1956 Chevrolet that had belonged to his father. Import of foreign cars was prohibited in the early 1960’s and the old American cars from the late 1950’s and early 1960’s were preserved with great care much like those in Havana. It is this car the Fusun learns to drive.

This period was one of major political unrest in Turkey as the nationalists and communists waged a civil war with bombings, assassinations and riots. Periodically the military took over, imposing martial law. Kemal’s only comment on all this:

I had no interest in politics, and it seemed to help no one that this war was being waged in the streets by an assortment of ruthless factions none of which had anything in common with the rest of us. When I told Cetin (the chauffeur), who’d been waiting for me outside, to drive carefully, I was speaking as if politics were as natural a cataclysm as an earthquake or a flood, and there was nothing we ordinary citizens could do except to stay out of its way.

Poe House Baltimore

Later in life, Kemal wonders what to do with the huge accumulation of Fusun memorabilia. He starts visiting museums around the world (1743 in all) with the same obsession he gave to the pursuit of Fusun. His favorite is the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Baltimore but he gets the idea that any collection can be made into a museum given money and dedication. His completed museum, housed in Fusun’s former family home, is left to the care of Orhan Pamuk who also wrote this account of his life of obsession.

This reader was interested in the insights into the perceptions of young Turks growing up in this period. Their parents grew up in the era of Ataturk who died in 1938 and who played much the same roll in modernizing Turkey as Meiji had played earlier in Japan. For Ataturk, the secular state was key to modernization of Turkey. By the next generation, this secularization was taken for granted by all “modern” Turks. Non modern Turkish men could be recognized by whether their wives and daughters wore headscarves. It was absolutely essential for a “modern” Turkish woman never to appear in public wearing a headscarf. The importance of this seemingly minor dress code distinction is now a central issue in France.

The young of this period and class were educated in Western Europe or America. While proud to be Turks, they still felt isolated and largely ignored by the outside world. They wanted increased visibility and respect but using cinema as the example in this novel, they were unable to produce films that would receive wide distribution in the West until much later. A 1964 movie Topkapi featured a heist from the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul and showed scenes from the city. It was directed by an American, Jules Dassin, and starred an Englishman, Peter Ustinov, A Greek, Melina Mercouri who married the director, and a German, Maximilian Schell. This is one of the few times a major Western film had been shot in Turkey. The Turkish film, Dry Summer, was made in the same year 1964, and it won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. In 1982, another full Turkish production, Yol, was smuggled into Switzerland for post production and submitted it to the Academy for Best Foreign Language Film.

A young Bangalore entrepreneur, Balram, learns that the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao plans a trip to Bangalore to learn about the envied Indian talent for entrepreneurship. Balram feels that he is in a unique position to educate the Premier from his own experience. He writes a series of email communications which constitute this novel.

Rural India

Balram was born into extreme poverty into a large family in the Darkness, the great interior of India along the Ganges River. His father was a rickshaw man who dies young of TB. Balram isn’t even given a name by his family who call him Munna which means boy. His teacher names him Balram which means white tiger. His last name, Halwai, is his families caste which means sweets maker. He is forced to leave school after a few years to work in a tea shop and contribute to his family. Balram is ambitious and saves enough to pay someone to teach him to drive. He applies for a job with the local landlord and gets lucky when the younger son, Ashok, has just returned from America and the family now has two cars and needs a second driver.

Rickshaw Man

Ashok and his Christian wife Pinky are sent to Delhi to live where he can bribe politicians to allow the family to avoid paying taxes. Balram is now making 3000 rupees a month, a fortune for his family back home. Balram is driving an air conditioned Honda City and is the envy of everyone in his family. One night Ashok and Pinky get drunk and Pinky insists on driving home. She hits and kills a young girl and isn’t even aware it has happened. Ashok’s family moves quickly, offering a large sum to Balram’s family on condition Balram signs a confession that he was driving at the time and struck the child. He will be arrested and sent to prison. But no one comes forward to report the girl missing and the police are able to dismiss the whole situation, sparing Balram. Balram now hates Ashok and his family. One day Ashok is carrying an Italian case with 700,000 rupees as a bribe. Balram kills Ashok and steals the money. The wanted poster looks like half the poor men in India. He thinks of running the Mumbai but has heard that things are happening in Bangalore so he travels there instead.

Bangalore Traffic

He finds there is a big demand for businesses hiring cars for their employees and executives. At first he can’t break into the business, but then remembers how Ashok bribes the politicians and he does the same to get a few car companies licenses pulled. Balram is then able to start his own successful company.

Bangalore Limo

Along the way we learn about the fate of poor workers (servants) in India. The servants largely remain honest (they can be seen spending hours in line at the airline ticket offices to buy tickets costing many hundreds of dollars without stealing the money even though they themselves make only a few dollars a month). Balram explains that this is largely because the employers know the families back home and the family honor is at stake to say nothing of possible revenge by the employers against the family. Balram also introduces us to the world’s greatest democracy where politicians register all villagers once they turn 18 and vote for them the rest of their lives regardless of where the person now lives. Balram left his village as a boy but has never missed an election at home.

Cosmos

A short marvelously written novel follows the evolution of the universe from the big bang through the eyes of seemingly immortal Qfwfq who thinks in time frames of 200 million years. As a child he plays a form of marbles with Hydrogen atoms. We follow the formation of the galaxy and the changes in the world which will allow the formation of life. We see the first life crawling out of the sea to begin life on land. Throughout the eons, Qfwfq is always looking for a mate, usually without success, often with jealous rivals.

The latest novel by the author of Brick Lane (and movie of the same name) has an English chef, Gabriel, as its main character. Gabriel grew up in a Northern mill town where his father introduced him to the latest technology and techniques in looms and weaving. The mills are now shuttered and one is being converted to a museum, his father has terminal cancer, and Gabriel, now a French trained chef, is about to launch his own London restaurants with his business and political partners. As a final preparation and as a test to satisfy his other investors, Gabriel is spending a year as executive chef at the Imperial Hotel, a Victorian era relic that has been refurbished everywhere but his kitchens. Gabriel has previously served in restaurants in Lyon and a two star restaurant in Paris. His new restaurant will be located near government offices and will serve classic French cuisine.

Thistle Royal Horeseguards Hotel London

Gabriel’s staff at the Imperial are all immigrant foreigners (Ali’s theme subject) of unknown legality. Some of his staff is highly educated (accountants, lawyers, one surgeon) just trying to survive in London. There is much detail about the day to day activities and human interactions in a large busy kitchen. One day Gabriel descends into the labyrinth under the kitchen (used for storage) and finds the body of Yuri, a Ukrainian worker naked and dead on the floor. The police conclude the death was accidental (Yuri slipped on the floor after a shower), that Yuri was secretly living in the labyrinth, and the case is closed.

Victorian Kitchen

Gabriel returns later to the labyrinth and this time encounters a Belorussian girl, Lena, who has been missing from work. She claims to be looking for money she has stashed in the wall. The money in the wall is gone. Gabriel suspects she has been living in the labyrinth as well and somehow invites her to stay at his place after he learn she is hiding from her pimp. This arrangement doesn’t go over too well with Gabriel’s long time girl friend Charlie, a 39 year old lounge singer, especially when Gabriel naively confesses he is sleeping with Lena. Gabriel started having repeating nightmares about events in the labyrinth and he loses sleep. Gabriel has become suspicious of the hotel’s maître d and now becomes obsessed with finding out what he is up to in an unused hotel room. Gabriel finally gets one of his workers to tell him what is going on which turns out to be human trafficking for the sex trade by convincing hotel chamber maids and kitchen workers that better employment can be found elsewhere. This means of “recruiting” sex workers is easier than smuggling girls across national borders since they are already in England. Gabriel descends, not so slowly, into madness and his behavior becomes increasingly erratic. After uncovering the maître d’s trafficking scheme, Gabriel now inadvertently stumbles into the maître d’s brother’s indentured servitude agriculture labor activity. The brother has purchased an old hotel shuttle bus to transport his labor to his vegetable farms and the mad Gabriel gets on the bus to see what other strange activity is surrounding the hotel.

We learn that Gabiel’s mom had descended into madness and Gabriel seems to be following. In the climax, Gabriel assaults his politician partner believing him to be the john of which Lena is terrified. Gabriel is dumped from the restaurant partnership and he loses his investment. Gabriel’s father dies, Gabriel is unemployed and his life savings are gone, to the restaurant and to Lena. Gabriel is living in his father’s house and ready to start rebuilding his life. Charlie may even give him another chance.

The madness comes off better in this novel than the themes of human trafficking and slavery that Ali is interested in exposing. Worth reading anyway.

Here is a concise attempt to explain in layman’s terms what went wrong in the financial crisis. It is particularly interesting since the author lives in London and can give us a view from the global epicenter complete with British wit. Unfortunately dry British humor sometimes doesn’t translate so well for an American reader.

Rogues Neeson <> <> <> Citron <> <> <> Iguchi <> <> <> Hamanaka <> <> <> Kerviel

He brings us up to date on the rogues gallery that began with Nick Neeson the Rogue Trader whose more than $1 billion trading losses single handedly brought down century old Barings Bank. The ever expanding gallery now includes Robert Citron of Orange County and Toshihide Iguchi of Daiwa Bank each losing more than $1 billion. Move up to Yasuo Hamanaka of Sumitomo who clocked in at $2.6 billion and on to the current reigning champion Jerome Kerviel of Societe Generale at $7.2 billion.

Joseph Cassano

Consciously missing from this rogues list is AIG’s London based Joseph Cassano who earned $280 million writing CDS insurance policies for much of the CDO industry.To date bailouts to AIG add up to $173 billion, most of which has gone to Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and other big subprime players in the form of insurance payouts.

He briefly explains how banks work, taking deposits and leveraging them into loans far exceeding the value of the deposits. With the invention of securitization and the use of off shore corporations to hide leveraged positions and avoid taxes, leverage went on steroids sometimes reaching 40 or 50 to 1 times deposits or equity.

Genius David X Li

He spends some time on the geniuses (mathematics and statistics) who came up with models that were presumed to eliminate all risk from investment and brought us LTCM that collapsed in 1998. We are now familiar with the VAR risk index based on the Gaussian bell curve much criticized by Nassim Talib (The Black Swan). Here we meet for the first time Chinese immigrant David X. Li (whereabouts unknown) with a PhD in Statistics from the University of Waterloo who suggested applying the Gaussian copula function to the CDO (subprime derivatives) market. Basically, and without any evidence that CDOs fit the function, Li proposed that the price of the insurance policies, the CDS, be used as the metric to determine the level of risk for any CDO. “On Default Correlation: A Copula Function Approach” In other words he proposed a totally circular measurement in which the price of insurance (CDS supposedly reflecting the actual underlying risk of the securitization) is used to determine the risk of the security! Wow! Yet this unbelievably stupid idea caught fire and suddenly, sub prime securitized mortgages were rated AAA, the same as US Treasuries. If this stuff were fiction no one would believe it for a second. This one dumb idea, allowing subprime junk to receive AAA ratings, more than anything else blew up the entire global financial system. The CDO market which was worth $275 billion in 2000 when Li published his paper exploded to $4.7 trillion by 2006.

To accommodate this massive new market, the industry needed vast numbers of new customers. Here is the the birth of the subprime mortgage market. Governments in the US and Britain played their part by staying away from any regulation under the guise of promoting the “ownership society”. Lanchester summarizes:

…by 2006, 60 percent of subprime applicants were lying about their income by more than 50 percent… By that point more than half of all applications for mortgages were either “piggyback” loans, meaning that they were double loans taken out to buy the same property, or “liar loans” in which the applicants were invited to state their own income, or “no doc” loans in which the buyer produced no paperwork. Gee, what could possibly go wrong?…And as for the idea that those peoples’ mortgage payments were being miraculously transmuted into AAA-grade investments…

Where were the regulators? Here is his summary of American government policy:

* insistance on free movement of capital across borders
* the repeal of depression era regulations seperating commercial from investment banking
* a congressional ban on the regulation of credit default swaps
* major increases in the amount of leverage allowed to investment banks
* a light (dare I say invisible?) hand at the Securities and Exchange Commission in its regulatory enforcement
* an international agreement to allow banks to measure their own riskiness
* and an intentional failure to update regulations so as to keep up with the tremendous pace of financial innovation

So what brought us to this disaster?

The credit crunch was based on a climate (the post Cold war victory party of free market capitalism), a problem (the subprime mortgages), a mistake (the mathematical models of risk), and a failure (that of the regulators).

How do we fix this mess? Lanchester doesn’t know.

The latest from Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible, Pigs in Heaven) is a strange one and has been met with mixed reviews. This reader liked it.

It is set in the time period from 1929 to 1951 and Kingsolver’s primary objective seems to have been to focus on significant events of the period; the great depression, war, the cold war and communist witch hunt; from a purely personal point of view namely through the life of the protagonist; a young man, Harrison William Shepherd, whose father is a Washington DC government bean counter and whose mother is the daughter of a Mexican bureaucrat (without an ounce of Indian blood) who married Shepherd as a young teenager against her parent’s will. The novel form is a little hard to make out but seems to be a biography of Shepherd based on diaries and letters and pulled together by mysterious archivist VB.

Tajin Pyramid near Veracruz

The story begins with the divorce of his parents when Shepherd is 12 and his mother returns to Mexico with her new lover, Enrique, a Mexican diplomat and owner of a Hacienda on Isla Pixol a small island north of Veracruz. The island has no school but Enrique loans the boy a few books at a time, mostly European classics, from his personal and locked library. Shepherd reads whatever Enrique chooses. The books include a few on Mexican history and young Shepherd develops a passion for Mexico’s great past civilizations. Shepherd’s mother buys the boy a leather bound diary and Shepherd begins his lifelong habit of keeping a diary.

Life on the island isn’t bad since a young cook takes him under his wing, teaching him to cook, and giving him his dead brother’s hand made diving mask. Shepherd becomes a proficient swimmer and diver and loves to explore an isolated cove where he discovers an underwater cave,a Lacuna. At low tide, during a full moon, the mouth of the cave is exposed and it is possible for Shepherd to enter and explore the cave. He can see light ahead and sets a goal of becoming strong enough to swim to where the light is. In his explorations he finds stone carvings and human bones and imagines that the Indians stored secret treasures in the cave when the Spanish arrived.

Shepherd’s mother tires of the stingy Enrique and runs away to Mexico City with a wealthy, married, businessman who promises her a place of her own and school for her son. Shepherd discovers the great Aztec ruins of Mexico City. Shepherd cannot pass the entrance exams for the better schools and is finally sent to a Catholic run school for misfits and delinquents.

Bonus Army Camp and Col. Pattan’s attack force

Bonus Army Camp burns with Capital in background

His mother convinces his father to put Shepherd in a good American school and packs him off alone by train back to DC. His father, the bean counter, arranges a place in a boarding school where he abandons him. Shepherd and one other student, an orphan and street smart bully are the only two students who live at the school year round. The two boys spend time on the DC Mall where one of the largest Hoovervilles has grown with tents everywhere and people are living in abandoned warehouses. On one occasion WWI veterans stage a protest demonstration because the government has failed to pay their promised pensions and Hoover sends the army (Gen. MacArthur and Col. Patton) to break up the protest. They use horses, tanks, and tear gas, trampling many and accidentally setting fire to some warehouses.

Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo

Diego Rivera Mexico City Mural

The story suddenly jumps a couple of years ahead and VB explains that a diary for those years is missing. We move to 1935 and find ourselves again in Mexico city. Shepherd is 18 and looking for work in a world without jobs. One day he sees an Aztec queen in the market followed by her slave carrying a bamboo bird cage on her head. The queen is buying birds from the market. Shepherd also goes to the city hall where he sees a mural in progress depicting the history of Mexico. On another day Shepherd again sees the Aztec queen in the market alone and offers to help carry her purchases home. The home is a bright blue house with a fabulous garden; Shepherd has met the painters Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera. He goes to work in their kitchen. Shortly after, Diego prepares to receive special guests by turning the blue house into a fortress. A Russian peasant couple show up; it is Lev Davidovich Trotsky and his wife. Shepherd knows how to type and becomes a second secretary to Trotsky. This appears a little over the top but somehow works.

Lev Davidovich Trosky and Natalya

Shepherd has also been secretly writing his own novel, a story of Cortez and Moctezuma, known only to Frida. Shepherd’s mother dies suddenly in a car accident while racing with her reporter boy friend to catch sight of Howard Hughes landing at a nearby airfield.

Trotsky is brutally murdered while Shepherd is in the house and the police arrive to take away all of Shepherd’s personal things including his novel and diaries. Frida goes to the police and manages to retrieve his clothes and other items and convinces Shepherd it is time for him to return to Gringolandia (America). She needs to ship her paintings to Peggy Guggenheim’s NY Gallery and sends Shepherd as her shipping agent. She gives him an extra crate which contains a small painting, a gift for Shepherd. After delivering the paintings, Shepherd returns to DC to discover his father has died leaving him a small amount of money and a nearly new white Chevy coupe. Orphan Shepherd drives out the new Blue ridge mountain federal highway until it ends in Asheville NC. He takes a room in a boarding house and gets a job. It is now 1940.

1939 Chevy Coupe

When the war starts Shepherd, who has been blue carded, (he has the wrong sexual preferences) is recruited by the Civilian service to help ship national treasures from DC to Asheville for safe keeping. In 1943 he finally opens Frida’s gift crate. The sketch it contains is not packed in the usual straw but in crumpled up paper and he discovers that Frida has managed to retrieve all his novel and diaries from the police and has hidden them as packing material in the crate. Shepherd immediately buys a typewriter and starts turning the pages into a manuscript. It is published, critically acclaimed, and suddenly Shepherd is famous and has money. He buys a small craftsmen s cottage and sets to work on his second novel. He is overwhelmed with mail and decides to hire a stenographer.

Appalachian Family

Violet Brown (VB) shows up for the interview and he realizes they lived for years in the same boarding house. VB is a widow, 17 years older than Shepherd. Her people have lived in the mountains a day’s drive from Asheville for hundreds of years and she is the only member of her family ever to have escaped the mountains (to Asheville). She reads widely and follows the National Geographic magazine, dreaming of trips she never expects to make. She speaks an idiom that would have been familiar to Shakespeare. She is unshakable and practical and was able to handle the army bureaucracy effortlessly as a secretary during the war. Shepherd hires her and she not only organizes his correspondence and novel drafts, but helps him deal with his new found fame getting him out of the house to mix with the town. The Asheville of this novel is the Ashville of Thomas Wolfe whose tell-all first novel exposed to town to scandal that forced Wolfe to move to NYC. (not to be confused with white suited Tom Wolfe) There is no mention here of Black Mountain College, famous after the war for the works of John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, or Merce Cunningham, who formed the cultural avant garde of the era.

The war ends and his second novel is published to even greater acclaim. He needs to hire a lawyer to negotiate the movie rights. He takes VB to DC to view a contemporary art exhibit the State Department wants to use to show the Europeans that American culture is more than Norman Rockwell. It is VBs first trip out of the county. Congress hates the show and kills the idea of touring the exhibit.

Shepherd decides to set his next novel in the Yucatan dealing with the decline of Mayan culture. He and VB spend two months in Mexico researching his subject. They return to Asheville to the inevitable rumors that they are romantically involved.

The last third of Lacuna deals with the post war Red scare and the communist witch hunts. Guess who is one of the victims. None other than gay, half Mexican friend of famous communists Frida and Diego, and former personal secretary to Bolshevik founder Trotsky himself.

Shepherd consults his lawyer and has VB burn all his diaries and letters, particularly those from/to Frida and Diego. Shepherd is hauled before Congress and it is all but certain he will be arrested. Before that happens he and VB make a final trip to Mexico (using assumed names), back to Isla Pixol. On the full moon at low tide with VB and other island children as witnesses Shepherd, who has been training in an Asheville pool, dives into his boyhood cove and vanishes. He is 34 years old. His body is never recovered. You can guess how VB managed to create this book from all the “burned” material.