TANUKI TANGO OVERDRIVE, sensitive readers strongly...STRONGLY...cautioned to pass by

TANUKI TANGO OVERDRIVE: Stories
ARTHUR GRAHAM
Arthur Himself
$7.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The (Self-)Publisher Says: What happens to Japanese yōkai once they reach middle age? How do they adapt to the sex-crazed, ultraviolent hyperreality of our modern world? And who all wants to fuck? Find out in TANUKI TANGO OVERDRIVE, by Arthur Graham!

Includes the following stories:

- Tanuki vs. the Aokigahara Swingers Club
- Tinseltown Tanuki
- Shinkansen of Love

BONUS ATTRACTION! Arthur's dulcet tones on Leo Robertson's podcast!

My Review: The tanuki is an actual living creature, a pretty one at that:

Totes adorbs! I mean, could you DIE from the cute!

But those are images of the REAL tanuki, a canid basal species unrelated to the raccoon that it resembles, but not closely related to Fifi or Duke either. They're considered an invasive species in some parts of their naturalized Baltic homeland. They're generalists, eating whatever they can find; they don't fear mankind particularly; and they have lovely, silky fur. They're hunted for the fur which is then knowingly mismarketed as "faux fur." Since they're not endangered, I don't much care about that. I care that the little darlings threaten endangered riparian-nesting birds and several threatened turtle species with their omnivorous ways. But enough about these dratted doggies! Arthur didn't write about them. He wrote about these guys:

Not quite so cute, but funny, tipsy trickster spirits. Japanese culture isn't as familiar to me as Western cultures are, but what I know leaves me verschmeckeled. Dog-men with big balls that they sling over their shoulders get drunk and play pranks on mere humans. Okaaaaay...I guess I'd be more impressed by this if, say, Alexander Skarsgard, Chris Hemsworth, and Ryan Gosling played live-action versions of them. Hint, hint Hollywood.

The Tanuki Tales are amusing, the translated ones I've read are anyway. They're Rabelaisian and bawdy and utterly unlike the Japanese culture of my stereotypes. It's a little like stumbling across Japanese porn in its head-scratching strangeness. Then Arthur got his mitts on the concept. Ever tried putting out a grease fire with a hose? Pretty much gives you the sense of what Our Hero has in store for the intrepid reader. Three tales that present Arthur's intelligence and erudition in an absurd light as evidence that he doesn't take himself or that education he worked so hard to get seriously. Now, I'll give you my opinion story-by-story in the simply named technique called the Bryce Method.

Tanuki vs. the Aokigahara Swingers Club has Mr. Tanuki, a bored middle-aged salaryman, having dinner with his wife and his bottle. A mysterious invitation to a swingers' club arrives, which his wife seems suspiciously unsurprised by, and she talks him into attending without a whole lot of trouble. Once there, Mrs. Tanuki vanishes and Mr. Tanuki gets an offer he can't refuse from a luscious redhead called Kit. Who turns out to be Kitsune, the trickster god of Japanese myth. Does the concept "monster porn" exist in your bubble yet? If not, it soon will...and this somewhat bizarre twist on the meaning of swingers and the nature of zombies will make your hairs do a little dance.

Tinseltown Tanuki revisits the Tanukis' salad days of great wealth in the wake of Super Mario Bros 3 featuring Mr. Tanuki's trickster demon talents. From great heights there are only great falls, and the Tanukis end up living as raccoon-dogs in an East LA trash can before long. One night at their local dive bar, they meet a stranger...a famous stranger...and an indecent proposal changes their lives. Not quite as much as it changes the famous stranger's, of course, these being Tanuki.

Shinkansen of Love goes where no bullet train has gone before. Several times. Poor Mrs. Tanuki, she's spoiled for good after this one....

So, in less than 100pp, Arthur has sent up zombie flicks, monster porn, cheesy mid-1990s Hollywood mind-rot, 9/11, and the loneliness of long-term love. Don't get taken in by this trickster: The point of the stories isn't to gross you out or make you squirm, the point is to gross you out while you squirm through the real stories of loss and ennui under the plaster façade. Those inclined towards lip-pursing are better off leaving Arthur alone. Those inclined towards gonzo grinning are encouraged to spend their substance on these tricky tales.

BLUE STEEL CHAIN, an edgy, triggery entry into a charming series of romantic suspense novels

BLUE STEEL CHAIN
ALEX BEECROFT Trowchester Blues, #3
Riptide Publishing
$17.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: At sixteen, Aidan Swift was swept off his feet by a rich older man who promised to take care of him for the rest of his life. But eight years later, his sugar daddy has turned from a prince into a beast. Trapped and terrified, Aidan snatches an hour’s respite at the Trowchester Museum.

Local archaeologist James Summers is in a failing long distance relationship with a rock star, and Aidan—nervous, bruised, and clearly in need of a champion—brings out all his white knight tendencies. When everything falls apart for Aidan, James saves him from certain death . . . and discovers a skeleton of another boy who wasn’t so lucky.

As Aidan recovers, James falls desperately in love. But though Aidan acts like an adoring boyfriend, he doesn’t seem to feel any sexual attraction at all. Meanwhile there are two angry exes on the horizon, one coming after them with the press and the other with a butcher’s knife. To be together, Aidan and James must conquer death, sex, and everyone’s preconceptions about the right way to love—even their own.

NOTE: The Trowchester Blues series features stand-alone titles that can be read in any order.

My Review: The stakes in this darker, more violent entry in the Trowchester Blues series could not possibly be higher. Aidan's life is in danger from the instant we meet him. His horrifying experiences as Piers's sex slave have reached crisis point. Pain and humiliation and viciousness are pale miseries compared to the violent escalation that Aidan precipitates by finding his very own friend unconnected to Piers in James the Trowchester archaeologist, familiar to us from his brief appearances in both previous novels. And there is no doubt whatever that Piers, the violent pedophile abuser, will make good on his ongoing threats to Aidan's life: No spoiler here, he's done it before. See publisher's synopsis.

James's own failing relationship is with self-absorbed rock musician Dave, a complete and utter bounder but not a murderous monster. James faces down the embarrassment of Dave's very uninterested and unloving attitude towards him with his accustomed acceptance. He finds he doesn't care much, is really only putting up with this nonsense on borrowed time. After all, the man he loves is being threatened with murderous intent by a stone-cold upper-class killer. That ain't a joke. Anything short of death threats? Pshaw! James will ride to the rescue! Blessedly, he does; he even leaves his dearly beloved entirely alone to find his way through a new world, one without rage and beatings, for himself. The fact that Aidan's new employer is James's bestie and a member of Finn's book club (now held at Finn and Michael's house on the canal) who willingly keeps James in the loop about Aidan's progress in his new life is making it easier, I'm sure. But it also keeps each man in a separate sphere of Romantic Self-Abnegation: I Shall Be Noble And Avoid My One True Love So That He May Find Himself/Get On With His Life.

And then it's time for reality. The harsh glare of terror dims down to the quotidian glow of spring sunshine and mellows into the lovely eternal tea-time of summer. Aidan discovers he's asexual. James discovers he has fallen head-over-heels in love for what seems to me to be the first time. And therein a significant rub: Party of the first part has only ever experienced sex as violence and party of the second part has only ever experienced love as sex.

I must pause here for an admission: I'm a bog-standard guy when it comes to sex. My sexual preference is more, and my orientation is towards whatever man I happen to be involved with, and asexual persons are not within my area of expertise. I do not get it. I don't have to, obviously, but I'm left utterly at sea as to how someone can have no sexual desire. I felt so sad for Aidan, and shouldn't have because he isn't broken or flawed or wrong, he's just not like me. And yet I am who I am: It makes me so sad that someone doesn't have the joy I experience in a strong, healthy sexual connection to my partner. Anyway, that's out of the way, on with the review bearing my inability to relate to the character's core identity in mind.

Aidan's life takes so many wonderful turns at this point...his newfound ability to relate to people, his new and exciting ability to support himself and to live as he pleases...that he decides to include James in his happiness. James is perfectly happy to have him there, since he's fallen hard for the man. Aidan, in his own way, is right there with James in the feeling realm:

Today James looked almost like a normal human being. He wore a tweed suit that should have looked ridiculous but in fact only cemented his resemblance to an absent-minded professor and resulted in a touching bohemianism. He had attempted to flatten out his hair with some kind of hair product, but fortunately it had fought back and was as distressed as ever. The day's heat had caused him to take his tie and jacket off and roll up his white sleeves, and the shape of his forearms seemed poetic to Aidan. His fingers itched to re-create the shape in art, to try to demonstrate to the world why James was so desperately important—why his existence said something that could not be said in any other way. Something everyone ought to hear.

That is, by anyone's standards, a man in love. Asexual maybe but a lover and a besotted one. Aidan has a wonderful eye for men, as does James. The men are having themselves a time there at the folk music festival; we see Billy and Martin, from Blue Eyed Stranger, on stage dancing their reconstructed Viking dances, James pointing them out as mates from the book club; there is such genuine joy in James now that he's there with Aidan that even though Aidan really doesn't much like the whole scene, he loves James and will learn not to hate it for his sake.

Another hiccup in their borning love comes when James, on taking Aidan home to his own place, expresses his love and gratitude for the evening that Aidan planned and executed for him with a kiss. Not a good idea. Spontaneous sexual gestures are complete triggers for Aidan. He has a massive meltdown on his front step, his protective housemates send James away with a flea in his ear, and things go from bad to worse when James gets home only to deal with a surprise of his own. Dave, whom James had thought well and truly thrown out never to return, has returned with his entourage, his new lover, and expects James to make his usual lifestyle adjustments to the whole insane clown posse.

The next day is the make-or-break point for the men. They have to clean up the messes of the lives they have never actually led but simply allowed to occur around them. They are each motivated to fix things up so they can get to the real fixing they want to do: Fix the other man into his own life, become the couple they cannot imagine not being. The major event that brings them together I won't reveal, but it was very satisfying. They fight their way into life together. They fight for their oddly assorted love. They come into a true and loving and satisfying life together, complete with strange corners and odd angles and the eternally unknowable alchemy of couplehood.

I am sad to see this series over. I don't know if Beecroft and Riptide plan to publish more of them, but I hope so. Trowchester could become the gay Barsetshire, and I for one would welcome it. There hasn't been an English setting as rich as Barsetshire since Mrs. Thirkell died in 1961. The time is ripe for one, and there couldn't be a better modern spin on the concept than one focused on gay men, lesbians (are we calling them gay women yet? I heard that was going to be the new thing), asexuals, transgender people, immigrants, and the whole lot whirling in a set of orbits that would make an astrophysicist dizzy.

Mrs Beecroft, I salute you for making in Aidan someone so powerful and amazingly appealing that even I, utterly alien to the concept of asexuality, could fall for him. Many many thanks for the hours of pleasure your books have already given me. Many more happy and creative years to you.

A KISS FOR A DEAD FILM STAR, short fiction done with panache and verve

A KISS FOR A DEAD FILM STAR & OTHER STORIES
KAREN M. VAUGHN
Brain Mill Press
$12.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Isaac Rubinstein has no choice but to kill himself.

He’s in love with Rudolf Valentino, and now Valentino is dead. His acolytes are committing suicide all over the city. The window to definitively display his devotion is closing, and for once the New York tenement apartment he shares with his mother, his grandmother, and his siblings is quiet. It has to be now.

Unless he doesn’t, because his grandmother calls out for him right before the blade touches his skin. Unless he does, and the cuts bleed away his heart’s blood.

In Karen M. Vaughn’s romantic and darkly funny melodrama, Isaac Rubinstein does both. Dies, and is united with his beautiful Valentino. Lives, and finds a reason to live.

A Kiss for a Dead Film Star is an astonishing debut collection of stories that inspire weird love and uncover surprising caches of eroticism. A museum T-Rex fossil awakens and contemplates his existential crisis. A devoted and loving wife copes with the inevitable loss of her handsome husband with an unusual provenance when he grows scales and a tail before her desperate eyes. A woman at the nadir of a breakup hears a song in a dingy bar and becomes rapturously, gloriously pregnant with a child made from song. A lemon grove that has sheltered a family of migrant workers reveals their secrets when their small daughter removes her own arm. Polyamory, the cosmos, and the end of the world serve as the angel of death for a wry scientist at the end of her life.

Psycho-medical-magical realism intertwines with old and new New York City, epic love stories, and tales best told in the smoky alleys behind bars or beneath the covers. Karen Vaughn’s capacious imagination and remarkable voice glitter—this collection is a comet that comes around rarely.

My Review: Look at that cover. The image is naive, charming, evokes a sense of simple drawings by sincere young artists. I can imagine a young artist seeing a Chagall painting for the first time and snapping into focus at last, "I am going to do that, yes that's right and it's me." Therefore it's the perfect cover image for this collection of Karen Vaughn's meditations on identity and voyages of discovery.

"A Kiss for a Dead Film Star" is a bang-up introduction to Vaughn's world-view.

The longer Isaac worked there, the more his life began to take on a kind of duality. During the day, he steeled himself against the various constrictions of the tenement: the overachieving brother; the distant mother; the school assignments that did nothing but demonstrate to the world how unexceptional he was; even the green paint that kept appearing beneath his fingernails, as if he had been clawing at the walls in his sleep. But in the evenings—oh yes, in the evenings, everything was different. There was glamor. There was mystery. There was divine justice. It was only in this rarefied atmosphere that Isaac felt he could truly breathe, within this strange golden existence that was like a sliver out of someone else's life.

And then, in his eleventh year, the reels arrived for a film called The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. As Isaac watched this new leading man tango across the screen in a Spanish hat and gaucho pants—eyes darkly seductive, limbs sinuous as a panther's—he felt the gears within himself quietly shifting into place. He knew he was falling in love.

That reason to live? As honest as they come: The small things. It's the small things that make decisions for us, that influence us, that bifurcate death from life. It's a charming tale.

"Still Life with Fossils" brings us the stoic ruminations of two outsized survivors of an era dim and distant as they adjust to their new, shabby world dominated by creatures they don't comprehend and can't eat. Nothing to eat them with...and she is an herbivore anyway. He spends his afterlife making conversation with her until, as is inevitable, everything is said and there is the heaven of shared silence. A lovely meditation on how it feels to find one's soulmate.

"The Piscine Age"

"The Angel Appearing to Corrine"

"Limbs"

"Edna, Filled with Light"

BLUE EYED STRANGER, another Trowchester Blues novel

BLUE EYED STRANGER
ALEX BEECROFT Trowchester Blues, #2
Riptide Publishing
$17.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Billy Wright has a problem: he’s only visible when he’s wearing a mask. That’s fine when he’s performing at country fairs with the rest of his morris dancing troupe. But when he takes the paint off, his life is lonely and empty, and he struggles with crippling depression.

Martin Deng stands out from the crowd. After all, there aren’t that many black Vikings on the living history circuit. But as the founder of a fledgling historical re-enactment society, he’s lonely and harried. His boss doesn’t like his weekend activities, his warriors seem to expect him to run everything single-handedly, and it’s stressful enough being one minority without telling the hard men of his group he’s also gay.

When Billy’s and Martin’s societies are double-booked at a packed county show, they know at once they are kindred spirits, united by a deep feeling of connectedness to their history and culture. But they’re also both hiding in their different ways, and they need each other to be brave enough to take their masks off and still be seen.

NOTE: The Trowchester Blues series features stand-alone titles that can be read in any order.

My Review: Unstoppable force, this is immovable object. Advise your trajectory can now continue unimpeded.

History geek Martin meets morris dancer Billy. Each is hella hot for the other. Problem 1: Martin's a half-Sudanese/half-Yorkshireman Viking warrior re-enactor. Not exactly the best candidate for romantic kissy-face, more the hot sweaty sex type, oh and shelve that hand-holding lark. Problem 2: Billy suffers the agonizing, debilitating curse of depression. It's all he can do most days to haul himself out of bed and there are times even that isn't on. Problem 3: They can't reach around their barriers to get at each other consistently despite a near-desperate need for the other man's being.

Add in the immigrant parent with impossibly high expectations, the hostile work environment, and the curse of trying to lift words out of the stygian gloom of broken souls...well. It's all I can do to put the book down long enough to tell you to go get it and read it and defy you not to fall in love with these marvelous men before re-reading it.

Yep. Thass right. I, the arch-advocate of "too many new pretties, don't bother me with that re-reading thing" am going to re-read this book as soon as I close my computer because I absolutely can. not. WAIT. to re-experience the ending of this book.

Yep. Thass right. I, the ever-whinging arch-complainer about the unsatisfactoriness of endings that either tie things up tight with Honey Boo-Boo bows or leave so many threads dangling that they resemble old-fashioned fringed vests (waistcoats to y'all Brits) am going to re-savor the beautiful, beautiful ending Ma Beecroft has imagined for this book.

Oh, and that missing half-star? It's the same place that the missing thirty thousand or so words dedicated to Martin's family, Billy's morris dancing side, and the gents' mutual projects are. I'd glower about it some but I'd be fronting. I love what's here enough to demand more. Brevity might well be the soul of lingerie, but it's not on when you're immersed in a deeply satisfying read.

Oh, and the book club crossover is on that list as well. Better pump the MIA count up to thirty-five thou.

TROWCHESTER BLUES, a tale of the rightness of love shared

TROWCHESTER BLUES
ALEX BEECROFT (Trowchester Blues, #1)
Riptide Publishing
$17.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Michael May is losing it. Long ago, he joined the Metropolitan Police to escape his father’s tyranny and protect people like himself. Now his father is dead, and he’s been fired for punching a suspect. Afraid of his own rage, he returns to Trowchester—and to his childhood home, with all its old fears and memories. When he meets a charming, bohemian bookshop owner who seems to like him, he clings tight.

Fintan Hulme is an honest man now. Five years ago, he retired from his work as a high class London fence and opened a bookshop. Then an old client brings him a stolen book too precious to turn away, and suddenly he’s dealing with arson and kidnapping, to say nothing of all the lies he has to tell his friends. Falling in love with an ex-cop with anger management issues is the last thing he should be doing.

Finn thinks Michael is incredibly sexy. Michael knows Finn is the only thing that still makes him smile. But in a relationship where cops and robbers are natural enemies, that might not be enough to save them.

NOTE: The Trowchester Blues series features stand-alone titles that can be read in any order.

My Review: Dear Mrs Beecroft,

A long time ago I bought a Christmas tree from a fireman. He carried the tree to the car, put it in the trunk, tied the lid down with some twine, and before he was through making the last knot (four in total...I said I was traveling a half mile, wasn't that enough knots already?) he asked for my phone number.

It was a wonderful few months.

I mentioned what happened next in my earlier review of your book CAPTAIN'S SURRENDER. Frank was shaken, changed, by the honesty, the clarity, the truth that you told in that book's most perfect (to me, of course) moment: Peter's coming out as a lover of men, a man, to himself and to his god. I still give people who need it copies of CAPTAIN'S SURRENDER. It hasn't failed me yet. That specific facet of your story has comforted four more hurting souls after Frank's response proved to me that there is healing in being seen and being loved.

I hope that fact fills you with pride and happiness. It does me. That it was your second novel amazed me then and amazes me now. I am happy to say that the pleasures of reading your novels has only increased as time has gone by and you've written steadily and well.

I've come to expect from you that gift of seeing the moment when depth is too deep, and when gloss is too glib; your ability to balance them is one of the unteachable gifts that you possess. I recommend your books to people based on that fine balance. But then there's the thing that I don't tell them. I just leave the lucky sods to discover it for themselves:

Shame was perhaps ninety percent of the weight lodged under May's breastbone where a heart should be, but he had enough experience of the stuff to know the shame was only a sugar coating on something more insidious, so deep, so hollow he often wondered why he didn't just implode. Take himself out of existence, like a soap bubble with all the air sucked out. Right at this moment, he'd welcome it. Stop thinking. Stop hurting. Stop being him. That would be fantastic.

I can't guess how you know with such intimacy the exact experience of toxic shame. I can say that your finely honed words that are both funny and horribly painful, encapsulate fully the experience as I know it. And again I say that there is healing in being seen, being loved...being created as your character Michael May was in your accepting imagination.

May returning to Trowchester, where he never drew a happy breath, makes a lot of sense in the context of a man hollowed out by a rough life seeing the least and the lowest in constant action. He's down near the bottom of the well already and there's nothing to lose by going to a place that taught him the worthlessness of happiness and the falseness of hope:

When [Jenny, his best friend] signed off, the place felt emptier, lonelier, a million miles away from anywhere. The boat looked bare and the bed cold. He tried sitting on it, but in the small space the curving walls seemed to be clenching around him, crushing him. He wondered how long it would take before whatever it was that was gnawing away at his insides would finally swallow them and let him die.

I think we're all, those of us broken and hollow and stinging with the pain of a parent's emotional abuse, familiar with the no-space-can-be-big-enough problem. You put it so well...the cold bed, the clenched walls, the apparatus of protection being made the mechanism of abuse...is any act more cruel than depriving another soul of the ability to find comfort in the place that we must all return to, our home? If there is, I don't know about it, and I don't want to.

But May isn't the only one whose life you're excavating to such good effect. Finn the ever-so-slightly bent boy-man whose long dark night of the soul came from the darker paths that his love of beauty led him down. Yes, like Michael's, his life was deeply and unnervingly flawed by his inability to resist the lure of the object even when its provenance was clearly tainted. His cultured soul recoils only from ugliness, brutality, not from legal niceties that mean nothing when matched against a palette of perfect beauty and the unique historical presence of objects. Finn will do anything to possess a perfect object, because he is imperfect. Criminality? Pfui. Pettifogging bureaucratic nonsense.

Until the day he loses more than his illusions can support. Again, I can't guess how you know with such intimacy what happens when one loses a partner. Far as I'm aware your husband is hale and hearty and bids fair to see your grandchildren married. But wherever it comes from, your knowledge of that loss's effects on the entire rest of a man's life is spot-on. After Finn loses his illicit career as well as his beautiful love Tom and runs away to Trowchester, you leave him alone for five whole years. That feels so familiar. Finn won't rush into anything serious because, well, there can't be anything worse than the disappointment of let-down, can there? You said it so well, in this moment after Finn, in short order, suffers many body-blows to his hard-won peace, not to mention an attempt on his life that damages his bookshop, and all without his Michael to protect him:

Bathing and dressing in clean clothes did a little to alleviate his mood, but not even eating bacon and eggs, toast and marmalade and coffee did anything to fill the hollow inside him, where everything that he was had drawn itself deep inside, retreated, squeezing itself together in a singularity of soul so buried he couldn't tell if he was angry or sad or calm.

There's really nothing much to say after that, is there, except "however it is that you know that sensation so intimately, I am sorry."

Finn has depths he doesn't visit too terribly often, depths of deeply sentimental and shockingly sincere lovingkindness. His is the kind of smiling, bright face that no one thinks to wonder what propels the wattage out, they just bask in the warmth and dread the flares. He quite simply can't not help when his help is necessary. He somehow knew that a shadowy lurker around his home was a soul in need, and he's been leaving a meal for the shadow without ever knowing the lost soul's identity. His grace is knowing when to poke and pry and when not to. His ghost has, in the whirl of events, vanished...but his concern has not:

"And you used to put dinner out on the table most nights, when you was eating yours." Her smile wavered and crumpled. Her eyes filled with tears all of a sudden. "And I used to eat it, and I'd look up, and I'd see you sometimes in the window. And it would be...It would be like I wasn't alone."

She raised her hands to her face, made a sound like a laugh until it escalated into racking sobs. Finn's own eyes watered in response.

"You're my ghost?" He didn't stop to think, just stepped forward and threw his arms around her. She stiffened briefly and then turned into him, burying her head in his shoulder, as she wept. "You're my ghost! I've been so worried. When you stopped coming I thought something bad had happened to you. I didn't know—" He looked up over her shoulder to Michael who was looking stunned and suspiciously glossy-eyed behind her.

"I can't believe it." He had a good cry himself, for joy mostly. His eyes were closed when Michael slipped his arms around them both and briefly held them both up. Then there was embarrassment and overly bright, overly cheerful voices as he passed Sarah his handkerchief, and Jenny picked the spilled coats off the floor, and insisted on a hug of her own.

I see what you did there: You made a family from the detritus of unmet needs and unwanted feelings. I am as sentimental a sod as they make 'em, and that just about perfectly met my need for the pieces to be picked up and made into a work of kintsugi by a mistress of the art.

There is a rightness to a story deeply felt, properly told, and burnished to a soft gleaming imperfect warmth. It lets me in, lets me inhabit the characters as I wish and as my needs demand. It isn't a common effect in any field of writing. It is a sensation that I have come to expect when reading your books...and I'm pretty much all caught up on your to-date output...and that is the reason I come back for more. Moments like this:

Michael had risen to his feet before it occurred to him that he should not be taking orders from Finn. He had a bizarre flash of mythology, the thought that if he was a fucking animal at times, maybe together, with Finn's controlling hand on the reins, they could be a centaur.

Well. That's me destroyed. You, kind lady, you reached southwestward from your northerly latitudes and delicately flensed from my hiding place the secret of my joy. I wonder if my cynical wounded self will have another Michael, be another Finn; it's almost enough to have your enfolding generous imagination include me in the world.

Oh dear, that was rather earnestly American of me, wasn't it. You will simply have to dig deep under your proper lady's reserve and forgive a heartfelt statement of admiration from,

Your fanboy,

Richard

PS if you're wondering where the missing half-star on this review is, it's the same place as the missing twenty thousand or so words dedicated to the Lis, to Sarah, to the book club boys are. (Yes, I know, James is coming, but it's not enough!) And while I, book magistrate, have determined that you have no case to answer, I strongly caution you that old American fanboys deprived of a return visit from Michael, Finn, Jenny, Sarah, and the rest of this cast could result in unwished-for squatter tents in your front garden. Complete with curmudgeonly glowers.

THE SONG OF ACHILLES, Patroclus tells The Iliad

THE SONG OF ACHILLES
Madeline Miller
Ecco Press
$16.99 trade paperback, $10.49 ereader platforms, available now

Rating: 6* of five read of 2011, when it first came out

The Publisher Says: Greece in the age of Heroes. Patroclus, an awkward young prince, has been exiled to the kingdom of Phthia. Here he is nobody, just another unwanted boy living in the shadow of King Peleus and his golden son, Achilles.

Achilles, 'best of all the Greeks', is everything Patroclus is not — strong, beautiful, the child of a goddess — and by all rights their paths should never cross. Yet one day, Achilles takes the shamed prince under his wing and soon their tentative companionship gives way to a steadfast friendship. As they grow into young men skilled in the arts of war and medicine, their bond blossoms into something far deeper — despite the displeasure of Achilles's mother Thetis, a cruel and deathly pale sea goddess with a hatred of mortals.

Fate is never far from the heels of Achilles. When word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped, the men of Greece are called upon to lay siege to Troy in her name. Seduced by the promise of a glorious destiny, Achilles joins their cause. Torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus follows Achilles into war, little knowing that the years that follow will test everything they have learned, everything they hold dear. And that, before he is ready, he will be forced to surrender his friend to the hands of Fate.

Profoundly moving and breathtakingly original, this rendering of the epic Trojan War is a dazzling feat of the imagination, a devastating love story, and an almighty battle between gods and kings, peace and glory, immortal fame and the human heart.

My Review: Here I am faced with a conundrum: What new thought can I give? This is The Iliad, told from Patroclus's point of view. Miller starts the story with Patroclus's memories of his father, King Menoitius, whose unloving, unforgiving horridness blighted Patroclus's childhood. When Patroclus causes the death of a bully who happens to be a powerful noble's son, the boy's family gives the king what he wants: An excuse to rid himself of unpromising Patroclus. He is exiled (a nine year old boy) to Phthia, and the court of King Peleus.

Father of Achilles. Born to the sea-nymph Thetis. Best of all the Greeks...Aristos Achaion...in each and every thing, yet mortal and so consigned to our world.

Patroclus and Achilles find each other, and Achilles chooses the unassuming boy to be his companion. Peleus says, when the choice is made, are you sure about this, son? This boy will add nothing to your lustre. Achilles responds, without rancor or boastfulness, “I don't need him to.” This being self-evident and inarguable, Peleus shrugs and life goes on. The boys spend a golden childhood as best friends, a golden adolescence as lovers, and, after being outed by Odysseus in Scyros where Thetis was trying to hide her son Achilles from the Trojan War where he is fated to die, a long (for the times) manhood as husbands. Everyone in Greece, and Troy, knows what time it is. No one says boo about it, except Thetis who LOATHES Patroclus because he's not good enough for her little boy...or is she just jealous of an interloper commanding her son's love? Who would dare? Achilles is a killing machine. He is the Aristos Achaion, the Finest Among the Greeks, for a reason.

And now we rejoin the mainstream of The Iliad for the remainder of the plot, with only a slight change in angle of view.

I think I wrote three heart-felt appreciations of this book. It is strong, and beautiful, and passionate. It is tough, and cruel, and inevitably sad. It is tender, and loving, and generous. It is indeed the Song of Achilles, sung by Patroclus, and it is a fitting funerary offering to them both.

But let me get out of the story's way. It speaks for itself.

”I will go,” he said. “I will go to Troy.”
The rosy gleam of his lip, the fevered green of his eyes. There was not a line anywhere on his face, nothing creased or graying; all crisp. He was spring, golden and bright. Envious death would drink his blood, and grow young again.
He was watching me, his eyes as deep as earth.
“Will you come with me?” he asked.
The never-ending ache of love and sorrow. Perhaps in some other life I could have refused, could have torn my hair and screamed, and made him face his choice alone. But not in this one. He would sail to Troy and I would follow, even into death. “Yes,” I whipsered. “Yes.”
Relief broke in his face, and he reached for me. I let him hold me, let him press us length to length so close that nothing might fit between us.
Tears came, and fell. Above us, the constellations spun and the moon paced her weary course. We lay stricken and sleepless as the hours passed.

I can't make any stronger a case for the book than this. I hope you will read it.

HOW ARE THE MIGHTY FALLEN, a mythopoetic extravaganza that still moves me to tears

HOW ARE THE MIGHTY FALLEN
THOMAS BURNETT SWANN
Out of Print
various prices from $9 plus shipping

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Cyclops and sirens, halfmen and godlings...that of which myths are made and that from which worship arises—these are the materials Thomas Burnett Swann weaves together in the fantasy-historical tapestry of this new novel, which he considers to be his most important work to date. For the author of Green Phoenix and The Forest of Forever now tells of a Queen of ancient Judea who was more than human, of her son who became legend, of their Cyclopean nemesis whose name became synonymous with Colossus, and of loves and loyalties and combats fixed forever in the foundations of human society.

The ever-growing audience that Thomas Burnett Swann has gathered for his unique novels will find How Are the Mighty Fallen a new fantasy fiction experience.

My Review: When this book came out in 1974, the publisher had to fight with its distributor to get it onto store shelves. The topic, gay male love in Biblical times and, in fact, between two men whose friendship *ahem* has survived the millennia in myth, was treated frankly as falling in love and being a couple. Yep, that's right, David and Jonathan were doin' the nasty in Swann's fantasy universe. And much like our own time, even more like the times 43 years ago, they had to avoid religious nuts and disapproving fathers and nosy old bats with more time on their hands than is healthy.

Like all the great love stories between men that have come to our own time, the idiotically squeamish have seen fit to reinterpret the tales as being examples of friendship. After all, friendship is sexless! And that means we don't have to think about men gettin' all naked and sweaty and touching each other with lovers' hands! Couple things wrong with that, hypocrites: 1) If your spouse isn't your friend, I feel very very sorry for both of you. 2) You have, by your squeamishness about man-on-man action, demonstrated that you're already thinking about other people, all other people, in sexual terms. Which is considered deviant sexuality in theraputic terms. Sex therapists teach that all sexual thoughts which do not involve the prior knowledge and explicit consent of the subject thereof are deviant. So every time you pleasure yourself thinking of Nick Jonas or Taylor Swift, you're a deviant!

Ha ha ha, deviant. That's the price of being a mere human!

But David and Jonathan paid the price that's demanded of all those who love transcendantly: Loss. It's not as though all of us mortals don't lose, it's that the stakes aren't as high for us. The great ones always excite envy in the lesser. Then the burden of life in the muddy mess of the world is lifted from them by their love and, well, that's more than can be borne by the small-souled:

Saul looked to Elim. "What do they say?" Deeply religious, he had not lost faith in Yahweh; rather, he feared that Yahweh had lost faith in him.

"Let the king discover and punish the transgressor."

Saul sighed and the years seemed to rest on his shoulders like a mantle of snow. Was this the ardent man she had loved at the well in Endor, he who had left his fields...to unite a divided country? It sometimes seemed to her that...he hardly possessed the energy to sigh. It was her one satisfaction that he could no longer be an impassioned lover to Rizpah [his mistress].

The great one here is Ahinoam, a Siren, a winged Queen of her people exiled from their happier exile on the abandoned Crete post-Minoan times. She and her son Jonathan swam to Judea from Crete in an escape from the Cyclopes, whose attentions great queen Ahinoam has been fleeing since her people first fled the great northern lands in fear of the Goddess. She, creature of the sky, found love and sanctuary with an earthy, earthly man of rough ways and deep passions, Saul the reluctant farmer-king of his people. Ahinoam and Jonathan are his, his alone, and none was happier with this than Saul himself. The wars roll past, the queen bears Saul sons and daughters, and slowly loses her Siren's powers even as she keeps her Siren's perfect beauty. Of course this beauty becomes her curse, loses her the beloved Saul to a manifestly inferior being as his mistress, and sets in motion the loss that all who dare to love, really love, face.

Jonathan grows up knowing nothing, except what's whispered near him, about his genesis. Saul loves him as a son. That's what Jonathan knows. He behaves as a king's son must behave in Saul's world, learning war and battle as the noblest accomplishments. He is, when the book opens, wounded and recovering when he and his one great love meet. David is a young man of great vigor and surprising depths of creativity. He is the son of a nobody, he has older brothers who are larger and stronger than he is, but he has a golden talent for psalmistry. I think we'd think of him as a rapper today. His lyrics have survived in the Torah and the Bible because he wrote beautifully. He sang beautifully, too, and it was this that brought him to Jonathan's bedside at his mother's behest. She thought to comfort her son, though Swann loads her actions with foreknowledge. David sees, really sees, Jonathan and that is doom for one who is primed by otherness for passionate love:

He discovered too a surprising weakness in the famous young warrior. It was neither moral nor ethical; it was not a shifty eye or an averted gaze. Rather, there was a fragility about him; he was like a purple murex with its delicate spines and its exquisite dyes. He is too beautiful, David decided. He has about him the transience of perfection. Being already perfect, he cannot be improved, he can only be broken.

Or, in simpler terms, love at first sight. Ahinoam, as the Siren that she is, knows what time it is, and has no problem with it. Her people and so many others, those who follow the Goddess, place no limits on love. Yahweh, jealous and angry god of a small people in a larger world indifferent to their fate, decrees the sexual love of like for like to be a sin (a concept lacking in Goddess worship) because the attraction is too powerful and will prevent Yahweh's people from making babies and thus perpetuating his worship:

The Goddess never decreed that men should lie only with women. All of the races which worship her...accept the love between two men as one more affirmation of the divine plan, the tide which rises and falls to the moon's compulsion, the inevitability of the seasons, the certainty that those who love will meet, after death, in the Celestial Vineyard. A man’s love for a man is neither more nor less than a man’s love for a woman, it is only different.

Loving each has its joys. Loving both has its pleasures. But sooner or later, a choice gets made, and it's not yet possible, like a Gethenian, to pick and choose one's physical state. I suspect that, when we're honest, each of us likes sex enough to give any old thing a whirl. Love is usually a little choosier. Falling in love is Game Over for all the others.

He is still in love with her, but Rizpah is comfortable, and the old need comfort more than passion. It is hard for advancing age to confront eternal youth. (italics in original)

I understand this, but I guess it means I'm not old yet because I ain't ready to say "buh-bye" to passion. Maybe this is why I find myself in relationships with younger men. Thank goodness there are one or two still ready to think of me in that way. Ahinoam chose, in Saul, the path of love; Saul lost himself to the immense gravity of a great love, a once-only full-being involvement. Such a thing can't last for a lifetime and, since his one true love is the very definition of Otherness, what else can he be expected to do except flee to the ordinary when he can't sustain his passion?

David is set to discover the same tragedy. Jonathan, in his illness, can't do battle with Goliath the Cyclops who has stalked his mother since the halcyon days on Crete ended. David the rapping shepherd, a young man of great strength who slew a lion with his bare hands, is still too young, too untested, too small to fight such a creature as a Cyclops, says the voice of consensus. The consensus fails to take into account the fact that a man in the grips of his one true love isn't limited by practical, realistic considerations. He will amaze everyone with his seemingly miraculous abilities:

"I will not die!" The words were a trumpet call.

He fitted his last stone, Jonathan's tourmaline, into his sling and somehow, propped on his other arm, flung the stone awkwardly upward and toward the bewildered eye.

I have missed, he thought, or done him no harm with so light a shot. He stands above me frozen like an Assyrian statue. Stone; stony and heartless. No welt has appeared on his brow. His boot will complete its descent and grind me into the flowers.

The earth exulted with Goliath's fall.

The power of love is terrifying.

But so is the price. David, in his deep passion for Jonathan, becomes more than a hero to his people, he becomes a legend. He is the name on every tongue, his psalms are sung by every voice, his lover Jonathan the royal prince is beautiful beyond compare...the very priests of Yahweh say he is the next king after Saul, beloved of the whore Rizpah.

NEVER threaten a woman's one great love. She will rise up and smite those who are stupid enough to do so. If a mother is the most dangerous opponent on the planet, a woman in love is next down the list, and both are far, far more dangerous than polar bears or sharks. Rizpah might be a whore, but she is a whore whose one great love is a king, and she does everything in her not inconsiderable powers to protect him. Including destroying his son, his son's lover, and to the extent she calls into motion the powers of war, her man himself.

Great love will always exact its price.

David survives the battle that destroys Saul and Jonathan. David goes on to found the greatest royal house known in Israel's history. David lives. What a curse it is, outliving your great love...alive but not yours anymore, like Ahinoam's Saul, the lover is allowed a painful comfort in knowing the beloved still lives. David's Jonathan, as Swann tells us, is in No-Land; his body is unburied so his spirit is trapped between worlds. Alecto the Siren calls Jonathan from his shadowy non-place to tell David how to release him into the afterlife. Naturally, David does this for the one love that exceeds all others, saving his Jonathan yet again, just as he did when he stood down Goliath.

Alecto should, I think, have the last word. She speaks these words to Jonathan when he visits her to lose his virginity with women. It isn't his desire to do so, he does this to please his David, but Alecto calls forth the shadow of love from him and he gives her his child. Her gift to him is to distill the nature of love into a memorable phrase:

There ought to be laughter in love. But there also ought to be wonder.

#LoveIsLove

THE PRIZE, a damning indictment of greed and careerism with a huge dollop of blame for the Lady Bountiful syndrome

THE PRIZE: Who's in Charge of America's Schools?
DALE RUSSAKOFF
Mariner Books
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Christie, and Cory Booker were ready to reform our failing schools. They got an education.

When Mark Zuckerberg announced to a cheering Oprah audience his $100 million pledge to transform the downtrodden schools of Newark, New Jersey, then mayor Cory Booker and Governor Chris Christie were beside him, vowing to help make Newark “a symbol of educational excellence for the whole nation.” But their plans soon ran into the city’s seasoned education players, fierce protectors of their billion-dollar-a-year system. It’s a prize that, for generations, has enriched seemingly everyone, except Newark’s children.

Dale Russakoff delivers a riveting drama of our times, encompassing the rise of celebrity politics, big philanthropy, extreme economic inequality, the charter school movement, and the struggles and triumphs of schools in one of the nation’s poorest cities. As Cory Booker navigates between his status as “rock star mayor” on Oprah’s stage and object of considerable distrust at home, the tumultuous changes planned by reformers and their highly paid consultants spark a fiery grass-roots opposition stoked by local politicians and union leaders. The growth of charters forces the hand of Newark’s school superintendent Cami Anderson, who closes, consolidates, or redesigns more than a third of the city’s schools—a scenario on the horizon for many urban districts across America.

Russakoff provides a close-up view of twenty-six-year-old Mark Zuckerberg and his wife as they decide to give the immense sum of money to Newark and then experience an education of their own amid the fallout of the reforms. Most moving are Russakoff’s portraits from inside classrooms, as homegrown teachers and principals battle heroically to reach students damaged by extreme poverty and violence.

The Prize is an absorbing portrait of a titanic struggle, indispensable for anyone who cares about the future of public education and the nation’s children.

Another gift from a special friend. Thank you, darling heart, but can I have a comic book now?

My Review: Betsy DeVos is the Secretary of Education. That sentence, plus the one about the racist, sexist shitheap that is Jeff Sessions becoming the Attorney General, really should drive home the point that these people your fellow Americans voted into office are the lowest of the low, the lowest and the least principled represented in halls of power where their like should simply never be allowed.

I do not belong to the school of thought advocating healing our divisions. I advocate the secession of the decent people from the rotten-souled fascist right-wing rest of y'all. And we'll take our tax money with us...we pay more than we get.

But then my conscience gets to me. What about the desperately poor and the hungry whose lives will, horribly, get still worse? The schools that will close? The school lunch programs that will vanish forever?

This book makes the cost of the Union's dissolution stark. It's never mentioned. It's not part of Dale Russakoff's brief in the least. But listen to this:

To those...who see education through the lens of students and classrooms, it is obvious that urban public schools are being asked to overcome nothing less than the effects of poverty. Reformers are right...to insist on consistently excellent teaching and leadership, but the results in Newark and in distressed cities across the country make clear that much more support is needed.

Given that most of the nation's schools are financed by property taxes (a system as blatant in its intent to preserve and protect the existing system of privilege as can be designed), and given that US government spending on early childhood support is abysmal compared to the entire rest of the planet, where is that support meant to come from? DeVos won't be there in her seat of power advocating for the Head Start program or the school lunch program. So now what?

Here's one perspective:

“Education reform is not about its leaders and their prerogatives. It’s about communities,” Michael Lomax, president of the United Negro College Fund and an ardent reformer, wrote on The Root, an online magazine. “Education reform doesn’t have to be—indeed, cannot be—force-fed to communities of color . . . We can be equal partners in ensuring what is best for our children and all children. It won’t work any other way.”

Inviting dialogue! Wow. What a concept. Except that there are a lot of people with huge financial stakes in the status quo that do NOT want to see reform. A 1994 Department of Education audit (mentioned in the book) of the Newark system found breathtaking corruption, a building that a school board member was selling to the district for $2.7 million that was generously worth under $200,000 being the one I was most repulsed by. In fact, "outsider" Democrat Newark mayor Cory Booker presented machine Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie with a school reform plan that warned explicitly against opening the process to public scrutiny since the unions and the other money-suckers would subvert or derail the process to protect their slots at the trough. (My phrase, not his.)

Then again, it's not just the greed factor that's at work in this process and its manifest failures:

“Education reform comes across as colonial to people who’ve been here for decades,” [an insider] said. “It’s very missionary, imposed, done to people rather than in cooperation with people.”

So even though our kids are failing to get even the minimal education they're being offered in the first place, who the hell asked your white ass to come sit at the table and tell us what's what? The Annenberg education initiatives of the 1990s (the Chicago branch of which featured one Barack Obama among its leading lights) faced the same issues. Here's a piece by a Teach for America alumnus. He isn't sanguine about the efficacy or the future of the program. Russakoff gives more detail, which I felt was nicely summed up by this:

“The ethos when I went through Teach for America was that good teaching and good leadership could solve the problems of poverty,” said [a Newark program participant]. “That’s part of the pie, but that’s not all of the pie. Our most dynamic teachers were burning out—the need and anger in the children, the mental health issues, the absenteeism, the transience.” They were witnessing the effect of what researchers call adverse childhood experiences, multiple traumas that, studies have shown, significantly interfere with learning and focus in children in the most disadvantaged communities.”

Back to the problems of poverty that education is being asked to overcome. That is manifestly absurd. Education is the way out of poverty. This is an article of faith among the educated. But what does that statement look like to a child whose world contains one educated person, usually not of his or her own ethnic background? "Be like me," they hear said earnestly and with all the best wishes in the world.

How? What does that look like?

Research had shown that children in the lowest-income families heard only a fraction of the words or conversations that were the daily bread of the more affluent. By age three, the difference was an astonishing twenty million words. (my emphasis)

By. Age. THREE.

Are you getting a view of the biblical proportions of this problem yet? The sheer magnitude of the changes needed to make even a minuscule dent in the problem? The reformers have hammers. The problems become nails:

“A lot of high-stakes accountability has become self-defeating—focusing solely on the identification of bad schools, the bad teachers, as opposed to creating a signal and involving teachers in processes that lead to investigations and changes,” [an expert] said.”

So here's The Purpose Explained:

[An expert] said the system, known as Student Growth Percentile, was designed to measure student gains or losses, not to assign blame or credit for them. “Simply focusing on teachers as being the only potential cause of growth of students is pretty obviously myopic..." The data would be more useful...as a starting point for discussions with teachers on the reasons individual students are improving or losing ground, which could include many factors in and out of school.

Mmm hmm. Statistics used as ploughshares, not swords, in the battle to save yet another generation of poverty-mired Black children from a lifetime of marginal existence. That's gonna happen. After all, the entire system isn't based on the need for the Black child to grow up to be a grunt worker, a pawn, or a prisoner, is it?
/sarcasm

So what's the answer? Mark Zuckerberg, who comes across in this book as a genuinely well-meaning man with a slightly different hammer he wants to wield on Newark's public school system:

Zuckerberg’s document laid out similar goals: “Restructure pay scale to increase base salaries for new hires . . . Abolish seniority as a factor in all personnel decisions and incentivize the removal of poor performers.” He also wrote that he wanted the best teachers to receive bonuses of up to fifty percent of their salary, the kind of incentives paid to top workers in Silicon Valley.”

Selected from among many other equally utopian proposals to stand for the dangers of false equivalency in public conversation about society's needs. Zuckerberg, a political conservative, wants to model the world on a business platform created by and for people who are high achievers. In Alcoholics Anonymous, this is called "acting as if," or "fake it til ya make it," an idea that behavior becomes habit becomes character.

Oh dear. That's not such a great idea, Zuck, especially since your own organization is so...fallible, let's say, due to its constituent members aping your own regressive politics and enforcing the attendant repressive and unpleasant standards on the billions who don't want any part of them. But that's another rant for another day.

Businesses aren't by their nature equipped to deliver what the teachers in the trenches say with near unanimity what they really want:

[T]eachers consistently tell researchers that, given the choice, they would opt for a good principal and supportive working conditions over merit pay. Indeed, research had found no correlation between merit pay and student achievement, although reformers and venture philanthropists were fighting hard to make it a staple of new teacher contracts.

So that's easier and cheaper than the throw-money-at-the-problem shtik, right? That's the teachers sorted. And the kids?

Children with more than one traumatic experience—violence, severe poverty, family breakup, or substance abuse in the home—were more than twice as likely as others to fail at least one grade.

And we're back to square one: Support the family that a child comes from, help the family eat, live in a stable location, get the services that it needs, and the battle's more than half won.

Does any of that seem to you likely to happen in Trump's America?

TEARS WE CANNOT STOP, a heartfelt sermon to an absent congregation

TEARS WE CANNOT STOP: A Sermon to White America
MICHAEL ERIC DYSON
St. Martin's Press
$24.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Short, emotional, literary, powerful―Tears We Cannot Stop is the book that all Americans who care about the current and long-burning crisis in race relations will want to read.

As the country grapples with racist division at a level not seen since the 1960s, one man's voice soars above the rest with conviction and compassion. In his 2016 New York Times op-ed piece "Death in Black and White," Michael Eric Dyson moved a nation. Now he continues to speak out in Tears We Cannot Stop―a provocative and deeply personal call for change. Dyson argues that if we are to make real racial progress we must face difficult truths, including being honest about how black grievance has been ignored, dismissed, or discounted.

The time is at hand for reckoning with the past, recognizing the truth of the present, and moving together to redeem the nation for our future. If we don't act now, if you don't address race immediately, there very well may be no future.

THE PUBLISHER PROVIDED ME WITH A REVIEW COPY AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU!

My Review: I don't take my white male privilege as my due. I recognize that, even in my state of disability and deeply offensive otherhood by being unapologetically gay and intelligent in a world that really really dislikes both those qualities, I am still protected by a halo of white maleness from the full force of contumely routinely piled on others. I'm not stopped by cops while walking on the boardwalk. I'm not made a target by predators as I wander through my wealthy little town. I'm not, in short, Black or Latinx or Desi.

Dyson is still speaking to me in my bastion of safety. I'm not immune to racism because I don't personally practice it. I am the beneficiary of racism's unbearable viciousness. Every unsolved murder of a Black man or teen or child hit by a stray bullet fired in a dispute over goodness knows what (that happened year before last in Hempstead, a few minutes from where I live) suffers from a lack of what I have without question: The full protection of the society I live in, however grudgingly offered. I can demand that the institutions in place give me what I need. Others can't. And that is institutionalized racism at its most disagreeable. Because I, and so many like me, can make these demands, others are perforce denied their access to them. It is a scarcity model, a zero-sum game, where my privilege comes at the expense of your access to the spoils.

How does one cause those who have abundant goods, easy access to services and wealth, to share with those who have not? Dyson exhorts and educates the white elite to enjoin us to see things as they are. Then we're left to question our consciences as to whether the way things are is okay with us. My answer is "no I'm not okay with it" and still that makes no difference in the world at large. It brings institutional racism no closer to collapse. And, crucially, it brings me into no significant danger of losing my white male privilege. Dyson has effectively presented me the case for my privilege to end; he and I together with the people of conscience can only exhort, can try to explain to any audience we can find that as "guiltless" as we may be in our own hearts, we need to put our hands to the divine work of ending our own luxury.

Savonarola tried that. Got him burned at the stake. The Black Panther Party has advocated for this for over 50 years. Got their leaders jailed, murdered, marginalized. White America isn't in the pews listening to the sermon, Dr. Dyson. The converts are, I hope, already out there flapping their gums about the subject. I bash my keyboard to bring awareness to the issues of exclusion and denial. This is my way of encouraging all my fellows in privilege to resist the understandable desire to (silently, tacitly) accept the tainted gifts that the kakistocracy currently ascendant in US politics delivers to us.

Despite the urge to put a book that makes you feel ashamed of things you think you can't control or influence right down on the nightstand, I ask you please to stop yourself from the easy course. Please pick the book back up. Please understand that Dyson is extending a hand to you, palm up, to offer you reasons to take action and make decisions that support true equality. Put your palm to his. Take that action, make that decision, no matter how small or how "useless." There is a reason for you to do the right thing:

We don't hate you, white America. We hate that you terrorize us and then lie about it and then make us feel crazy for having to explain to you how crazy it makes us feel. We cannot hate you, not really, not most of us; that is our gift to you. We cannot halt you; that is our curse.

#ReadingIsResistance

THE GREENLAND BREACH, cli-fic thriller with some kickass characters

THE GREENLAND BREACH
BERNARD BESSON (tr. Julie Rose)
Le French Book (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Experience the eco-thriller at a whole new level in this cli-fi spy novel. What is the real impact of global warming? This stylish thriller about climate change and its consequences couldn’t be more topical. Espionage, intrigue, and behind-the-scenes struggles for natural resources combine with French freelance spies and Bond-like action for a convincing, beautifully orchestrated tale, “like a sophisticated manga.”

The Arctic ice caps are breaking up. Europe and the East Coast of the United States brace for a tidal wave. Meanwhile, former French intelligence officer John Spencer Larivière, his karate-trained, steamy Eurasian partner, Victoire, and their bisexual computer-genius sidekick, Luc, pick up an ordinary freelance assignment that quickly leads them into the glacial silence of the great north, where a merciless war is being waged for control of discoveries that will change the future of humanity.

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME A DRC VIA EDELWEISS+ AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU!

My Review: John Spencer Larivière heads Fermatown, his own special crack spy team he starts after his retirement from the French spy agency. His current, and first really profitable, job is to protect a silly girl-child from the consequences of her rash actions against her Canadian father's Arctic oil-and-gas business interests. This sounds a lot like the set-up for The Expanse book and television series, doesn't it? As framing devices go, it's not a bad one. John left the intelligence service after inheriting a house from an aunt...the kind of house that you see on those abandoned-castle sites. I want that house.

John is described as a gentle man, and his actions are oddly in accord with the description. I never had the feeling that he was some rampaging testosterone factory kept lightly controlled, waiting for an excuse to open a can of whoopass on someone. It was a refreshing change from most of thrillerdom's male leads. Even female leads, like a certain dragon-tattooed wench.

Victoire, John's partner as well as his wife, is the muscle being martial-arts trained. She's also a wisecracking disrespectful annoyance until about two-thirds of the way through the book. I found her to be a drag all the way through the book because she's not given anything all that challenging to her skill set to do. What she does do, she does splashily. I get it: Powerful woman doesn't need saving and in fact saves others. But can it please be more than enough for her to need to dig deep sooner than she's forced to do? I get the feeling she's really just doing her bit and then fixing her manicure while others are narrating the action.

Their computer-genius partner is Luc. Oh my. Luc is the sex machine that every spy novel needs. He uses his moneymaker(s) to great advantage throughout the book. It's refreshing in the extreme for his sexuality to be frankly omnivorous and for very little of consequence to be said about it. When bear is hungry, bear will eat. Bear eats a lot in this comparatively short book...and does it while maintaining an undercover persona. That's a handy trick (!) to have. Their spy outfit runs a semi-phony website for corporate research. Luc plays a researcher/reporter for the site and when someone needs to give up a datum but isn't being forthcoming enough for Luc, he flips the sex machine on and bam! Down they go, up comes the needed datum, and the story cracks on.

And the story does indeed crackle with energy, fed by many wires from multiple characters and organized into several competing circuits whose interconnection doesn't instantly leap forth. That's both a plus and a minus, as the pace can be so quick as to leave the reader wondering why this or that is happening, why the story needs all the characters it has...and I'd say it doesn't really need so many. It dilutes the effect of the main three series characters to have the many other voices speaking to us. There are some data points that can't reasonably be delivered any other way, I grant you, but it seemed to me to be a net hindrance to the reader's enjoyment of the story.

But the story itself is a bit of a problem. Greenland's de-icing is progressing at a terrifying rate in reality. This story's ecoterrorists' deliberate acceleration of that fact into a crisis-level event is very, very tense and provides a real edge of planet-wide stakes. Devastation from the tsunamis inherent in a truly large chunk of ice calving off the place actually makes me jittery to contemplate, living as I do on a sandbar stuck out into the North Atlantic...and on the beach no less. But the story, a complex chase after a MacGuffin, ends badly in that the MacGuffin's mere existence simply vanishes. I was deeply bothered by this. If people are willing to kill to possess the MacGuffin, make me understand that the story resolves its possession. I was left muddled.

The spycraft was interesting, the fiendishly knotted plot strands were each compelling, the pattern the whole made was still unresolved...but the verve, the energy, and the inclusion of a bisexual good guy elevate the read well above the expected and well-worn paths of American spy thrillers. It isn't perfect but it is very good, and it won't disappoint you if you're looking for a diversion that isn't substance free.

Holy Carp it's FEBRUARY already!

Over on Medium, I've published an article about the perils of burnout...and a few escapes I gave myself to avoid this common curse of the driven. Creatomic founder and personal inspirational/aspirational creative entrepreneur Jon Westenberg posted a rallying cry for aspiring creatives, "How to Make Something People Give a F*ck About."

It's no surprise to anyone that I'm a curmudgeon. I struggle not to say exactly what I think to every person I meet because I don't think much of most people. So how does someone without more than a soupçon of the Milk of Human Kindness involve others in what matters to him? Find a passion that makes a difference, yes well...#ReadingIsResistance is it for me.

I want this nightmare kakistocracy to be over. Now. Yesterday, preferably. I can't manifest that reality, sorry. I can't do a lot except talk about it. Given the Trumpets' response to dissent, it's probably not the smartest thing to do. For me, it could mean being targeted on social media by the various Strumpets who still support Twitler...and more sinisterly, it could affect my status as a recipient of Medicare and a constellation of other benefits I paid for with many years of payroll tax payments.

Look at the image above. That's not an irrational or deluded worry. But ya know what? If #ReadingIsResistance draws that much attention, and makes even a tiny ripple in the shallow puddle that is this administration's talent pool, I will feel that the risk is so very worth it as to make the downside endurable.

If a guy who was just walking home with his groceries can go stand in front of a stonking great tank, I can write what I mean to say and tell everyone I can find about it. I hope y'all care enough about the beautiful, amazing country our ancestors did their bumbling best to make for us to resist the kakistocracy. I know not everyone thinks they can. But remember something really important: #ReadingIsResistance. No one can tell you what to read. No one can tell you what to think once you've read it. No one can make you shut up about your thoughts and feelings.

Yet.

And if you and I and all the people we can reach and all the people they can reach and on and on ad infinitum will read and resist, they...the kakistocrats...won't ever be able to. It's an investment in something so precious, so incredibly precious, that They really want you to give it up without a fight. They make distractions and They create perceptions of readers that are unflattering or attempts to marginalize us. That's plain old fear.

They fear us, our mental furniture is piled too high for them to casually push into our brains. We are the #Resistance. Don't let Them win this battle without a fight.

#ReadingIsResistance

GHETTOSIDE, being a jeremiad of a review of a jeremiad of a book

GHETTOSIDE: A True Story of Murder in America
JILL LEOVY
Spiegel & Grau
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: On a warm spring evening in South Los Angeles, a young man is shot and killed on a sidewalk minutes away from his home, one of the thousands of black Americans murdered that year. His assailant runs down the street, jumps into an SUV, and vanishes, hoping to join the scores of killers in American cities who are never arrested for their crimes.

But as soon as the case is assigned to Detective John Skaggs, the odds shift.

Here is the kaleidoscopic story of the quintessential, but mostly ignored, American murder—a “ghettoside” killing, one young black man slaying another—and a brilliant and driven cadre of detectives whose creed is to pursue justice for forgotten victims at all costs. Ghettoside is a fast-paced narrative of a devastating crime, an intimate portrait of detectives and a community bonded in tragedy, and a surprising new lens into the great subject of why murder happens in our cities—and how the epidemic of killings might yet be stopped.

This book was a holiday gift from a special friend. "Thanks" honey, I love you too.

My Review: I had nightmares reading this damned book. I finish a book a day. This one took me a solid month of on-again, off-again "holy shit I can't, I just can't" reading to finish. I'm a privileged fuck. I always was. I think my one hope for any redemption is that I've never been under any illusion I wasn't. This is a read to make a decent soul scream and rage against the horrors of an everyday reality *in*our*own*country* that is so, so, I can't...I do not possess a word anywhere in my brain that's equal to the towering emotional and political indignation, fury, disgust, horror, agony, grief that I am experiencing.

I'll attempt to be a bit more rational from here on out. I think quoting Leovy herself will help with my incoherent outrage.

Start with this. Leovy's commonsensical reduction of the problem facing our country's law enforcement machinery, the notable lack of a will to do the right thing:

...[T]o assert that black Americans suffer from too little application of the law, not too much, seems at odds with common perception. But the perceived harshness of American criminal justice and its fundamental weakness are in reality two sides of a coin, the former a kind of poor compensation for the latter. Like the schoolyard bully, our criminal justice system harasses people on small pretexts but is exposed as a coward before murder. It hauls masses of black men through its machinery but fails to protect them from bodily injury and death. It is at once oppressive and inadequate.

That's pretty much the entire book's point in a nutshell. Understand this, really get it, and you'll be able to read this book without feeling bitch-slapped by the facts. It won't help one iota with the emotional shellacking you're going to take. Yep, that's right laddies and gentlewomen, this another Eat-Your-Spinach Book! Oh boy oh joy, Jeremiah bar Derus slings another jeremiad at ya!

But c'mon, read this and tell me that you can't see why:

Society's efforts to combat this mostly black-on-black murder epidemic were inept, fragmented, underfunded, contorted by a variety of ideological, political, and racial sensitivities. When homicide did get attention, the focus seemed to be on spectacles — mass shootings, celebrity murders — a step removed from the people who were doing most of the dying: black men.

They were the nation's number one crime victims. They were the people hurt most badly and most often, just 6 percent of the country's population but nearly 40 percent of those murdered. People talked a lot about crime in America, but they tended to gloss over this aspect — that a plurality of those killed were not women, children, infants, elders, nor victims of workplace or school shootings. Rather, they were legions of America's black men, many of them unemployed and criminally involved. They were murdered every day, in every city, their bodies stacking up by the thousands, year after year.

These facts constitute an invitation to jeremiadize, no? The appalling stark factual truth makes for bad feelings but better votes, or so I hope. The facts of young Bryant Tennelle's murder aren't unusual. They're quite appallingly routine, in fact. I can't see any reason to pretend otherwise. His father is one of the good guys...a cop...but he was just like a million other young Black men in his neighborhood. And he paid with his life for his father's decision not to leave the world he grew up in, the world of violence and death and grief that generations of political and social inaction at the least destructive and targeted harassment at the worst have created. Make no mistake: Leovy shows clearly that this situation isn't new, isn't accidental, it isn't some ghastly malevolent internal evil inherent in South Central's men. It's us, the rich white people who vote for Law-n-Order for no free rides for moochers for the eternal unchallenged supremacy of Our Kind over the lower orders. Or, to put it simply, Trump's Murrika.

The fact is that this carefully constructed economic and social apartheid has predictable consequences. Among them is the inevitable rise of illegal shadow economies centered around illegal activities. How the hell else are you supposed to be part of this giant consuming machine? It takes money to be one of those getting and spending, and flipping burgers at Mickey D's isn't going to get you an Escalade:

When your business dealings are illegal, you have no legal recourse. Many poor “underclass” men of Watts had little to live on except a couple hundred dollars a month in county General Relief. They “cliqued up” for all sorts of illegal enterprises, not just selling drugs and pimping but also fraudulent check schemes, tax cons, unlicensed car repair businesses, or hair braiding. Some bounced from hustle to hustle. They bartered goods, struck deals, and shared proceeds, all off the books. Violence substituted for contract litigation. Young men in Watts frequently compared their participation in so-called gang culture to the way white-collar businessmen sue customers, competitors, or suppliers in civil courts. They spoke of policing themselves, adjudicating their own disputes. Other people call the police when they need help, explained an East Coast Crip gang member. “We pick up the phone and call our homeboys.”

Unpurse your fucking lips, hypocrite. You're right there with your VISA in your wallet and your mortgage payments met. You're in this hip-deep and you've made it look good in a big public way. Of course everyone else wants it too. Everyone in the world wants it too, and that's how we got this far down the rabbit hole that's rapidly turning into a black hole swallowing the entire substance of the planet. Bryant Tennelle could have had your kind of life, if he'd been able to keep his own. He was a middle-class kid in a world where walking the tables to middle classdom is only possible when you join the alternative economy and its social offshoots, or you sell out and support the "legitimate" system.

One of Skaggs’s colleagues picked up a word a Watts gang member used to describe his neighborhood: ghettoside. the term captured the situation nicely, mixing geography and status with the hustler’s poetic precision and perverse conceit. It was both a place and a predicament, and gave a name to that otherworldly seclusion that all violent black pockets of the country had in common—Athens, Willowbrook, parts of Long Beach, Watts. There was a sameness to these places and the policing that went on in them. John Skaggs was ghettoside all the way.

The author has quite a case of hero worship for John Skaggs. I am right there with her on the fact that he is a decent and honorable man. Based on the book's portrayal of him, I think his desire to do the right thing is just a part of him, like his hair or his eyes.

I can genuinely understand how a man of his caliber would look around and say to himself, "No."

Explicitly confronting the reality of how murder happens in America is the first step toward deciding that it is not acceptable, and that for too long black men have lived inadequately protected by the laws of their own country.

It's obvious and inescapable that this is reality. A man like John Skaggs isn't built to see this and not do what he can to change it. But there's a price to pay for this kind of starchiness. He doesn't come across as a very approachable person. Does that matter? In the wider scheme of things, not really; but it makes the book a bit hard to carry on with at times. Author Leovy's obvious admiration for Skaggs increases the effect.

But listen up, internet-enabled scions of generations of privilege and oppression: Change is Gonna Come. Get on board or you'll really, really, really regret it. Ask the poor white people who voted for Trump. They know.

THE BLACK CALHOUNS, proof that history is fluid when more voices join the conversation

THE BLACK CALHOUNS: From Civil War to Civil Rights with One African American Family
GAIL LUMET BUCKLEY
Grove Press
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In The Black Calhouns, Gail Lumet Buckley—daughter of actress Lena Horne—delves deep into her family history, detailing the experiences of an extraordinary African-American family from Civil War to Civil Rights.

Beginning with her great-great grandfather Moses Calhoun, a house slave who used the rare advantage of his education to become a successful businessman in post-war Atlanta, Buckley follows her family’s two branches: one that stayed in the South, and the other that settled in Brooklyn. Through the lens of her relatives’ momentous lives, Buckley examines major events throughout American history. From Atlanta during Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, to New York City during the Harlem Renaissance, and then from World War II to the Civil Rights Movement, this ambitious, brilliant family witnessed and participated in the most crucial events of the 19th and 20th centuries. Combining personal and national history, The Black Calhouns is a unique and vibrant portrait of six generations during dynamic times of struggle and triumph.

ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS SENT ME A REVIEW COPY AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU!

My Review: There is a television miniseries on its way via ABC Studios. Here's to hoping they do it justice.

My goddesses. There is so much I personally don't know about the African American history of my own country. The saga of the Calhouns is epic, and an instructive look at the roots of white nationalism in the demagoguery of politicos hoping to be elected to office. Vile, disappointing, unsurprising given today's terrors.

The author understandably focuses on her famous mother, Lena Horne, for specifics and anecdotes to enliven her historical thesis about the existence and condition of an African American elite in each decade following the American Civil War. That's inevitable, I suppose; had she done otherwise, assuming she possessed the information to do so, this book would've been as thick as a Bible and about as interesting. Gadzooks were there a lot of Calhouns and cousins and families and friends and husbands and...well, let's just say that a four-line summary of the huge majority of the dramatis personae still pumps us to over 300pp of relatively dry material.

It's the relatively dry part that bothers me the most. I am entirely sure that Author Buckley possesses the chops to do more with even cursory mentions than is done here. I am even more sure that fewer names and more anecdotes/reminiscences/stories would've made for a deliciously readable, dare I say it novelistic, book.

Not that there is a single thing *wrong* with this book. There's a slightly slippery slope in the alternating north/south chapter format; it starts to feel forced. Believe me when I tell you that this isn't anything more than a quibble. I don't at all want to give you the impression that the book isn't a terrific investment of your eyeblinks, especially my fellow white folks who are earnestly seeking some road signs in this complicated minefield that is race relations. It helps that Author Buckley has a background in history. Her potted course in American race relations is richer for it.

Don't miss this chance to learn about race-related issues in a relatively painless way, from the "other" side of the issue.

THE LOOTING MACHINE, outrage upon indignity after robbery

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THE LOOTING MACHINE: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth
TOM BURGIS
PublicAffairs Books
$2.99 eBook platforms, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The trade in oil, gas, gems, metals and rare earth minerals wreaks havoc in Africa. During the years when Brazil, India, China and the other “emerging markets” have transformed their economies, Africa’s resource states remained tethered to the bottom of the industrial supply chain. While Africa accounts for about 30 per cent of the world’s reserves of hydrocarbons and minerals and 14 per cent of the world’s population, its share of global manufacturing stood in 2011 exactly where it stood in 2000: at 1 percent.

In his first book, The Looting Machine, Tom Burgis exposes the truth about the African development miracle: for the resource states, it's a mirage. The oil, copper, diamonds, gold and coltan deposits attract a global network of traders, bankers, corporate extractors and investors who combine with venal political cabals to loot the states' value. And the vagaries of resource-dependent economies could pitch Africa’s new middle class back into destitution just as quickly as they climbed out of it. The ground beneath their feet is as precarious as a Congolese mine shaft; their prosperity could spill away like crude from a busted pipeline.

This catastrophic social disintegration is not merely a continuation of Africa’s past as a colonial victim. The looting now is accelerating as never before. As global demand for Africa’s resources rises, a handful of Africans are becoming legitimately rich but the vast majority, like the continent as a whole, is being fleeced. Outsiders tend to think of Africa as a great drain of philanthropy. But look more closely at the resource industry and the relationship between Africa and the rest of the world looks rather different. In 2010, fuel and mineral exports from Africa were worth $333 billion, more than seven times the value of the aid that went in the opposite direction. But who received the money? For every Frenchwoman who dies in childbirth, 100 die in Niger alone, the former French colony whose uranium fuels France’s nuclear reactors. In petro-states like Angola three-quarters of government revenue comes from oil. The government is not funded by the people, and as result it is not beholden to them. A score of African countries whose economies depend on resources are rentier states; their people are largely serfs. The resource curse is not merely some unfortunate economic phenomenon, the product of an intangible force. What is happening in Africa’s resource states is systematic looting. Like its victims, its beneficiaries have names.

My Review: The statistics are appalling: Two percent of the entire planet's gross domestic product, 13 percent of its population; a whopping 80 percent of the planet's platinum ore; 15 percent of its petroleum reserves...and 69% of the planet's people living in extreme poverty.

It's enough to make a decent human being into a raving lunatic-level, bomb-throwing, anti-capitalist revolutionary.

The scale of this appalling criminal enterprise beggars the imagination. There is no conceivable metaphor for the sheer scope of it. The number of companies and countries involved is shocking, but not remotely the most revolting datum; the volume of money is stunning, but not outside human comprehension; what makes every other data point irrelevant, unimportant, is the fact that a mere handful of human beings—fewer than two thousand—control this machine.

Think about that.

We allow it. We know it's going on. We allow a small town's population of kakistocrats, kleptocrats, scumbagarchs to perpetrate this immense crime every single day without any significant impediment being put in their way. How can that be allowed? What happened to the merest whiff of that antique virtue, morality?

Nigeria, on paper one of the best candidates for wealth in Africa, is mired in poverty and factionalism that drew the author to two inescapable conclusions: he was part of a system that cared nothing for the people it used to perpetuate its privileges, and he was alive in large part at the expense of some of those people whose fate he witnessed firsthand:

I arrived in a village on the outskirts [of a Nigerian city] not long after a mod had set fire to houses and their occupants, among them children and a baby. I took pictures, counted bodies, and filed my story. After a few days trying to understand the causes of the slaughter, I set off for the next assignment. Over the months that followed, when the images of the corpses flashed before my mind's eye, I would instinctively force them out, unable to look at them. ... I felt that I ought to suffer as those who died had—if not in the same way, then somehow to the same degree. The fact that I was alive became an unpayable debt to the dead.

PTSD in textbook case form. Survivor's guilt is damned near unbearable. How come I'm here and that one isn't? How can I keep going when bearing witness is the only power I possess?

Journalism to the rescue, in a way. Reporting the facts is one thing an observer can do that does, in fact, have force and effect in the world. Nigeria's problems, like any and every country's, have many facets and roots and reasons. The heinous kleptocratic regimes aiding and abetting the amoral-by-design corporate exploiters. The exploiters hiding their vileness (not least from themselves) behind the soulless, bodiless legal fiction of corporations with legal responsibility solely and entirely to their shareholders:

What has happened to Nigeria is not the result of some innate facet of the African spirit, as some observers suggest with a shrug of casual racism. British members of Parliament have shown themselves willing to sell their right to ask parliamentary questions, and the pork-barrel politics of Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, looks very much like a patronage system. Lobbyists in every major capital inject money into politics on behalf of vested interests. The difference between a corrupted resource state and a state that can still call itself a place of representative rule is the extent to which such subversion of public office for personal benefit is the scandal or the norm. It is the degree to which the institutions of state -- legislative bodies, the police, the courts -- serve as instruments of the mighty or as checks on arbitrary power.

This isn't an accident. It's a careful design. Think about it: How else can a person, a living one with a heartbeat, live with the inevitable consequences of a resource-extraction economy on the extractees' lives? Distance is the only option. The fiduciary responsibility of corporate officers is solely to the shareholders. By law. Not the environment, not the community, not the stakeholders like employees or citizens of a foreign country. The shareholders' profits are legally ALL that can be considered. Makes sleeping at night a lot easier: "I was just following orders," say multinational Eichmanns in their SS uniforms tailored in Savile Row and Bond Street and Hong Kong, sold at Barneys New York and Neiman Marcus.

But then there's another group of criminals whose participation in the crimes is vital to making sure the spice keeps flowing (Dune reference, go look it up): The banksters. Oh my yes. The banksters are in it up to their pear-shaped hips. The author's a financial journalist by trade, he should know. And he explains in this concise example of the financing of a Ghanaian mine that cyanide-poisoned an entire town:

When the International Finance Corporation announced in 2005 that it was planning to invest in Newmont's development of the Ahafo mine, Newmont's market capitalization, the total value of all its shares on the New York Stock Exchange, stood at $17.5 billion, twice the size of Ghana's economy. Its quickly rising annual revenues were $4.5 billion, and it made $434 million in profits from operations on four continents that produced 9 percent of the gold mined worldwide. The Ahafo concession alone was sitting on gold worth $12 billion. The following year the IFC approved a loan for the Ahafo mine from its own account of $75 million and arranged a further $50 million from commercial banks, including Rothschild and Royal Bank of Scotland. The total package represented a modest 7 percent of Newmont's $1.9 billion total debt.

You don't need a finance degree or a business background to see that a minuscule fraction of debt owed by a profitable enterprise like 7 percent could easily be financed on the open credit market. The risk isn't enormous, when the underlying asset is valued at a sum like $12 billion. The IFC was founded to finance high-risk loans to corporations involved in socially desirable but economically risky activities. Mining $12 billion in gold from a tiny economy's land while poisoning its people doesn't meet a single one of those criteria.

The examples and analyses just keep coming. The book's cumulative effect is much like a dermabrasion treatment for your conscience. How could you not have known? How could anyone who did know not shout the iniquity, unfairness, abusiveness, from the rooftops? And how can you, wired netizen that you (and I) are, possibly disconnect from this system?

Can't. There's gold in each and every device you use at home, in your car, at work. Microscopic amounts, irreducible contributions to the iniquitous resource-extraction economy that stain our collective hands. How to deal with this particular "survivor guilt?"

Don't stuff your ears. Read about it. Talk about it to others because if you don't, who will? When the time comes to vote, look into the stances your candidates take on environmental issues. When the time comes to sign up for a retirement plan, sign up for or switch to a "green" one. Will it save the world? No. But that icon of charity, Mother Teresa, said: