Book Report

Books I've meant to mention individually, but which I'll never get to if I wait for time to do that. From the left in this first shot:

Two Kinds of Time, by Graham Peck, introduction by Robert Kapp. Riveting and hilarious accounts of travels through WW II-era China by an American diplomat (and litterateur and artist), fascinating in their own right and all the more rewarding because of their resonance with the superficially-different China of 60+ years later.

Typhoon, by Charles Cumming, previously mentioned here and elsewhere. I now have a sense of why this conceivably might have been detained by Chinese authorities when I ordered it before. It is largely about a CIA plot to destabilize the Chinese regime by working with Muslim/Uighur nationalists in Xinjiang region. If you're looking for an action-and-romance driven spy novel, as opposed to one mainly about mood and psychology, check it out.

Beijing Coma, by the exiled Chinese writer Ma Jian. You want dark, about the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen? This will give you very, very dark. Hint: the coma in the title is not simply figurative.

Still on the China beat: Global Shanghai, by Jeffrey Wasserstrom, very interesting historical/ intellectual / cultural analysis of the ways my former home town has been perceived as both a Chinese and a non-Chinese city.

Finally, for Something Different: A Romance on Three Legs, by Katie Hafner. The author is a good friend, but even if she weren't I would find this a masterful demonstration of how to make a subject you didn't know you were interested in page-turning reading from beginning to end. The description of how the "action" of a piano actually works will stand as an example of how to explain complex processes lucidly.

For the record, a review I'm very grateful for

In Blogcritics, by Xujun Eberlein, about Postcards from Tomorrow Square, a review whose first two or three paragraphs capture what I've been trying to do. I know it's not seemly to point out one's own good reviews, but this one meant a lot to me and I note it for the record. (Reprinted in China Beat here.) In the same vein, gratitude to Fareed Zakaria for a generous mention of the book on yesterday's GPS show.

And while I'm at it, I'll be doing appearances for the book at the Shanghai Literary Festival on March 7 and 8 and the Beijing Literary Festival on March 19.

Ok, I've got this out of my system now. Back to the F-22 etc.

This better be worth it!

The thriller novel Typhoon, which I tried in vain to track down while I was in China (the tale of this quixotic search, thrilling enough in itself, is laid out here , here, and here), is now on hand, shipped by Amazon Canada to Washington DC. It is shown below, in pillowed presentation mode appropriate to the difficulty of finding it.



That leaves two associated mysteries to figure out. One: since the word "China" does not appear on the front or back cover of the book, and since the cover illustration of Hong Kong might at worst seem to suggest a natural-disaster weather story, how could the Chinese customs officials have figured out that this was a "sensitive" book that they had to intercept -- if that is indeed what happened to it?

The other mystery, of course: is it any good? Stay tuned.

Penultimate words on 'Typhoon'

What have we learned from this episode? (Background, about the difficulty of tracking down a book with possibly "sensitive" anti-Chinese content, here and here.)

1. I argued earlier that the disappearance of a copy of this book in the Chinese mail was more likely inadvertence or error than anything else. That's my default explanation for most of what happens in life, and most of what happens in China. But I got this contrary testimony from an official of a large international manufacturing firm, who is based in Shenzhen:

As for the book Typhoon, I am almost positive it was the customs people who took it.  I used to order books online from Hong Kong and shipped to me in Shenzhen.  Sometimes the shipment never arrived even though the store assured me it was shipped.  A few times they made another shipment that also never made it to me.  The coincidence is the shipments were 'lost' any time a book with some type of negative China history or thought was being discussed (i.e a book written in the west about the Boxer Rebellion).

I think what happens is the customs people open the box, have basic English so understand a little about the book's topic, then decide it might be controversial and seize the shipment.  Since they don't want any arguments they don't bother to notify anyone.  Just <poof> and it's gone.

Could be! As with other kinds of Chinese control mechanisms, the uncertainty about what's happening makes the controls weirdly all the more effective. (For how this works with the Internet, here.)

2. Why this book, from this author? From Kevin Chambers, of the West Peavine blog, a hypothesis that it has to do with this article, by the book's author in the Guardian last year, about Chinese-Uighur tensions. I say: Maybe. Both this hypothesis and the previous one assume that Chinese customs officials are busily reading the English-language press and matching "sensitive" views to incoming shipments. But, again, it's possible.

3. About why some used books are on the market for prices from $75 to $247.87, this hypothesis from Tim Rossiter:

I've been listing used CDs on Amazon recently. I've found that there are some CDs that Amazon doesn't have in stock, yet are not rare by any means. If Amazon doesn't stock it and no one has listed a used one, someone will come along and list a used one for a ridiculous price to see if anyone bites. I think some of the larger used CD dealers may even have this kind of pricing automated.

My guess is that you're seeing the same type of thing with your book.

I've learned time and again over these last two and a half years in China not to rule out any explanation. Any or all of these theories could be true.

As advertised, these will be the penultimate words on the topic from me. For-real final words after I've actually read the book.

Selamat Tahun Baru!

Or Happy New Year, as they put it in the Indonesian language I have been hearing around me for the past week. That week has coincided with enforced separation from the mighty Internet -- not a bad way to spend time with one's family! -- which in turn leaves me behind on various year-end updates still to come.

But I can't let this day pass, nor this moment of online connection, without mentioning that my new book Postcards from Tomorrow Square goes on sale today, with official pub date early next month. Random House's catalog listings here. Random House's e-book format is here, and Amazon's Kindle format is here.  A very nice set of quotes, for which I'm grateful, here.



I won't make a habit of book promo, but I include this link to an email Q-and-A that Kate Merkel-Hess, of the influential blog The China  Beat, conducted with me about the book and the general process of writing about China. She evoked from me an admission I'd long managed to avoid:

Ahah! You have cruelly revealed the trademarked secret of everything I've ever written for the magazine! 

Further details and secrets at the China Beat site. Further promised year-end updates on software, hardware, the press, and China in this space very soon. New Year's greetings for now.

One more word about "books as gifts"...

... following Roy Blount Jr's testimonial two days ago on behalf of independent book stores,  here are two other sites, one from the Association of American Publishers and another from Random House but concerning books in general. All make the case for this year as the Year of the Gift Book.

Judge for yourself, but I'm persuaded: placing online orders now with various independent bookstores in the US. For searchable directories of such stores, check here; for a subjective top-10 list of indie bookstores, go here. Read up!

Advance review from Publisher's Weekly

I won't do this systematically, because that would mean I'd have to include bad reviews too!, but for the record here is an early, nice PW note on my forthcoming collection of China writings, Postcards from Tomorrow Square. It's a "starred" review about halfway down the page that this link brings up. Actual text of the review after the jump. The book is a Vintage paperback original (bargain!) and has a pub date of January.  (Links through Amazon, B&N, Powell's.) 


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Continue reading "Advance review from Publisher's Weekly" »

More about "America's Defense Meltdown" (Updated)

This is the book I mentioned yesterday, a very useful overview of the issues, challenges, constraints, and possibilities for America's defense policy. Two tech-related positive developments concerning this book.

- Hardcovers of the book will be available sometime soon. But if you would like to start reading it today, you can get an electronic copy, free, by requesting one from Winslow Wheeler, the book's editor. He has placed his email address on the Center for Defense Information web site, and  (with his permission) I also give it here: WinslowWheeler@msn.com .  UPDATE: free PDF download now available directly via this link.

- If, in addition to being interested in a sustainable defense policy for America, you use a Kindle, you will find that the emailed PDF version formats itself well for Kindle reading. (Thanks to Dave Finton on this point. For info and links about how to view .DOC and .PDF files on a Kindle, check here.)

Back to business: must-read new book on defense

At its site here, the Center for Defense Information announces the imminent release of its new book "America's Defense Meltdown." Really this is a guide on how to think about, pay for, reconfigure, equip, deploy, withdraw, modernize, simplify, support, strengthen, lead, motivate, inspire, and in all other ways improve America's military establishment. 

The talent, judgment, and insight collected in this book are phenomenal. Over the last generation, the authors have been more right, more often, about more issues of crucial importance to American security than any other group I can think of. It is a tremendous benefit to have their views collected in one place and concentrated on the next big choices facing a new Administration.  This really is a book that every serious-minded citizen should read.  

Maybe this will help Cullen Murphy's book?

Start of headline on Maureen Dowd's  column in the New York Times today: "Are We Rome?"

Cover of my friend Cullen Murphy's* excellent 2007 book:


Column, in mock-Latin, is very funny, in a way that is cumulative rather than easily illustrated in a brief clip. Book is very funny -- and erudite and informative and provocative and surprising. Like the column? Buy the book. Hell, buy it even if you didn't like the column. (I mean, "Infernus**, buy it even...."). It's written in English, after all.
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* Cullen was for 20 years the Atlantic's managing editor.
** This is probably in the wrong Latin case, but I don't care!

Endurance champ (flyweight division)

Yesterday I mentioned that because I couldn't find a USB stick, I had rigged up a clumsy ad hoc network just to transfer one file.

It turns out that the USB stick wasn't actually lost. It was.... only resting, deep in a pocket of some pants that had gone into the wash. The pants have now come out of the wash -- in specific, a trip through the washing machine and the dryer, though not the ironing board. Of course only after all that was the USB stick discovered.

With a sense of doom, I tried it -- and it still works fine! All the files that were on there before are on there now, and perfectly readable. I just used it to make another file transfer: no problem. It even passes the performance tests for "ReadyBoost" service as temporary RAM under Vista.

So if you're looking for the USB stick that, in the words of the ancient Timex slogan, takes a licking and keeps on ticking, I say: look no further than the PNY Optima Attache 8GB model. This genuinely surprises me. And think of the seconds you'll save not having to empty your pockets.

PS the reddish background in the picture above is not some lush grosgrain but the back cover of Bowl of Cherries, a racy recent comic novel about teenaged lusts, the war in Iraq, modern college life, etc. It is the first novel from Millard Kaufman, who was born in 1917. He is said to be at work on his second. Endurance champ of a different sort.

Noirest of noir

The new "Hard Case" crime-fiction series is justly celebrated. This is a combination of "classic" pulp fiction from the post-WW II era and new noir novels. The covers are the initial selling point -- loving modern recreations of a lurid 50s-retro style. The one below is among the more violent looking; after the jump, samples of the more typical hot-dame type of luridness.

The few books I've read in the series have been very good, and Grifter's Game, above, is remarkable in two ways.

One, it's a kind of time capsule, showing what's changed, and hasn't, in U.S. pop culture. It came out in 1961, and some aspects seem positively antique. The protagonist needs to go from NYC to Cleveland -- so he takes the train. (Yes, it may come to that again.) TV broadcasts shut off after midnight. All prices need to be adjusted by a factor of ten or more. Newspapers cost a nickel, a good meal costs $2.50, a dollar bill is a huge tip.

Continue reading "Noirest of noir" »

Superior genre fiction: An Ordinary Spy

Some reviewers and blurbers have loved Joseph Weisberg's An Ordinary Spy ("In two words: a masterpiece," from Gary Shteyngart, author of Absurdistan.) A few others have not -- you can go find those reviews yourself.

One of my rules of life is: there are a whole lot of terrible books out there, but many, many books deserve a better shake and wider audience than they receive. An Ordinary Spy deserves attention and a chance. Its immediately noticeable gimmick is that pages in the finished book have passages blacked out, "redacted," as if this really were what the fictional premise holds, the memoir of a CIA agent. The pages look like this:

and even, as the climax to one joke, this:

I found this artifice, and the resulting guesses about what was left out, increasingly interesting as the book went on; some reviewers were bored or annoyed.

But the book's real point is conveying what the craft of spying is like -- now, with all we know about failures of intelligence and America's blundering in the world. Weisberg himself is a former CIA agent. Is his account realistic? Well, the CIA's former chief of counterintelligence says so:

An Ordinary Spy captures perfectly the spy world I lived in my whole career, how we talk, how we think, and how we operate. Joe gets it better than Clancy and is on a par with McCarry.

The McCarry here is of course the sainted Charles McCarry, former CIA agent and author of The Tears of Autumn and many subsequent Paul Christopher novels. (McCarry is a good friend of mine; I have met Weisberg only briefly but do know his wife and brother.)

I have my own minor criticism of one element of Ordinary Spy's finale, which for spoiler reasons I won't mention except to say that the more you've read of Dennis Lehane, the more you'll see what I have in mind. But overall I thought this was a very good book. To be put in Charles McCarry's company, for knowledge of spycraft and for narrative skill, is high praise -- and deserved, I think. Check it out.

Another very good book: 'China Road'

I am remiss in not having said anything earlier about China Road, by NPR's long-time China correspondent Rob Gifford, which came out last summer.

The book has been widely and deservedly praised for its structure: a narrative of a trip along China's Route 312, a kind of Route-66 counterpart, which runs from Shanghai to the far northwestern Silk Road outpost of the country. Gifford knows the language, obviously enjoys the people, and has a good eye and ear. I have now been to most of the places Gifford describes, and reading his account of them both reminded me of what I'd seen and told me something new.

Gifford's obvious and undeniable love for China and average Chinese people allows him to pepper nearly every page of the book with tart, even harsh observations -- confident that they'll be seen in context of his overall affection for the place. (By analogy: I love America, but I've got a million complaints about my modern America. Although Gifford is obviously not Chinese, something similar it true between him and China.) I'll mention only two here, though there are many I'm tempted to quote.

First, a a small (and accurate) jab at prissy Westerners, which is on my mind as I pack for a quick trip to the U.S. Then after the jump, a jab more directly at China, which also corresponds to what I've seen. For the rest, get the book!

About Westerners:

The DVD is playing several hundred decibels above the level permitted in heavy industrial factories in the United States, though at first I don't realize this. It's only when the child in the seat behind leans over the back of the seat next to me and starts singing that I realize how, over time, I have become inoculated against Chinese noise... China does that do you. You go back to the United States or Europe , and people wonder why you're not jumping up and down with annoyance at some minor noise or irritation, and you look at them and think, What's your problem? We have such low thresholds of annoyance in our cozy Western world. (The danger is, though, that you also forget to fit back into Western ways of, say, road safety or table manners on returning to your homeland.)

Continue reading "Another very good book: 'China Road'" »

Archival note: M-16 article

Magazine articles published before the early 1990s are available digitally in only hit-or-miss fashion. Republication rights were still being worked out then; Nexis coverage from that time is erratic; some material has been scanned in and much has not. I am aware of this spotty coverage mainly as it affects two Atlantic articles I did in this period: "A Damaged Culture," about the Philippines; and "M-16: A Bureaucratic Horror Story," about how internal bureaucratic squabbling left American troops in Vietnam with defective, jam-prone weapons. I frequently receive requests for copies of these articles.

I have finally found, and earlier posted, a digital version of the Philippine article, which appeared in expanded form in Looking at the Sun. I am not aware of a digital version of the M-16 article. For those who ask (and I write this because I've gotten another round of requests), it too appeared in expanded book form, in National Defense. That book was published in 1981 and has recently gone out of print, but used copies are easily and cheaply available on Amazon. That is where to look if you are interested.

Robert Klitgaard on culture, education, and More Like Us

I have often thought of Robert Klitgaard's book Tropical Gangsters when living in or reporting on countries where structural corruption seems like an unavoidable and unchangeable condition of life. The book is a darkly comic, Evelyn-Waugh-as-economic-advisor account of Klitgaard's experience on World Bank project in Equitorial Guinea, often described as "the worst country in the world." I was living in Japan at the time, which was still on the way up, but also traveling in countries like the Philippines and Indonesia -- whose contrast with Japan raised obvious questions about the relative roles of policy, and of culture, in national improvement or deterioriation.

One result of this on my end was an article about the Philippines called "A Damaged Culture,"

Continue reading "Robert Klitgaard on culture, education, and More Like Us" »

Interview with Santa Barbara Independent

Interview about terrorism and Blind into Baghdad , conducted by reporter Sam Kornell.

Blind Into Baghdad

"In Blind Into Baghdad, Fallows takes us from the planning of the war through the struggles of reconstruction. With unparalleled access and incisive analysis, he shows us how many of the difficulties were anticipated by experts whom the administration ignored."

Published by Vintage. Buy the book

Free Flight

The troubles of the airline system have become acute in the post-terrorist era. As the average cost of a flight has come down in the last twenty years, the airlines have survived by keeping planes full and funneling traffic through a centralized hub-and-spoke routing system. Virtually all of the technological innovation in airplanes in the last thirty years has been devoted to moving passengers more efficiently between major hubs. But what was left out of this equation was the convenience and flexibility of the average traveler. Now, because of heightened security, hours of waiting are tacked onto each trip.

As James Fallows vividly explains, a technological revolution is under way that will relieve this problem. Free Flight features the stories of three groups who are inventing and building the future of all air travel: NASA, Cirrus Design in Duluth, Minnesota, and Eclipse Aviation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. These ventures should make it possible for more people to travel the way corporate executives have for years: in small jet planes, from the airport that's closest to their home or office directly to the airport closest to where they really want to go. This will be possible because of a product now missing from the vast array of flying devices: small, radically inexpensive jet planes, as different from airliners as personal computers are from mainframes. And, as Fallows explains in a new preface, a system that avoids the congestion of the overloaded hub system will offer advantages in speed, convenience, and especially security in the new environment of air travel.

Published by PublicAffairs. Buy the book

Breaking The News

Why do Americans mistrust the news media? It may be because show like "The McLaughlin Group" reduce participating journalists to so many shouting heakds. Or because, increasingly, the profession treats issues as complex as health-care reform and foreign policy as exercises in political gamesmanship. These are just a few of the arguments that have made Breaking the News so controversial and so widely acclaimed. Drawing on his own experience as a National Book Award-winning journalist--and on the gaffes of colleagues from George Will to Cokie Roberts--Fallows shows why the media have not only lost our respect but alienated us from our public life.

Published by Vintage. Buy the book

Looking at the Sun

In a timely, even prophetic, portrait of Asia's rise and the magnitude of its challenge to the West, Fallows demolishes the myth that Japan is a capitalist country built on the Western model. He demonstrates instead how Japan's economic system treats business as an instrument of national interest while casting aside the traditional Western values of individual enterprise and human rights.

Published by Vintage. Buy the book