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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
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Blind Into Baghdad: America's War In Iraq
Free Flight: Inventing the Future of Travel
Breaking the News
Looking at the Sun
