War on war

Is war the ultimate evil or simply a brutal but necessary tool that brings peace? That's the question Ian Morris explores in his latest book, "War! What is it Good for?" which I had the pleasure of reviewing for the Weekly. Like Bill Hicks talking about drugs, Morris thinks wars have "done some good things" and he has all the number to prove it. Needless to say, I'm not convinced.

Here is my take on what I read:

War and peace

Stanford professor argues you can't have the latter without the former

by Gennady Sheyner

"War! What is it Good for?: Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots," by Ian Morris; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2014; 512 pages; $30

Wars, Martin Luther King Jr. once said, are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.

Ian Morris respectfully disagrees. In his latest book, "War! What is it Good for?: Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots," the Stanford professor makes the opposite case. For all the gore, death and destruction, war is in fact the surest path to peace, Morris argues in his learned, engaging and highly debatable book.

"Contrary to what the song says, war has been good for something: Over the long run, it has made humanity safer and richer," Morris writes in the introduction. "War is hell, but -- again, over the long run -- the alternative would have been worse."

The book's breadth is sweeping. In describing the "long run," the Stanford archeologist, historian and biologist traverses thousands of years of human history and dozens of civilizations. In some ways, he follows the venerable tradition of works like Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel," Samuel P. Huntington's "The Clash of Civilizations" and Francis Fukuyama's two-part "The Origins of Political Order" -- acclaimed tomes that survey the world from a high academic perch and offer broad-stroke conclusions about how we got to where we are -- and where we're going next.

Much like Morris' 2010 opus "Why the West Rules -- For Now," his new work is lucid, provocative, more than a little Eurocentric and extremely entertaining.

To bolster his argument that war is a necessary ingredient for peace, Morris cobbles together insights from history, archeology, military studies and biology, and traces the level of violence (measured in deaths per thousand residents) in societies historic and modern.

Much of the story is well-known turf for readers familiar with Diamond's work, which devotes many pages to explaining how geography, agriculture and technology largely determined which civilizations are the world's "haves" and which are the "have-nots." In Morris' book, like Diamond's, guns, germs and steel remain the major drivers of change. Geography is once again a critical determinant, with the regions located in the "lucky latitudes" (a fertile strip that extends from the Roman Empire in the west to China in the east) experiencing the joys of civilization well before other areas of the globe.

The story predictably begins with massacre. It's the year 83 A.D., and Roman legions armed with chain mail, iron shields and short swords are gleefully slaughtering thousands of Caledonians in the British highlands. By this time, the Romans have already conquered much of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Morris recounts a passionate pre-battle speech in which Calgacus, the leader of the Caledonians (a Celtic people), encourages his "jostling, disorderly men" to stand up to the invaders, whom he brands "the only people on earth who want to rob rich and poor alike."

"They call it stealing, killing and rape by the lying name of government! They make a wasteland and call it peace!" Calgacus shouts in a futile attempt to rally his troops.

The battle predictably ends in carnage, with about 10,000 Caledonians killed by Roman soldiers who "speared everything that moved and trampled anything that did not."

Squeamish readers may find this whole spearing business unseemly, but for Morris, the Roman blitz is the prime example of what he calls a "productive war" (one of several terms in the book that almost seem designed to make a pacifist seethe). A productive war strengthens the Leviathan of state, subdues roving bandits and turns disparate tribes into cohesive and at times prosperous societies, Morris argues. In the Middle East, for example, the Assyrian Empire became the dominant force, uniting disparate villages under one political structure before getting conquered by Persia, which in turn was defeated by Alexander the Great.

Between 10,000 and 1 B.C., most major civilizations followed the same pattern, albeit on different schedules (Mesopotamia and Asia were generally ahead of Mesoamerica and the Andes). Discovery of agriculture (which "caged" people in one location) was followed by domestication of wild horses (around 4000 B.C., on the steppes of what is now Ukraine), establishment of cities and states, development of military technology (bronze, composite bows, city fortifications and chariots) and, ultimately, the creation of empires. In China, India, Egypt and other lucky-latitude civilizations, the trend in the first few millennia B.C. was toward larger armies, stronger states and fewer violent deaths. These were the salad days for the Leviathan.

The good times, however, wouldn't last. By the first century A.D., nomadic horse-riding barbarians from the steppes began to invade the newly forged empires in what Morris calls "counterproductive wars." Between 200 and 1400 A.D., these wars had become more lethal, threatening and at times toppling entire empires. Scythian armies long associated with mere banditry conquered large swaths of the Middle East and celebrated their conquests by scalping their conquered enemies. Goth tribes looted and pillaged Greece and Rome, Turkish horsemen swept through the steppes of central Asia and Mongol invaders terrorized China's northwest frontier, turning generals into warlords and splitting the Han kingdom into three warring empires. Leviathans across the "lucky latitudes" became toothless. The "bloody breakdown of great empires was becoming the norm."

This is where Morris' account of war as a force of cohesion becomes shaky. With so many exceptions, one may wonder, how can Morris' rule still hold true? If we accept the book's premise that war generally leads to stronger empires and less violence, we have to write off roughly 1400 years of barbarian rampage as an inconvenient exception. Current events put another dent in the theory. The idea that war is a steroid for the world's superpowers is less than convincing in light of ISIS soldiers threatening to tear apart the governments of Syria and Iraq.

Yet even with these dark gaps, Morris remains bullish, and for that we have Europe to thank. In Morris' history of the world, the barbarian age ultimately gives way to what he calls the "Five Hundred Years War," a period between 1415 and 1914 in which Europe almost "conquered the world." To a less hawkish reader (or anyone in the conquered colonies of America and Africa), five centuries of unending warfare may sound like a tedious and terrifying prospect. For Morris, these wars (the most "productive" the world has ever seen) were exactly what the globe needed. With guns now in common usage, European armadas gobbling up new colonies and capitalism spreading faster than the Spanish plague in the New World, the war between Europe and the rest of the world was a mismatch.

Morris writes: "By 1914, Europeans and their colonists ruled 84 percent of the land and 100 percent of the sea. In their imperial heartland, around the shores of the North Atlantic, violent death had fallen lower than ever before and standards of living had risen higher. As always, the defeated fared less well than the victors, and in many places colonial conquest had devastating consequences. But once again, when we step back from the details to look at the larger picture, a broad pattern emerges. On the whole, the conquerors did suppress local wars, banditry and private use of deadly force, and began making their subjects' lives safer and richer."

This passage, like many others in Morris' book, harkens back to the old adage made famous by New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, who excused Joseph Stalin's atrocities with the now infamous line, "You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs." Morris notes that while war made humanity safer and richer, "it has done so through mass murder." The latter, in his history of the world, is the price we had to pay for the former. But we may also ask: Is this really his call to make?

It may be true, as the author maintains, that "in the long run," war has done more good than harm. For evidence he gives us analysis showing that the rate of violent death was about 10 to 20 percent in Stone Age societies and 2 to 5 percent for ancient empires before falling to 1 to 2 percent in the 20th century. On the one hand, this is great news. On the other, this is a strictly utilitarian argument that downplays the inherent moral quandaries. The cost of prosperity can be steep, and stark numerical analysis doesn't always offer a full picture.

Even if we grant Morris' claim that war has made "humanity safer and richer," does this historical trend justify the Romans' slaughter of the Caledonians, the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, Nanking and the Holocaust? Are even "productive" wars worth fighting? Morris seems to think they are, yet one can't help but wonder: Would Calgacus agree?

A Requiem for the American Dream

George Packer usually doesn't sound like Chicken Little, so I was struck by his decision to title his new book "The Unwinding." The book features profiles of regular Americans, from Silicon Valley to Florida, and pithy character sketches about the nation's rich and famous (Oprah, Sam Walton, Newt Gingrich and many others). Packer, a Palo Alto native who writes for The New Yorker, is a sharp-eyed, humorous commentator on American culture (his spring article about Bay Area's start-up culture was as profound as it was entertaining). But while his reporting is always thorough and his writing always sizzles, his point that America is going through a period of "unwinding," characterized by a collapse of long-standing institutions, felt simplistic and uncharacteristically sensational. Thankfully, the book offers plenty of evidence to counteract the title, as well as the kind of lively, insightful, entertaining and at times heart-breaking reporting I've come to expect from Packer. My review of "The Unwinding" for the Weekly appeared in the Sept. 20 edition.

Here is my review, slightly longer than the one that ran in print.

A Requiem for the American Dream

There's no sign of Normal Rockwell in George Packer's America: no turkeys carved, no carols sung, no smiling dads or sizzling logs. Instead, Packer's new book, “The Unwinding,” gives us tales abandoned factories, broken families, Beltway lobbyists, wilting Florida subdivisions and blue-collar Americans struggling to keep their heads above the quicksands of poverty, bankruptcy and crime.

 

Packer, a Gunn High graduate and veteran writer for The New Yorker, has a sharp eye for crumbling institutions. In “The Assassin's Gate,” his nuanced 2005 collection of dispatches from Iraq, he illustrates America's misadventure in Mesopotamia by chronicling the stories of soldiers, bureaucrats and regular Iraqis. Other Packer stories took us to Sierra Leone, Egypt and the Ivory Coast.

In his new book, Packer demonstrates that you don't need a passport to chronicle misery, poverty, destruction and resilience. The book's title refers to the whittling away of long-standing America's institutions, a phenomenon that in Packer's account begins at around 1980, when union jobs began to fade away. If you were born after 1960, he writes, “you have spent your adult life in the vertigo of that unwinding. You watched structures that had been in place before your birth collapse like pillars of salt across the vast visible landscape.”

“When the norms that made the old institutions useful began to unwind, and the leaders abandoned their posts, the Roosevelt Republic that had reigned for almost half a century came undone,” Packer writes in the prologue. “The void was filled by the default force in American life, organized money.”

The phenomenon isn't all bad. The unwinding shakes things up but it also brings freedom, “more than the world has ever granted, and to more kinds of people than ever before.” And with freedom, Packer writes, “the unwinding brings illusions, for all these pursuits are as fragile as thought balloons popping against circumstances.” It also raises the stakes. Winners “win bigger than ever, floating away like bloated dirigibles, and losers have a long way to fall before they hit bottom, and sometimes they never do.”

No one illustrates the dark side of “unwinding” better than Tammy Thomas, a factory worker from Youngstown. In the early 1980s, as one steel mill after another shuts its doors, her hometown becomes one of the first to go through now familiar phases of post-industrial decay: white flight, gang takeover, drugs, violence and poverty. In 1983, Packer tells us, bankruptcies doubled and unemployment in the Mahoning Valley hovered above 20 percent, tops in the nation.

Nothing comes easy for Thomas. As a child, she is embarrassed to invite friends to her Grandma's house, where she is staying, because thieves have stolen the front door. At 15, she has her first baby (two more quickly follow). After high-school, she gets her first job as a factory worker at Packard, making electrical components for General Electric on an assembly line. The wages are meager but they suffice, even if the work “beat you down.” Her friends and relatives get gunned down. Her mother is a crack addict. She moves to safer neighborhoods just before they cease to be safer neighborhoods. We follow Thomas as she develops asthma from dipping copper wires into melted lead that “felt like her chest and back were trying to touch” and “Packard hands” (what we now call carpal tunnel syndrome) that were so painful they woke her up at night years after she stopped working.

After her company gets sold and rebranded in 2009, Thomas accepts a buyout, turns to political activism and has her “I'm not going to take this anymore” moment. Writes Packer:

“She thought about being forced to retire from Packard, and the CEO, and upper-level staff getting their bonuses while leaving all these people without jobs, decimating a community, and some of the banks getting bailed out with her tax dollars, and she still couldn't get a loan from them while she had to pay her mortgage every month. 'That makes me want to say, 'What the F? It's the injustice of it.'”

Thomas is one of many characters in Packer's book to channel populist rage against the American machine, a sentiment that hits its highest note in Packer's brilliantly reported chapter on the Occupy Wall Street, which was adapted from his New Yorker story and which is one of the highlights of “The Unwinding.” But things get dicier when we get to some of other main characters in Packer's book. Jeff Connaughton's story, if anything, runs counter to the book's central message.

As a youngster, this political idealist with the “lifelong inferiority complex that's bred into boys of Alabama” becomes infatuated by a charismatic politician named Joseph Biden. He spends a few years in investment banking before joining Biden's campaign, where he takes on the thankless role of a fundraiser. He becomes, in D.C. Parlance, a “Biden guy” and learns all about D.C.'s incestuous revolving-door culture, where who you know is the key to power, respect and recognition. Years later, Connaughton joins the lobbying giant Quinn Gillespie and officially becomes a card-carrying member of “the class of Washingtonians – lobbyists, lawyers, advisers, consultants, pundits, consiglieres, fixers – who shuttled between the shower of corporate cash ever falling on the capital and a series of increasingly prominent positions in Democratic Party politics.”

“Wealth added to their power, power swelled their wealth,” Packer writes in a typical Packer passage.
“They connected special interests to party officials using the adhesive of fundraising. They ate breakfast with politicians, lunch with the heads of trade associations, and dinner with other Professional Democrats. Behind their desks were 'power walls' -- photo galleries showing them smiling next to the highest-ranking politicians they knew. Their loyalty was first, then their former boss in politics, then their party, and then – if he was a Democrat – the president.”

Packer's writing is never dull, even if the substance sometimes feels familiar. You don't need to watch “House of Cards” or read Mark Leibovich's much-hyped Beltway expose, “This Town,” to know about the dirty mix of money and power in the nation's capital. This isn't news. Packer starts his book in 1978, but the time frame feels almost arbitrary. His point about collapsing American structures getting filled by moneyed interests doubtlessly would've been just as valid half a century ago, if not earlier. “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” after all came out in 1939, nearly two decades after the Teapot Dome scandal rocked the Harding administration. In fact, if there is one thing apparent to anyone who watches CNN or reads the paper it's just how resilient the nation's political structures are, for better or worse

 

For this reason, the entire idea that America is undergoing an “unwinding” feels less like a real argument and more like a device meant to staple the disparate stories together. Packer's assertion that Americans are now “alone on a landscape without solid structures” is rarely supported by the book's own evidence. When her union life collapses, Tammy Thomas becomes a community organizes, effectively exchanging one structure for another. Dean Price, a biofuel pioneer who gets intoxicated by Napoleon Hill's “Think and Grow Rich” dictums, is a lone wolf, but mostly by choice. Even when Price hits rock bottom -- when his business partners reject him, the legislature he is banking on for fizzle and his debts mount -- there remains the hope that through bankruptcy process (another stable American institutions) he will find a fresh start. As for Connaughton, if he is is “alone,” then so is everyone else in his “class of Washingtonians.”

Packer is at the top of his game when writing about the exuberance of Bay Area's start-up culture. In a May article in The New Yorker titled “Can Silicon Valley Embrace Politics?” he visits a group of young techies in a San Francisco start-up called Path and listens to a guy named Dave Morin (whose resume includes Apple and Facebook) describe the city as a “a place where we can go downstairs and get in an Uber and go to dinner at a place that I got a restaurant reservation for halfway there.” This triggers Packer's delightful epiphany:

“It suddenly occurred to me that the hottest tech start-ups are solving all the problems of being twenty years old, with cash on hand, because that’s who thinks them up.”

“The Unwinding” revisits Silicon Valley and gives us an expanded version Packer's New Yorker profile of Peter Thiel, the quirky, entrepreneurial “disruptor” for whom the unwinding is a chance to shine. Writes Packer,

“As a libertarian, Thiel welcomed an America in which people could no longer rely on old institutions or get by in communities with longstanding sources of security, where they knew where they stood and what they were bound for. All that was anathema to Thiel's worldview. He believed in striking out into the void alone, inventing oneself out of ambitious, talent, and abstractions -- so the unwinding allowed him to thrive. But he also stood at the center of a tight-knit group of friends, almost all men, most of them young, like-minded Silicon Valley successes who had gotten rich around the same time....”

So what does this libertarian champion of individuality and non-conformity do once he makes his billions off Facebook, PayPal and Palantir? Naturally, like every other champion of individuality and non-conformity, he begins to “live the life of a Silicon Valley billionaire.” He hires “two blond, black-clad female assistants, a white-coated butler, and a cook, who prepared a daily health drink of celery, beets, kale and ginger.” He buys a Ferrari, flies in private jets and throws parties in his lavish mansion. Needless to say, Thiel came to work in a T-Shirt -- the official uniform of champions of individuality and non-conformity. Strangely, Packer doesn't seem to see the irony in Thiel's venture firm, Clarium, developing a reputation “of a Thiel cult, staffed by young libertarian brains who were in awe of their boss, emulating his work habits, chess playing, and aversion to sports.”

A “cult” of “libertarians” may sound like the ultimate contradiction to a reader who hasn't encountered an Ayn Rand fan lately. In Thiel's case, it's just one of many. Take, for example, the Thiel Fellowship, which pays bright students $100,000 to forego college for two years in favor of pursuing their own ideas. According to the book, Peter Thiel started the fund because he “disliked the whole idea of using college to find an intellectual focus.”

“Majoring in the humanities struck his as particularly unwise, since it so often led to the default choice of law school. The academic sciences were nearly as dubious -- timid and narrow, driven by turf battles rather than the quest for breakthroughs. Above all, a college education taught nothing about entrepreneurship,” Packer writes.

This idea is a dubious one, even if we set aside the fact that Thiel himself had spent seven years at Stanford and had graduated from the Stanford Law School. Thiel's assertion that college education teaches nothing about entrepreneurship may come as surprise to the Larry Pages and Sergei Brins of the world, whose entrepreneurship skills remained intact even despite(!) Stanford. Nor is it clear that a humanities major is as worthless as Thiel claims. A student who spends her days reading Aristotle and Kant may never build the perfect drone, but she might be better equipped than Thiel when it comes to knowing when to use it. And while a humanities major may not lead a student to the Promise Land of white-coated butlers and kale-and-ginger shakes, it just might protect her from the type of demagoguery espoused by Thiel and his past and present heroes, Ayn Rand and Ron Paul.

It would have been nice to see someone like Packer engage -- perhaps even challenge -- Thiel's ideas rather than simply lay them out. But that is not the function of “Unwinding.” This book is about narratives, not arguments. It's about showing us scenes from today's America and letting us jump to our own conclusions. Despite a populist undertone, Packer shies away from directly articulating any Thomas Friedman-like theory or seriously engaging the argument he makes in his prologue and title. Rather, he is an observer and a reporter and Thiel is just one of many colorful fragments in Packer's vivid kaleidoscope of America.

The savage beauty of "The Son"

In Philipp Meyer's "The Son," it doesn't take a Comanche raiding party, an assault from gun-happy Texas Rangers or an old-fashioned shootout to fill the eye of the reader's mind with blood and gore. To be sure, there is enough violence in this beautiful book to make Tarantino fans blush and to warrant automatic Cormac McCarthy comparisons. This is, after all, frontier Texas, which is as close a representation as we have in literature of America in its purest, most primitive form, the kind of America that England most certainly was not. And McCarthy is the dean of this bleak, masculine Texas, a country truly unfit for the squeamish man.

Yet Meyer's voice bears little resemblance to McCarthy's, whose brilliant, distinct brand of bleakness has made him as easy target for caricature as Ernest Hemingway. One need look no further than YelpingWithCormac.tumbr.com, which features the following review of American Apparel: "A stinking host clad in patchwork tunics of brightest cotton. As if their carnival colors could mask the blackness of their nature."

Meyer doesn't pull punches in describing the horrific violence, but instead of one voice, he gives us at least five. The strongest voice, and the one that will resonate loudest after "The Son" concludes, belongs to Eli McCullough, the first son we encounter in this multi-generational Texas epic. Abandoned by his father, a wayward Ranger, Eli sees his family get massacred by a Comanche raiding party, which kidnaps and ultimately adopts him. Over the course of the book, Eli's story is the story of early Texas: the frontier wars, the rise of the Rangers, a stint in the Confederacy, the cattle drives and, ultimately, oil. His presence looms large even in chapters devoted to other members of his clan, his sentimental son, Peter (the most relatable but least appealing character in the novel... in short, the anti-Eli) and Peter's granddaughter, Jeannie, the new McCullough matriarch who takes us into the present.

Meyer's narrative device works wonders. Each generation informs the other. By reading Peter and Jeannie's musings, we come to appreciate Eli and how he became what he is. He is a ruthless bastard, eager with a gun and quick to dispense justice. Like Omar on "The Wire" (another popular comparison), he is a killer who understands the old maxim, "Man gotta have a code."

But it doesn't take murder to get to the blood and guts in The Son." Sometimes, it takes a simple exposition about nourishment from the priceless section when Eli lives with the Comanches.

"If water was scarce, the veins of animals were opened and the blood drunk before it had time to clot. The skull was cracked, the brains stirred on rawhide and eaten as well, being fatty and tender; the teats of any lactating cows were cut and the warm milk sucked directly from them. If the brains were not eaten immediately they were taken to tan hides; every animal has enough brains to tan its own hide, except the buffalo, which was too large."

There is beauty in Meyer's violent scenes, whether spoken by Colonel or (by Texas standards) lesser men. His lyricism and eye for detail are apparent when Peter -- the pacifist black sheep who dares fall in love with a Mexican woman -- describes the shootout that ensues after a few horses get stolen from his property. Eager for vengeance, Colonel (as Eli is later known) goes off to seek justice, accompanied by his men and a small squad of trigger-happy Rangers. Peter's attempt to approach the Garcia household peacefully falls flat and within minutes a fuselage of bullets rains on the Garcia house.

"The bullets continued to snap overhead. I was looking at Bill Hollis when a pale cloud appeared and his eyes went wide as if he's had some realization. His rifle clattered over the wall and he lay down his head as if taking a nap. I had a vision of him playing the fiddle in our parlor while his brother sang."

From this chaos comes order -- the state of Texas that plays by its own rules, where a man's word is worth more than a lawyer's contract; where killing a thief is an God-given right; where nonviolence is weakness; where family matters and business is pleasure. "The Son" explains Ron Paul's libertarianism and Rick Perry's swagger. It doesn't explain why Texas just declared war on abortion, but it does explain why it doesn't give a rats ass about how people like me feel about this war. "What, then, is the American, this new man?" J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur famously asked in 1782. "Here I am, you son of a bitch," Eli McCullough replies.

The mood gets more somber and reflective when we get to the Jeannie chapters (also known as the J.A. McCullough chapters, depending on her age at the time of writing). She is old now, and there is proud wisdom in her voice as she reflects on the many glass ceilings she had to break to become the family's last oil tycoon. In her early years, she has to face the usual sexism and distrust from the hypocritical traditionalists around her. "She was a slut or a dyke or a whore. A man trapped in a woman's body ..." she reflects at one point. At another, she considers the difference between her and the other oil men.

"To be a man meant not living by any rules at all," J.A. McCullough ponders late in life. "You could say one thing in church and another at the bar and somehow both were true. You could be a good husband and father and Christian and bed every secretary, waitress, and prostitute that caught your eye."

Through her successes and anxieties, Jeannie shows herself to be Eli's perfect grandson. She picks up the main threads of Meyer's majestic, survivalist narratives and demonstrates the cyclical nature of time. Texas is a different world now, but how little it has changed, the Jeannie chapters teach us. In the most simplistic sense possible, it's a modern state with a frontier soul. It has our respect, not that it wants it.

Which brings us back to de Crevecoeur and his question. For him, an American was an immigrant whose experience pulls him apart from Europe. This process, he concluded, extinguishes in the process "all his European prejudices" and forces him to forget the "servility of disposition which poverty has taught him." The Texas of Philipp Meyer has its share of servility and poverty, racism and class hierarchy, torture and death, but these things barely obscure the American spirit de Crevecoeur identified a century before the Colonel struck gold. Money and power still rule, but these commodities are generally amassed through a ruthless, bloody meritocracy -- a quality that justifiably makes the nation proud. There are no powdered wigs in "The Son."

The veterans in the early chapter weren't born on cotton plantation; they are survivors who paid their dues through blood, skill and toughness. If you steal the Colonel's horses, he will track you down, call you pard'ner, engage you in a bit of small talk, hang a noose around your neck, tie the rope to a tree and tell you that it's either here and now or the sheriff later, so why waste time? No one argues. Everyone understands the rules. Good or evil, this is the bleak and beautiful Darwinism in Meyer's Texas. Or, as they say in David Simon's Baltimore, "It's all in the game."

Under Siege

I don’t eat meat, but I have my own trick for making my Thanksgiving meal savory: a book about hunger. Nothing depressing. No emaciated Ethiopians, concentration camps, or sepia photos of dour-faced Oklahomans creeping in their rusty lorries through dusty fields. Instead, I sought solace and well-being in Daniel Bentioff’s, “City of Thieves,” a work of fiction that pretends to be semi-nonfiction but ultimately gets dragged down by the unbearable weight of its sappy artifice.

The book is a quick and engaging read, which helps explain its longstanding perch on bestseller lists and conspicuous ubiquity at bookstores nationwide. The story is set in Leningrad in the waning days of World War II, when the city is under siege and its residents are starving. The narrative is carried by the fictional author’s grandpa, a former solider who had settled in America in the decades after the told escapades. We thus know, right off the bat, that the hero, Lev, will make it -- a no small matter given the number of bullets flying toward him over those 200-plus pages.

The grandson narrator freely acknowledges that, as a writer, he has taken some liberties with Lev’s story. But by the time the story ends, it becomes clear that this is a colossal understatement. The plot is delightfully absurd. Lev gets caught looting a corpse and faces imprisonment or worse. As he is detained, he meets another man in a similar predicament, a muscular, sex-crazed, salty-tongued companion named Kolya. The odd couple has an unusual assignment -- find a dozen eggs and deliver them to a Soviet colonel, who needs the eggs for a wedding cake for his daughter. So far so good. But what begins as a bleak but brisk-paced tale full of dark-humored naturalism gets bogged down in fake pathos and over-the-top action. The comically absurd becomes the painfully absurd as Bentioff, scraps emotional honesty in favor of fake pathos and over-the-top action scenes that would be better placed in Tarantino movie than in a book of historical fiction. The pages turn quickly but the book disappointedly devolves into action-packed melodrama -- a “Water for Elephants” with testicles.

 Sure, there are plenty of smiles and tears to complement the bullets and grenades, but the laughs are generally triggered dirty jokes and the tears are those of melodrama. But the lingering feeling after the final page is one of frustration and disappointment at the wasted opportunity. Bentioff is a Hollywood screenwriter, not a historian, which explains why “City of Thieves” is the way it is. He is a gifted and engaging storyteller, which helps explain the book’s success and which makes it a fine airplane companion. Unfortunately, a reader hungry for a meatier, weightier war story, with emotional honesty and  fare should scour elsewhere.

Read this tomorrow

Oh deadline, where the hell art thou? Without you, a procrastinator like myself feels lost at sea -- a useless slug in a world of dirty dishes, brisk novels and lofty thoughts doomed to never get anywhere. And that's the problem with having a blog -- no deadlines, no stick, no motivation and no posts for a month. The horror. The horror!

But I'm out of my writing coma now and I have Dr. Perry to thank. That's John Perry, a professor of philosophy at Stanford University. He wrote a useful guide for people like me -- a pithy, read-in-one-sitting gem called "The Art of Procrastination" that I reviewed for the Weekly and that ran this week. The fact that it's an "art" makes me feel better. The fact that it brought me back here after an inexcusable delay fills me with hope. Here it is (also found at http://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/story.php?story_id=18049):

In praise of tomorrow

John Perry's quest to make life easier for the procrastinator

"The Art of Procrastination: A Guide to Effective Dawdling, Lollygagging and Postponing," by John Perry, Workman Publishing Company, 112 pp., $12.95

It's a real shame that most of the people John Perry targets in his new book, "The Art of Procrastination: A Guide to Effective Dawdling, Lollygagging and Postponing," will never get around to reading it because they're too busy scrubbing clean pots, finishing last Sunday's crossword puzzle or sweeping crumbs and pennies from beneath their couch cushions.

It's a shame not just because Perry's book offers plenty of simple and practical tips to the chronic delayer. The witty, breezy volume also serves as a support group of sorts, a warm hug and a pat on the back to those of us all too skilled at tuning out that annoying sound of time's winged chariot hurrying near. He calls his book of musings "a sort of philosophical self-help program for depressed procrastinators" and he doesn't disappoint.

The scope of the book is mercifully limited. A veteran procrastinator himself, he knows his readership well and he points out in the conclusion that most self-help books for procrastinators look down on the habit. Perry's doesn't try to plumb the deeper mysteries of the procrastinator's psyche or engage in the type of neuroscience jargon that characterizes much of today's pop science. As the title makes clear, procrastination to Perry is an art, not a science — a fact that offers little comfort to those of us looking for a quick fix. No magic pill can cure us of our affliction (if one existed, we'd pop it first thing tomorrow). No surgery can fix us up (even if it could, we'd spend a year weighing its pros and cons). We can't even pin the blame on some obscure virus whose Latin name would at least lend our paralyzing condition a shred of dignity and legitimacy. No, when it comes to chronic procrastination, the enemy is within and defeating him typically involves an intricate chain of self-deception, self-flagellation and a rack of dishes that sparkle mischievously after repeated washings while a story lies unwritten or the manuscript lies unedited or the homework lies uncompleted while the clock ticks away.

Perry, a Stanford University philosophy professor, is here to guide us through the endless cycle of deception, disappointment and deadlines. The key, Perry claims, is to become a "structured procrastinator," which he defines as "a person who gets a lot done by not doing other things."

"Oddly enough, once we realize that we are structured procrastinators, not only do we feel better about ourselves but we also actually improve somewhat in our ability to get things done, because, once the miasma of guilt and despair clears, we have a better understanding of what keeps us from doing those things," Perry writes.

To cope with the problem, Perry prescribes a series of simple solutions with complicated names. Chief among these is "task triage," the art of sorting your list of tasks according to urgency and determining which of these tasks demand perfection and which can be relegated to the just-good-enough pile. The exercise is offered as a treatment for a symptom (or possibly the cause) of procrastination — the self-defeating drive toward perfection that keeps one from getting anything done. The task triage, Perry explains, gives the tortured procrastinator the permission to do an imperfect job right at the outset of the activity. By consciously deciding which tasks can be accomplished without perfection, the paralyzed perfectionist effectively turns down the pressure and frees himself up to proceed with no (or at least little) delay.

While task triage is Perry's solution to prioritizing projects, he relies on a more traditional tool for planning daily activities — the to-do list. To him, however, these lists are palliatives as much as directives. The Stanford philosopher understands the giddy comfort that comes with checking a box on a list, regardless of the activity being checked off ("It helps us to think of ourselves as doers, accomplishers, and not just lazy slugs. It gives us psychological momentum," Perry writes of checking boxes). His own to-do lists, which he says he tries to make before he goes to bed, are far from imposing. The first seven items on the list — turn off the alarm, don't hit the snooze button, get out of bed, go to the bathroom, don't get back in bed, go downstairs, make coffee — get accomplished by the time he sits down with his first coffee cup, as he points out.

The detailed to-do list is a particularly useful tool because it allows the procrastinator to break down large, daunting tasks into small, conquerable increments and to pat himself on the back at every increment. He finds similar guidance in Kaizen, the "Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement through small, implementable steps." He encourages his disciples to lean on these ancient teachings from the East.

"If you say you are adopting the Kaizen Way, rather than simply that you're trying to procrastinate less, you will sound like you have adopted a martial arts regimen," Perry writes. "That's kind of cool."

A cousin of the to-do list is the "not-to-do" list — Perry's preemptive strike against foreseeable distractions. His examples, which likely sound familiar to procrastinators and regular people alike, include "do not check email" and "do not start surfing the web." The latter habit, as the perpetual delayer knows too well, is particularly vexing, and Perry helpfully devotes an entire chapter to the love-hate relationship between the procrastinator and the computer. His solution? Surf only when you know you'll be interrupted.

"I log on when I'm already hungry or I'm sure my wife is going to pop in with some urgent task before too long or I am already feeling the first signs of a full bladder," Perry writes. "If you use a laptop, another ploy is to unplug it before you start your email; the spell will be broken when the battery dies — although as batteries improve, this technique becomes less useful."

Perry's prescriptions, whether for finishing projects or getting through the day, tend to target symptoms rather than the disease, which in his mind isn't such a bad one to have. It's good, for example, to play lively music in the morning (even if it's bad music) to get out of bed and inject some momentum into your day. It's also useful to collaborate on projects with non-procrastinators, who as Perry points out "will likely have already started on many tasks by the time you are ready to plunge in." His solutions are clear, easy to implement and demonstrate a deep, nuanced understanding of the procrastinator's inner dilemmas. He doesn't chide or slap wrists. You are who you are, gentle procrastinator, Perry seems to say. Live with it and let me help you.

At certain points in the book, Perry comes close to but stops just short of glorifying procrastinators. He acknowledges that procrastination is a "flaw, not a well-hidden virtue," but then spends much of his treatise praising this flaw with faint damning. The goal, he writes, "isn't to find a philosophy of life that makes procrastinators into heroes (although it might be fun to try to work out the principles). I simply want to note that it's not the worst flaw in the world; you can be a procrastinator and still get a lot of work done. Plus, with good self-deception skills and the little bit of willpower that allows you to manipulate yourself, you can become less of a procrastinator."

The problem he diagnoses is all too real and, for some of us, far too familiar. The solutions sound plausible and comforting. But desperate cases and those looking for more substantive changes (perhaps making that astronomical leap from "structured procrastinator" to "actual achiever") might need heavier medication. Reading "The Art of Procrastination" made me want to get crazy with checkmarks, compose a not-to-do list, flip my alarm-clock radio to a station that plays something jollier than static, close my browser and meet a few more go-getters. These things will get done. First thing tomorrow.

Chinese bullet

Liu Zhijun, also known as Great Leap Liu, had a sweeping vision -- to construct a high-speed-rail system and to rescue China from an embarrassing legacy of crammed, crawling trains. As Evan Osnos showed in his New Yorker article, "Boss Rail," Liu succeeded much too well. Liu blasted through China's bureaucratic rates, a climb to the top propelled by kickbacks and rewarded by paramours (his 18 mistresses are as much as testament his stamina as his public-works achievements). Liu succeeded in building the 7,500-mile train system in record time, though his ambition ultimately landed him in jail for corruption. His name, Osnos notes, has been generally purged from China's celebratory news releases. The July 23, 2011 crash of bullet train D301, which killed 40 people, took some gleam off this proud accomplishment.

The incident, and Osnos' wonderful article as a whole, made me think about my home state of California, which is preparing to lay the tracks for its own rail system -- a project I've been covering since January 2009, when rail officials hosted their first scoping meeting on the mammoth project. To be sure. California can't compete with China for the scale of corruption, cost overruns and mismanagement. But when it comes to high-speed rail, that's surely not for the lack of effort. The project received a literate vote of confidence from Californians in November 2008 (the vote  approved a $9.95 billion bond for the $33.6 billion-at-the-time project). Its progress since then has been a series of missteps, management errors, conflicts of interest, scathing audits, lawsuits, managerial mishaps and souring public opinion. Gov. Jerry Brown sees the San Francisco-to-Los Angeles high-speed-rail system as his transformational "legacy" project (will future generations call him "Great Leap" Brown?). But in recent months, he's had some troubles convincing even his fellow Democrats to share his vision. Despite his party's dominance of the Senate, the bill authorizing roughly $ billion in funding for high-speed rail and other train improvements passed the state Senate by a single vote in July.

The Democrats who were most familiar with the project through committee assignments -- Joe Simitian, Alan Lowenthal and Mark Desaulnier, all voted against the rail bill. Each argued that high-speed rail is a great concept but that the current plan is badly flawed and should be reconsidered. They cited financial uncertainty and second-guessed the plan's key tenets -- including the decision to launch construction in the Central Valley. Simitian, who is concluding his final Senate term, gave an impassioned speech in explaining his "No" vote and rejected the supporters' assumption that the plan should be approved because it will generate jobs. The vote is not on a "vision" but on a specific plan that will cost the state billions of dollars during a fiscally turbulent time. "This is a question of whether or not we generate good jobs with the right plan or the wrong plan," he said.


Supporters, led by Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, didn't bother with the details. They virtually ignored the plan in front of them and talked about Abraham Lincoln building the Transcontinental Railroad, California's can-do spirit and construction of Golden Gate Bridge. If any of them had actually read the transformational bill they were about to vote on, they did a great job hiding the fact.

"In this era of term limits, how many chances do we have to vote for something this important and long-lasting?" Steinberg asked in a question that could just as easily refer to the world's biggest coal factory or a space station pegged for Saturn.

China's rail system is one of many invoked by California's rail officials to promote the state's own push. We are behind and we need to catch up, the argument goes. The California High-Speer Rail Authority's former CEO Roelof van Ark often stressed the agency's desire to learn from foreign partners and had traveled to China to solicit investments for the Golden State's fledgling efforts. So the Senate vote in July, and California's project as a whole, rarely strayed from my mind while I was reading Osnos' description of Great Leap Liu's "important and long-lasting" legacy project:

"China's most famous public-works project was an ecosystem almost perfectly hospitable to corruption -- opaque, unsupervised, and overflowing with cash, especially after the government announced a stimulus to mitigate the effects of the 2008 global financial crisis. It boosted funding for railway projects to more than a hundred billion dollars in 2010. In some cases, the bidding period was truncated from five days to 13 hours. In others, the bids were mere theatre, because construction had already begun. Cash was known to vanish, in one instance, seventy-eight million dollars that had been set aside to compensate people whose homes had been demolished to make way for railroad tracks disappeared. Middlemen expected cuts of between one and six per cent."

The problems with California's rail project are different from those in China, but the difference is mostly in degree. The parallels, meanwhile are jarring. The oversight in California is virtually nonexistent with a few dozen state staffers managing a team of more than a thousand consultants, who manage teams of subcontractors, who manage their own subcontractors. This problem has been flagged repeatedly by State Auditor Elaine Howle, who has repeatedly raised red flags about the project's weak oversight, including a slew improprieties carried out by the main project manager, the firm Parsons Brinckerhoff.

Howle flagged several suspicious rail expenditures, including $46,000 spent on furniture for a program manager. The payment was "based on an oral agreement, despite the fact that its written contract expressly states that oral agreements not incorporated in the written contract are not binding," her audit stated (the written contract required the manager "provide its own furniture, equipment and systems." The audit also noted a case in which the rail authority paid a regional contractor more than $194,000 to subcontract for tasks that were not included in the work plan -- one of many such transactions. Hardly the stuff that inspires confidence.
 
Howle is far from the only impartial official to blast the project. The Legislative Analyst's Office called the rail authority's decision to launch the line in Central Valley a "big gamble" based on "faulty assumptions" and concluded that the governance structure for the project "is too weak to ensure that this mega-project is coordinated and managed effectively." The office recommended not approving the bond money until these problems are corrected. The majority in the Legislature ignored this recommendation because, as the hard-to-refute argument goes, Lincoln built the Transcontinental Railroad.

Eric Thronson, who wrote the LAO report, also noted that the rail authority has "considerable autonomy" and that this "does not ensure that the board keeps the overall best interests of the state in mind as it makes critical decisions about the project."

"This relative lack of accountability to either the executive or legislative branches creates a risk that the board will pursue its primary mission — construction of the statewide high-speed rail system — without sufficient regard to other state considerations, such as state fiscal concerns," he wrote.

Howle voiced a similar sentiment when she wrote in her audit:

"The Authority's current organizational structure places the largest portion of the program's planning, construction, and most importantly, oversight in the hands of contractors who may not have the best interests of the State as their primary motivation," the report states. "As a result, the Authority lacks assurance that the program is implemented in a way that best serves the public."

The rail authority responded in May with a face-palm of a hiring decision, when it hired one of its main contractor to manage the entire project as the agency's CEO. The decision to name name Jeff Morales, a vice president at PB, as its new CEO earlier this year did little to comfort the project's growing swell of critics. For a project in which contractors have been in charge since Day One, the state's decision to give its main contractor the power to officially call all the shots can either be seen as a step toward greater transparency or toward giving California's most glaring conflict on interest the state's official seal of approval.

It's possible that things will turn around and that the badly botched $60 billion project (up from the original estimate of $33 billion in 2008) will become the envy of the rest of America. It's also possible that Central Valley will have a shiny new set of tracks for its moderate-speed trains, footed by the rest of the state at a time when teachers are getting canned and state parks are shuttering. It's possible that the $50 billion dollars that the state still needs for the project will magically materialize. And it's also possible that it won't, that the largest infrastructure project in California's history will die a low-speed death and that Legislators will start quoting Abraham Lincoln as they advocate for Brown's next legacy project. Water tunnels anyone?

"Born with a gift of a golden voice"

As a young man, he hobnobbed with Joni Michell, Lou Reed and Nico; jammed to his biggest hit with Jimi Hendrix; received a blowjob from Janis Joplin at New York City's Chelsea Hotel (and wrote a song about it); wrote poems and novels and climbed up the literary ladder of his hometown, Montreal. He was enchanted by a woman named Suzanne and fell in love with a woman named Marianne. He would immortalize them later. He lived in Greece, Montreal and New York.

As an older man, he tasted failure, suffered through depression ("I have no talent left/ I can't write a poem anymore/ You can call me Len or Lennie now/ Like you always wanted"), experimented with styles, producers, fasts and LSD, strummed his guitar before modestly attended shows, gradually conquered Canada, England and most of Europe ("First we take Manhattan/ Then we take Berlin" -- but in reverse order) and wrote songs for the top folk singers of his day.

As an even older man, with his fame catching up to him and America waking up to his talent, he retreated to a monastery to become an ordained Buddhist monk. His style changed -- he had synthesizers now and backup singers cooing as if in a choir. His voice matured into a rich baritone -- haunting, deep, crystal clear, almost hypnotic. His lyrics were sparse. Simple words with profound resonance. Religion. Mortality. Sex. Love (If you want a father for your child/ Or simply want to walk with me a while/ Across the sand/ I'm your man). He retreated to a monastery. Tribute albums and Best Of compilations arrived in droves. One of his hits was covered by Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Bono, Rufus Wainwright, Justin Timberlake, k.d. lang and (most memorably) Jeff Buckley. As a more pertinent sign of its prominence in the new millennium, Simon Cowell declared it one of his personal favorites. Another cover of this same song climbed to number one on the UK singles chart but was later pushed to number two by another cover of the same song ("Baby I have been here before/ I know this room, I've walked this floor/ I used to live alone before I knew you./ I've seen your flag on the marble arch/ Love is not a victory march/ It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah."). He stopped smoking and threw away his antidepressants. He said he wanted to fall with his eyes open.

He got engaged to Rebecca de Mornay in the early 1990s, but it didn't last. He cut an album with Rick Ruben. He lost his entire fortune in 2004, when a business associate to whom he entrusted his finances betrayed him. Now in his mid-70s, he was forced to go on a world tour. His sublime, three-hour performances are now the stuff of legend. He's a wit, a charmer, a fountain of wisdom and the ultimate gentleman. And he's still going strong, having just released a new album in January.

Leonard Cohen's voice was rolling through my head almost the whole time I was reading Sylvie Simmons' phenomenal new biography, "I'm your man: The Life of Leonard Cohen." That, in itself, is a great reason to read the book, but there are many others. Her research is astonishing, her writing is beautiful and she intersperses her tales of Cohen's fascinating life with interview snippets. She covers her subject with affection but doesn't shy away from chronicling his depression, anxieties and sexual liaisons. She talks to everyone and, more importantly, everyone seems to talk to her.

Consider Simmons' account of Leonard battling depression in the Mount Baldy Zen Center, a spartan Buddhist retreat close to Los Angeles where Cohen became "Jikan," a monk among monks subject to a rigorous daily routine. In describing the experience, Cohen compares the monk's life to "pebbles in a bag; one is always working shoulder to shoulder, so it has the same quality as life anywhere, the same sensations of love, hate, jealousy, rejection, admiration. It's ordinary life under a microscope."

His first stop after leaving Mount Baldy, Simmons notes, was McDonald's, to buy a Filet-O-Fish. "He would wash it down later with a glass of good French wine." He went home for a few days, watched some "Jerry Springer," realized what life outside the monastery is like, and went back to the mountain. The details sparkle.

Simmons also does a masterful job tracing Cohen's evolution as a musician, from a guitar-stroking folkster singing about tea and oranges to a fedora-wearing crooner predicting Apocalypse in front of a booming synthesizer. The difference is striking. The voice I hear when I listen to early versions of "Suzanne" and "Bird on a Wire" is indistinguishable from the one belonging to the "kid with a crazy dream," the Jewish monk in a fedora who enchanted the Paramount Theater crowd in Oakland in December 2010 (one of the most memorable concerts I've ever attended). The beautiful vocals of the Webb sisters and the soft notes coming from his band provided the perfect backdrop for Cohen's baritone ("I was born like this/ I had no choice/ I was born with a gift of a golden voice").

Cohen's wisdom is as soothing as his voice. When he loses his life savings, he doesn't panic or despair (though his history shows he was perfectly capable of both reactions). He tells his friends, "It's enough to put a dent in one's mood" and then rises up to even greater height. Crowds pack to see him. Women swoon and so do critics. Now 78, he remains on top of his game -- still, steady and free. A bird on a wire.

My favorite Cohen performance of "Hallelujah." Live in London, 2009:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrLk4vdY28Q