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Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Here’s Looking at Euclid” by Alex Bellos

January 22, 2016

Screen Shot 2016-01-22 at 4.41.01 PMWe all learn to count, add, subtract, and do our multiplication tables in elementary school. From there we move on to more advanced calculations, geometry, algebra, a smattering of trigonometry, and, for some calculus, and then most of us are done. Much of what we learn – Euclidean geometry and the Pythagorean theorem – was known to the ancient Greeks, and the rest was developed a few centuries ago. As Alex Bellos puts it, in his eminently readable history “Here’s Looking at Euclid,” by “age 16, school kids have learned almost no math beyond what was already known in the mid-seventeenth century.” That’s because humans figured out the math basics centuries ago.

But we don’t learn this history, and that’s what Bellos explores in what he describes as his journey in the world of abstract mathematics. Indeed, his travels take him to India, Japan, and the United States (Bellos is based in the UK). He discusses concepts of time and ways to count its passage with an academic who studies the Munduruku, an indigenous group of the Brazilian Amazon whose language has “no tenses, no plurals, and no words for numbers beyond five.” Bellos describes his frustration when his subject can’t tell him how long his trip to the Amazon took. But Bellos learns that our linear understanding of numbers is not so deep-rooted as we would like to believe, and he draws on modern neuroscientific research to outline an explanation of why.

From there he goes on to explore counting, in base 10 of course, but also in base 8, base 2, base 12 and a particularly interesting exploration of a historical use of base 20 (Bellos makes a solid case for why base 12 might be more useful than base 10, even for those of us with the usual number of fingers). Bellos uses a numerologist’s analysis of his name (Alexander is better than Alex) as a jumping-off point for an exploration of some of the properties of numbers, including squares, which then leads him through the Pythagorean theorem to Euclidean geometry and thence to origami. Other chapters discuss the useful concept of zero and its role in multiplication (and different algorithms for multiplying, and oh, by the way, a brief exploration of where the word ‘algorithm’ comes from), and the properties of pi. Along the way he touches on the lives and work of the mathematicians who spent careers calculating the digits of pi, among them the brothers Gregory and David Chudnovksy, who have devised a formula approximating pi.

An entertaining chapter about puzzles starts with a discussion of word puzzles and magic squares, and then goes on to Sudoku, which is, Bellos says, “math by stealth. Though Sudoku contains no arithmetic, it does require abstract thought, pattern recognition, logical deduction and the generation of algorithms.” The Sudoku discussion leads Bellos to a discussion of the concept of the unique solution, and from there he explores the branch of math called combinatorics, which involves the counting of possible combinations. Tangrams make an appearance, as does Martin Gardner, for many years the writer of a regular column in Scientific American.

Even if the basics don’t change – “[t]he theorems of Pythagoras and Euclid are as valid now as they always were” Bellos writes – there are plenty of insights to learn from the history. Read this entertaining and interesting book, and the world around you will appear slightly different and even more interesting.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. Follow me on Twitter @abowie917.

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Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “The Table of Less Valued Knights” by Marie Phillips

January 15, 2016

Screen Shot 2016-01-13 at 11.48.14 AMThe Round Table was round for a reason: all its knights shared equal billing, and hence precedence (even though, these days, most of us can’t name more than one or two). In her hilarious take on the Arthurian legend, “The Table of Less Valued Knights,” Marie Phillips posits two additional tables, the Table of Errant Companions (oval, for knights aspiring to the Round Table) and the Table of Less Valued Knights (rectangular, with one leg shorter than the others). “It was home to the elderly, the infirm, the cowardly, the incompetent, and the disgraced. . .” says Phillips. The hierarchy is clear.

The novel opens on Pentecost night, when the knights gather to repeat their vows, celebrate the past year, and await the most prestigious new quest. Edwin enters the room in search of a champion, stating he is King (or prince consort) of a neighboring kingdom, and his wife, Martha, has been kidnapped on their wedding night. A knight duly heads off with Edwin – since Edwin is clearly not Round Table material he’s not interested in doing the job on his own. Sir Humphrey from, yes, the Table of Less Valued Knights lingers in the hall, and is still there and available when a second seeker, Elaine, arrives. She, too, needs a knight, as her fiance has been abducted by a knight wearing black armor just before their wedding.

We learn fairly quickly that Martha, rather than consummate her marriage to the bombastic and annoying Edwin, has run away. The local Crone, Martha’s first choice for help, is unfortunately unavailable, but she has left an Acting Crone in her place. The Acting Crone is young and inexperienced. Instead of changing Martha into a man she manages to change only Martha’s appearance, giving her a scruffy beard but leaving the gender-identifying and eliminatory organs intact. (If you’re worried, the Acting Crone gives Martha a tiny bottle of universal panacea for later.) Martha looks like a 14-year-old male version of herself. Since she’s a very innocent young woman, she acts like a 14-year-old female version of herself. There are a lot of opportunities for entertainment here, and Phillips takes them, especially after Martha acquires a sword (from the Lady of the Lake, of course) (not really, it was the Lady’s Locum) and joins forces with Humphrey and Elaine. And Humphrey’s squire, a half-giant named Conrad, and their livestock, which includes an elephant named Jemima. Though joins forces only partly describes the complicated relationship, as Martha is partially their prisoner (her sword, which appears to have a mind of its own, attacked Humphrey).

Martha, who has told the others her name is Marcus, keeps forgetting she’s a boy, which leads to all kinds of awkwardness. Phillips has a good time playing with the cultural expectations we have now based on appearance, and the juxtaposition of our assumptions with the Code of Chivalry. The writing is clear, focused, and consistently entertaining. Here’s one example, where Conrad, who is very angry with Humphrey, thinks of all the ways Humphrey violates the code he claims to live by:

To refrain from the wanton giving of offence: Humphrey believed that offence was the gift that kept on giving. To live by honour and for glory: abstract terms, said Humphrey, which meant that they did not exist . . . At all times to speak the truth: except where it would be more convenient for Humphrey to lie.

Phillips’ characters, for all their disguises, costumes, and belief in magic, are deeply human, and her whimsical recreation of their legendary time entirely beguiling. “The Table of Less Valued Knights” is the perfect book to take with you on a long plane trip.

What’s your favorite moment? Let us know in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. Follow me on Twitter @abowie917.

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Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “The Death of Cancer” by Vincent T. DeVita Jr, MD

January 8, 2016

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by Alexandra Bowie

Vincent DeVita opens his memoir “The Death of Cancer” with a story: in a chapter titled “Outrageous Fortune” he recounts the history of his close friend Lee–from Lee’s diagnosis with prostate cancer through efforts to find the best treatment, surgery, radiation and a lengthy remission. When the cancer recurred, Lee joined a study that examined the effect of a set number of treatments. The drugs slowed but didn’t stop the cancer and Lee’s treatment ended with the study. Eleven years after the initial diagnosis, Lee died. Soon thereafter, a new drug that did push Lee’s type of prostate cancer into remission became available and in Dr. DeVita’s view would have been likely to save Lee’s life. If Lee had been able to take the study drug in a regular maintenance dose, Dr. DeVita believes, he would have survived until the drug that worked became available. To Dr. DeVita, this is more than bad luck; it’s an indictment of a system that “limits our ability to make good use of the information and treatments we already have.”

DeVita started his career as a research chemotherapist, a clinical associate at the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, after medical school at George Washington. It was one of those serendipitous turns careers can take; he wanted to become a cardiologist (but botched, he says, the interview at the National Heart Institute) and he did not want to be a medic in Vietnam – service at the NIH would count as military service. Eventually, he became director of the NCI, served as physician in chief at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York and later became the director of the Yale Cancer Center. Working with others, in the face of opposition by practitioners who believed that surgery and radiation were the keys to cancer treatment, he developed the first combination chemotherapies that successfully treated Hodgkin’s disease and paved the way for successful combination treatments for many additional cancers. Bucking conventional wisdom also gave him a strong belief in his own judgment.

“The Death of Cancer” includes clear explanations of how tumor growth rates and chemotherapy interact, the different roles chemo, surgery, and radiation play in cancer treatment, and a cogent explanation of how cancer cells develop and what characterizes cells as cancerous. There are many touching stories of treatment success, and several moving descriptions of failure, including the unsuccessful treatment of DeVita’s own son for aplastic anemia. DeVita outlines the history of our understanding and treatment of cancer, focusing on three paradigm shifts (his word) in cancer treatment over the past half century.

The first was the recognition that combination chemotherapy could cure advanced cancer. That led to the decline in mortality of the leukemias and the lymphomas . . . [a]nd it gave rise to the use of adjuvant chemotherapy–cancer drugs paired with surgery and/or radiotherapy–that led to the decline in mortality of common cancers like those of the breast and the colon.

The second . . . was the result of research that gave us proof of principle that targeted therapy–drugs aimed at specific molecular lesions . . .– was successful and that it could convert a previously fatal leukemia into a chronic disease that did not reduce the patient’s life span . . . The third . . .was the understanding that immunotherapy . . . can work in a majority of patients.

Together, these breakthroughs have resulted in treatment modifications and extended lives. As DeVita writes, they have “changed the experience of having cancer.” His concern is that too many other promising approaches are slowed by caution, or doubt, or pessimism, all of which are built into a regulatory structure that frustrates the cancer doctor’s ability to take action based on promising early results. And delay is something to which Dr. DeVita cannot resign himself. He prescribes a new cancer act of Congress, one that will include a position of cancer czar with budget authority over “all government components of the cancer program,” funding for an expanded network of comprehensive cancer centers, and delegation of spending authority to center directors so that they can build fast-acting, flexible treatments. Perhaps most important, he argues that the FDA (whose approach may already be changing) and the NCI should delegate all authority for early clinical trials to cancer centers, allowing doctors flexibility not permitted under today’s regulatory structure: one that, Dr. DeVita believes, tightly over-regulates cancer therapies.

But success in cancer treatment is difficult to define – does it mean removing all measurable signs of cancer? Continuing treatment with maintenance drugs? Which of the many treatments under study are those going to be? At every point there are things we don’t know, and some we will know in the future. The doctoring Dr. DeVita describes is muscular and creative, based on a deeply held belief that if patients can hang on a little longer a new drug that will work is just around the corner. I’d definitely want to speak with him if I, or a close family member, were diagnosed with cancer. But I’m not persuaded by his prescription for the cancer research infrastructure. The problem is that generalizing from the particular doesn’t always work out: we don’t know what we don’t know. Dr. DeVita is correct, as a society we need widespread basic research, broad access to clinical trials, and a better way of translating research into practice. But because not every doctor has the time and inclination to do the careful research and follow detailed protocols–as Dr. DeVita’s recollections show–we need administrative structures that won’t allow the quick and easy widespread adoption of treatments that may work only for a small number of people.

“The Death of Cancer” is a useful contribution for the general reader, a good supplement to “The Emperor of all Maladies” by Siddhartha Mukherjee and “The Breast Cancer Wars” by Barron Lerner. But it’s hard not to take Dr. DeVita’s conclusions without a grain or two of salt. Do you agree? Let us know in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. Follow me on Twitter @abowie917.

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Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “A God in Ruins” a novel by Kate Atkinson

December 18, 2015

Screen Shot 2015-12-18 at 10.44.00 AMThere are novels that readers describe as thrillers, novels whose plots are complex but clear, novels of manners, and novels that grab the reader’s attention because they are so emotionally compelling. Kate Atkinson’s latest novel, “A God in Ruins,” is all of these. Ted Todd is an RAF pilot during the Second World War; he’s based in the northeast of England, and flies many bombing runs during the Allies’ strategic bombing campaign against Germany. Before the war he was a banker like his father Hugh, though, unlike his father, Teddy was not happy in that career. After the war Teddy comes home and marries Nancy Shawcross, the girl next door. He and Nancy both teach, and while Nancy is a success, Teddy is not, and he becomes a journalist, writing a column for, then becoming a reporter for, and finally running, a local newspaper.

This work leaves him a great deal of time to spend with their daughter Viola, who grows into an angry and somewhat self-destructive adult. In her twenties (by now we’re in the mid-1970s) she moves into a London squat with her partner and Sunny (a boy), their first child. They move on to a countryside cult where Viola has her second child, Bertie (a girl). When Viola has to run she brings the children home to Teddy. Bertie and Sunny adore him and, yes, we learn why Viola does not.

If these characters sound familiar, they should, because many of them appear in Atkinson’s previous novel, “Life After Life” (you can read my review of that novel here). “Life After Life” focused on Teddy’s adored older sister Ursula, and her experience during the war. Teddy and Ursula have two other siblings, Pamela, who makes a brief appearance here, and the pompous Maurice, who mostly stays offstage. Each novel stands on its own (in an afterward, Atkinson writes that she thinks of “A God in Ruins” as a companion to “Life After Life,” not a sequel). Nevertheless, the experience of reading each is deeper and more resonant for readers who read the other. (If you haven’t read “Life After Life” the order probably doesn’t matter but please weigh in on this question in the comments, especially if you disagree.)

Family life, sorrow, a good mind, pain–these are the plants that grow in Teddy’s garden. But it’s the substrate of the war that provides the soil, and Teddy’s experiences as a Halifax pilot are at the center of the novel. Atkinson’s text is vivid and lively; she slowly increases the tension as she describes the life of a bomber crew before, after, and especially during the slow and dangerous progress of a bomb run. Her meticulous descriptions are based on memoirs, and include details as small as the crew’s good luck charms and routines, and as large as the moral questions that followed from the decision to bomb German industrial centers and worker housing. The bombing may have been intended to avoid the need for the useless trench warfare of the Great War, and the Germans continued to bomb population centers like London, but neither of those is an adequate justification for Atkinson. For Teddy, the bombing campaign became a war of attrition, and the war became the central experience of his life. When he thinks about it, he concludes that the best and possibly only thing he can do to atone is to be kind. That’s not enough for Viola.

In “Life After Life” Atkinson trusted her readers to follow her through different permutations of a story, as she explored the ramifications of chances taken or passed by, and let consequences play out. “A God in Ruins” explores one of the roads not taken by the Todd family (or written there by Atkinson) and Atkinson provides signposts as she follows Teddy’s family through the decades succeeding the war. The ending is unexpected, heartbreaking (one friend described herself as “gobsmacked”) and breathtaking.

Read “A God in Ruins” but take it with you on a plane, or a vacation, or save it for a long weekend. You may not be able to stop reading it once you’ve started.

Happy Holidays! I’ll see you in the new year. In the meantime, have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie.blogspot.com. Follow me on Twitter @abowie917.

This post has been updated to include a missing link.

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Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Purity” A Novel by Jonathan Franzen

December 11, 2015

Screen Shot 2015-12-11 at 10.55.20 AMJonathan Franzen’s new novel, “Purity,” is a big book, 563 pages long. Mr. Franzen is mindful of the pressure on male American novelists to write Big Books. In fact, one of his minor characters is a writer who tries to do just that. (He teaches creative writing to make a living.) “Purity” starts with Purity Tyler, the only child of single mother Penelope Tyler. Purity, called “Pip,” lives in Oakland California and works dead-end jobs with no hope of paying off a crushing load of college debt. But Purity’s nickname is a hint that life holds some surprises for her.

Pip obtains a desirable internship with the Sunlight Project, run by Andreas Wolf, the “famous internet outlaw” whose website is dedicated to airing the deliberations and secrets of governments and corporations obtained by hacking and leaks. Wolf was an East German dissident who stood up to the Stasi and, when the Berlin Wall came down, helped reveal its secrets. Wolf’s behavior was not entirely disinterested – his father was a high-level member of the East German power apparatus, and Wolf was an accidental dissident, trying to make sure a secret of his own remained buried.

After that internship Pip becomes an investigator for another main character, Tom Aberant, a respected writer who runs a website that publishes long-form investigative journalism. Tom is the domestic partner of one of his reporters, Leila Helou, but refuses to remarry, claiming his first marriage traumatized him. He started the website with funding from his former father-in-law whose daughter, Tom’s ex-wife, vanished without a trace after their divorce. As you might expect from his name, Tom also has a past, one that intersects, naturally enough, with Wolf’s.

Everyone’s choices, whether or not they come from the moral high ground or simple good intentions, have consequences, and Franzen explores the unintended ones that follow from the actions of Andreas, Tom and Anabel, Tom’s ex-wife, in this lengthy novel. He also, and this is what provides the novel’s bulk, provides detailed descriptions of the past actions of all three of them, the activities that brought Andreas and Tom into conflict and, in dreary detail, the workings of Andreas’ mind. Even so, there is much that is delightful in this uneven novel. Pip, for instance, is smart, driven and capable of working things out for herself, as is Leila Helou, and the beginning and ending are very good, as Franzen is at his very good best when he’s exploring Pip’s and Leila’s worlds. But there’s a good deal that’s annoying, not the least of which is Franzen’s disinclination to recognize that even Pip’s acts, generous and unselfish as they may be, might also have unintended consequences.

A book doesn’t have to be big to be memorable, and the list of writers who have written memorable small books – Alice Thomas Ellis, Tessa Hadley, William Maxwell, J.M. Coetzee, Barry Unsworth, even Charles Dickens spring to mind – is lengthy. Inside this so-so big book about men is a very good small book about women trying to get out.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. Follow me on Twitter @abowie917.

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Events, Food

Walk the Windows Festival on Atlantic Avenue, December 12

December 9, 2015

Screen Shot 2015-12-09 at 12.43.12 PMLooking for gifts, interesting food, or just something to do? On Saturday, December 12, from 11AM-7PM the Atlantic Avenue LDC is sponsoring a walk along Atlantic Avenue between Hicks Street and Fourth Avenue. Walk the Windows will include live music, art exhibits and lectures, food and drink, photo ops with Santa and the Snow Queen, holiday windows and more. Some merchants are giving a 10% discount between now and December 19th. More information here.

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Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “The Secret Chord” A Novel by Geraldine Brooks

December 4, 2015

Screen Shot 2015-12-04 at 8.42.39 AMHandel’s Coronation Anthems begin with the words “Zadok the Priest, and Nathan the Prophet, anointed Solomon King” and well might the people have rejoiced. Solomon succeeded King David, described in Geraldine Brooks’ retelling of his story “The Secret Chord” as the difficult, tempestuous, musical, brave killer of Goliath and later King of the Israelite tribes. Brooks drew on the Bible and numerous other sources to develop her version of this Biblical figure. One of her many interesting choices is to tell the story from the point of view of Nathan, who served David as prophet and advisor since Nathan’s childhood.

Readers will know the outlines – David, a shepherd bringing food to his brothers fighting with King Saul’s army against the Philistines, killed Goliath, the giant champion of the Philistines. Saul brings David into his household, and David and Saul’s son Jonathan form a deep, and in Brooks’ version most likely sexual, friendship. Eventually David rebels against Saul, defeats his army, and succeeds him. (One of the saddest and most beautiful pieces of music is Charpentier’s opera “David et Jonathas”; you can listen to Les Arts Florissants’ beautiful staging of the scene where David learns of Jonathan’s death here.) David takes several women as wives, who give birth to several sons, including Amnon and Absalom, and a daughter, Tamar. He upends his life when he spies the beautiful wife of one of his generals, Batsheva. She gives birth, eventually, to the son who grows up to be King Solomon, but David and his other children (and wives) pay an enormous price (Batsheva’s first-born son dies; Amnon rapes and disfigures Tama; Absalom kills Amnon and ultimately dies a gruesome death).

Brooks takes a clear-eyed view of David. The good, of which there was much, was very good: David united the tribes, took a deep and abiding interest in his people, exercised good judgment when he decided disputes. But the bad was very bad: over and over, Nathan tells us, David, or his henchmen, does whatever is necessary to wrest power from his adversaries, and to secure it. This generally means killing, and more killing, often of women, old men, and children as much as the men of the armies. Nathan retires as much as possible from his court, undertaking, among other tasks, to tutor and protect Solomon.

Brooks has chosen well in making Nathan the narrator. He cannot, he says, control or predict the visions he is sent by God, but he can remember and interpret them, and David trusts Nathan’s visions, as does the reader. It’s a small further step to believe Nathan’s version of events he did not or could not witness. David composed many of the psalms, and his songs, his musicianship when he plays the harp, and other music regularly illustrate David’s best qualities (the novel takes its title from the song by Leonard Cohen). Brooks is at her best in describing the smaller spaces — villages, palaces, tents and houses and the events within them are all deeply vivid, as are the minds and, occasionally, the dress of her characters. The larger movements, of individuals and especially of the armies that sweep through, are hard to follow, and the maps that cover the endpapers are not detailed enough to help.

Using such an old story, one that has been told and adapted by countless artists whose works have their own resonance for each reader, is a risk, one that Brooks has met and overcome. “The Secret Chord” is an engaging and interesting take on a historical figure whose acts and life are the stuff of myth. Do you agree? Let us know in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. Follow me on twitter @abowie917.

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Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Tightrope” by Simon Mawer

November 13, 2015

Screen Shot 2015-11-13 at 8.55.24 AMBelief. Blackmail. Bribery. These are the three motivations for betrayal that one of the several spymasters in Simon Mawer’s new novel “Tightrope” give to Marian Sutro in the cold, gray world of dreary post-war London. “Tightrope” picks up shortly after the end of “Trapeze” (reviewed here), Mawer’s novel of Marian’s heroic deeds and miscues as a member of the Special Operations Executive parachuted into France. If you haven’t read the earlier book, skip to the end of this paragraph to avoid spoilers. Marian is returning to London after a year and a half in the custody of the Germans, first at Gestapo headquarters in Paris, then at a concentration camp. It takes a while for Marian to be able to return to daily life, and Mawer’s descriptions of her psychological struggles, which include some breakdowns and thoughts of suicide, are fully credible. Marian takes a job at the Franco-British Pacific Union; she marries. Horrified at the destruction caused by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki Marian has also become an ardent advocate for peace. It’s a wedge between her and her husband, and threatens to become one between Marian and her beloved brother Ned, an atomic scientist.

Mawer moves fairly slowly through Marian’s early post-war years, as his narrator pieces together Marian’s actions. It’s not altogether easy to do so, as Marian has had good training from the secret services, and knows how to cover her tracks. In “Trapeze,” Mawer describes Marian as a woman who is temperamentally an impetuous risk-taker whose behavior extends to her sexuality. As she matures in “Tightrope” Marian grows less impetuous – of course she’s experienced what Mawer describes as the full range of fear, from anxiety to outright terror – as her experience of fear slows her down. She remains in control of her sexuality, and feels able to act as she wishes, when she wishes – which means she seduces, or is seduced by, several men not her husband. It’s a nice contrast to the experience of her brother, Ned, whose sexual activities, in the 1950s when homosexual acts were against the law in Britain, can’t help but be compromising.

Novels about spies can be convoluted, with complex plots that are difficult to follow. Mawer remains close to Marian’s point of view for much of the narrative, and the reader is able to follow Marian’s view of events as they play out, even as she speculates about the moves, motives, and knowledge of the people – they are all men – she deals with. One motif is kriegspiel or blind chess; as a child in Geneva Marian had served as referee in her brother’s games with Clément Pelletier, who grew up to become the nuclear scientist Marian helped extract from Nazi-occupied Paris. Marian would like to see herself as the referee in the grand game she is playing, but comes to realize that she is, rather, one of the players. What she does about it, and the consequences, make up the final part of the book.

“Tightrope,” though a long novel, remains compelling and engaging, if perhaps not as taut as “Trapeze.” It’s a worthy follow up all the same, and a deeply interesting story of what motivates some people to acts the many of us might consider foolish, painful, or treasonous.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. Follow me on twitter @abowie917.

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Events, News

Superstorm Sandy and Real-Time/Social Media Crisis Communication at the Transit Museum

November 9, 2015

On Thursday, November 12, at 6 PM, the Transit Museum will host a panel discussion on the Transit Authority’s response to the threat of and damage caused by Superstorm Sandy three years ago. Panelists include:
* J.P. Chan, Assistant Director of Multimedia Production at the MTA;
* Jeff Ferzoco, NYC Business Manager at CartoDB (online mapping);
* Damian Gutierrez, Associate Partner at Intersection (OntheGo kiosk design); and
* Juliette Michaelson, VP for Strategy at the Regional Plan Associate, moderator.

Admission is $10 for the general public/free for Transit Museum Members. Tickets available here.

The Transit Museum is located at the corner of Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street in Brooklyn Heights. Doors open at 5:30 PM.

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Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Flood of Fire” by Amitav Ghosh

November 6, 2015

Screen Shot 2015-11-06 at 12.28.39 PM“Flood of Fire,” the final novel in Amitav Ghosh’s wonderful set of historical novels the Ibis Trilogy, covers the years 1839-1841 and brings the history up to the early months of the first Opium War. Like its two predecessors, “Flood of Fire” stands on its own, but the resonances are deeper and the ironies considerably more acute for the reader who has read the earlier books. (They are “Sea of Poppies,” reviewed here, and “River of Smoke,” reviewed here.) “Flood of Fire” follows several characters peripheral to the action in the earlier books and allows us to renew our acquaintance with others.

Each of the main characters is in search of something. Keshri Singh is a sepoy or Indian soldier serving the British, and, as it happens, brother to Deeti, the main character of the first novel. He volunteers for a deployment to China, hoping it will bring him back to a safe retirement in his village. Zachary Reid, former first mate of the Ibis and now struggling to make a living in Calcutta–who has played crucial roles in the first two novels–is central to the action here as well, as he manipulates the feelings and needs of various wealthy persons to build the foundations of stability and wealth for himself. Neel, formerly the Raja of Raskhali, remains in China, where he works, though his heart remains in India (as do his wife and son). Shireen Modi, of Bombay, wife of Bahram Modi, a central figure in the second book, is persuaded to leave her city. She has lived most of her life in seclusion, but her husband’s bankruptcy and death leave her destitute, and she is persuaded that her presence will increase the likelihood of recovering some of the losses. Ghosh twines their stories together as each travels to the triangle formed by the cities of Macau, Guangzhou (Canton) and Hong Kong – the latter still an island that is transferred to the British Crown in the course of the novel.

These characters take part in the events that lead up to what will be known as the First Opium War. The Chinese have stopped the foreign merchants from selling opium (imported from India) to their people, and the foreigners, the British in particular, are extremely unhappy. Fortunes have been lost and once-wealthy and powerful men who have spent years voyaging to and remaining in a foreign country risk serious losses. Their talk is of free trade and the glories the advanced British civilization brings to the East, but the subtext is money and power, caste and position. American readers may find the British justification for the opium trade Ghosh describes familiar:

The demand came from Chinese buyers and if the British did not meet it then others would. It was futile to try and hinder the flow of a substance for which there was so great a hunger. Individuals and nations could no more control this commodity than they could hold back the ocean’s tides: it was like a natural phenomenon–a flood. Its flow was governed by abstract laws like those that Mr Newton had applied to the movements of the planets. These laws ensured that supply would match demand as surely as water always seeks its own level. . . The truth was that the best–indeed the only–way that the public good could be arrived at was to allow all men to pursue their own interests as dictated by their own judgment.

Other themes include love, loyalty, and the place of women. As in the earlier books, much of the action takes place on ships or in planning journeys; the Ibis herself plays an important role. In several scenes Ghosh brings all of his characters together on one or another of the ships — they all know each other, and in an epilogue Ghosh describes his novels as a story about the community of the Ibis. As in the earlier books much of the dialogue includes dialect, but with a quick perusal of Neel’s Chrestomathy, available here, the reader will have no trouble understanding it. The Ibis books are historical fiction, so Ghosh’s work encompasses real people, yet it came as a surprise to learn that Neel was a real person, and it’s his archive, supplemented with memoirs, histories, and documents made available long after he died, that is the main source for the narrative.

There’s a lot to this book and even more to the trilogy. For readers interested in a historical perspective, written from well outside the European or American point of view, or general readers interested in an extremely well-written story with vivid characters, telling details, and a compelling narrative, the Ibis Trilogy will not let you down.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics at asbowie.blogspot.com.

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