Review of Babylon's Ark

Babylon’s Ark: The Incredible Wartime Rescue of the Baghdad Zoo
Author: Lawrence Anthony, with Graham Spence
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
Date of Publication: March 2007

 

               In March 2003, the U.S. invaded Iraq, beginning the Iraq War and what would be the end of Sadam Hussein’s rule. Within a month, the capital, Baghdad, had fallen. One of the first civilians to enter the country and reach Baghdad was Lawrence Anthony. A prominent conservationist from South Africa, he feared for the residents of the Baghdad Zoo, trapped in cages in one of the city’s worst conflict zones and additionally devastated by looting. Working with local staff who risked their lives to come to the Zoo every day, Anthony scrounged food and materials from bullet-riddled streets and earned the compassion and aid of American soldiers. This is the story of starved royal lions, black market zoo busts, intense and reckless bravery, and a beautifully stubborn effort to rescue some of the most hopeless victims of human brutality.     

What makes Babylon’s Ark a great story is that it is entirely, heartrendingly real. If there are any gaps between Anthony’s memory and his tale, they are invisible. With each chapter comes a new challenge and a harrowing solution. Anthony’s struggles range from finding a cold beer in a powerless Middle Eastern summer to rescuing a deplorably caged bear from one of the most dangerous parts of Baghdad. These struggles are remarkable not just for their face-value risks, but because of the improbable dedication they require to solve. Anthony’s bullheaded, well-meaning charge into a war zone earns the respect, protection, and gradual assistance of American soldiers. The Zoo staff and other Iraqis that join the support team are not so protected. With Hussein’s loyalists still on patrol and anti-American sentiment at an all-time high, visible collaboration with a foreigner—even if he is South African—could be a death sentence. Not only that, but all resources provided by Iraqi locals are scrounged from a city intensely and violently plundered with scant attention to the animals caught in the (literal and figurative) crossfire. Many messages are conveyed by the story, and more still explicitly stated by Anthony. The most atrocious casualties of war are those who are helpless. Cross-cultural communication is invaluable. When we destroy the environment that both awes and feeds us, we imperil not just human life, but human decency.

               Anthony’s literary skill falls a bit short of his conservation prowess. Particularly earlier in the book, excessive and awkward linguistic flourishes encumber an already detailed narrative and an oddly romantic air to a ravaged, hostile city[ku1] . However, in a story this eccentric, some strange language is arguably just another adventure for the reader. Anthony’s tangents about trials at his home game reserve or oddly specific details of his interactions with soldiers suit the story of a man devoted to an unusual life path and sanguine about the associated risks. The book seems to accomplish its purpose: to use the story of the Baghdad Zoo to encourage awareness of interdependency between humans and nature, and to encourage care for the animals we look to for inspiration – and who depend upon our care and regard. Anthony’s chronicle is a reminder that true stories can and should embolden us to attempt the improbable. The world is a little bit better because Anthony did.

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Review of Ink and Bone (The Great Library #1)

Ink and Bone (The Great Library, Book 1)
Author: Rachel Caine
Publisher: New American Library
Date of Publication: July 2015

 

Should knowledge be shared or controlled? Can powerful institutions change? Rachel Caine is both writer and director in this blockbuster book that is at once fast paced and philosophical.

Tota est scientia. Knowledge is all. The Great Library of Alexandria is a globally dominant force, governing the flow of knowledge to the masses. Alchemy makes possible the instantaneous delivery of literature, but personal ownership of books is forbidden. Jess Brightwell, born into a family of black-market book dealers, grows up bound to, and watched by, the Library. His belief in the institution’s value withstands his own persecution—until he is sent to the Great Library to become his family’s spy. While training and competing to enter the Library’s service, Jess and his peers are tested for loyalty to an institution they increasingly question. Controlling knowledge requires an unyielding and sometimes brutal authority over the people who seek it.

Within three pages, Jess is running. Ink and Bone begins with a chase scene, and the action movie tempo continues from there. The story is heavily plot driven, and creates intrigue from danger and secrecy. Caine’s careening exhilaration is highly compelling, but has benefits and drawbacks as a writing device. The world of the story is incrementally revealed, steadily feeding the plot’s momentum as the pace accelerates and subthemes develop. What this need for momentum limits is the development of the characters. The characters feel right in number to enable plot twists and give some depth to the fictional world without becoming a legion of extras. However, there are also enough that the time and detail required for them to deepen and evolve would overburden the plot. The characters’ inclination to action movie stereotypes actually underlies the thrill of the book. Among the roster is an innocent good guy, a bully and his cronies, a mysterious woman, and the protagonist just trying to survive. They are guided by their backstories in their patterns of decision making, their interactions with their peers, and even in the paths laid out for them by people with greater power. Their sojourns and trials are excitingly fraught, but somewhat predictable.

Despite these limitations, Ink and Bone is purposeful as well as exciting. Jess is the most quickly and fully detailed character, allowing him to be the lens through which the world of the story can be satisfactorily revealed. The quick plot provides light content for younger readers, who can also engage with the clearcut emotions of the characters. Even for older readers, the pace and story are riveting and there is also substance to contemplate in the structure and secrets of the Library. Jess’ familial ties to the black market shape what he values and criticizes in the Library, prompting consideration of how the power of knowledge and the written word can change based on their management. For audiences drawn to more fast-paced content, this is a wonderfully fun adventure through a world with ruthless pursuit, robed villains, and where independent thought is at once demanded and dangerous. For those steeped in more solemnly topical literature, this book feels painfully relevant to a time when the power of words and writers seems at once essential and imperiled.

Review of Birds Without Wings

Birds Without Wings

Author: Louis de Bernières

Publisher: Vintage

Date of Publication: June 2005

 

This is a story with a beating heart.

A small village in southwestern Anatolia. Ottomans who speak in Turkish, write in Greek, and pay homage both to Allah and to Christian icons. Children, already betrothed, play at the noises of goats and birds. Women tend to the young and the dead, and men tend to their crafts and their games of backgammon. Nothing remains the same once the land that is to become Turkey enters war in the early twentieth century. New patriotism, new loyalty, and new sacrifices change not just political order, but people.

Birds Without Wings is incredibly compelling and equally dense. Bernières shapes his story through his characters, their lives, and the changes that both undergo. The characters are given individual definition by Bernières’ skillfully varying style and diction. Birds Without Wings is historical fiction, though in a deeply personal sense; the fullness of the characters enriches the substantive sense of the period in which they exist. Perhaps the only drawback of this approach to storytelling is that it limits and directs how Bernières relates critical background. Interwoven with the history of the village of Eskibahçe is the history of the Ottoman Empire’s conflict and downfall in the early 20th century. Rather than just saying what happened and risking a disruptive tonal shift, Bernières writes the experiences of several characters in those conflicts. One is Atatürk, Turkey’s founder, called by his birth name Mustafa Kemal in the book. The others are small town inhabitants caught in sweeping, violent political fervor. The transmitting of Ottoman and Turkish history through those vessels both humanizes large-scale history and allows Bernières to direct focus to particular messages. However, this approach - keeping international turmoil intimately linked with personal turmoil - also limits the scope of what the author can share.

For all the words spent explaining that critique, take this as a counter: this book is powerful in its content, direct but not suffocatingly polemic in its messages, and luxuriously rich in its prose. It is not a happy book. Death and disappearance are frequent. The pain endured in Eskibahçe as a result of frustratingly senseless political decisions suggests the suffering of millions more. Yet Birds Without Wings has the qualities that leaven a book hefty in content and emotion. There is consistent humor, both obvious and subtle. There is love of all types, tested and strong. There are themes that give the book clear purpose. There are little details given to each character, presented like a gift of intimacy to the reader who witnesses them. Bernières has meticulous control over his writing, giving weight to each sentence and a sense of thoughtful care to the story at large. This is a book whose characters’ voices will rise vibrantly from the page, and whose content will captivate those drawn to stories both pertinent and lyrically potent.

Review of Orbital

Orbital

Author: Samantha Harvey

Publisher: Grove Press

Date of Publication: October 29, 2024

 

         In space, the body rebels. It sleeps and wakes based on instructions from machines. The air it breathes is recycled and recirculated. The mind becomes the body’s sole authority on what demands and is worthy of attention. It must be hard to both control and obey that mind when circling the Earth 16 times a day. Orbital covers one day in the lives of several astronauts—16 trips around the globe. It is a meditative, lonely, lyrical veneration of the place we inhabit, gently mournful about how we inhabit that home.

         This is not science fiction that leans hard into technological specificities. It is instead dedicated in its effort to truly occupy the headspace of people observationally suspended, both weightless and quite literally detached, from the only home they know. Harvey does not diminish the enormity of her characters’ accomplishment. Instead, her astronauts’ wonder at their position is counterbalanced by their intense love for a home that they have worked so hard and risked so much to leave. It is not the space they are in that eventually binds them; it is their new ability to observe and reflect on their lives from afar. Each view of Earth is written with similar structure and content, giving the space station the static, familiar role of home. The space station has to become as familiar to the astronauts as the home they came from before they can look at Earth with a mix of fresh awe and critical detachment. The writing moves quickly from one astronaut’s mind to another, and uses the views as a form of rhythmic continuity physically connecting the astronauts’ varying temperaments. Those transitions communicate that shared experience does not always create shared perspective. However, they can make it difficult to keep track of which defining traits belong to which character. The integration of an immense physical journey into the ruminations of, and changes within, each astronaut creates the sense of action continually mounting without a climax, not unlike the astronauts’ perpetually forestalled fall toward Earth. While this might frustrate some readers, it gives some movement to a meditative book.

         For a book in part about observational detachment and grounding perspective, the marketing on and within the cover was frustratingly distracting. A defining point of the rear cover summary—that the space mission narrated is one of the last of its kind—is not referenced or relevant in the story itself, rendering the mention a weirdly misleading attention grab. Also detracting from the insular contemplation that defines Orbital, inside the front cover, before the title appears, there are numerous pages of promotion and praise blurbs. As a reader, I would prefer to enjoy a story without having to wade through pages of gushy pap from the publicity team before I even read the first paragraph written by the actual author.

         But this gripe is with the words that describe Orbital, not the ones that comprise it. The book itself is a reflection on the purposes and effects of exploration, why and how we love, and the results of being untethered from the known world. To those who enjoy a faster pace and a more grounded story, this book is probably not for you. To those for whom the mental journey complements and enriches the physical, do consider an Orbital sojourn.

Review of The Lathe of Heaven

The Lathe of Heaven

Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

Publisher: Scribner

Date of Publication: January 1971

    There’s nothing like waking abruptly from the middle of a dream, feeling on the verge of falling out of bed, to make you question reality. My body is tingling and strangely foreign, while my mind tells me that I have gone nowhere since I fell asleep. I feel entirely awake even as my frightful, still imagining subconscious tries to tell me that nothing I experience is real. This is the world in The Lathe of Heaven—abuzz, disorienting, and torn between the governance of the mind and an anarchy of the senses. It is terrifyingly brilliant and disorientingly familiar.

    George Orr is a man without much substance or significance. Yet he has discovered that he has the power of affective dreaming. He can literally change the world. Distraught at his capability, he consults a psychiatrist, Dr. Haber, who sees and seizes an opportunity to improve the world. As Orr’s control over his power decreases, he becomes increasingly desperate to keep the world as it as and reign in his mind.

    In the case of George Orr, dreaming the world anew means that he is the only one who knows what was lost and what was gained in the change. It is an incredibly isolating premise. Not just the abstract world at large, but the people around him change, the place where he earns his keep changes all the time, and even his home can change in one night between sleeping and waking. Each time Orr has an affecting dream, he endures all the grief, fear, hope, and resignation that someone else might endure over the course of several years of change and loss. Le Guin does a beautiful job of conveying the toll of constant, isolating loss and novelty. Orr has no choice about whether he stays the same. He is both more deeply connected to his world and more deeply disconnected from it than anyone around him. His sanity is admirable, his desire to eliminate his power is humbling, and his ironic helplessness is pitiable. Because of all that Orr is and all that he cannot be, he is the perfect encapsulation of how awful it can be to be ordinary.

    This story amplifies many familiar doubts. George Orr has the hypothetical power to create an ideal world, yet no actual control over his capability to do so. His memories of each life “lived” blur together. He loves people who in some of his worlds never lived. In The Lathe of Heaven, idealism is of tenuous value, loving someone may become a waste, and while the mind is the only real source of truth, it can reinvent the truth at any time. Orr is a character that readers can empathize and connect with, yet not want to become. That is what makes him so human, and that is part of what makes the story so powerful.

    Le Guin’s writing is as magnificent as the character and story she tells. Her character descriptions are consistent without becoming repetitive. She shies away from excessive worldbuilding, as Orr’s world is always changing, but there is enough to give shape and flavor to each iteration. The details she does share evoke a place both crowded and lonely, aptly chosen for a protagonist experiencing Orr’s cruel capability. Her dialogue feels straight out of the minds of her characters, unfiltered and structured hastily as it leaves their mouths. Her diction aids a mounting sense of disturbance and disorientation. I finished Le Guin’s book and felt as though I was situated in the wrong world, that my mind should be able to position me within the covers I had just closed. Upon finishing Le Guin’s book, I had the sense that somehow, her worlds were more real than mine, even as they perpetually unmade themselves.

    This book is for the people that live in their heads and question the workings of their world and the limits of perception. It is for the people who wish they could be something other than themselves. It does what the best science fiction does: amplifies and extrapolates the strange, uncomfortable aspects of the world we think we know.