“Henri Poincaré was a man who longed to believe, a man who was moved by mystery and beauty but a man for whom belief was impossible. He was too much a scientist, ever the investigator in a world bound up in webs of cause and effect that had served him well in every regard save one: that at the hour between dusk and darkness, when the sky slid from deepest cobalt into night, he suspected something large, momentous even, was out there just beyond his reach….”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (NOV 3, 2011)

In Leonard Rosen’s superb mystery, All Cry Chaos, Henri Poincaré, fifty-seven, is a veteran Interpol agent who believes that it is “better to let one criminal go free than to abuse the law and jeopardize the rights of many.” One of the malefactors that Henri tenaciously and successfully tracked down is Stipo Banovic, a Serb accused of ordering and participating in the mass murder of seventy Muslims in Bosnia. A furious Banovic vows to make Poincaré suffer. In a stunning exchange, during which Henri trades invective with the imprisoned criminal, Banovic screams, “Did you once stop to think why a man becomes a killing machine?” He goes on to say, “I will put you in my shoes before I die.”

Such confrontations do Henri no good, especially since he suffers from heart arrhythmia. His wife, Claire, has repeatedly urged her husband to retire to their farm in the Dordogne; she would like him to spend stress-free hours with her, their son, and their beloved grandchildren. Instead, Inspector Poincaré persists in using his experience and uncanny intuition to “anticipate a criminal’s moves as if he were the pursued.”

Poincaré’s next case involves an explosion in an Amsterdam hotel where a thirty-year old mathematician, James Fenster, had been staying prior to delivering a speech to the World Trade Organization. All that is left are the corpse’s charred remains. Who would want to destroy this man of ideas, a gentle and brilliant scholar with no obvious enemies? The search for Fenster’s murderer will lead Henri down many byways, during which he will encounter, among others, a Peruvian activist, a fabulously wealthy mutual fund manager, Fenster’s former fiancée, and a graduate student in mathematics. Most fascinating of all is the possibility that the crime occurred as a result of Fenster’s prodigious mathematical knowledge and wide-ranging imagination.

Nothing is obvious or can be taken for granted in this beautifully constructed and intricate novel. Rosen’s vividly depicted characters have lively discussions that touch on philosophy, economics, psychology, theology, mathematics, and jurisprudence. Passages of deliciously dark humor and vivid descriptive writing enhance All Cry Chaos, a challenging brain-teaser as well as a powerful, literate, and entertaining police procedural. Rosen expresses ideas about family, human rights, morality, and justice that take on added significance in a unsettled world marred by war, financial collapse, political infighting, and lawlessness.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 33 readers
PUBLISHER:	Permanent Press (September 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Leonard Rosen
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Keeper of Lost Causes by Jussi Adler-Olsen The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Bibliography:

Interpol Agent Henri Poincaré series:

• All Cry Chaos (September 2011)

“Just go sit in a café and read the play,” he told us. “Have a coffee. Take a pen.”

He said these things as if they were obvious, as if they were what any normal person would do.

But they weren’t obvious things to most of us. Even if I explored Paris on my own, even if I sat by myself from time to time on the banks of the river, when he suggested them they were different, as if we’d be crazy not to listen. And so those many of us who loved him, we did what he asked. And we felt important, we felt wild, we felt like poets and artists, we felt like adults living in the world with books in our hands, with pens, with passions. And when we returned to school, how many of us prayed he’d ask what we’d done over the weekend? Not only if we’d read but where.

And that’s something.

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (SEP 26, 2011)

Part school story, part existentialism primer, You Deserve Nothing, is a deftly told and absorbing debut. Ostensibly, the story of a troubled teacher who goes too far, You Deserve Nothing is also a thoughtful examination of moral education, of the ways in which we learn to navigate the minefield between duty and freedom, courage and cowardice, the self and the persona. The story, predominately concerned with a scandal that is as shocking as it is mundane, is told from three perspectives some five or so years later: Will Silver’s, a young and charismatic English teacher; Marie de Cléry’s, the beautiful, but insecure daughter of a cruelly elegant mother and a workaholic father; Gilad Fischer’s, an intelligent but lonely boy, the son of an American diplomat and Israeli mother, who idolizes Will.

International School of France is an expensive private school in Paris, and while the majority of students at ISF are “kids who’d been plucked from an Air Force base in Virginia and deposited in Paris, who resented the move, refused to adapt,” the informal style of Will Silver’s Senior Seminar resonates with the privileged offspring of upper-echelon executives and foreign diplomats, kids “who were fluent in several languages and cultures, who were so relaxed, so natural in exquisite apartments at elaborate parties, who moved from country to country, from adult to adolescent with a professional ease.” A dynamic and charismatic teacher, Will pushes his students to think through ideas of duty and freedom, courage and responsibility as they appear in the Bible and the works of Sartre, Camus, Shakespeare, and Faulkner. Although a true believer in the power and importance of literature, Will can’t help but wonder if much of the pleasure of teaching “lies exclusively in the performing, in being adored.” Will enjoys celebrity among the student body, and undoubtedly, his exhortation to pursue your dreams “in spite of fear . . . No matter what. Because you have to. Because you know it’s right. Because you believe in it. Because by not doing it you’re betraying yourself” will remind many of Robin Williams’ character (carpe diem, seize the day boys, make your lives extraordinary) in Dead Poet’s Society, and as I read the classroom scenes, I half-expected everyone to jump up on chairs and quote Walt Whitman (O Captain! My Captain).

An obvious association, I know, but I couldn’t help but feel at times that that’s the point, that Will is aping that role – the role of risk-taking, life-changing teacher. This is a book about courage and responsibility, about the ways in which we shirk our freedom and opt out of creating ourselves; moving half-way across the world for a job you love might seem like a brave choice, but for Will it’s an act of cowardice, an abrupt flight from a wife he loves when the pain of his parents’ deaths becomes too much.

Numbing himself with a sort of Sartrean bad faith, Will’s dazzling persona protects him from having to emotionally engage with the world. Even when he flouts conventional morality and starts a sexual relationship with Marie, both a minor and a student at ISF, it is less a principled embrace of desire than a retreat from his despair, having witnessed a murder, and his shame at having done nothing to apprehend the murderer. Even the young and inexperienced Marie starts “to have the impression that [she] was making love to a ghost or something.” However, there are no easy villains here, and Alexander Maksik wisely avoids moralizing their relationship. Although Marie, masking her inexperience and insecurity, plays at being the seductress, Maksik allows her a honest sexuality, and Will, unable to doff his role as the instructor, gently teaches her how to enjoy her sexual nature. This is not to excuse Will, of course. Mickey Gold, ISF’s bumbling biology teacher, hits it on the head when he advises Will that trading in the complicated (and reciprocated) love of a real woman for the empty pleasure of “those adoring eyes” is “a coward’s game.”

Just as Marie’s disappointment with Will is inevitable, Gilad’s hero-worship can only mature through disillusionment. Gilad, in the way of the young, conflates the thrilling ideas being taught with the character of his teacher and when, after a heartbreaking scene with his parents, he sits in a café, reading Camus, it pleases him to think that Will would approve of him “there alone, so early in the morning, paying such attention to simple, beautiful things” and when Gilad admits that his infatuation was so complete he “wanted to go to war for him,”,I was reminded of one of the best instances of hero-worship and disillusionment in literature: Nicholas Rostov’s infatuation with Tsar Alexander in War and Peace (in case there’s any doubt: I mean this as a compliment). In fact, it’s partly  Maksik’s astute understanding of adolescent psychology and mannerism that makes this book so good and his characters so real, as captured here in this bantering dialogue between Will and a former student, Mazin:

“ . . . I miss our talks.”
“But we’re having one now.”
“Yeah, on my free period. Lame.”
“I’m flattered you’d waste your free period with me, Maz.”
“Yeah, well don’t get too excited. Anyway Silver, school’s a waste of my time.”
“Carrot?”
“No man, I don’t want a carrot, I want to know why I shouldn’t just move to LA and start a band.”
“Who says you shouldn’t?”
“Please. Everyone.”
“You realize, right, that this is a tired conversation? You know everything I’m going to tell you. It’s the height of boring.”
“No, I don’t. You’re the height of boring. What are you going to tell me?”

However difficult Marie and Gilad’s loss of innocence is, narrated from a place of relative wisdom many years later, that past pain is softened. In comparison, Will is frustratingly opaque, and I couldn’t help but wonder about the place he was narrating from: had he found the courage to dismantle his armor or was he “teaching the needy in some unspecified African nation” or “living cheap in Thailand,” still a ghost?

You Deserve Nothing is an auspicious debut, both for Alexander Maksik who shows himself here to be an unfairly talented writer and for the new Europa Editions’ imprint, edited by Alice Sebold (of The Lovely Bones fame), Tonga Books. I look forward to seeing more from both.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 73 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions; 1 edition (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Alexander Maksik
EXTRAS:	Excerpt and Interview with the author
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Last Brother by Nathacha Appanah

Bibliography:

• You Deserve Nothing (August 2011)
• A Marker to Measure Drift (July 2013)

“His hand is growing cold; still she holds it. Sitting at his bedside she does not cry. From time to time, she lays her cheek against his, taking slight comfort in the rough bristle of unshaved hair, and she speaks to him a little.

I love you, she tells him.

I always will.

Je t’aime, she says.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (SEP 8, 2011)

Lily Tuck`s novel, I Married You for Happiness, is the story of a woman mourning the sudden death of her husband. It was shortly before dinner when Philip came home from his college teaching position. When Nina calls him for dinner he is dead. She lies by his cold body all night remembering their lives together. The prose is spare and lovely, recalling their joys, passions and pains of their forty-two years together.

Recently, I’ve read three memoirs about grieving a spouse after sudden death: Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Joyce Carol Oates’ A Widow’s Story, and Francisco Goldman’s Say Her Name. Lily Tuck’s book covers similar territory as these memoirs but in fictional form.

Nina is an artist and Philip is a mathematician specializing in probability theory. They have one daughter, thirty-five year old Louise. This book takes place over the course of one night following Philip’s death. As the story unfolds, Louise does not yet know her father has died. Nina just wants to spend this one night next to Philip. “In the morning she will make telephone calls, she will write e-mails, make arrangements; the death certificate, the funeral home, the church service – whatever needs to be done. Tonight – tonight, she wants nothing. She wants to be alone. Alone with Philip.”

Nina tries to remember their lives together, the big things and the little things. She is especially focused on thoughts about a woman that Philip had known before meeting her. Iris and Philip were in a car crash and Iris died. Had Iris lived, Nina wonders, would Philip have married her instead of Nina? She puts together different theories of probability in her mind for different scenarios and tries to think like her husband would in these situations. “What if she finds a photo of Iris? The photo slips out from in between papers, from inside a folder in a desk drawer.”

Simple things cause her great anxiety. What were the exact last words she said to Philip? What did they do yesterday, last weekend? She is not sure and this bothers her. She wants to know and hold the past close to her, remembering all that she can.

She and Philip were so different. Nina paints mostly landscapes and portraits, usually with water colors. Philip gives lectures on probability. She remembers lots of mathematical problems and information that Philip has shared with her even though many are beyond her capacity to understand. “Most mathematical functions, Philip tells her, are classified as two-way functions because they are easy to do and easy to undo – like addition and subtraction, for example. The way turning a light on and turning it off is a two-way function. A one-way function is more complicated because although it may be easy to do, you cannot undo it. Like mixing paint, you can’t unmix it, or like breaking an egg shell, you can’t put the egg back together.” Nina thinks about the physics of alternate universes and wonders if Philip can be alive and dead. Is he really dead?

Nina also gives a lot of thought to the existence of an afterlife and what the great philosophers had to say about it, especially Pascal. Pascal believed it was a better probability to believe in God than not because if God existed and one behaved righteously, they could have eternal life. Still, Nina is not convinced. Ironically, Philip the mathematician had more of a belief in afterlife than does Nina. Philip believes in a libertarian God, “a God who allows room for free will.”

Nina struggles to remember where they’ve lived, what countries they’ve visited, how many houses they resided in, how many animals they’ve owned. These little things help her feel closer to Philip as she spends the night next to him holding his hand and stroking his face. This is her night to be with him, her last night to shower herself in their love.

Philip’s favorite color was red. He once brought her a red embroidered coat from Hong Kong. She rarely ever wore it. However, tonight she puts it on over an old coat she is wearing and parades around the room in it, wondering if Philip would have found this silly.

During their marriage, Nina had an affair and once was raped. She kept both of these occurences secret from Philip. She worries about Philip’s faithfulness to her. “Sometimes when Philip comes back from being away, she sniffs through his laundry, searching for the scent of an unfamiliar perfume – patchouli, jasmine, tuberoses. What is her name? The name of a city. Sofia.”

The prose is spare and the book is written in short vignettes, each about some aspect of their life together or their belief system. As the night progresses, Nina drinks wine, dozes occasionally, but mostly stays up and remembers and imagines their time together. Theirs was a great love and one that has withstood the test of time. Lily Tuck understands what it is like to be with one person for forty-two years. She understands great love and passion.

Interestingly, Ms. Tuck has borrowed information from some of the greatest mathematicians, logicians, physicists, and philosophers for this book: Pascal, Einstein, Wilczek, Erdos, Hofstadter, Hawking, and Feynman to name a few. Though the parts about physics and math were sometimes difficult for me to get my head around, they served nicely to illustrate the yin and yang of this marriage. This is a short and lovely book, an homage to a great love, now lost in real time, but forever present in Nina’s heart and mind.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 43 readers
PUBLISHER:	Atlantic Monthly Press; 1 edition (September 6, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Lily Tuck
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion Also by Lily Tuck: The News from Paraguay

Bibliography:

• Interviewing Matisse, or the Woman Who Died Standing Up (1991)
• The Woman Who Walked on Water (1996)
• Siam Or the Woman Who Shot a Man (1999)
• Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived (2002)
• The News From Paraguay (2004) 
• I Married You for Happiness (September 2011)
• The House at Belle Fontaine: Stories (April 2013)

Nonfiction:

• Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante (2008)

“Do you remember?” Mitch said staring out the darkened window, “how we used to talk about the rich guys, the CEOs and politicians? How we used to hate them for acting in their own interests instead of for the good of everyone else

“We went into this thinking we were going to stick it to guys like that. Like Johnny. People who broke the rules for their own good. And now here we are. Thinking the same way.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  AUG 6, 2011)

The titular novices of Marcus Sakey’s recent novel, The Amateurs, are four friends, three men and one woman, who band together against the frigidity of Chicago’s winters and the loneliness of urban life to form the Thursday Night Drinking Club. But amateur drinkers these four are not – experts in the art of throwing back martinis, the first thing any of these four do in a time of crisis is reach for a bottle of vodka. If only the same could be said for their foray into the criminal underworld.

Rounding thirty, they are poster children for urban ennui: Alex is a former law-student whose sideline as a bartender turned full-time ten years ago when his now-ex wife gave birth to their daughter, Cassie; Ian, a trader with a coke problem, flew too high, too fast with a phenomenal trade in undervalued Hudson-Pollam Biolabs stock, only to face increasing loss and derision as he stalks the financial markets, looking for another off-the-radar meteor to ride back to his seat among the stars; Mitch is a bookish hotel doorman who carries a torch for Jenn, the only female member of their drinking crew, but lacks the spine to do anything about it; Jenn is a travel agent who dreams of travelling herself but can’t seem to commit to making it happen, much like she can’t seem to commit to any of the men she dates, content to coast along on what is left of her good looks. If the group reads like a clichéd list of youngish urbanites, well that is largely because it is. But in lieu of nuanced characters, Mr. Sakey presents us with a moral dilemma.

Imagine you could steal a substantial sum of money, not enough to make you rich, but enough to alleviate some of your immediate problems and broaden your future horizons, would you do it? What if I promised you wouldn’t get caught? Or what if that money belonged to people you knew were overdue for some karmic comeuppance, people like professional criminals?

That is the question the Thursday Night Drinking Crew faces when Alex’s no-good boss, Johnny Love, bullies him into posing as muscle for an after-hours deal. The money for the deal is locked away in a safe, but Alex knows the combination. Resentful of Johnny Love for coercing his participation, Alex tells the crew about the deal. With their last game of “What would you do if . . .. you had half-a-million dollars?” (called “Ready-go” here) still fresh in their minds, the others are primed and ready to fantasize about travelling the world or day trading themselves to a fortune, but the stakes for Alex are much higher.

Cassie’s step-father has received a promotion that requires moving the family to Phoenix. Alex’s ex-wife informs him that, while she has no intention of keeping his daughter from him, due to a series of late or missed child support payments, he doesn’t have a legal say in the matter. Figuring (bizarrely) that making up the late payments will give him the legal right to stop the move, Alex pushes his friends, first Jenn, who he’s casually sleeping with, then Ian, who has developed a gambling problem (and the concomitant debts) to help him steal the money. Following Alex’s lead, the group uses Mitch’s crush on Jenn to coax him out of his reluctance.

Because why should they be shut out when everyone else has their hands in the cookie jar? Bear Stearns is in the midst of collapsing as the sub-prime mortgage crisis guts the economy, leaving many on Wall Street millions, if not billions, of dollars richer. Regular people like them are being stolen from everyday. Why shouldn’t they step up and start taking want they want too?

Ian brings up a problem that has become a classic in both game theory and moral philosophy, The Prisoner’s Dilemma. Although it can take many forms, the dilemma is usually presented in the form of two people getting arrested for a crime. The police know they are guilty, but don’t have enough evidence to press charges. The criminals are separated and told that if they rat out their partner they will go free, but their partner will get 10 years. If both criminals stay silent, they will each get charged with a lesser crime that carries a penalty of, say, 6 months in jail. If both confess, they will split the time, each serving 5 years. What is the rational thing to do here? If maintaining your freedom is a priority, then obviously you’re best off confessing before your friend does. But if the game is repeated, that is, if after the first prisoner confesses, the second prisoner is still given the opportunity to confess, the best thing to do over time is to stay silent, because 6 months (the time served if both stay silent) is better than 5 years (the time served if both confess).
Since the Thursday Night Drinking Club do not belong to the criminal underworld, and do not need to maintain trust and relationships of fellow criminals, there is no iteration of the game for them, and so, according to Ian, they have nothing to lose, and much to gain, by betraying Johnny Love.

But, in moral philosophy, the Prisoner’s Dilemma is often used to illustrate how rational self-interest can produce socially undesirable outcomes. Or to put it another way, the problem describes the tension between self-interest and the interests of the group, because a group where everyone acts in self-interest can sometimes produce individuals that are all worse off than they would have been if they had acted in the interest of the group.

As the four friends plan their heist, they fail to anticipate some obvious contingencies, and the robbery goes the only way it could – horribly wrong. Left with a pile of money and a new set of problems, the group promises to lay low for a while, each swearing not to spend their share of the money until the heat has died down and they’re sure they’re beyond suspicion.

But group interests aren’t enough to keep Alex from breaking their pact and paying his overdue child support. Ian, fearing for their personal safety (when Ian exchanged information about their plan for guns, Katz, the gangster running an illegal casino, threatened the lives of his friends if he didn’t settle immediately following the robbery) pays off his gambling debts. However, word travels fast in the underworld, and Victor, the other end of Johnny Love’s deal, gets wind of this ridiculously inept band of robbers. Not planning on ever having to deal with these criminals again, the group didn’t account for iteration – and as things go from bad to heart-breakingly horrible, they quickly realize that what they made the wrong choice: they should have played it straight instead of betraying a group of known criminals.

Despite all this philosophy – Plato, Nietzsche, and Sartre all get paraphrased for good measure – this is a darkly effervescent book. In this fast-paced and entertaining novel, Mr. Sakey spins the crime genre on its head to ask what happens when regular folk take it into their heads to become criminals.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 25 readers
PUBLISHER:	NAL Trade; Reprint edition (June 7, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Marcus Sakey
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes

Bibliography:

• The Blade Itself (2007)
• At the City’s Edge (2008)
• Good People (2008)
• The Amateurs (2009)
• Scar Tissue: Stories (2010)
• The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes (June 2011)

“I found that as life went on, the problems mounted and their solutions only served to make things worse.

I didn’t have a case at that moment which meant that no money was coming in. When I did get a job, that just meant that somebody was going to get hurt, one way or the other – maybe both. And even then I might not collect my detective’s fee.

A good friend was dying in my eleventh-floor apartment, and my wife was having an affair with a man half her age. And those were just the devils I knew.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (MAR 9, 2011)

Walter Mosley has created a private eye with a unique take on the world in Leonid McGill, son of Tolstoy McGill and brother to Nikita. Leonid’s Father was a communist activist, a man for the worker, with a philosopher’s tongue. When the Thrill is Gone opens with Leonid having been estranged from his father for many years. However, Leonid often refers to his father’s adages to get him through life. And, like Dr. House, Leonid believes that everybody lies. “Almost everything you know or ever hear is a lie. Advertisements, politicians’ promises, children’s claims of accomplishments and innocence…your own memory.”

This mystery opens when a woman named Chrystal Tyler walks into Leonid’s office claiming that her husband Cyril is planning to kill her. She also believes he is having an affair because she can hear him talking to a woman on the phone late at night and he has lost a lot of weight lately. Leonid comes to find out that this woman, who claims to be Chrystal Tyler is really her sister Shawna. On top of that, Shawna is murdered soon after retaining Leonid’s services, leaving five orphaned children. Leonid sets out to find Chrystal and to save her from possibly being murdered.

While he searches for Chrystal, he often philosophizes, utilizing pugilistic metaphors from his time in the ring and philosophical tidbits he picked up from his father. He worries about the lives he impacts. “I’d never been caught or convicted, not so much as indicted for the lives I’d shattered.” As he searches for Chrystal, he finds out that Chrystal’s husband has been married twice before and both of his wives have died mysteriously. Leonid has good reason to suspect Cyril Tyler of murder.

The story is quite complex with a huge array of characters and sub-plots. Leonid’s personal life is not going too well either. His closest friend Gordo is dying of cancer in Leonid’s apartment. Leonid’s wife is having another affair, this time with a man half her age. His sons are giving him trouble. Dimitri is in Paris with the ex-girlfriend of a Russian gun runner. His other son, Twill, who is Leonid’s favorite, is making a lot of money and not in an honest way. Leonid lets the reader know that his wife thinks she pulled a fast one on him as two of his three children are not his by blood, but are the children of other men. That doesn’t matter much to Leonid who is wise to the scam. Dimitri is the only one of his children related to him by blood. He often wonders why he has remained married to his wife for so long. He has a way with the ladies and has a special one, Aura, who he loves. He has offered to divorce his wife and marry Aura but Aura is afraid that Leonid will die a violent death. In a previous book in this series, it was Aura who nursed Leonid back to health.

If you like your mysteries filled with quips, lots of sharp turns and rabbit trails, this is one for you. I especially liked Leonid’s character and enjoyed looking at life from his perspective. I found the huge cast of characters somewhat confusing but focused primarily on the ones I thought were part of the big hunt. I think the book would have been better with fewer characters. Overall, however, this is a topnotch thriller worthy of the author.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 32 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Hardcover (March 8, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Walter Mosley
EXTRAS:	Wikipedia page on Walter Mosley
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Blonde Faith and books in the Easy Rawlins series Fear of the Dark and others in the Paris Minton & Fearless Jones Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (Socrates Fortlow) The Man in My Basement Futureland Workin’ on the Chain Gang

Bibliography:

• R.L.’s Dream (1995)
• Blue Light (1998)
• Futureland (2001)
• The Man in My Basement (2004)
• 47 (2005)
• The Wave (2006)
• Fortunate Son (2006)
• Killing Johnny Fry: A Sexistential Novel (2006)
• Diablerie (2007)
• The Tempest Tales (2008)
• The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey (2010)

Easy Rawlins Mysteries:

• Devil in a Blue Dress (1990)
• A Red Death (1991)
• White Butterfly (1992)
• Black Betty (1994)
• A Little Yellow Dog (1996)
• Gone Fishin’ (1997)
• Bad Boy Brawly Brown (July 2002)
• Six Easy Pieces: Stories (2003)
• Little Scarlet (2004)
• Cinnamon Kiss (2005)
• Blonde Faith (2007)

Socrates
Fortlow novels:

• Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (1998)
• Walkin’the Dog (1999)
• The Right Mistake: The Further Philosophical Investigations of Socrates Fortlow (2008)

Paris Minton and Fearless Jones Mysteries:

• Fearless Jones (2001)
• Fear Itself (2003)
• Fear of the Dark (2006)

Leonid McGill, P.I. series:

• The Long Hill (2009)
• Known to Evil (2010)
• When the Thrill is Gone (2011)
• All I Did Was Shoot My Man (January 2012)

Nonfiction:

• Workin’ on the Chain Gang: Shaking Off the Dead Hand of History (2000)
• What Next: An African American Initiative Toward World Peace (2003)
• This Year You Write Your Novel (2007)

Movies from books:

• Devil in a Blue Dress (1995)
• Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (2002)

“When Cass, in all the safety of his obscurity, set about writing a book that would explain how irrelevant the belief in God can be to religious experience — so irrelevant that the emotional structure of religious experiences can be transplanted to completely godless contexts with little of the impact lost — and when he had also, almost as an afterthought, included as an appendix thirty-six arguments for the existence of God, with rebuttals, […] he’d had no idea of the massive response his efforts would provoke.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (FEB 20, 2011)

With a doctorate in philosophy from Princeton, Guggenheim and MacArthur (genius) awards, several novels, and non-fiction studies of Gödel and Spinoza under her belt, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is nobody’s fool. But I can’t decide whether her decision to populate her latest novel exclusively with people like herself is good or bad. Set in and around Cambridge, Massachusetts, partly at Harvard but mainly at another elite university which might be a fictionalized Brandeis, the entire cast of characters seems to consist of academic philosophers, psychologists, mathematicians, or theologians, all determined to prove that they are smarter than anybody else. Readers who enjoyed the intellectual name-dropping of Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of a Hedgehog might well like this, but it can be hard going. I soon began to wish for at least one character who did not know the Wittgenstein Paradox or Heideggerian Hermeneutics inside out. After about 80 pages, however, I found myself drawn into the strange world of the book, for three main reasons. I list them in increasing order of importance.

1. Goldstein can be very funny. There is splendid scene when the great professor Jonas Elijah Klapper (think Harold Bloom) makes a state visit to the Valdener Rebbe, head of a Hasidic sect headquartered in a building described as “A Costco that had found God.” In the ensuing dialogue, the professor tries hard to impress with obscure references to early Jewish mystics, while the Rebbe merely wants to discuss how best to secure federal matching funds. Nevertheless Klapper treats this as deep rabbinical wisdom expressed in parables, silencing a doubter with the words: “You are the sort who, should she witness the Messiah walking on water, would be impressed that his socks had not shrunk.”

2. The chief character, Cass Selzer, is the least pretentious of the lot and really very likeable. A psychologist, he has recently published VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS ILLUSION, vaulting him to the New York Times bestseller list and a Time Magazine feature as “The atheist with a soul.” The 36 Arguments of the book’s title form the appendix to Selzer’s book, reprinted as a 50-page appendix to the novel. Each argument is laid out in clear syllogistic form only to be dismissed by equally clear analysis of its flaws. But for the most part, Cass leaves the logical legerdemain to the appendix. As a character in the story, he speaks normal conversational English, and is really quite sympathetic as he moves from hero-worship to rejection of the monstrous Klapper, and tries to find a life partner among a sequence of dauntingly brilliant women.

3. The book does indeed have a soul. The visit to the Valdener Rebbe (a distant relative of Cass) is more than a comic tour-de-force. Cass also meets the Rebbe’s son, Azarya, clearly a mathematical genius and as lovable for his personality as amazing in his desire for knowledge. At the age of only six, he explains discoveries in number theory that he has made by himself, describing the various classes of primes as orders of angels as real to him as Cherubim and Seraphim. Uniquely, he unites religion and science, not as opposites, but in a single world view. There is a great set-piece which is an ecstatic description of a “shabbes tish” or ceremonial meal, which draws me further into the spirit of Hasidic life than anything I have read before, including Chaim Potok’s The Chosen. Towards the end of the book, Cass argues against the existence of God in a public debate at Harvard. But the last chapter is not left to the arguments of philosophers but to another celebration at the Valdener shul, a glowing scene that somehow makes the entire debate almost irrelevant.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 70 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage (February 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Rebecca Goldstein
EXTRAS:	36 Arguments website with excerpts and reading guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More on the subject of God: God is Dead by Ron Currie, Jr. And, our review of: The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

Bibliography:

• The Mind-Body Problem (1983)
• The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind (1989)
• The Dark Sister (1993)
• Strange Attractors: Stories (1993)
• Mazel (1995)
• Properties of Light (2000)
• 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction (January 2010)

Nonfiction:

• Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel (2005)
• Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (2006)

“It’s the same thing in life, says Pirsig. Take the time to decide what you want; then take the extra time to make it happen according to your own terms. Slow down. Always remember that the real motorcycle that you’re actually working on is the cycle called Yourself.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (JUN 19, 2010)

Equal parts road trip, biography, philosophy and travelogue, Zen and Now: On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is an entertaining, educational and illuminating look at an American literary phenomenon and its creator.

In 1974 Robert Pirsig published Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The book was Pirsig’s attempt to articulate his “philosophy of Quality.” He posited that the inherent tension of modern life was a result of conflict created between different ways of looking at the world. There is the romantic approach, that is the “being in the moment” approach; and there is the classic approach, that of rational analysis. Pirsig’s narrator, fashioned after the author, suggests that in classic philosophy a division was made between these two ways of looking at the world. In antiquity, it was necessary, but for moderns it causes frustration and tension. He builds a philosophy around the pursuit of “Quality” to address this using a cross country motorcycle trip with his son and friends as framework. It is not necessary to be familiar with Zen and the Art to appreciate Richardson’s book. It is highly entertaining in it’s own right. But certainly it would be lacking if the reader has no inkling of the references.

Of equal import is a passing familiarity with Pirsig the man. Pirsig and his 170 I.Q. permeate both books like a heavy fog. He was a troubled yet brilliant man and eventually was institutionalized and subjected, forcibly, to electroshock treatment. The treatment erased a personality Pirsig dubbed Phaedrus, after a character in a Plato dialogue. Zen and the Art is also Pirsig’s attempt to come to grips with the shadow soul Phaedrus. Phaedrus comes and goes in Pirsig’s book, but is always lurking. Sadly, it was Phaedrus to whom Pirsig’s youngest son Chris clung as father, not Robert. As a result, Chris, who rode with his father throughout the trip captured in Zen and the Art, struggles with the loss of a father he loved, while wrestling with his own tenuous grasp on reality. Tragically, Chris was murdered outside the San Francisco Zen center two years later.

This is the world Richardson sets out, on the cusp of his 42nd birthday, to trace. Richardson is not a philosopher or academic. He is a journalist, specifically he writes about cars and motorcycles for The Toronto Star. Nor is his idea–to follow Pirsig’s route on a motorcycle–all that unique. We learn in Zen and Now of a generation of “Pirsig’s pilgrims” seeking enlightenment, or something akin it, on their cycles with the open road before them. Richardson is everyman to Pirsig’s singularity. He seems affable and accessible while Pirsig is distant and sullen. In common they share a love of the open road on a motorcycle and a modern, suburban angst. Both books continue a long tradition of truth seeking on the long stretch of highway.

Feeling lonesome–Richardson has two young boys and wife–and dreading the route through the mountains, Richardson wonders, “Why am I doing this, again? Not so sure now. To discover something? To relate more directly to the book that inspired me? To see some of the sights that Pirsig so eloquently described in his spare narrative? To get away from the wife and kids?” His questions are rhetorical, but hint at his reservations, nonetheless. He does not come across as a hard-core “seeker,” a true Pirsig pilgrim. That is refreshing, frankly. Again, his approach to the project stands in stark juxtaposition to Pirsig’s hellbent determination. A hundred pages or so later, Richardson comes back to the question. “I’ve just wanted the opportunity for so long now to devote time and effort to something without the phone ringing or rushing to get the boys to soccer practice. To do something for the pleasure of it without having to justify it first to my equally stressed-out wife. To sit and think….” Haven’t we all checked this box on occasion?

So sit and think he does. Though less thinking, it seems, than sitting. Outfitted on a 1985 Suzuki DR600, complete with GPS device (programed with Pirsig road-side highlights) and “Butt Buffer” gel seat pad upon with to do his sitting, Richardson sets out along Pirsig’s route from Minnesota to San Francisco, where he plans to celebrate his 42nd birthday. Richardson is a gear guy. He likes talking about bikes, about tires and breaks and clutches. And he seems a born curious traveler, which is the perfect companion for the armchair traveler. (I was reminded on more than one occasion of Paul Theroux, and his wonderful idiosyncratic travel books.) Along the way he stops at Pirsig stops, meets locals, as well as a few remaining original Pirsig characters. When he fills his gas tank, he goes to pains to try to find the same station Pirsig used. It’s fun to follow along. Richardson is affable and engaging, the physical ground he is covering is beautiful and dramatic, and the personal ground–middle-aged guy on a motorcycle roadtrip–is enlightening and thought provoking. Woven throughout is a pedestrian look at Pirsig’s philosophy. “A big part of the message of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance can be boiled down to a truism: if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. Pirsig would spend hours considering a problem and its solution–how to fix a motorcycle, how to build a workbench drawer–and I so wish I had the time in my own life to devote to such satisfying pursuits. But I don’t.”

Don’t expect great insights here. Early on, Richardson tells us there are ample sources to turn to if you are feeling scholarly. Yet, his writing about Zen and the Art is refreshingly simple and accessible. We are fortunate that he found the time to carve out this adventure.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 14 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage (September 8, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Mark Richardson
EXTRAS:	Excerpt Wikipedia page on Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: How to Live, Or a Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell

Bibliography:

• Zen and Now: On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (September 2008)

By Robert Pirsig:

• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (1974)
• Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals (1991)

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“Doubt is the big machine. It grinds up the delusions of women and men.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (MAR 26, 2010)

The Big Machine is a genre-busting romp through the fields of good and evil. Part mystery, part science fiction, part philosophy, and part theology, this book takes us on a heady journey from underneath the earth’s surface to the wonderment of the universe.

Ricky Rice is a janitor for a bus station in Utica, New York when he gets a puzzling envelope delivered to him. It has a note inside that says “You made a promise in Cedar Rapids in 2002. Time to honor it”. He wonders how anyone knew about the promise and how they could have found out? Who are these people? Along with the note is a bus ticket to Burlington, Vermont. Ricky decides to go but says to himself, “What kind of a black man accepts an unsigned invitation to the whitest state there is?”

Upon arriving in Burlington, Ricky is picked up at the bus station and escorted into the deep woods where he finds a small and cozy cottage awaiting him. For a man used to flop houses and shared one-room apartments, this is nirvana. Also on the property is The Washburn Library, a huge and beautiful structure. Ricky gradually finds out that he is a part of a secret society searching for “the Voice,” an unearthly sound that only few humans have been privy to hearing. He is part of a group that he calls “The Unlikely Scholars.”  They are unlikely because all of them have a past. They are made up of ex-cons, drug addicts, prostitutes, the homeless and the disenfranchised. Ricky himself has a history of heroin addiction. He’s been clean for three years but still totes six bags of heroin and a syringe with him – just in case. Additionally, all of the Unlikely Scholars are black, both male and female.

Gradually, Ricky finds out the history of the Washburn library and this society that has made him an honorary member. Judah Washburn, a freed slave, once heard “the Voice” and the Voice led him to an underground tunnel that went from the west coast of the United States to Vermont. Along with hearing the Voice, Judah also found millions of dollars of Spanish bullion. He founded this society to perpetuate his search for the Voice. He wanted to know its origins, what it meant and why it spoke to some people and not others.

Ricky and the other Unlikely Scholars are under the tutelage of “the Dean” who once heard the Voice himself. Each Scholar has their own office and each day newspapers from around the country are delivered to them. Their job is to peruse the newspapers and find articles that can somehow lead to the Voice. How to identify which articles are meaningful and which are not is a real puzzle to Ricky and he spends days scratching his head. He enjoys reading the journals of the past Scholars.

One day the Dean requests that Ricky join another Scholar, Adele Henry, on a super-secret mission to find someone who is a threat to the society. On this trip, Ricky and Adele meet with all types of dangers, both worldly and otherworldly. They find themselves in sewers pursued by the Devil of the Marsh. They meet angels as well. They also have run-ins with human bad guys with plans to destroy all that the Scholars stand for.

An aspect of this novel that I found interesting is that chapters about the Unlikely Scholars are interspersed with chapters about Ricky’s life. He was brought up in a cult called “The Washerwomen.” This cult operated out of an apartment building in the borough of Queens in New York. It billed itself as Christian but it had a different bible and belief system. The cult had an enormous impact on Ricky’s life. We also find out what happened in Cedar Rapids where Ricky made his promise.

LaValle is a wonderful wordsmith and I loved his descriptions. He describes two brothers as having “faces like Boston Terriers, somber eyes that were a little too large, and jowly cheeks that only emphasized their frowns.” His writing is brisk and descriptive. His characters are the dispossessed brought up to a higher rung in the food chain, an aspect of the book I really appreciated. The Unlikely Scholars are a group to be reckoned with and appreciated, pasts and all. Some of the science fiction seemed too over the top for me but the rest of the book was so interesting, I could easily forgive that.

This is a book for readers who love science fiction and mysteries. It is also for readers like myself who may want to wander outside their comfort zone and try another genre. This book is comprised of many genres and is often surreal or “trippy.” It is a mind-bender and a roller coaster ride to the far side.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 33 readers
PUBLISHER:	Spiegel & Grau; Reprint edition (March 9, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Victor LaValle
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another SciFi book that deals with race:Futureland by Walter Mosley And another that is a SciFi thriller: Improbable by Adam Fawer And another new author: Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

Bibliography:

• Slap Boxing with Jesus (1999)
• The Estastic (2002)
• Monster (2004)
• The Big Machine (2009)
• The Devil in Silver (August 2012)

“…if free will exists, it’s a decision we make between futures.”

Book Review:

Review by Kirstin Merrihew (FEB 18, 2010)

If you are mad about Somewhere in Time and/or H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, The Kingdom of Ohio may be right up your alley. A star-crossed love story intertwines with questions of how people might leap from one time and place to another. However, The Kingdom of Ohio would have been a more original story if it had been published during Well’s time, or even just before 1980 when the Christopher Reeve/Jane Seymour movie was first released. Those who keep up with current physics theories and read science fiction and fantasy will find more derivative than seminal thought here, but this novel still emanates power to engage.

First-time novelist Matthew Flaming, who studied philosophy, provides back-of-the-envelope (i.e., brief, pithy) insights into the still unsolved mystery of self and existence, inserting comments such as, “And that’s the funny thing about memory, isn’t it? Nothing is so near, and nothing else so unreachably far.” He wants to explore reality and whether it is solid or diaphanous. He uses the metaphor of the “machine” of bustling New York at the dawn of the twentieth century to invoke such ideas as a mechanical universe, the inhumanity of the industrial age, and the rise of science. He opens Chapter 1 with nostalgia from the primary narrator (who is writing this manuscript, complete with meticulous and helpful footnotes), and then this lament: “Carried on the tide of progress, we all seem to be fast-forwarding into a future where our memories become irrelevant relics from a useless and discarded past.” The character, in other words, isn’t exactly sure where he belongs, and he tells us why.

The book’s aging narrator (who doesn’t initially bother to impart his name) also conveniently includes a good plot summary: “It’s a story about conspiracies and struggles to reshape the world; about secret wars between men like J. P. Morgan, Thomas Edison, and Nikola Tesla. It is about one of the strangest and least-known mysteries of American history: the existence and disappearance of the Lost Kingdom of Ohio (arguably the most inventive idea in the novel). It is about science and faith, and the distance between the two. Most of all, it’s a story about a man and a woman, and about love.” Certainly each of these elements is present. The difficulty is that they don’t really ignite the story, even when “fire and light” adorn the text…perhaps because the writing is dispassionate (possibly reflecting a reserve in the narrator) and tends to telegraph plot and dissipate suspense. As for the portraits of the real luminaries, they feel postured at times, and their parts in the plot don’t always feel very organic. This novel simply doesn’t always integrate like, say, good calculus. Also combining a tiny and defended kingdom in Ohio, the “true” reason for the N.Y. subway layout pattern (also in the hunt for most inventive idea, but not fulfilled), a beautiful woman mathematician whose perils are gradually shared by a protective subway mechanic, and a narrative movement that switches from present day back a hundred years and more, proves a bit unwieldy.

Despite these critiques, the eccentric The Kingdom of Ohio can appeal to those, like me, who are philosophically inclined; those who muse about the things that Flaming and his characters do. Maybe it can appeal even more to curious readers who have only a glancing knowledge of its subject matter; the book may whet their appetites for history, mathematics, physics, etc. I read it eagerly, did so quickly, and do recommend it as a reputable first novel sporting some handsome prose — with the proviso that the grandness of its themes aren’t quite matched by execution or content. Flaming possesses an out-of-the-box imagination, and I look forward to his increasingly seasoned application of it.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 35 readers
PUBLISHER:	Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam; 1st edition (December 31, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Kirstin Merrihew
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Matthew Flaming
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another interesting read about Tesla: The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt

Bibliography:

• The Kingdom of Ohio (December 2009)

“I remembered that quote . . . from Epictetus. ‘Everything has two handles, one by which it may be borne, the other by which it may not.’ “

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (SEP 27, 2009)

Disturbances in the Field is a deep novel and book of philosophy in one. It opens up very slowly, developing characterization and heading very slowly towards a tragedy. What, you might ask, is a disturbance in the field? The field is the entire environment that we experience. Any occurrence which changes the equilibrium of the environment is a disturbance in the field. The field is then in disequilibrium until it achieves a new balance. This is one of the reasons that this book develops very slowly – – it describes the field and all of its elements.

The book begins with a group of close-knit students at Barnard College: Lydia, Esther, Nina, and Gaby. Their friendships are one of those rare ones that last their entire lives. Together they take philosophy classes and study the pre-Socratics, Aristotle, Plato, Dante, Sartre, and others. The philosophers and their beliefs are discussed among them as they try to interpret their lives. Lydia narrates the book and the book is written on two different planes – – that of the intellect and that of the heart.

The women finish college and begin their lives as independent people. Lydia, Gaby and Esther marry while Nina remains single. They are close friends with some male college friends as well. George is a psychotherapist who has slept with all of the women. Victor is an artist who marries Lydia and together they have four children. Gaby gives up her dance career to marry Don, an Orthopedist, and they have two children. Esther marries twice, both times to unsuitable men. Nina has a number of serial monogamous relationships. As the years pass they try to understand the meaning of their lives while dealing with their heartfelt emotions. Their lives intersect in many ways as their relationships endure through the years.

It is difficult to review this book without spoilers. The author carefully and methodically draws out each character as perceived by Lydia. The reader reaches a point where she feels like she knows each and every one of the characters like a trompe l’oeil painting. We know that the book is building up to something very major and tragic but there is no hint of what it is or when it will come. When it does come, everything is changed.

The writing is superb, not a word wasted. This is a book of the mind and the heart. It makes the reader think and cry. The author has created a major piece of work with this book, one that has enriched me in the reading.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 35 readers
PUBLISHER:	Counterpoint (May 31, 2005)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Lynn Sharon Schwarz
EXTRAS:	No excerpt or reading guide for this book — but a few people are rediscovering it and raving about it
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More great reads:Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer In Hovering Flight by Joyce Hinnefeld

Bibliography:

• Rough Strife (1980)
• Balancing Acts (1981)
• Disturbances in the Field (1983)
• Acquainted With the Night: Stories (1984)
• The Melting Pot and Other Subversive Stories (1987)
• Leaving Brooklyn (1989; 2007)
• In the Family Way: An Urban Comedy (1999)
• The Fatigue Artist (1995)
• Referred Pain and Other Stories (2004)
• The Writing on the Wall (2005)

Nonfiction:

• Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books (1996)
• Face to Face: A Reader in the World (2000)
• Not Now, Voyager: A Memoir (March 2009)