Julian Barnes
Nothing to be Frightened ofNEW! (Added 06/07/2009)
The twin themes of mortality and oblivion will be familiar to readers of Julian Barnes' novels. As early as Metroland, which he wrote in his early 30s, he was describing the night terrors of an introspective teenager as he contemplated the finiteness of existence.
Barnes was no doubt always, at some point, going to devote a whole book to death, and finally, here it is. Though, that said, it is not a general philosophical disquisition on the meaning of mortality, but a gloomy polemic on why the only sane attitude to it is fear.
The book is free in form, and consists largely of anecdotes from Barnes' family history on the one hand, and the biographies of writers and artists - mostly French - on the other. Interspersed with these are private musings on death and religion.
Barnes labels himself an agnostic, not for hopeful reasons, but for sceptical, negative ones: all he knows is how little he knows. His working assumption is that there is no God and no afterlife, in the face of which scenario "I repeat and insist that I suffer from rational (yes RATIONAL) fear". Acknowledging that intelligent people exist who appear not to fear death, he ascribes this outlook mostly to a lack of imagination, though conceding that there is likely a genetic component.
I would disagree with Barnes here, and argue that our fear of death only appears rational to us because we can't imagine not having it. At bottom it is a necessary condition for our species' survival - the problem for homo sapiens being that our capacity for abstract thought makes us anticipate death even in the absence of immediate danger. Barnes acknowledges this, but only in passing: for him the crux is that no individual consciousness can reasonably accept the possibility of its non-existence.
But look at some other animals: soldier ants, for example, routinely sacrifice their lives for the survival of their colony. This isn't (we assume) down to courage, but to evolutionary logic: all the ants in the colony are genetically identical, so if the impulse to self-sacrifice helps the colony's survival, it will win out against any impulse to individual dominance.
Furthermore, Barnes' musings on religion, though interesting, are rather limited in scope. Barnes sees any mystical or quasi-religious attitude that compromises with Christianity's teachings as a cowardly cop-out: "You may have your own personal idea of God, but does God have His own personal idea of you? Because that's what matters." Yet this shows, ironically, that the agnostic Barnes has his own personal idea of God, as a being who has personal ideas of all of us. Barnes' conception of religion is Western, empiricist, and one might say, in its pflegmatic scepticism, particularly English: it is anti-mystical, rejecting the idea that God, or whatever you want to call a putative superior consciousness, is a thing to which the individual human mind can connect directly. God is, if anywhere, "out there", nothing to do with what happens in our own heads. Many Hindus or Buddhists, I suspect, see things differently.
Anyhow, part of the enjoyment of this book lies in considering ripostes to Barnes' gloomy pronouncements; judging by its undercurrent of wryness, one guesses that Barnes wouldn't object to a little good-natured contradiction by the reader. All told, this is an engaging and stimulating book. The usual Barnesian preciousness crops up from time to time, but is counterbalanced by frequent outbursts of wit, bordering on the exuberant at times, and by an agreeable sense of intimacy with the writer. In particular, Barnes' portrayal of his eccentric and undemonstrative family is touching, funny, and in places rather sad.
Derren Brown
Tricks of the Mind
As Derren Brown points out in the chapter of this book on hypnosis, it's remarkably easy to make people believe what you want them to. The masterly irony of this, his first major publication since he made the big time as a TV "mentalist", is that the people who'll gobble up its assertions most unquestioningly are those who most cherish their scepticism.
As his TV career has progressed, Brown has moved away from an ambiguous "Maybe I'm psychic, maybe I'm not" message, to become an increasingly strident critic of religious belief and pseudo-psychic charlatanism. Of course a healthy scepticism is preferable to blind faith of any kind. But Brown is now consciously aligning himself with the Richard Dawkinses and Robert Parks of the world in trying to convince the lay readership that anything which can't be explained by the 300-year-old Newtonian materialist paradigm simply doesn't happen. Whether he really believes this, or is just using it as a diversionary tactic, one could argue about all night, but either way in much of the book - which, to be fair, is well-written, incidentally informative, and often extremely funny - he comes across as a smug, intolerant prat.
So what's the book about? Well, it has to be understood in terms of its intended readership - i.e. anyone who wants to know more about how Brown's brand of magic works. To state the obvious, that puts it in a fundamentally ambiguous category: if the magic is going to continue to be magic, its secrets aren't going to be covered here in any useful depth. Which leaves the question of how the 300 pages are filled.
The earlier chapters describe at mind-numbing length baroque memory "tricks" which those of us with normal intellectual and imaginative capacity will find as good as useless. The dubious implication is that Brown's apparent memorisation of the entire contents of telephone directories is simply a development of the use of colourful mnemonics that we all used for exams at school.
The middle section of the book is, I believe, the one part that offers a modicum of real insight into Brown's act, and it covers hypnosis. Now, I know a little bit about hypnosis myself, both through reading and through personal experience, so I feel qualified to say that Brown is talking out of his behind, and knows it, when he strongly implies (without ever claiming it outright) that there is no such thing as a hypnotic state. The contradiction is glaring enough for anyone with their wits about them: writing one minute that there's "no need" to invoke ideas of a special state in explaining hypnosis, he a few pages later describes, tersely but accurately, how to hypnotise someone "as though" there were such a thing as a trance. The tortuous reasoning, even by as deft an advocate as Brown, alerts the reader to the possibility that something interesting is being glossed over. I won't bang on about this, but rather recommend Robin Waterfield's history of hypnosis as collateral reading to this part of the book.
The later chapters find Brown at both his most unattractively bellicose and intellectually meretricious. They comprise a no-holds-barred attack on blind faith, whether it's inspired by religion or by dubious self-styled psychics. Now, I'm neither religious nor a believer in 90% of what's claimed of the paranormal; but while Brown pays lip-service to the notion of "live and let live", the overriding message he conveys is that to have any belief in either religion or psychic ability is to be an unadulterated loser.
Brown himself - this is one of the book's genuinely interesting revelations - was until his early adulthood a Christian of the preachier kind. When such people lose their faith, they often become equally preachy rationalists, Marxists or postmodern theorists, and Brown has - or would have us believe he has - followed the first path. His argument is basically that if one does not believe in the single doctrine of the Resurrection, one must dismiss the whole of what's written in the Bible as a bunch of fairy stories with no historical, linguistic or moral interest whatsoever.
Meanwhile, what's most interesting about Brown's rant against charlatan and self-deluded "psychics" is that he never suggests that the reader should really think indepedently, considering the arguments both for and against psi; rather, he strongly implies that the manifest delusions and malpractice of the majority of self-styled psychics seal the argument once and for all. I realise I'm in a minority here, but I have a strong suspicion he protests too much.
Adam Eason
The Secrets of Self-Hypnosis
This review is bound to be provisional, until I pluck up the courage to actually try out the techniques outlined in the book.
What I will say is that its humorous and friendly style encourages positive expectations of self-hypnosis. For all Adam Eason's limitations as a writer (of which more in a moment), he does have the gift of seeming to address the reader personally and of really wanting the best for him or her.
This is an extremely thorough book, but it isn't all that well organised. Eason presents a step-by-step procedure for performing self-hypnosis, but goes on to offer many variations on the basic format, without always being clear which step he's discussing. Even the distinction between the main text and the scripts isn't always apparent. One comes away - rightly or wrongly - assuming that the detail of the procedure doesn't matter all that much, and that it's more a question of getting a feel for how to recognise and use the hypnotic state; but still, more clarity would be desirable.
A more jarring flaw is the appalling standard of the prose. It's not that Eason doesn't have a sense of how to make words flow - understanding that is part of the hypnotist's trade, after all. But his regard for grammatical sense and correct punctuation is zero. The result is that many sentences must be read twice in order to be correctly parsed. I don't know anything about Network 3000 Publishing, but I can't believe that even their presumably small budget couldn't stretch to getting a proofreader on board.
Still, the book must ultimately be judged by its effectiveness. There are different scripts and techniques to suit different temperaments, and Eason definitely gives a good sense of what hypnosis is about, and what it can do. I shall report more fully when (or if) I've dabbled more in the practice.
Walter Ellis
The Oxbridge Conspiracy
This book could have been a valuable expose of the persistent dominance of the Oxbridge old boys' (and girls') network in British public life. Unfortunately, it is so subjective, and so dominated by a tone of personal grievance and self-pity, that even Ellis's valid criticisms don't invite much sympathy. And they certainly should; one Oxbridge graduate reviewed the book under the headline, "One of Them gets uppity about all of Us".
Ellis is resentful that he didn't manage to get his journalistic foot in the door of Fleet Street, and blames his status as an "outsider"; but if this book is any index of his journalistic style, his handicaps may rather have been, frankly, journalistic: he can't distance himself from his subject matter, and he gets his facts wrong. For example, at one point he insists that novelists usually need to have been to Oxbridge to succeed - suggesting he hasn't heard of Kazuo Ishiguro, Beryl Bainbridge, David Lodge or Ian McEwan.
We all know that many Oxbridge graduates think the sun shines out of their a**es; but in reality, Oxford and Cambridge _don't_ hold the grip that they used to, and Britain today is more of a meritocracy than Ellis would have us believe. Besides, if the superior education Oxford and Cambridge provide is any kind of bulwark against the tide of philistinism that threatens to drown the cultural life of Britain in a soup of docusoaps, Big Brothers and new things to do with text messages, I'm all for its continuation.
Arthur J Ellison
Science and the Paranormal
Arthur Ellison was a Professor of Engineering who disbelieved in the existence of material reality. (Don't worry - he didn't design bridges.) In his spare time, he attended seances and accumulated what he believed was evidence for telepathy, psychokinesis, clairvoyance and life after death. He reports on his experiences and research in this intriguing if far from wholly convincing book, written just before he died a few years ago aged 80.
It should be pointed out that the book's title is misleading. There are very few accounts here of rigorous experiments on the paranormal, and very little discussion of the basic question of whether paranormal phenomena exist at all. Ellison rather takes that for granted, and spends the book instead speculating on the metaphysical nature of their various (apparent) manifestations. There are case studies of mediums, reports of solid objects materialising during seances at which Ellison was present, and descriptions of the author's (possibly hallucinatory) night-time excursions out of his own body.
Ellison comes across in this book, accurately or not, as something of an innocent, rarely entertaining the possibility of fraud, and conspicuously failing either to draw or to rebuff the obvious conclusions when his investigations yield unfavourable results; for example, seance "communications" supposedly from dead scientists are invariably nonsensical, but Ellison persists in believing, on less than compelling evidence, in some kind of life after death.
Ellison's philosophical ideas are interesting, and heavily influenced by Eastern mysticism, but he seems to me as uncritical of Eastern thought as he is critical of Western rationalism. He adopts the Hindu view of the world around us as a "maya" or dream which has no more ontological validity than the "worlds" we drop into when we sleep, and attempts rather feebly to back this up with a nebulous appeal to the idea of interdeterminacy in quantum physics. He doesn't see the likelihood that both Eastern and Western paradigms might be partially right and partially wrong; and whereas he mocks most Western scientists as "naive materialists", he comes across himself as something of a naive idealist, explaining away all the mysteries of the world with the assertion that the world doesn't really exist!
In short, this book is worth reading if you are (like me) interested in psychology and already partially convinced of the possibility of paranormal phenomena. However, it isn't a significant contribution to the more general debate about these phenomena's scientific status.
John Kenneth Galbraith
The Affluent Society
JK Galbraith argues that the West's equation of social progress with a perpetual increase in economic production is a flawed model whose roots are in the outdated economics of want of the 18th and 19th centuries, rather than the economics of plenty of the post-war period. He sees increasing social inequality, poverty of public services, and a possible severe slump, as the inevitable consequences of failing to confront the (as he sees it) absurd paradox of an economic system in which the practical justification of an increasing number of goods is spurious need that has to be synthesised by advertising.
Galbraith takes the intelligent reader's concurrence for granted that better schools, more police and cleaner streets are more desirable than a mounting profusion of consumer goods that nobody needs. Laudable, no doubt; the problem is his disregard for the fact that the interest of society as a whole generally runs counter to the immediate interest of the individual people and - even more so - businesses within it. Nor does his penchant for sneering rhetoric and unsubstantiated generalisation do his arguments many favours.
Galbraith's ideal is a society in which a diminishing employed population generously funds the inactivity of the unemployed; or alternatively, where everyone agrees to work fewer hours in the interest of keeping unemployment down. He also advocates increasing the use of the sales tax in America in order to enable local government to better finance its own social programmes as an alternative to reliance on income tax, which tends to get ciphoned off by the Federal government for spending on defence and servicing the national debt.
Could it work? It would be nice to think that (a) the public is idealistic enough to buy into the idea of sacrificing some private wealth for the improvement of public services and (b) it can be happy without a constant stream of new goods, however useless in themselves, to spend its excess income on. Maybe I'm just a jaded cynic but I don't think either of these is true. People are generally happy to forego fuzzy feelings of charity if it means they can keep a few more cents of their income for themselves. They also need things to aspire to, and except for the airy-fairy few this generally means more money, more possessions and more holidays.
That said, Galbraith's warnings - dating back to the first edition of this book from 1958 - about the dangers of our reliance on production could yet come home to roost, with the world economy apparently heading for a downturn to which overproduction of goods is no small contributing factor.
Either way, this book provides much food for thought; not just in the realm of pragmatic economics, but also as regards the rather more disquieting question of where western civilisation as a whole is heading. Free market ideologues will probably throw The Affluent Society away after the first 5 pages; anyone else will find it, at the very least, a valuable introduction to pretty much all the major economic issues facing the western world today.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
News of a Kidnapping
A factual account of the kidnappings of several middle class Colombians by one of the drug cartels that hold Colombia perpetually to ransom. However, Garcia Marquez seeks to trace a proper story in the events, and to convey, with a novelist's eye, the characters of their participants.
Those who come to this book expecting another One Hundred Years of Solitude will be disappointed - as, I confess, I was. Garcia Marquez's respect for the truth and for the people he interviewed prevent him from indulging in imaginative flourishes; there's no magic here, just visceral realism. All the same, I couldn't help feeling that he doesn't do this kind of writing as well as his best fiction; in particular the style, compared with that of _100 Years_, I thought was decidedly pedestrian.
In the end, it probably comes down to taste. One thing I will say is that this book gives a chilling, depressing insight into life in the forgotten hell-hole of Colombia. You can see all too clearly where Garcia Marquez gets his fatalism.
David Ray Griffin
The New Pearl Harbor
This was the first book that attempted to consolidate, into one resource, the claims by independent journalists of inconsistencies in the official US Government account of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
If nothing else, it was courageous of Griffin to publish this work back in 2004, a time when both the US Government and the mainstream US media were still loudly denouncing indigenous critics of the official account of 9/11 as traitors and conspiracy theorists. In fact, Griffin came in for less of a media thrashing than other reporters like Mike Ruppert and Alex Jones, perhaps due to his less strident tone and his modest public persona. He merely goes through his arguments methodically, and is always careful to preface contentious propositions with phrases like, "Critics of the official account suggest...". Maybe, too, the media and the US Government realised that to come down hard on a sexagenarian professor of theology might prove a PR own goal.
All of which makes the book the more remarkable, because the evidence it lists for some degree of Government cover-up surrounding the events of 9/11 is both convincing and voluminous. In fact it's so voluminous that it defies easy summary, but the most immediately striking points are these:
- Standard US operating procedure for dealing with off-course aircraft is the immediate scrambling of jet fighters to intercept them and warn them, via radio signals and physical manoeuvres, to return to their correct paths. This is not a rare occurrence: fighters had been thus scrambled 67 times between September 2000 and June 2001. However, there were unprecedented and unexplained delays in getting jets off the ground on 9/11, so that none of the flights that hit the WTC and (allegedly) the Pentagon were intercepted. This is particularly remarkable given the 52-minute gap between the first plane's hitting the WTC, and the attack on the Pentagon.
- When jet fighters were finally scrambled, it was from air bases other than those nearest to New York and the Pentagon.
- All the fighters that were scrambled were flying at a fraction of their top speeds.
- The automatic missile defences of the Pentagon - almost certainly the best-defended building in the world - failed to be activated by the incoming aircraft that hit it.
- There is photographic evidence that the hole in the Pentagon's wall - before the west wing of the building collapsed - was less than 20 feet wide, not nearly big enough for the fuselage of a Boeing 757 to fit into, let alone its wings and tail fin.
- There was no debris of a Boeing 757 outside the Pentagon or, according to rescuers at the scene, inside it.
- The twin towers of the WTC, and another building in the WTC complex, WTC7, were the first steel-structured buildings in history to collapse due, allegedly, to fire. WTC7 was not even hit by an aircraft.
- The remains of the three collapsed WTC buildings were taken away and shipped to foreign countries as scrap, without any analysis, in spite of the fact that it is a federal crime to remove evidence from a crime scene.
- There is a large amount of evidence suggesting that the the Bush administration planned wars in Afghanistan and Iraq many months before September 11, 2001.
Well, the list goes on: Griffin's final summary list is 40 points long and could easily have been broken down into more. There's the oddly unperturbed behaviour of President Bush, who upon hearing the news of 9/11 continued with his scheduled visit to a Florida primary school; the many reports from FBI officials of their superiors "stonewalling" efforts to investigate leads into known terrorist threats; the fact that numerous foreign secret services had given the CIA very detailed information pertaining to likely terrorist attacks, which the CIA failed to follow up; the Bush administration's unco-operativeness in investigations into 9/11 after the event; the US military's and CIA's apparent lack of interest in actually capturing Osama bin Laden; the mysterious deaths and demotions of numerous people claiming to have information that implicated the US administration in colluding with terrorists.
As will be evident, Griffin's book addresses both the events of 9/11 themselves, and their wider context. Most intelligent readers, I think, would admit the reasonableness of Griffin's objections to the official account of 9/11, but will nurse a residual scepticism as to the possible motives for any complicity of the Bush administration in the attacks. Certainly, the Bush administration wanted a more reliable government than the Taliban in Afghanistan, because US corporations planned the construction of a gas pipeline passing through that country from Turkmenistan. And certainly Bush and his many allies in the US oil industry wanted Iraq's oil. What Griffin doesn't convincingly show - but wait for it - is that the Bush administration wanted these things badly enough to stage the bloodiest and most dramatic "false flag" operation ever perpetrated by a democratically elected government.
With regard to this last point, I once again invoke those two words: "Peak Oil". Michael Ruppert's Crossing the Rubicon deals with this very frightening possible motive, and in my opinion is a necessary complement to this book. Ruppert's book is less coherent than Griffin's, but it fills in many of the gaps in Griffin's otherwise impressive argument.
Richard Heinberg
The Party's Over
A thorough and sober introduction to the issue of Peak Oil, this being the shorthand term for the point at which global oil production reaches its all-time maximum before starting to decline.
Heinberg starts by describing how fossil fuels, particularly oil, have given humanity an unprecedented "energy subsidy" over the past 150 years and provided even the average westerner with a standard of living beyond the dreams of the most affluent of previous ages. Oil is also almost entirely behind the exponential rise in world population from less than 2 billion in 1900 to nearly 7 billion today.
Heinberg proceeds to set out the geological evidence that oil production will peak before 2010 (this second edition of the book was published in 2005: production data for the intervening period suggests that we're now, in 2008, at the tip of the peak or past it), before discussing alternative power sources.
There's still a fair bit of coal left but it's a lot less energy-dense and flexible than oil, and brings many environmental problems. Natural gas production will peak only a decade or so after oil production. Nuclear power Heinberg rejects on environmental grounds, although it's the only energy source that could feasibly sustain the current world population in the medium term, once fossil fuels run out. He plugs wind power heavily, but most experts dispute that it could ever power the world.
What follows is the most depressing chapter of the book, "A Banquet of Consequences". Here Heinberg lists the possible synchronous economic, health, political, demographic and psychological crises resulting from peaking oil production. I say "possible", but realistically it's not a question not of if, but of when these disasters start to strike us. The first effects we're feeling already: escalating oil and food prices, and a dramatic economic downturn as banks, in the face of permanently shrinking energy supplies, call in their debts and stop lending. Within the next couple of decades, if not sooner, we can expect wars in the Middle East as the world's big powers - the US, Russia and China - fight tooth and nail for access to the remaining big reserves of oil in Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran. Add to that social breakdown in the West as our oil-based infrastructures crumble, and our cash-strapped governments either fail to keep a lid on things, or else resort to totalitarian methods of repression, and you've got a recipe for nightmares to last you the rest of your life.
Is there, then, no hope? Heinberg finishes by offering crumbs of comfort in a vision of a sustainable, lower-population, lower-energy world run by clear-sighted people with humanity's good at heart. But we all know what happens in severe crises: the virtuous are the first to go to the wall and brutality usually wins the day. That's how all animals survive when resources are scarce. It's clear from the general tone of the book that Heinberg expects the worst - how could he not? - but one must give him credit for at least giving lip service to possible solutions.
All the while, it's sad to read how many wise voices in the past, from US President Jimmy Carter to M. King Hubbert, the geophysicist who first showed that oil production follows a bell curve, went unheard in the insane capitalist rush for perpetually increasing wealth and the unsustainable financial model of permanent compound interest. 30 years ago we could have started making preparations for the inevitable transition, but instead there prevailed that perennial, fatal human response to unpalatable challenges: "Let's worry about all that when it happens."
Aldous Huxley
The Doors of Perception/Heaven and Hell
Aldous Huxley was a participant in research into the effects of the hallucinogen mescalin in the 1950s, and in The Doors of Perception he offers a memorable account of the eye-opening, mind-warping afternoon he spent following his first dose. The world around him seemed to become saturated with meaning, objects appearing to glow with an almost conscious sense of their identity. Huxley's essential hypothesis, distilled from Bergson's philosophy, is that the brain is not a creator of meaning but a reducer of it to those facets which are useful for its owner's survival - and that mescalin temporatily opens the "reducing valve". It's a vertigo-inducing idea, but anyone who's done their own open-minded research into head-stuff will find it worth taking seriously.
Of almost infinitely less interest is Huxley's "sequel" to his trippy classic, called Heaven and Hell. It's included in the Vintage edition, and is a meandering, lazy and pretentious rumination on mysticism as expressed through the ages and across the globe in art, literature and architecture. Huxley's aim here is to be a kind of Ruskin of the technological age, and he thinks being longwinded, unfocussed and "intense" will do the trick. Unfortunately, he's missing the vital ingredient of genius. No amount of repetition of the phrase "the mind's antipodes" can compensate for that.
Milan Kundera
Testaments Betrayed
An extended philosophical musing on art, artistry and integrity. Very similar in style to Kundera's fiction: incisive, stimulating and free of descriptive bloat. Some will find his relentless theorising self-indulgent. Not me though. Kundera can be pompous, certainly, but he's never boring.
Edward Lucas
The New Cold War
Edward Lucas argues that the West has been underestimating the threat posed by an economically resurgent, ideologically nationalistic, and politically authoritarian Russia in the first decade of the 21st Century. Under President Putin's leadership, Russia has brought itself back from the brink of social and economic ruin, to become one of the world's leading creditors, and one of its most stable economies. What's remarkable is that this has been achieved not alongside a loosening of political control, as the West complacently assumed it must, but alongside a tightening of it.
Lucas spends much of his book crying "Foul!" to some imaginary geopolitical umpire who has protected Western interests in the past. Russia, he argues, doesn't understand that capitalism can only work in a democratic and liberal political environment, and will ultimately pay the price for its arrogance. Yet he doesn't clarify what this price is, and consistently plays down the possibility that Russia is rewriting the rule book for economic success. It's very well for Lucas to suggest that Russia risks cutting itself off from the Western economy if it doesn't start to demonstrate more good will to its economic partners and their allies; but the way the Western economy is going at the time of writing, that looks like a hollow threat indeed. As Lucas acknowledges in a moment of lucidity, Europe now needs Russia more than Russia needs Europe.
And the reason for this is simple: energy. Thanks largely to gas and oil exports, Russia has paid off all the debts it accumulated in the 1990s. At least a dozen European countries already rely on Russia for most of their gas, which puts them in a poor bargaining position, and threatens to split the European Union along pragmatic fault lines, with those members less dependent on Russian energy supplies uneasy about the compromises their partners are making with the Kremlin. Russia's state-owned gas company, Gazprom, not only supplies a huge proportion of Europe's gas, but is buying up, directly or indirectly, enough downstream infrastructure to make much of Europe effectively captive to Russian threats and caprices. Attempts by Western nations to build rival pipelines from non-Russian Central Asia are being thwarted by prohibitive costs, and by a lack of goodwill from the largely Moslem nations (notably Iran and Turkey) through whose territories these pipelines would pass.
All this would matter less if global gas and oil supplies were projected to be abundant for the foreseeable future. But they're not. On this issue, if not on others, Lucas has his eyes wide open: both gas and oil are at or near their global production peaks, and their suppliers will shortly find themselves in an unprecedented position of strength. Is it any wonder, then, that energy-hungry countries like Italy and Germany are prepared to make a deal with the "Devil" that is the new Russia, as an alternative to future energy poverty? Do they, at bottom, have any choice?
Lucas says it's a matter of principle. Europe should stand up and present a strong, united front against Russian pressure and threats. Yet I wonder what his stance would be if he were German, with his country set to become mostly dependent on Russian gas in the next few years. As things are, the Germans might reasonably accuse Lucas of hypocritical self-interest, since Britain is still getting by with its own gas and Norwegian exports and in the short term stands to gain little by a closer relationship between the EU and Russia.
The New Cold War is part fascinating exposition, part polemical rant. In fact, despite the bias mentioned above, the chapter devoted to "Pipeline Politics" is one of the most informative and balanced in the book. The stories of Putin's rise to power, and of his taming of the Russian political and economic machines, are similarly level-headed. Elsewhere, though, the book often descends into incontinent invective that has the flavour of panic masquerading as moral disgust. Lucas writes for the Economist, and his strongly right-wing, free market bias comes through repeatedly. His comparison of Russian and Western foreign policies is particularly disingenuous, as he rounds on Russian support of despotic or anti-democratic regimes, as though the United States had never supported Saddam Hussein, had never created the Taliban, and had never assassinated democratically elected politicians and backed murderous dictators in Central and South America.
The book is best where its aim is exposition, and where it grudgingly acknowledges Putin's talents as a ruthless political strategist. Furthermore, its central claim - that the West underestimates Russia's power and belligerence at its peril - is most certainly valid. What it fails to convince the reader is that, at this juncture, the West, in particular Europe, can make up in willpower and moral resolution what it lacks in natural resources and financial stability. Russia holds all the aces, and it may be that all we can do for the moment is stop it from playing them for as long as possible.
Graham McCann
Fawlty Towers: The Story of Britain's Favourite Sitcom
A fairly thorough, and intermittently enlightening, account of the conception, making and reception of the classic 70s comedy. Much of the content won't be new to fans of the show - the extensive plot synpopses, the inspiration of the deranged real-life Torquay hotelier for Basil Fawlty - but there are interesting explanations by the actors of how they interpreted their parts, and some of the author's observations about the show's characterisation border on the insightful. Ultimately, though, the book aims its sights at the broadest possible readership, and most of the prose wouldn't be out of place in the Daily Mirror in terms of either its style or its penetration. That's no doubt a testament to the scope of the show's appeal; but as testament to the subtlety and brilliance of its writing and execution, one can't help but feel that this book falls a little short.
John Perkins
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
In early 1970s America, consultancies with close ties to the Government and the security services were recruiting economists, who were paid to visit developing countries and predict spectacular economic growth on the basis of huge infrastructure projects. These projects were to be implemented by American corporations, and financed via loans from American banks.
Within the consultancies, the people who made these projections were known as Economic Hit Men (EHMs). In these early days, there was little pretence surrounding the consultancies' real aim, which was to saddle these poor countries with unpayable debt and, when the defaults began, demand access to natural resources - most commonly oil - military co-operation and political support.
John Perkins, a bright graduate embittered by his repressed and stuffy New England upbringing, was recruited by one of these corporations, MAIN, as an EHM. Although his conscience nagged him from the beginning (by his own account), he was sufficiently intoxicated by the power, the money and the glamourous lifestyle that it took him ten years to quit MAIN. During this time he helped to funnel billions of dollars from poorly developed countries all around the globe to the United States. Perkins was one of the chief architects of the so-called Saudi Money-laundering Affair (SAMA), whereby the locally unpopular Saudi royal family was guaranteed American miltary protection in exchange for an agreement to sell oil cheaply and in dollars, and to invest a large portion of the proceeds in American businesses.
It is easy, at first, to be cynical about a book like this. If Perkins was so conflicted about what he was doing, why did it take him so long to pull out of MAIN? And why did it take him even longer (till 2003) to come clean and write about it? However, as the book develops one becomes inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. He is forthright about his own character flaws, but the accounts of his affection for the cultures of the countries he was exploiting ring true (one of the reasons, he claims, he was so successful at his job is that he ventured beyond the "suit zones" and got to know the natives). He developed a particular friendship with the subsequently almost certainly assassinated Panamanian leader Omar Torrijos; and even while an EHM he wrote an editorial in the Boston Globe advocating Panamanian control of the Panama Canal, an act which got him labelled a "Commie" internally in MAIN.
After leaving MAIN, Perkins married and had a daughter, and this seems to have thrown the immorality of American foreign policy, and the unsustainable economic model of perpetually increasing wealth, into sharp relief. He started writing this book in 1982, but claims he was bribed out of publishing it by an extremely lucractive "consultancy" offer for an engineering firm. It would appear that by the early 2000s, however, in true end-of-empire style, the firm had lost interest in his silence and he went ahead and published it anyway.
The long genesis of the book is evident in its rather disjointed narrative. The years at MAIN are covered fluently, but after the account of his resignation Perkins jumps around a fair bit between describing his own doings (running a - relatively - eco-friendly energy company) and later, often hamfisted attempts by the US to bring other countries under its control. Still, even in these late chapters, although Perkins was not directly involved, his experience and his contacts enable him to provide fascinating insight into the stories behind, for example, the 1989 US invasion of Panama, the two US-Iraq wars, and the failed coup against Hugo Chávez in Venezuela.
Perkins' prose doesn't exactly set the page alight, but that's not such a bad thing: the fascination here is in the facts. This is a unique book that goes a fair way towards illustrating why America is in the mess it is today, awaiting economic collapse in autumn 2008.
Michael C Ruppert
Crossing the Rubicon
In the 1990s, American hopes for the long-term future of its - and the world's - economy were resting on the results of oil drilling in the Caspian Sea area. By the late 1990s, however, it had become clear that the size of reserves in this area had been vastly overestimated and would not delay the point of peaking world oil production by more than a few months.
The seriousness of the issue of peaking oil production cannot be overstated. Industrial capitalist society has at its root the assumption of permanent long-term economic growth - and permanent economic growth depends on permanently increasing energy usage. When more energy is needed, production of fossil fuels is increased to meet demand. But this can't go on forever: oil production peaks roughly when half the oil in the world has been used up. The easily-accessible liquid has all been taken, and what's left gets harder and more expensive to extract.
Predictions made in the last century suggested that oil production would peak some time between 2005 and 2010. It looks as though they were spot-on: oil production levelled off in 2006 and hasn't increased since.
The immediate effect of the point of "Peak Oil" production being reached is that the oil market turns from a buyer's to a seller's one, resulting in skyrocketing petrol and food prices. (Food depends on oil at every stage of its production, from pesticides to farm equipment to transport to packaging.) This is the situation we're in at the time I write this review (June 2008). At some point, probably in the very near future, the financial markets and the banks will have to face the inescapable truth that a decreasing energy supply means a permanently shrinking world economy, which will make lending and investment a fool's game, which is likely to send the stock market and the banking system on the road to terminal collapse.
The American political and military elites have known for a decade that their country is in serious trouble. It's not the only one, of course, but as the only remaining superpower it's in a unique position to protect its own interests at the expense of other nations'. Voices in the ranks of the Republican Neo-Conservatives have declared openly their desire to secure whatever significant reserves of oil are left in the world in order to sustain America's fragile economy; Vice President Dick Cheney has declared, "The American way of life is not negotiable".
How far would the Neocons go? Mike Ruppert thinks they'd go as far as allowing, encouraging or even orchestrating the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, as justification for seizing control of the Middle East. There are two objections to this hypothesis: firstly, that no democratically elected government, however morally bankrupt, would be capable of such an atrocity; and secondly, that there is no evidence that the 9/11 attacks were anything other than what they are claimed to be, terrorist attacks by Islamic fundmantalists based in the Middle East.
Neither of these objections are necessarily watertight. Firstly, proposals for "false flag" operations to win over the support of the American public for foreign policy adventures have in the past reached as high up as the Presidential Office. In the 1990s, documents were declassified that revealed proposals by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff in the early 1960s to fake attacks by Cuba on American interests in the Caribbean, and on Cuban refugees in or heading for America, as a pretext for a US attack on Cuba. This programme was named Operation Northwoods; it was vetoed by President Kennedy.
Meanwhile, the most cursory perusal of the official account of 9/11 reveals an inordinate number of inconsistencies and puzzles: the conveniently discovered passports of the terrorists; the lack of airliner debris (notably wings or indeed wing-shaped holes) at the Pentagon; the mysterious collapse of a third building in the World Trade Center that was (a) announced by the media before it happened and (b) was not mentioned at all in the official 9/11 Commission report) and (c) was housing the command centre of New York's Office of Emergency Management at the time of the attacks.
Not only that; "war games" were being conducted by the US military on 9/11, simulating among other things terrorist attacks by aeroplanes on major US buildings. The fighter jets sent to intercept the hijacked airliners were travelling at a mere 200mph. There exists little-publicised footage of George W Bush at a press conference apparently unable to bring himself to deny that he knew about the attacks in advance.
Other writers such as David Ray Griffin have written intelligently about the strangeness of the official account of 9/11, but without presenting a convincing hypothesis as to why the US government might commit such an atrocity. Sheer greed for oil was never a convincing motive. Ruppert argues, on the other hand, that wasn't a matter of greed but of desperation. The American economy has been "running on empty" for a decade, propped up by the printing of extra dollars and possibly by the diversion of public money into the stock exchange via various tortuous routes. On top of this, Ruppert claims to have circumstantial evidence that the CIA launders money it obtains through involvement in international drug dealing using the stock exchange.
Ruppert is a scrupulous researcher, and his evidence, if true, speaks for itself. As an analyst, though, he tends to over-extrapolate. I'm unconvinced, for example, of the extent to which he claims the United States engineered Russia's economic collapse after the fall of Communism; or that the Democratic Party was "in on" the Neocons' plans for invading Iraq. Furthermore, Ruppert descends too readily into snide sarcasm and even, on occasion, invective, when a cool-headed analysis of facts would have done his cause more favours.
A more basic flaw of the book - fascinating though it is - is its less than coherent organisation. Ruppert structures it as though it were a legal case against the Neocons, in particular US Vice President Dick Cheney, elucidating motive, means and opportunity; yet it's never entirely clear what case he's making. Whereas more restrained writers like David Ray Griffin have simply taken the line that "something smells of fish" surrounding 9/11, Ruppert seems to desire nothing less than to explain the entire world order since 2000, and to point to a blanket conspiracy involving the American "Empire" (an unfortunate term that he uses throughout) to dominate the world and ultimately to subjugate its own people when - as will happen once the reality of Peak Oil hits home - fuel poverty starts to provoke civil unrest.
A large amount of the book is reproduced from Ruppert's newsletter From the Wilderness, which ran from 1998 to 2006 and which set to expose corruption, deception and misdemeanour at the top levels of the US government, military, corporate world and security services. Ruppert had a lot of information on tap, much of which pertained at least tangentially to 9/11 and Peak Oil, and he's stuffed the book full of his source material, rather than reshaping it to fit the book's purpose. An example of how this distorts the narrative is that two whole chapters are devoted to a former intelligence agent named Mike Vreeland, arrested in Canada for credit card fraud, whose sole claim to fame is having written a note that can be interpreted as implying foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks. Ruppert does not seem to know exactly who Vreeland is, nor what he did for the US Government, but he clearly devoted a lot of time to trying to find out and so includes what he does know in this book, even though the story is left hanging.
Ruppert also concentrates very much on his own research into 9/11; in fact, there is a large amount of evidence, some of it considerably more persuasive than some of Ruppert's, available in other books and on the World Wide Web that tells the same story.
On its own, Crossing the Rubicon wouldn't necessarily persuade the reader of US government involvement in 9/11, but other material I've seen inclines me to give Ruppert the benefit of the doubt on many points, at least provisionally. Moreover, he deserves credit, in my opinion, for being the first journalist to perceive a possible link between 9/11 and Peak Oil, and for persuasively presenting the argument for such a link.
Ultimately the scope and the comprehensiveness of the book help to overcome its editorial weaknesses, and while I would not recommend it as an introduction to either Peak Oil or to the mysteries surrounding 9/11, it is certainly the book to read after one has educated oneself about these issues separately.
John Ruskin
Selected Writings (Penguin)
John Ruskin raised art criticism to an art in itself: so penetrating were many of his insights and so lucidly were they expressed. In fact, as Kenneth Clark points out in this selection, Ruskin could not discuss art without touching on every other subject that interested him, in particular nature, architecture and society. This breadth of vision is both his strength and his weakness: in small measures it is exhilarating, but in longer stretches his tendency to let ideas run away with him is exhausting and irritating.
He could be perverse, arrogant and obtuse, characteristics that make his work full of wildly ridiculous assertions whose reasoning can be difficult to penetrate. Yet even his absurd statements are interesting, precisely because of the light they shed on his strange, visionary personality.
Clark's selection is divided into chapters on autobiography, nature, art, architecture, society and 'poetic description'. The selections are brief - often just a couple of paragraphs - which, given the frequent starchy richness of the prose, may be appropriate. That said, Ruskin's ability to create a sense of drama and suspense in his longer passages shouldn't be underestimated.
Of the chapters in the book, I was least taken with the one on nature. To me, Ruskin seems to indulge too readily a frenzied animism, seeing grass, trees and mountains as sentient entities. Often, one gains a clear enough picture of his ecstasy, but a curiously incomplete one of the scene that inspired it. His detailed, convoluted descriptions tend to exhaust the reader, who loses all sense of the scene's structural lines and of what point Ruskin is trying to *make* about the landscapes he loves - other than that he loves them.
In other words, Ruskin's was a profligate genius which didn't appreciate that less can sometimes be more. But all said and done, there is something uniquely inspiring about his best writing, on both aesthetic and social issues. He is one of the few writers who can make one see the world in a totally new - and, it should be said, better - light. Definitely a book to keep dipping into.
Robin Waterfield
Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis
The history of hypnosis as currently practised in the West is remarkably short. Until the 18th Century, the phenomena now associated with the hypnotic state, such as heightened suggestibility, control over normally unconscious bodily functions, and greatly enhanced mental faculties, were mostly attributed to witchcraft, superstition or religion. Things changed with the arrival on the scene of Franz Anton Mesmer, an egotistical Austrian doctor who claimed to be able to use magnets to send patients into hysterical fits, from which they emerged cured of hitherto intractable physical ailments. Over the course of the 19th Century, Mesmer's magnets were dropped - firstly in favour of the notion of "fluid exchange" between doctor and patient, and finally in favour of the purely psychological model that remains current.
Unfortunately, just when the first glimmerings of true understanding of hypnosis emerged in the late 19th Century, Freud declared it of limited therapeutic use (largely, it seems, because he was rather a poor hypnotist). Since then hypnosis, while just about recognised as a real phenomenon by science, has largely been left on the sidelines, where its application by seedy stage performers has done little to relieve it of its ambivalent scientific status.
No less offputting to researchers are the large claims made by some about hypnosis's power: its alleged ability to cure physical ailments from warts to cancer, and its alleged effect of disinhibiting latent telepathic faculties. Robin Waterfield, the author of this witty and highly readable history of hypnosis in the West, believes that, disregarding the claims of rogues and cranks, there is too much credible evidence for both of these types of phenomena for them to be disregarded. Indeed, he waxes almost evangelical in his advocacy of the more widespread use of hypnosis in the medical profession, dismissing rather petulantly the claim that, badly applied, hypnosis might sometimes be dangerous.
Can hypnotised subjects be made to do things that contravene their moral codes? Can they get stuck in trances? And is there - as has been argued recently in UK law courts - any evidence for links between hypnotism and mental illnesses such as schizophrenia? Waterfield's answer to all these questions is "Not really", but his tone is uncomfortably defensive. Without going into too much detail, from personal experience I've drawn my own conclusions about the latter two claims and feel Waterfield dismisses them too glibly; and as for the first, whether hypnosis can loosen people's sense of morality, his argument that hypnosis merely lowers inhibitions, and does not affect our fundamental sense of morality, simply does not wash. Half of morality *consists* in inhibiting inclinations; so how can Waterfield argue, as he seems to, that women who claim to have been raped by their hypnotists were pretty much "asking for it" - that hypnosis merely, as it were, exposed their fundamental immorality? It's a short step from there to saying that the crime is in the thought, and not in the act.
Still, these reservations aside, this is for the most part an informative, entertaining and well-written account of a phenomenon that, after more than two centuries of continuous practice, has yet to be either explored or exploited to the full.