The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean

Several years ago I read Penny Le Couteur and Jay Burreson’s , a book of popular science whose title came from a theory about Napoleon’s botched invasion of Russia during the winter. The theory goes, as Le Couteur and Burreson reported, that the buttons of Napoleon’s soldiers, which were made of tin, turned to powder in the extreme cold, thus exposing their tender torsos to the wind. Though it seems implied, the authors don’t come down strong on either side of the historical reality of this. Though the confluence is in doubt—indeed, it seems unlikely—the individual components of the tale are true: there were a lot of dead Frenchmen that winter, and tin—a perfectly solid metal under normal conditions—does turn into powder in extreme cold.

In The Disappearing Spoon, Sam Kean revisits this tale, but as a side note to yet another tin tale, namely Robert Scott’s fatal 1910 expedition to the South Pole. Many of his caches of food and fuel, which he left on the initial trip, had leaked in the interim, wasting the kerosene and spoiling the potables onto which it spilled. It’s speculated that the fuel cans, soldered with tin, might have succumbed to what is known as “tin pest”. This, too, is largely speculative; the tin pest problem is apparently too tricky to resolve, even for relatively recent history.

Obviously, it's barely changed in 150 years

But such is the sort of story that Kean likes to reproduce in his new book, a rather jovial romp that uses two main storytelling threads. The first is a history of the periodic table itself, beginning with Mendeleev and his contemporaries and leading all the way to Glenn Seaborg’s reorganization in the mid-20th century. This narrative intertwines with the discovery of elements which fill in or append to the known list; though Kean skips the elements that were known early on—e.g., nitrogen or oxygen—he details the discovery of the more difficult substances such as Aluminium, and certainly all of the trans-uranic elements, whose discoveries paralleled our knowledge of atomic science (and, unfortunately, nuclear weapons).

The second narrative thread is that of anecdotes, wherein Kean relates the funny stories, tricks, and other errata that accompany some of the elements. The name of the book, in fact, derives from a popular chemist prank: spoons made of gallium (which melts at just above room temperature) are served with tea or coffee, and dissolve when uses to stir. Often, these quirky stories are simply part and parcel of the discovery of the element itself; a mine near Ytterby, Sweden, produced no fewer than four eponymous elements: Yttrium, Ytterbium, Terbium, and Erbium; these latter three are all Lanthanides, one of two rows stuck mysteriously at the bottom of the Periodic Table, the way Alaska is shown floating nebulously off to the side of U.S. maps. The Lanthanides and Actinides disrupt the careful lines of the table because of the way electrons behave; the lanthanide series all have to do with the filling of “f-orbitals“, the science of which is beyond me, but which Kean spends no small amount of time explaining. While the f-orbitals are more complicated, the more basic and predictable tenets of electron behavior which govern the chemical properties of elements, such as their propensity to form bonds, are a little easier, and rather important in understanding why the table is arranged the way it is. In this, Kean does the job well enough; it’s difficult writing such concepts for what is essentially a lay audience.

Later elements, of course, necessarily introduce the concept of radiation, and all of the various and grisly stories that go along with it—though Keen tends away from the morbid, eschewing most talk of The Bomb, or the death of the Curies, for instance. Curiously, the race to produce new trans-uranic elements in the lab—even if they exist only for seconds or fractions of a second as they follow a chain of radioactive decay—gets a lot of page space, as Kean brings us up to the state of the art (as of about 2009), which has as much to do with politics now as it did during, say, Germany’s 20th-century dustups or America’s long staring contest with the Soviet Union.

By and large, The Disappearing Spoon is a wonderful little book that is manages to be an entertaining history of the period table and its elements, and a relatively easy [re]introduction to the basic principles of chemistry that make it all happen. I’m a little disappointed that Kean’s history skips over so many primordial elements with their own storied histories and instead focuses a bit too much on the historically-recent quest for synthetic elements, but I suppose that the former has been done before and the latter has not, so perhaps it’s to our benefit that the book mixes historicity with recency.

The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss

By the time I read Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind, it had been out for four years, garnered a critical mass of critical acclaim, and been followed up by a sequel both half again as late as expected and half again as long as its predecessor. The Wise Man’s Fear picks up almost exactly where the first book in the series left off. By way of summary: Kvothe, an extraordinarily intelligent and precocious gypsy child is orphaned by the brutal attack of a præternatural group called the Chandrian. His eventual enrollment in a university of engineering and magic lead him on a number of adventures both profitable (in many ways) and detrimental on his way to investigating and avenging the death of his parents. When we last left him, he had inadvertently called the True Name of the wind, which is the purest and most real form of magic.

If you have not read my review of The Name of the Wind, I would suggest doing so in order to understand why, immediately after finishing it, I read The Wise Man’s Fear, and why I felt so compelled and excited to do so. Though the second installment in the series came out a full four years after the first, and this in turn bodes poorly for the timetable of the third and final entry, I could not help but see what Rothfuss had in store for young Kvothe, whom I had, despite my general cynicism, come to care deeply about as a character. Rather than summarize the plot, which is large and intricate, I’ll instead cover some of the major themes, either narrative or responsive.

Kvothe hit puberty?

When dealing with adolescent protagonists as they grow (see: Harry Potter, Bella Swan), authors are left with the difficult task of narrating their eventual entry into the sexual world—either by praxis or imagination—in a way that is both convincing to readers (who, we must bear in mind, are generally familiar with at least one of the two forms) and not damaging to the general tone of the story, if such a danger is even applicable. Thus far, the story of Kvothe has been largely appropriate for all ages, short of its implied violence. Though there were women (all of them superbly attractive and attracted to Kvothe, natch), our young protagonist’s approach has been one of either disinterest or gentlemanly courtesy. Rothfuss must have been faced with the difficult problem of acclimating Kvothe, now 16, to the looming problem of his genitals; either because the author could think of no subtle way to do it or just because he likes narrating sex, Kvothe finds himself trapped in Fae (i.e., the land of the Fairies) with an ancient magical sexbot named Felurian, who teaches him the entire Fairy Kama Sutra of sex techniques, and is enraptured by Kvothe the Virgin’s innate sexual talent. Yes, this is ridiculous as it sounds. Over to Daniel Hemmens:

Felurian is that staple of fantasy novels, the deadly naked sex monster. She’s the most beautiful, most alluring, most sexually attractive woman you’ll ever see, and she will totally kill you with sex.

Felurian is the sirens, and Artemis and pretty much every other sex-death-nudity chick from mythology or fiction rolled into one. Kvothe catches her, bones her, breaks free of her sex-death-nudity mind control, completely whips her ass in a straight fight, then bones her again, then plays music that makes her think he’s awesome, then writes half a song about her that is so awesome that she agrees to let him go so that he can finish it, then disses her sexual prowess, which prompts her to get really insecure and tell him what an amazing lover he is, then they have sex some more, then she sews him a magic cloak, while he goes away and talks to a prophetic tree which turns out to be evil.

Then they have sex some more, then he comes back to the real world and is all “bros, I totally did it with Felurian” and everybody is all like “no way, you’d be mad or dead” and he’s like “no I totally did it with Felurian” and then the hot barmaid from earlier is all like “no he’s definitely telling the truth because I am a woman and I can see that he has got totally sexed up since we last met, because I tried to sex him and it freaked him out, but now it looks like he wouldn’t be freaked out and also he would be totally awesome at sexing.” Then Kvothe does sex with the hot barmaid and he is totally awesome at it, and he explains how doing sex with the hot barmaid is totally as good as doing sex with Felurian, because women are like music and sometimes you want to listen to a beautiful symphony and sometimes you just want a nice simple jig, and by the way this definitely isn’t sexist, and if you think it is then you know nothing about music or love or him.

This last line, apart from being switched from the first to the third person, is a direct quote from the book.

Faced with the notion of introducing Kvothe as Lover (even Kvothe as Legendary Lover), we really have two options: one is to admit Kvothe into the bed of some barmaid or peasant girl, where he stumbles and fumbles his way through the account, only to improve quickly and dramatically with practice. This would be in accordance with Kvothe’s story so far.

The other would be to have Kvothe learn, automagically, everything about sex and the fairer sex from the magical sex goddess. This would, although less in keeping with the tone so far, be an easy deus ex machina for Rothfuss to skirt the issue and have his protagonist emerge from the other side suitably versed in the carnal arts.

As Hemmens notes, however, the solution Rothfuss chooses is—bafflingly—to have Kvothe the young bumbler, Kvothe the romantic idiot, be so innately brilliant at sex that he wooes a centuries-old sex goddess, and still automagically increase his practical knowledge of physical intimacy by manifold. It’s a wild turn toward ridiculous wish-fulfillment fantasy, and the salt to this nasty, gangrenous wound is Kvothe’s time in Ademre, the warrior-culture village where uniformly attractive women have sex as casually as you or I might blow our noses.

This sudden preoccupation with sex commandeers the latter half of the book, even though it seems to serve no purpose; indeed, it fails even to seem prurient or lurid, instead lending a sense of ridicule or burlesque to the book, as though listening to an inadvertently-knowledgeable child talk about how he is going to marry his first-grade crush and pee inside of her.

Whatever happened to the Chandrian?

While Kvothe is spending all his time in bed with every attractive woman in sight (except, notably, his long-time squeeze Denna), he is very obviously not doing what we all expected him to do, which is to continue his obsession with the group of demigods that killed his parents. The Name of the Wind saw Kvothe’s efforts stymied by the censored selection of books available to him in the University; because The Wise Man’s Fear sees him, after 300 pages or so, sent temporarily away from the University to “chase the wind” for a bit, it’s not unreasonable to readers to hope that the story will take our young heroes to exotic locales where he will begin to unravel the mysteries of the evil Chandrian—a search which, we can only assume, will come to a head in the third book.

But there’s almost nothing about the Chandrian to be found in The Wise Man’s Fear. Yes, Kvothe encountered one of their number leading a clutch of bandits; yes, he gets a juicy tidbit about them from the Maer (Mayor?) of Vint, for whom he is a servant for a long period of time. But our expectations—that we would know more about the Chandrian on page 900 than we did on page 1—are unfounded.

By the end of the book, we’ve established that Kvothe

• Is good at sex (and likes it)
• Learns how to fight from an Adem mercenary
• Is still in the Friend Zone with his crush, Denna.
• Is getting better at True Names, even though he still only uses them during extreme duress.

But that’s it. Kvothe just increases his powers and talents incrementally, as though we’re watching Rothfuss level up a World of Warcraft character.

Oh, I get it… Kvothe isn’t so great after all…

Though I noticed the trend during the first book, I saved its mention for this review because the notion really becomes apparent during The Wise Man’s Fear; namely, the initial impression we are given of Kvothe—a legend in his own time, rivaling Taborlin the Great—seems less and less truthful as he tells his story. Some bits of rumor or dispelled outright as Kvothe tells the corresponding true story behind some ridiculous bit of fiction; other times, it’s simply implied that a distant reference is being countered by a suspiciously similar and reasonably less fantastical one. What’s more, the “current” Kvothe (who is relating his story to The Chronicler) has been designed by Rothfuss to be a dejected, largely powerless schmuck who doesn’t at all resemble the fiery-spirited Kvothe of the story.

In other words, the initial disparity that Rothfuss creates, which causes readers to desire to understand why the Kvothe legend and the real Kvothe seem so different, may not simply be due to an RPG-like progression of skills and power as we might assume; it might, in fact, be an unfortunate misunderstanding all along, and that Kvothe the Narrator is still a schmuck who simply happens to have a good memory and is pretty good at sympathetic magic. That would—ha ha!—be a clever deconstruction of fantasy tropes and our linear expectations of power and character, although it would certainly make for a disappointing story. All of this remains to be seen, of course, and despite what seems like a number of deep faults with the second installment in the series, I find myself anxiously awaiting the conclusion.

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

The Name of the Wind came up, a little unexpectedly, on a list of the top 100 or so science fiction and fantasy books of all time. These are about as common as oxygen nowadays, but this particular list was from NPR, so I stopped to read. Among the obvious Tolkien, Heinlein, Herbert, Orwell, and other thoroughly entrenched authors were some surprises. I first learned of Gene Wolf’s The Book of the New Sun, which was new to me but an old book with its sci-fi bona fides. Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind was more puzzling, being the debut novel of an unknown writer, published a mere four years ago. My curiosity was piqued.

It would be a mistake to say that Rothfuss breaks new ground with The Name of the Wind, the first part of a planned trilogy called The Kingkiller Chronicles. To the contrary, most of the appeal of Rothfuss is that, as a well-versed fan of science fiction and fantasy, he knows to cherry-pick the most interesting bits of all his various and sundry interests. The result is a mélange of influences, for better or worse.

This is a dangerous game to play. Christopher Paolini, author of the Inheritance cycle which ended this year, wrote from a similar position, and while the books were certainly successful, they were also uniformly awful—an uninspired pastiche of Middle Earth, Star Wars, and Pern. Because there was nothing unique about the books, and the characters similarly uncompelling (I found myself wishing for the untimely death of no smaller number of them), they were little more than lengthy Tolkien fan-fiction. From the very beginning, we knew that Eragon would eventually beat the evil Galbatorix; since the plot itself was invented by Paolini on the fly to suit whatever ends he felt at the time, the muddled mess in between Eragon’s discovery of a dragon egg and the final battle of the fourth books was narrative masturbation.

Rothfuss handles this with significantly more grace—or at least he does so far. The series is told as an extended flashback; from the very beginning, readers know that Kvothe, the hero with flaming red hair, is a living legend. We don’t know what he’s done, aside from a few tall tales, but we can intuit from the name of the series that regicide will ultimately be involved. We also come to understand, early on, that Kvothe is now living as an innkeeper under the assumed name of Kote. A strange and compelling scene indeed. Eventually, Kvothe relates his story for posterity to a writer named The Chronicler, and the book is mostly told as a story, punctuated by interludes in the present.

By way of a brief plot summary: Kvothe’s story begins when he is young boy, traveling with his family as part of a collective group of musicians and performers known as the Edema Ruh (think of gypsies, negative connotations and all). When a magician (“sympathist”) briefly traveled with them, the precocious Kvothe learns about magic and science. When his entire troupe is slaughtered by an ancient group of bogeymen known as the Chandrian, young Kvothe becomes a street urchin in the large city of Tarbean, homeless and wretched, before he finds his way to The University, which teaches sympathetic magic and other, more mundane topics. The rest of the book details Kvothe’s first few terms at the University.

This all sounds perfectly mundane, but I found myself drawn to Rothfuss’ story; I couldn’t put it down until I finished it, and I’m not the only one. The reasons are subtle, but important.

Whence Kvothe? Since we know immediately that at some point, Kvothe becomes legendary, with apparently unrivaled power, it’s important as readers for us to understand how he goes from a smart and precocious child to the stuff of myths. Especially when Kvothe spends much of the book desperately poor, beaten up, fearing for his life or his status in the University; even by the end of The Name of the Wind, the Kvothe we know doesn’t begin to approach Kvothe qua Legend. It’s a trap that Rothfuss sets; until this disparity between our a priori knowledge of Kvothe and the story of Kvote as Narrator is resolved, there’s a dramatic tension that holds us. A lot—even too much—time is spent with Kvothe worrying about his money as he lives a penny at the time.

Everyone loves ginger kids.... right?

Magic done right. Magic is easy to write, but it’s also boring. Anybody can cast Magic Missile; that, for instance, Harry Potter can wave his wand and do just about anything, makes the magic itself that much less compelling. Rothfuss’ approach to the topic, then, splits into a number of fronts. The more mundane kind of magic, known as “sympathy”, is a blend of traditional magic and more modern ideas like thermodynamics or quantum entanglement. A sympathist (not a magician) uses magic to link two similar objects; by using a handful of ash from a roaring fire, for instance, a sympathist can use its heat to start a fire even when spatially distant from said fire. The quality of the link depends on the similarity from the items, and when desperate, a sympathist can use the heat from their own blood to power a spell. This is a tricky form of magic whose uses and drawbacks aren’t immediately obvious, and so we can’t necessarily predict when or how Kvothe will be able to use them.

A love story, sort of. It’s not too long before Kvothe introduces Denna, a young girl about his age who is likewise a wanderer. The relationship is frustrating to readers because Kvothe remains solidly in the “Friend Zone” while Denna is courted by tens (hundreds?) of men and patrons; yet it is obvious to readers (and even to the characters themselves) that they’re crazy about each other. When Kvothe the Narrator first introduces the subject, however, he does so with an import that implies his relationship with Denna (who is only ever referred to in the past tense) will come to mean a lot more than the romantic-comedy foibles Rothfuss gives us in the first book.

Chicks dig rock stars. Perhaps the most unique—perhaps I should simply say “surprising”?—aspect of Kvothe’s story is that Kvothe is a highly skilled lute player, actor, and singer. His instrument of choice—a lute—features heavily in the story, and is the catalyst for his meeting Denna. Rothfuss’ invented world is gaga for musicians, and Kvothe’s performances routinely move people to tears and/or wild applause; this is perhaps a little difficult to swallow, but we accept it because Rothfuss is at least consistent in his treatment of the subject.

There’s magic, and then there’s magic. I’ve already talked about sympathetic magic, which is a compromise between traditional fantasy thaumaturgy and steampunk science; in fact, the two meet more obviously in the art of “artificing”, which involves engineering mechanical objects which utilize sympathetic magic to do things—”sympathy lamps”, for instance, which use small amounts of the bearer’s body heat to produce a flameless light. But there’s another kind of magic to be had which is more important in Kvothe’s case. A widely-told legend in Kvothe’s universe is that of Taborlin the Great, who “knew the names of all things”; by “names”, we mean of course “True Names”, which is a convenient label for a metaphysical understanding of an object, and which has been used to greater or lesser degree in both other fantasy novels and in real-world myths and legends. Kvothe’s first knowledge of this comes when he botches a sympathetic link and essentially suffocates himself when learning magic from the wandering sympathist in the beginning of the book. The sympathist, who knows that Name of the Wind (you see?), called upon it to undo the binding. From that point forward, Kvothe seeks the Name of the Wind, and it isn’t until the end of the book that he calls it very much by accident and falls under the tutelage of the quirky Master Elodin, the University’s Master Namer.

All of these unsolved mysteries, taken as a whole, are enough to make The Name of the Wind extraordinarily compelling. There’s no small amount that Rothfuss does wrong in his writing, and I hesitate to say that The Kingkiller Chronicles will enter into the fantasy canon, but there’s no denying that the first book in the series is an engaging, playful, thorough beginning to what I hope will be an equally thrilling series.

Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorp

Die Hard has been one of my favorite movies since on first saw it on TV as a child; it sparked my love affair with Bruce Willis and with antiheroes in general. When, only a few years later, I stood in a used book store in Fremont, Nebraska, and read the back cover of a old book called Nothing Lasts Forever and thought “Hunh, this sounds familiar” before putting it back on the shelf, I had no idea that Roderick Thorp’s 1979 novel was, in fact, the inspiration for Willis’ break-out movie.

There’s a lot of similarities; there’s still a bored cop stuck in a highrise with a clutch of Teutonic terrorists; he still winds up shoeless and lacerated; he still talks to a black cop named Al Powell via CB radio. Other things are changed; instead of an estranged wife, Joe Leland (not John McClane) is visiting his estranged daughter Stephanie. Instead of a middle-aged (late-30s?), wisecracking nobody, our protagonist is actually a retired policeman who’s kind of a big deal in the security world; so McClane/Leland goes from being young and unimportant to old and famous and well-versed in tactics and gunplay.

The effect here is twofold: first, there’s a sense of geriatric anger and frustration that imbues Leland’s thoughts that is entirely disjoint from McClane’s alternating fear and snarky comments; second, Leland responds viscerally to killing in a way that McClane doesn’t. Both characters break the neck of their first terrorist; McClane does it by tossing a blond German down the stairs, where he lies still, but Leland does it by narrating how he places his shoulder at the back of the neck, shifts his weight, and feels the popping separation—then he vomits.

In Nothing Lasts Forever, the corporation, Klaxon Oil, is basically funneling money into a South American dictatorship; the terrorists, then, are actually leftist guerrillas, after a fashion, and their entire plot does seem to entail disrupting Klaxon’s operations, publicizing their crimes, and blowing $6 million in cash onto the streets of L.A. The makers of Die Hard actually make fun of that motivation by having leftist politics serve as a red herring so that the terrorists can steal bearer bonds and “sit on a beach, earning 20%”. I suppose the idea lost merit in the intervening decade between the book’s release and the filming of the movie.

In these respects, Nothing Lasts Forever represents a more subtle work that spends time cultivating the motivations of its characters; Leland spends no small amount of time reminiscing about his marriage and divorce, the eventual death of his ex-wife, his career as a security consultant, and more importantly, the preconditions and effects of violence. At the beginning of the book, when Leland flourishes his Browning at an irate taxi driver to make it to his flight on time, Thorp was actually giving us the first of many meditations on our disposition to violence. If Leland had not been so quick to pull his gun in order to solve a problem, he may have missed his flight; he would then not be trapped in a highrise fighting twelve armed terrorists. If he hadn’t put up armed resistance, would the terrorists have killed as many people as they did? In the movie, it’s clear that the terrorists planned to blow up their hostage to cover their escape, but the notion is left in doubt in the book, given the gloss of “freedom fighter” mystique that clashes with the terrorists cold-blooded-murder personas. In other words, Nothing Lasts Forever is a short pulp novel which is actually a sustained inquiry into the repercussions of easy violence, even if only threatened or implied.

Reginald VelJohnson is born to play cops

One notable deficit is that because the authorial voice is third-person, but not omniscient (that is, it’s limited to Leland’s knowledge), we miss out on the characterization of Hans Gruber (Anton “Little Tony” Gruber in the book) as done so brilliant by Alan Rickman. In the book, Gruber is a throwaway villain, just as the other terrorists, and even much of the action, is itself throwaway in the manner of so many action pulps of the Don Pendleton variety. Al Powell—in the book a baby-faced rookie—is similarly one-dimensional, little more than a voice on the radio, rather than an empathetic character with his own backstory.

Nothing Lasts Forever, then, is a more subtle work in the sense that its approach to its hero as a sad, lonely older man makes for a rather unique hero, and his framing of the villains as violent (approaching sadistic) leftist Robin Hoods introduces doubt into the neat good/bad binary that we like to expect from pulpy action stories; it is also, however, a thinner and less substantial work in that its cast of supporting characters is one-dimensional, and its narration therefore spirals into mopey solipsism. Nothing Lasts Forever is simply sad; it begins with a sad man regretting the loss of his relationships, and ends with a bloody, critically-injured man regretting the loss of even more relationships and questioning whether his heroism actually cost more lives than it saved. I’m left with no doubt that the film version is better, but I can’t quite decide if the book is good in the first place. I suppose that means Thorp did something right.

Shadow & Claw by Gene Wolf

What is one to make of a book entitled The Shadow of the Torturer? This famous 1980 novel by Gene Wolf, the first of a four-part series, is paired with part two, The Claw of the Conciliator, to form Shadow & Claw.

The title is not sensationalistic in the manner of some recent books, but genuinely reflects the topic of the book. The “hero”, Severian, is in fact a member of the “torturer’s guild”, and does in fact torture and execute a number of people. That he commits a grievous offense against his order/build—by allowing one of his charges to commit suicide—is the most we can say about Severian as a human being; there is not much otherwise to recommend him as a protagonist.

Wolf’s The Book of the New Sun, of which Shadow & Claw comprises the first half, is considered a canonical book of science fictional fantasy. I use a wishy-washy phrase like that because the text is difficult to pin down in either camp. The immediate text, that of sword-swinging, castles, and magic, seems like something firmly fantastical, a direct child of the sword-and-sorcery genre. And yet, Wolf drops subtle clues and sidelong references to the story taking place in the far, far future (with the sun noticeably dimmer), and mechanical contraptions that sound vaguely like engines or firearms, and manned spaceflight.

Unfortunately for readers, much of the world-building that goes on is entirely in the form of subtle clues; having read through the first two books, I still cannot say for sure what Wolf’s created world is aside from a far-future dystopia; the rules which govern Severian’s universe remain largely unspoken, and we learn very little of them by praxis. In my research of the series, I’ve found this to be a common complaint; I can only hope the picture becomes clearer in the second half.

As I mentioned, Severian is a young apprentice of the Torturer’s Guild; perhaps in part to his youth or Wolf’s desire to make him a protagonist we could relate to, early Severian takes care of a disabled dog, and falls in love with Thecla, a prisoner and subject of the guild’s ministrations. When he affords her the limit of his power as a torturer apprentice—a contraband knife with which she can take her own life—he is unofficially booted from his guild, but given the trademark fuligin (a color “darker than black”) cloak and a sublime executioner’s sword known as Terminus Est, and sent to a distant city called Thrax to serve as a lowly executioner.

This new sojourner Severian seems a different man than the apprentice we know; he is clipped in manner, amoral, and swift to anger. He is no longer an immediate foil to the corrupt world in which he lives: a empire run by an Autarch whose power is so absolute that citizens are compelled (either by fear or mandate—it’s not clear which) to follow every invocation of his name with some ridiculous honorific like “whose forbearance knows not walls nor seas” or “whose pores outshine the stars themselves”. This state of affairs reminds me not a little of North Korea, where a repressed citizenry are compelled to worship Dear Leader as a god, inventing stories about birds mourning his death, &tc. Severian then, becomes a protagonist not because he seems to be one, but because the narrative centers around him, and Wolf’s continuing hints make it clear that he’s supposed to be one.

Also, his mask is ridiculous

After a number of strange, rather disjointed adventures, Severian ends up in the service of Vodalus, a revolutionary and a traitor to the Auturch, whose life Severian saved in the opening pages. Early on, Severian professed to follow Vodalus, even though we’re never quite sure what Vodalus stands for aside from being against the Autarch; I suppose our innate sympathy with the little guy—Rebels v. Empire—is supposed to inform our feelings as readers. Vodalus tasks Severian, who is still technically on his way to Thrax, to deliver a message to a servant in the Autarch’s massive castle-cum-city, the House Absolute. Captured by guards, they are thrown into the “Antechamber”, essentially a prison, and at this point the story begins to get really strange; I won’t go into details, since they would only be more confusing in this context, but it has to do with Koreans, robots, space-travelers, and lots of allusions to Kafka. Severian meets the Autarch himself, and swears service to him (isn’t it rather difficult to swear service to Vodalus and the Autarch at the same time?).

There is a long interlude wherein Severian and his traveling companions perform a play, the entirety of which is reproduced in the book, and I’ve never seen a more absurd stretch of obviously-allegorical but maddeningly-opaque verbiage. Imagine Waiting for Godot but with the entirety of the play imbued with the febrile incoherence of Lucky’s monologue. Given how the story has progressed thus far, this seems duly appropriate.

Jonathan McCalmont writes,

The great mystery behind The Shadow of the Torturer is that there is no mystery. It is an entirely solipsistic piece of writing that does not seek to comment upon the real world or the human condition. It has no deep spiritual meaning or political significance. Instead it is a monument to the author’s skill at controlling the perceptions of his readers. His use of pseudo-mystical imagery seeks us scurrying here looking for hidden meanings, his repetitions of certain phrases and images make us consider them to be somehow significant. We read and re-read his words trying to make sense of them and when nothing concrete can be coaxed from the text Wolfe benignly pats us on the shoulder and says that it is not easy trying to work out what someone as clever as him is trying to say.

While I cannot deny the possibility that the second half of the series will tear away the veil, so the speak, I can’t help but nod my head in agreement.

(If you enjoyed Jonathan’s superb write-up of The Shadow of the Torturer, see also his critical reading of The Claw of the Conciliator).

The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History by Jason Vuic

The first time I physically remember hearing the Yugo referenced in pop culture was seeing Die Hard with a Vengeance on TV (this must have been 1997 or so, when I was 12 or 13), though I must have known about it before because I laughed: Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson drive a commandeered Yugo down a busy freeway, and when Bruce (John) complains about their pokey pace, Samuel (Zeus) replies “It’s a Yugo; it’s built for economy, not for speed!”

I somehow realized or knew, though I don’t remember how or when I would have learned it, that the word “Yugo” was a punchline for a car only a few steps better than a pennyracer. Jason Vuic’s The Yugo is the story of how the hapless automobile came to be the butt of so many jokes, but also how it ever-so-briefly was a commercial success, and how one enigmatic business was behind it all.

Malcolm Bricklin (born 1939) began his foray into the automotive industry in the 1960s. He made a name for himself by starting an American import company which sold Subaru 360 models to dealers in the United States. To modern readers, this might not seem like a bad idea, but at the time, Subarus were basically matchbox cars, and Consumer Reports labeled the 360 as “The Most Unsafe Car in America”. Bricklin sold his share of Subaru of America, Inc. to his business partner; incidentally, this company would later become a very successful one.

Between the disastrous early days of Subaru of America and the cataclysmic entirety of Yugo America, Bricklin managed to created his own custom car, the Bricklin SV-1, a futuristic car with gullwing doors and an acrylic exterior; 2,854 were manufactured in the mid-70s after Bricklin conned the city of New Brunswick into subsidizing the operation. Bricklin’s habit of making wild, fantastic promises and then completely and utterly failing to deliver are running themes in the story of both Bricklin and the Yugo. It’s very possible that the episode of The Simpsons where Homer discovers a long-lost half-brother (“Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?“) has veiled references to the SV-1, although it probably acts as an umbrella joke for a number of failed car designs.

My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard...

After the 1979 oil crisis, the 1980s saw the slow return of muscle cars and luxury cars to the American market; prices and sizes crept steadily upward. Bricklin, believing there was a well-defined market for a cheap, small economy car (a blind optimism that would be his downfall), began importing Fiat cars from Italy, but eventually stumbled across a small, cheap export from Yugoslavia, technically transliterated as the Jugo (but pronounced, and eventually respelled, as Yugo). The car was built by the Zastava corporation, a government-controlled automobile manufacturer (and, during the internecine Balkan crisis, briefly and arms manufacturer), in what was then a Communist but not Soviet-block country. To put it succinctly, the Yugo was a copy of a poor Fiat design, made by largely unskilled workers in an environment more concerned about employing everybody rather than increasing quality of efficiency; it was a cheap piece of shit that fulfilled a market niche in a very poor Communist country. That it ever became (ever so briefly) immensely popular in the United States, and thereafter universally reviled and mocked, has a little to do with the fundamentally poor construction of the car and a lot to do with the obstinacy and near-fanatical optimism of its American cheerleader, Malcolm Bricklin.

...they're like, "It's better than yours"....

What many people don’t realize is that despite its current reputation, Bricklin’s imported Yugoslavian turd was, for a very short time, all the rage. Bricklin predicted the market for cheap compact cars—a niche almost entirely unfulfilled in the early 1980s—and he was entirely correct; so when news of a car costing less than $4000 hit, both dealers and consumers clamored to get on the waiting list. The Yugo experiment quickly began to unravel as a couple of things happened. First, the public quickly realized what an unmitigated disaster the car was; even with extensive aftermarket revision, the product coming out of Yugoslavia barely passed minimum U.S. regulatory requirements, and bottomed out on Consumer Reports and other watchdog publication tests. Second, other foreign manufacturers such as Honda and Hyundai began to reenter the compact market with much higher standards of quality, even if it meant a high market price than the excretory Yugo.

Bricklin was eventually kicked out of the company he created with a generous severance package of around $10 million (he was considered too erratic and his history too failure-ridden to attract investors), a move which ruffled his feathers but was much more than he deserved, since the company imploded shortly thereafter. An endless succession of reorganizations, additional loans, and further failures marred the company, and before long their assets were liquidated and the American-Yugoslavian partnership plopped into the gutter of history. Oddly enough, the Yugo itself only stopped being manufactured in 2008; Eastern Europe, with its lax safety laws and continuously-fumbling economy, apparently still had use of such a car until recently.

This all seems a straightforward tale, and it largely is. Even without the benefit of foreknowledge of the Yugo’s demise and infamy, one can quickly determine from Vuic’s exposition that the Bricklin has doomed every enterprise he’s come in contact with. And the notion of a ridiculous subcompact from a struggling Communist country carving a secure niche in the American market is a stretch even without the nearly criminal lack of quality. Vuic’s explanation of Bricklin’s involvement (leadership, if you can call it that), and the details of the Yugoslavian side of the relationship is genuinely informative; certainly, it explained things about the Yugo of which I was unaware. There are stretches however, as Bricklin and his import company keeping kicking the can down the road with more lies and loans, where the narrative becomes monotonous, saved only by the reader’s growing incredulity that such a debacle managed to survive as long as it did.

Arguably by Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens’ recent diagnosis of cancer is bad news for all the readers who appreciate his profound and prolific output as a writer of political journalism, social commentary, and literary review (this latter, naturally, encompassing both the former). A man who “writes faster than most people talk” naturally generates no small œuvre. Hitchen’s last book of collected writings was Love, Poverty, and War in 2003, and it’s no surprise that Arguably, his latest compendium—and morbidly, the last which will not be posthumous—is a hefty eight-hundred pages of essays hand-picked from Hitchens’ various media—Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, Slate, and no few introductions to reissued classics—without likely exhausting the pool.

The topics selected here, of course, tend away from his articles for Slate which are more topical, and would not fare well when several years removed from their source. More impressive to me, as always, are Hitchens’ monthly literary reviews for The Atlantic and his various and sundry topics of criticism for Vanity Fair. In this respect, of course, one does not even need to buy the book; most of the essays reproduced here are still viewable online, with the exception of his introductions to published books. But it’s easy, especially given The Hitch’s prolificacy, to overlook the significance of this particular set of essays plucked from the much larger corpus. More interesting than any individual essay itself, perhaps, is the fact that it is in this collection at all.

All American

The entries in Arguably are grouped loosely by some shared subject or quality. First in queue is a series of pieces about [in]famous Americans, ordered roughly by chronology. Some are old Hitchens hobby-horses, including Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine; another chronicles Jefferson’s handling of the (Muslim) Barbary pirates as a way of presaging the current global problem of Islamic fundamentalism. Even more interesting than this, perhaps, or because Jefferson in particular and the Founding Fathers in general are hardly untrod territory, are his essays about Twain—at least obliquely, as the main thread of the essay is Hitchens’ excoriation of Fred Kaplan—and Vladimir Nabakov as revealed by the famously transgressive Lolita.

Some of these topics are simply here because they are Americans by nationality. Others seem to be here because they say something distinctly American; there is no surprise that Hitchens’, early a socialist and lately a something, should find no small import in the topic of Upton Sinclair, perhaps the most famous of early American socialists, and the way in which his points of issue are persistent… for which see Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (2001), not necessarily for the gruesome details of figurative and literal sausage-making, but for dwelling on “those whose lives are lived at the point of production”.

Eclectic Affinities

The next section strikes me as miscellany, or a dumping ground for essays that would not go easy into that dark category. Incidentally, however, it contains some of Hitchens’ best pieces of this anthology. Of particular note are his treatment of Dr. Samuel Johnson (he of the first appreciable dictionary) in a review of Peter Martin’s Samuel Johnson: A Biography; a review of an poetic anthology by Philip Larkin, whose contribution to the world of poetry is perhaps critically underappreciated because he is more infamous than famous.

There’s a customary piece on Animal Farm (Orwell is never far from Hitchens’ pen), but even more interesting is a historical piece about Karl Marx’s early career as a journalist (the lens through which Hitchens reviews a compendium of Marx’s early work), before he became better known as a social philosopher of sorts. Hitchens finds it fascinating, as I do, to see the germ of Marx’s later calling present in his journalism: Marx’s targets tended to be the suppression of free inquiry and the maltreatment of the lower class of the sort that typified the mid-to-late 19th century. I can imagine that Hitchens himself must feel some intimate connection to this topic, as the germ, if not the later sprout, must have been at the root of his own early attachment to British socialism, and his lifelong distaste for tyranny.

Amusements, Annoyances, and Disappointments

I would categorize this section as the humorist in Hitchens, or at least Hitchens at his most playful, for it not for the inclusion of a somewhat more serious piece about the late Stieg Larrson, author of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels. Others are sufficiently lighthearted, notably Hitchens’ controversial piece on why he thinks women simply aren’t as funny as men unless they’re lesbians, but also (among others) a piece on political sex scandals in the wake of Larry “Wide Stance” Craig‘s rather public debacle, a scathing denunciation of Prince Charles, and, oddly enough, a well-worded rant on how much Hitchens hates it when waiters at upscale restaurant presume to pour wine that a table has already purchased.

Offshore Accounts & Legacies of Totalitarianism

A much longer section—no surprise given the subject of Hitchens’ contemporary journalism—deals with foreign policy, much of it having to do with the “Axis of Evil” and associated actors, including North Korea, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan. One notable inclusion is the tale of Hitchens experience with waterboarding, wherein the journalist—a staunch support of the invasion of Iraq, remember—concludes quite definitely that the experience constitutes torture… this at a time when conservatives all over the map were falling over themselves to, at best, declare it “harsh interrogation” or some other sickly euphemism or, at worst, make barely mask their disappointment that America isn’t doing much worse. Hitchens’ essays on the Middle East are very much in line with his public appearances and other essays, and not of particular note. More interesting is his essay on the Jewish lobby and the latent anti-Semitism which is still disturbingly widespread; or his more general view of humanitarian intervention, which helps to illuminate the underlying ethos that informs his political and social positions.

It would be easy to say that Middle East foreign policy has come to dominate Hitchens’ writing in the last few years; more accurately, it has come to dominate his TV appearances while the War in Iraq was still big news and before his phase as an outspoken atheist took over following the publication of God Is Not Great. In his writing, Hitchens remained as global as ever, and his aversion to totalitarianism remained as consistent as ever, whether near the fertile crescent or not; hence the inclusion of his thoughts on Vietnam, Cuba, Tunisia, and postwar Germany. There were those on the Left who puffed up their plumage and got very offended when Hitchens became perhaps the most vocal and eloquent proponent of military intervention in Iraq, and it seemed somehow incongruous with his leftist history. But one can easily see a thread which has informed all of Hitchens’ positions, including his apparently strange stance on Iraq, and which persists today in other locales as well.

The next section (“Legacies…”) deals again with foreign policy, but through the lens of literary reviews, including books about or reviews of Victor Klemperer, Isabel Allende, and Arthur Koestler. Because the locus of these reviews ends up being less about the book and more a lesson in history and Hitchens’ own opinion about the foreign policy involved, it once again makes sense that these essays directly follow his collection of essays which deal more immediately with his political ideals and foreign policy implications.

Words’ Worth

The final section, and the one which stands out as my personal favorite, deals both with words and the rights to use them. This latter topic touches upon such obvious and contemporary issues as the Danish cartoons lampooning Muhammad and the violence of response, or the autography of Ayaan Hirsi Ali (a Somali apostate who became active in Dutch politics and now works at the American Enterprise Institute).

With a lighter heart, Hitchens touches upon the foibles of language, such as the rise of “like” as a filler word for young adults, or the particularly British phrase “fuck off”, and ends with a rather poignant piece about the accumulation of books in his apartment, which (though written in 2008, before the news of his cancer) seems as though it could be interpreted as a metaphor for the acceptance of death. The accumulation of books—of knowledge—either read or unread, known or unknown, and the realization that one cannot finish or store them all.

Like all compendia, Arguably has crests and troughs, some absolute and some arising from the reader’s judgment. Of no departure from history, and of no surprise to longtime readers, this collection embodies the best and worst about Christopher Hitchens: an acerbic wit, a vast hunger for knowledge, a boastful bit of pride, a decent, solid, but occasionally old-fashioned worldview, a stubborn but consistent political worldview, and incredibly talent for wordsmithing, and a mind with few equals in this generation. It’s difficult to say, as of December 2011, just how much longer Hitchens will be around, but Arguably is another volume of examples, as if we needed any, why he will be sorely missed when he’s gone.

V for Vendetta by Alan Moore

There’s no denying that Alan Moore is a force to be reckoned with in comic books; his work has produced a number of very famous books (Watchmen and V for Vendetta being two notable examples that have also been turned into major films) and popularized the “graphic novel” format. At the same time, one can’t help but find, eventually, that Moore’s strangeness, preponderance of imagined dystopias, and penchant for oddity, to be somewhat laborious.

It's less romantic if you remember that Guy Fawkes was tortured, hanged, and mutilated

Still, it must be said that, at least in a few well-known cases, Moore manages to make compelling stories, whose narrative complexity, breadth of allusion, and characterization easily outstrip those of “real” novels. I have never been a follower of comic books, but the few graphic novels I’ve read in recent years have instilled a fondness for them in telling certain kinds of stories. Certainly, it’s difficult to imagine The Watchmen as a novel; V for Vendetta likewise strains my creativity in pondering an alternate universe where is a standard novel. It could be done, surely, but would it not be a fundamentally different work? Also, we’d be left without the familiar anarchic symbol of the Guy Fawkes mask, recently co-opted by Anonymous.

For those unfamiliar, V for Vendetta tells the story of a near-future England, run by a white supremacist movement called Norsefire. This dystopia encompasses a number of fatalistic ideas of Moore’s: the first is the reemergence of institutionalized racism and eventually ethnic cleansing, and the second is the growth of a police state, wherein liberty is traded for perceived security. After a nuclear war and a plague that may or may not have been real, England is one of the few nations in the world to be relatively prosperous, in part because of the election of the Norsefire Party, which quickly revitalized the nation at the cost of pretty much everything a civilized people hold dear. Non-whites are rounded up and terminated, homosexuals are driven into hiding or outright exterminated, and all items of cultural relevance—books, records, art, &tc.—are declared contraband and destroyed. Imagine a melange of Nazi Germany with handful of Stalinist USSR mixed in; it’s one of many recent works which borrow heavily from Orwell’s 1984.

Enter “V”, a masked outlaw who seeks to overthrow the incumbent regime. After blowing up an important landmark, he saved the life of Evey, a young girl about to be sexually assaulted and likely “disappeared” by the secret police, known as “The Finger”. Thus Evey becomes a part of V’s plans, which include the assassination of a number of prominent politicians and public figures. V’s plans themselves become an issue as readers are made to wonder where his personal revenge stops and his battle to overthrow the fascist government begins.

The language of the graphic novel is not particularly realistic, at least where V himself is concerned. There’s a lot of flowery narration on his part, solemn intonations, and poem-perfect turns of phrase that nonetheless seem to work because Moore wants us (initially) to see V as supernatural. The issue of mortality, when it does arise, is superseded by the notion that ideas are immortal when not invested in a single mortal man. “Did you think to kill me? There’s no flesh and blood within this cloak to kill. There is only an idea. Ideas are bulletproof.” Thus, it is not simply V’s design to destroy, one by one, the institutions and leaders of Norsefire; rather, his aim is to convince England’s citizens (who, you may remember, elected Norsefire in the first place) to overthrow the government themselves. His narrative proxy in this is young Evey, whom he draws into his plans and into whom he instills his anarchic ideas; her slow progression from fear to uncertainty to acceptance, we are to take as a synecdoche for all of England.

Alan Moore: Totally Not Creepy At All

I’m told that V for Vendetta was originally inked in black and white; the version of the graphic novel I read was in color, but a terrible washed-out palette of mucous and menses that simply made the panels muddled and the characters difficult to differentiate. It was actually confusing at times which identically-dressed government agent was which. Then, too, I had my own quibbles with Moore and Lloyd’s work itself: the leader of Norsefire has a strange and fetishistic obsession with a computer network called FATE, which makes it too easy to dismiss the man as a raving lunatic; villains who are insane are generally cliché, and do nothing for a story. The movie version wisely omitted this small and insipid subplot.

Though Watchmen was partially a black comedy, V for Vendetta has very little comedic elements, darksome or otherwise. Though one could say it has a happy ending, it is largely a long funeral dirge; a succession of death and dismay. For all that, it is difficult for those with rebellious minds not to feel a stirring in their hearts at the righteous anti-authoritarian sentiment.

Chocolate Wars by Deborah Cadbury

If you’re curious as to the strange coincidence that someone named Cadbury is writing a book about the history of British chocolatiers, cease your cogitating: Deborah Cadbury is, in fact, a direct relation of the family which ran the largest chocolate business of the isles, though she is admittedly several steps laterally distant from the immediate chocolate-making family. If, now that you know this, you’re troubled as to the possibility that Deborah Cadbury may not, therefore, be the most reliable narrator, you may once again cool your firing neurons, because I can say with little hesitation that your fears are justified.

Chocolate Wars comes out just as Cadbury, long a staple of British industry, was acquired by Kraft foods in 2010. I can’t say for certain if the book was written in response to the takeover, but Cadbury in her introduction makes no bones about her stance:

This book is a modest challenge to [Irene Rosenfeld, Kraft CEO] and to Kraft. If her wordsa re to be taken as anything more than platitudes, and if Kraft is truly to respect the values of Cadbury, it must understand its particular traditions and history. The story of Cadbury, in a way, is the story of a different kind of capitalism.

This “different kind of capitalism” to which she refers is what she calls “Quaker capitalism”, an umbrella term identifying the successful businesses of 19th-century Quaker entrepreneurs who eschewed massive profits in favor of paternalism. If you remember the less-than-successful planned community of Pullman, Illinois, you understand the basic gist of Cadbury, but while Americans have become leery of planned communities to the failure of many paternal American companies, these sorts of things did work for a long time in Britain, and Cadbury is one of the most successful examples.

The author does not dedicate any verbiage to the origins of consumable chocolate (which, although interesting, is a topic whose scope exceeds that of the book), choosing instead to begin at a time when chocolate consumed in Europe was mostly in the term of cocoa drinks. The undisputed king of global chocolate manufacturer was Nestlé, a Swiss company which got its start selling manufacturing condensed milk and baby formula; to this mix was added first a triumvirate of British manufacturers—Cadbury, Fry’s, and the Taylor Brothers—and later by the American giants Hershey and Mars. So how did Cadbury, at one time the smallest of operations, eventually become the largest chocolate manufacturer on the British isle? Some is luck; some is successful corporate espionage; still some is potentially, as Deborah Cadbury implies, a result of Cadbury’s progressive policies with respect to their employees.

Though told, by and large, in a single narrative, The Chocolate Wars is comprised of two parallel themes: one is the rather mechanical (if creative) expansion of the market for chocolate confections, the scientific or industrial breakthroughs required to satisfy that demand, and the rise and inevitable decline (or rather, subsumption by publicly-traded food conglomerates) of Victorian chocolatiers; the second, though, is a narrative about just what the legacy of such Quaker companies (and, by extension, other long-standing companies not borne of the modern tendency for conglomeration and mergers) tells us about business and what we’ve become as a globe of consumers.

I still don't know what nougat is. Probably for the best.

With respect to the first narrative, Cabury’s book is fine if unspectacular. Cadbury, like other dynastic businesses within its market and without, has a history of by-the-bootstraps work, near-failures, and steady expansion. This linear and rather predictable narrative ends, ingloriously (and the author emphasizes this sentiment) with its merger with Kraft. Consider, for a moment, that between 1824 and 1969, Cadbury was called Cadbury, and made a variety of chocolate confections, mostly famously its “Dairy Milk” bar; in 1969, it merged with a soft drink company, apparently because it provided a short-term profit to shareholders, and from that point it was known as the droll “Cadbury Schweppes plc” until its demerger in 2008, when the soft drink part of its business became the laborious “Dr. Pepper Snapple Group Inc.” The trail here is clear to see even with Deborah Cadbury drawing particular attention to it; we can watch a simple, prestigious chocolate-making business devolve into a series of financial transactions, marked by names which aren’t indicative of anything except perhaps the umbrella firm which holds them. The notion of shareholders, and a company board acting in the short-term interests of shareholders rather than the long-term interest of the company, is obviously anathema to the livelihood of an autonomous business, and Deborah Cadbury expects us to see this as she does. Most of her narrative, after all, is building up Cadbury as not simply a business, but an institution wrapped up in British nationalism and our rosy-eyed ideals of egalitarian societies and corporate paternalism.

In the second narrative, then, Cadbury’s anti-Kraft sentiment is well-honed and well-placed. It also seems like an inevitability; after all, the successive generations of Cadbury men became less and less Quaker, first consenting to advertising and “fancy boxes”, and then with record profits, expansion, mechanization, and eventually public trading. All of this represents a slow decline into the “modern” economic era, which seems at once coldly sensible and absolutely anathema to the pastoral tale which we’ve been reading, and which our inner selves still want to be common.

There’s a lot to be said for corporate paternalism, especially as relates to the success of firms like Google and modern theories about motivation. The Chocolate Wars doesn’t touch upon them except in the sense that the rise and downfall of Cadbury as an autonomous organization shows us everything that’s good about business, and everything that’s bad about the modern financial system’s approach to them.

Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker by Kevin Mitnick

Social Engineering was my hobby horse as an undergraduate IT major; I say this as though I’m an old veteran of the IT industry, but I’m not—I’m a fresh-faced, startup-mentality programmer. One of the reasons I always focused on social engineering in my various papers and projects, however, is I was exposed early to the idea of Kevin Mitnick. This isn’t to say I was particularly familiar with his exploits, or even well-versed in the technology of his area, but the notion that you could con your way into systems without necessarily programming or “hacking” was easy enough to understand.

At the time Kevin David Mitnick dominated the national news, there was no first-person narrative available for consumption. Prior to his conviction, of course, Mitnick would not publish a book of his exploits; after his conviction, one of the restrictions placed upon him was an inability to profit from books or films about his hacking for seven years. In the meantime, several books came out from journalists of varying proximity to Mitnick himself. One was Jonathan Littman’s The Fugitive Game, a narrative crafted in part from Littman’s conversations with Mitnick while he was on the run from the FBI. The other is Jonathan Markoff’s Takedown, which is a largely sensationalistic work with as much fiction as fact; Markoff, as it happens, was a New York Times reporter who was responsible for most of the hysteria and a lion’s share of the misinformation about Mitnick in those years. The idea that Mitnick had access to secret NSA databases, or that he’d hacked into NORAD, or that—as one prosecutor actually said in court—he could launch nuclear missiles by whistling into a phone, was largely the invention of Markoff the Fabulist and the long trail of phone company stooges that Mitnick left writhing and thrashing in his wake.

zomg hacker!

Ghost in the Wires is the first attempt by Mitnick to tell the story of those turbulent years in his old words. On the one hand, this means that we can avoid any speculation and hearsay; on the other hand, it’s a convicted felon writing about his years performing felonies. I’m not familiar with all of the laws in this regard, but it’s possible—hell, likely—there are arrestable offenses that Mitnick committed that nobody knows about. It’s unlikely that Ghost in the Wires contains any revelations, but at least we can expect it to be better than Takedown.

Our popular conception of hacker emphasizes their technical skills; we picture strange men in dark rooms interpreting binary code and issuing cryptic commands into a command-line prompt; coding malware in C and Assembler; sniffing TCP/IP packets and cracking encryption keys. Certainly, there’s an element to hacking which involves all of these things. There’s also an element, at least in Kevin Mitnick’s case, which involves fraud and impersonation and blustering into order to trick and manipulate one’s way into systems, rather than managing the entire feat via technological skills alone. Many modern writers tend to forget, when writing about Kevin Mitnick, that he was a very skilled technologist; because so many of his “hacks” involved simple impersonation, it’s easy to forgot that he was an adept at hacking computer systems programmatically, especially when it came to the de rigueur enterprise system of that time, DEC’s VMS. Ghost in the Wires reminds us that, though social engineering was often used to acquire information, or access to a system, technical expertise was needed to do anything with that access.

It’s been hypothesized (see Douglas Coupland’s JPod for mention of the subject within a fictional narrative) that the programming or technical community has a higher-than-average incidence of autism-spectrum disorders, simply because of the way disorders like Aspergers tend to emphasize concentration and technical ability. For a hacker like Kevin Mitnick however, such a diagnosis is impossible; as he himself mentions, his real skill as a hacker came from his ability to speak boldly with strangers while impersonating system users and to modify his story on the fly. Stutterers and bashful speakers need not apply when it comes to calling Nokia in Finland and pretending to be one of their U.S. engineers.

I see three main points to take away from Ghost in the Wires that are interesting and/or important:

It sucks to be one of the first well-known hackers in popular culture. Preceding Kevin Mitnick’s rise to infamy was Kevin Poulsen, perhaps the first “hacker” in the modern, pejorative sense of the term, to be arrested with national attention. But Mitnick captured the media attention in a way that, I think, has yet to replicated. His exploits came at a time when our culture was just young and naïve enough to believe just about anything told to them about technology, but invested enough in this whole “Internet” thing to be frightened by the possibilities. He was a scapegoat, at the right time; I would say “with the right crimes”, but of course most of the public panic about Mitnick’s abilities was based upon fairy tales.

Technical expertise or no, the ability to bullshit well is paramount. Technical brilliance will only get you so far in life; to achieve anything truly impressive requires bridging the gap between what can be accomplished with computer code and the real-life (personnel security, physical security, security through obscurity) obstacles in the way. This is also a frightening proposition for CIOs and network administrators, because it underscores what is still the case just about everywhere you go: people are the weak link in your security. Forget about that unpatched Apache flaw, or SQL injection, or overly-broad permissions—actually, don’t forget about them: they’re still important—because even a perfect technical system is meaningless when employees distribute credentials without performing the same sort of identification, authentication, and authorization steps that any decent information system implies.

Kevin Mitnick without an FBI manhunt might still be a minimum-wage worker. What happened to Kevin Mitnick was ridiculous. I don’t mean that Mitnick should necessarily have escaped punishment for hacking, as technically he did commit fraud and intrusion; however, the charges levied against him were farcical and largely fabricated; his five or so accumulated years spent in prison, including a long stint in solitary confinement, an injustice. The hysterical hue and cry in the media who latched onto the salable story of Mitnick-as-terrorist is an indictment of the journalists involved and the slavering readership who pay money for salacious sensationalism. All of that being said, one could argue that without an FBI manhunt, high-profile court case, and front-page coverage, Kevin Mitnick might still be a poor loser working Tier 1 tech support by day and hacking for fun at night. Instead, he’s now at the helm of a thriving security consultancy and manages a busy schedule of corporate speaking engagements. A worthwhile trade-off? Hard to say, and though Mitnick recognizes the irony, he doesn’t make any easy statements as to whether he’d do anything different; as readers, we end up not being sure what we think, either. It’s not satisfying in that regard, but at least Mitnick respects our intelligence.