Friday, October 26, 2012

Opium Nation: Child Brides, Drug Lords, and One Woman's Journey Through Afghanistan

Opium Nation is a portrait of Afghanistan today - corrupt, impoverished, clannish, and teeming with life. The author, Fariba Nawa, an Afghan by birth whose family fled during the Soviet war in the early 1980s, returns to her beloved homeland post-2001 and finds a war-ravaged land and people. She also finds opium, lots and lots of opium, in nearly every province and in every form. As I read the last pages, I couldn't help but feel a sense of disappointment that what had begun as a promising look at the roots of the drug trade and the implications of the drug trade on foreign policy around the world had devolved into so many incohesive stories. By the end, Opium Nation seemed to be experiencing a real identity crisis: part serious work of research with real potential and real life, part graduate thesis that read more like it was made for an academic journal than a global audience, part autobiography, and part a defense of Afghanistan and its people. For example, Ms. Nawa's quest to find the girl Darya became the story because of her personal importance to the author, when from the perspective of the drug trade and economy she was no more than a blip on the radar screen.

Every few pages Ms. Nawa would drop tantalizing pieces of information about the global drug trade, for example Thailand's decades of work to reduce the quantity of drugs produced in that country, but then the trail went cold. The book - and therefore its readers - might have been better served had Ms. Nawa focused on a single narrative (for example, the underpinnings of the drug trade and opium/heroin market) and then examined that narrative from so many viewpoints - traveling to Thailand and speaking with officials there, traveling to the final consumer countries and examining demand drivers, treatments, even distribution networks, comparing Afghan opium, smuggling, and distribution networks to those of South American countries. I was frustrated because the topic had great potential and yet too often the real story was interrupted by a familial anecdote or some other sentimentally important story that served no larger purpose than for the author to weave her own history into this book.

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Paris, I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down

This is a lovely book about about Paris, or rather being an American in Paris and trying to figure out: how? why? WHAT? Anyone who has traveled someplace they did not speak the language can relate to many of the feelings expressed by the author, although certainly the volume of red tape he encounters is unique to being an expat. Paris, I Love You... is smart and funny; it is also a beautiful portrait of Paris through the seasons and of the many quirks that make the French, well, French.

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Tokyo Vice

When both Paris Match and the NPR book list highlight books on the same topic, I generally think that means I should read up, doubly so when the topic is anything to do with Japan these days. NPR suggested People Who Eat Darkness and Paris Match suggested Tokyo Vice. The former wasn't available at the library, so I went with the latter, by Jake Adelstein. Both books are about the dirty underbelly of Tokyo - prostitution, human trafficking, drugs, yakuza - and the oftentimes cozy relationship between the cops and the criminals. So basically everything I hope my students' parents will NOT associate with Japan!

From the standpoint of being a book about a side of Japan about which I knew nothing, Tokyo Vice was a compelling read. By the end, and by the middle if I'm honest, I was really tired of the author.  It wasn't only that he constantly inserted himself into the story, even when it seemed gratuitous, sometimes the story seemed to veer off on tangents with no clear purpose other than relaying a story about the author. Whether Adelstein was proclaiming his greatness or self-flagellating, I no longer cared. For me, he wasn't the story; the narrative he was writing could have stood on its own without a running commentary on how many cigarettes he smoked on a given day or how long he and his wife and been trying to have a child. By the end, it seemed like the personal information offered nothing new - if he wrote one more time that he was a Jewish American from Missouri, I might have screamed. Also, I know,I know, you're really, really great, but I don't care. I think thou doth protest too much.

The bottom line: if you're really curious about Tokyo's criminal underworld, by all means, this book will initiate you and then some. I'm actually curious about People Who Eat Darkness, just to see how the treatment of the topic varies, but I think I've had enough of the yakuza for awhile. Still, Adelstein irritated me enough in Tokyo Vice that I'd probably recommend PWED even though I haven't read it.

Monday, October 8, 2012

Suite Française

This is a work of fiction, set during the early days of World War II in France as the Maginot Line was falling and the French were coming to terms with the reality of a third war with Germany in as many generations. As the Germans marched toward Paris, those in the city decided whether to remain or head elsewhere in France and those in the Occupied Zone found themselves forced to house the conquerors beneath their own roofs. The characters existed in the notebooks of Irene Nemirovsky alone, but the story is as much non-fiction as fiction, for she wrote it as she and her family grappled with the reality of the war that had descended upon them.

Perhaps because it was written during the war, as events happened, and not from a distance with the benefit of hindsight - or even knowing how things would end - there is no fine line between collaboration and resistance, no acts of great heroism or cowardice. These people are simply trying to make it from one day to the next.

Nemirovsky was a Russian Jew; her family's fortune had been stripped during the Bolshevik Revolution and they'd been forced into exile in France; twenty years later this status left her pesona non grata in her adopted country and she wrote feverishly in an attempt to leave a record of what it meant to be a refugee and what it was to be amidst the confusion and loss of war. When she writes about "the reluctant tears of the very old who have finally accepted that sorrow is futile," the reader knows these words are the experience of a woman grown old before her time; likewise, when she muses on whether one will see the post-war life, it is clear she is speaking not only of her characters. In fact, Nemirovsky was arrested and deported to Auschwitz only weeks after writing in her notebook "...I do not lack the courage to complete the task / But the goal is far and time is short." What she was able to complete is still a remarkable book.

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War

First things first: I must confess that I opened this book expecting it to detail Commodore Perry's 1853 voyage to Japan and the subsequent opening of that country. I was disabused of this notion quickly, in the second paragraph to be precise; The Imperial Cruise refers to yet another voyage to Japan - as well as elsewhere in the Pacific - this one in 1905 and headlined by then-Secretary Taft and President Teddy Roosevelt's oldest daughter, Alice. It is in the context of this cruise that Bradley revisits American imperialism of a century ago, giving us a blow-by-blow account of the wrongs committed against each of the nation's the cruise visited, and some that it did not.

As James Bradley notes in the opening lines of the book, he researched and wrote this book in an attempt to understand the root of World War II in the Pacific. Like Flyboys, this book is beautifully written, complex, and forces the reader to think deeply about history and the generations-long ramifications of seemingly small words or actions. The protagonist of Imperial Cruise is Teddy Roosevelt, whom history generally teaches was one of this nation's greatest presidents - he saved the cute little "teddy" thus giving all stuffed bears his name, he is the father of our national parks, he charged gallantly up San Juan Hill in his days as a rough rider - why he even has his face carved on Mount Rushmore alongside Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. Bradley's take on Roosevelt is a bit different: Bradley's Roosevelt is imperialistic, power hungry, manipulative, and believes unabashedly in the absolute superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race over all others.

Yet, this book is not merely a portrait of President Roosevelt. It is an examination of an America that believed wholeheartedly in manifest destiny and Monroe Doctrine, marauding in Cuba and Puerto Rico, stealing away the Kingdom of Hawaii, and massacring some hundreds of thousands of Filipinos in a matter of a few short years (as Bradley notes, few remember that more Filipinos died on the first day of battling American forces than Americans died on D-Day). It was the need to "civilize" the Philippines, in fact, that gave rise to such tactics as waterboarding, repeated statements at home that "the war is already over" or "the thing is already over" and "the insurrection ended some months ago." Yes, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Bradley's criticisms of Roosevelt are harsh as he builds the case that Roosevelt almost singlehandedly laid the groundwork for World War II by green-lighting Japanese expansion elsewhere in Asia (Teddy "should like to see Japan have Korea," but not the Philippines, please) while also managing the neat trick of building resentment against the United States. Bradley is fair, however, is his judgment that Roosevelt, while perhaps more imperialistic than other politicians of his day, was nevertheless a product of his time and class. He certainly was not alone in seeking to exploit Asian nations for his own gain; the British Empire and its young queen so depended on the profits from the illegal sales of opium in China that Bradley notes (rather smugly, I might add) that "Queen Victoria stands as history's largest drug dealer."

Four stars.