BOOK REVIEWS

2000, Part E: May 2000

2000, Christian Sauvé

Featured this month:

 

 

The Gemini Man
Richard Steinberg

Bantam, 1998, 374 pages, $9.99 Can. pb, ISBN 0-553-58016-7

I picked up this book by mistake.

I had been reading movie-rumor sites, and a particular project had caught my interest. Harrison Ford (or Mel Gibson, or Sean Connery) was supposed to be attached to star in THE GEMINI MAN, a thriller about a government operative being tracked down by... a younger clone of himself. Very interesting, especially given that a digital recreation of the lead actor (built from footage taken from movies released twenty years ago) would be used to re-create the younger version of the character.

So I found myself at a used-book sale with a dirt-cheap copy of Richard Steinberg's THE GEMINI MAN in my hands. A quick glance at the back cover blurb seemed to match my recollection of the film project: "He was trained to be our deadliest weapon. Now he's our worst nightmare." Sounded about right.

Certainly, the first chapter of The Gemini Man is one of the best thriller opening I've read in a long, long time. Deep in Siberia, an American officer is sent to a concentration camp in order to bring back another American operative. The Russians put up some resistance, muttering something about freeing the devil and how, even under maximal security, the prisoner has already killed half a dozen guards. The terrified Russians add that his last escape attempt resulted in the death of a civilian family. The writing is brisk, clear and terrifying as we meet special operative Brian Newman, as if Hannibal Lecter had ended up as an US secret agent. A lot of small ominous details add up to promise a gripping novel.

The rest of the book never matches this promise. In short order, our female protagonist is introduced; a psychologist tasked with interviewing Newman to decide if he's fit to re-integrate civilian life. That is, if he can stop killing small birds and stray cats. Hmmm... what do you think?

It gradually becomes apparent that this isn't the story for which Ford, Gibson or Connery would have agreed to star. It takes a bit longer to realize that this is a completely ludicrous novel.

It's obvious from the start, however, that super-agent Brian Newman, he of murderous dispositions and terrifying abilities, is positioned as an anti-hero of Lecteresque appeal. He seems consciously engineered by author Steinberg as the perfect dangerous man, charming yet ruthlessly amoral, a genius-level sociopath with no remorse. Needless to say, we've seen this before, from Patricia Highsmith's Mr. Ripley to Harris' Lector, passing by the real-life Ted Bundy. As a reader, I tend to be annoyed by this quasi-glorification of criminal behavior. It seems all the most manipulative ("Oooh, a sexily dangerous man! My primal urges are taking over!") when considering the statistically documented dimness of most criminals.

It gets worse, because as the novel unfolds, Steinberg conjures up some neurological/psychological claptrap to "prove" that Brian Newsman isn't simply a nut, a wacko or a government-trained mad dog, but rather a newly-evolved species of Humankind, Homo Sapiens Saevus or Homo Crudelis. Brain of a new man. Brian Newman. Ooh, subtle stuff.

I'm used to seeing thrillers come up with whoopers, but that pretty much took the cake. Once the other characters start agreeing gravely and coming out of the woodwork as further examples of this new species, it's only a small step to suppose that Steinberg belongs to the NRA and that he thinks that the Nazi concept of eugenics was a pretty good idea. Or maybe not, but at the very least he needs to work some more on suspending his readers' disbelief. (In any case, he's not learning very quickly; paging through his second novel in bookstores, it quickly became obvious that this was a novel where the protagonist discovers that -egawd!- the American government secretly knows about aliens! How so very original!)

Of course, once super-badass-anti-hero is established as a new species of man, it doesn't take a genius to see where the novel is going. It goes there without too many surprises. Yawn.

Too bad, because The Gemini Man had the kernel, and the opening chapter, of a great thriller. Start of a series? Blah.

 

 

The Hacker Crackdown
Bruce Sterling

Bantam Spectra, 1992, 316 pages pb.

(Available online at http://www.lysator.liu.se/etexts/hacker/)

Bruce Sterling has acquired, in the science-fiction community, an enviable reputation as one of the smartest, most visionary representative of the genre. Indeed, in the turbulent nineties, Sterling has shown himself capable of adapting to the new wave of technology that almost made Science-Fiction obsolete. A string of excellent books (Heavy Weather, Globalhead, Holy Fire, Distraction, A Good Old-fashioned Future) have cemented his reputation as one of the current masters of the genre.

Few SF observers would have been as bold as to claim such an honor for Sterling at the end of the eighties. Sure, Schismatrix was a boffo space-opera, and Islands on the Net showed promise, but apart from a few other short stories in Crystal Express, the rest of Sterling's fiction output was disappointing, to say the least. Who remembers Involution Ocean? Or The Artificial Kid? If anything, Sterling was showing more promise as a competent critic (Cheap Truth) and anthologist (Mirrorshades) than a fiction author.

In the early nineties, however, something happened. In 1990, a string of events rocked the computer underground. A friend of Sterling, Steve Jackson, saw federal agents confiscate a good part of his small gaming company's assets under the pretext that he was writing a manual for computer pirates. Sterling didn't simply get mad; he seeked the truth behind the event. The Hacker Crackdown is a journalistic account of the 1990 skirmishes between the telephone companies, the hackers, the police and the civil libertarians.

The book is divided in four parts. In the first, Sterling begins by explaining the roots of cyberspace, going back as far as the first telephone networks. In one of the best passages of the book, he explains how the telephone system went from a simple cable strung between Alexander Graham Bell's phone and Watson's receiver to the current unimaginably complex packet-switching network. Then he traces the effects of a simple bug which shut-down AT&T's telephone network in January 1990.

He then takes us deeper underground, describing the subculture of the computer hackers that existed in 1990. He shows how paranoia, caused by the AT&T shutdown, percolated in a "need for action" that led police officers to raid private citizen's house and to grab their computers—and in many cases, much more than their computers.

In the book's third quarter, he goes from one side to the other and ends up talking about the police forces and how they're trying to update their mandate in the information age. He discusses how most computer security outfits were severely under-funded in the early nineties. Sterling takes us at a computer-security conference, and does some hacking of his own.

Finally, he ends up explaining the most enduring legacy of the 1990 events; the electronic rights interest group that have been formed. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is described, along with a variety of speculations on the future of "law and disorder on the electronic frontier".

How important were the 1990 events? Well, as Sterling puts it, any policeman can go to a group of scruffy-looking hoodlums hanging in front of a store and ask them to leave, or else. Few groups of hoodlums would have the presence of mind to go phone up a lawyer to protest police repression of their constitutional right of free assembly. That's what happened in 1990; for ill-defined reasons, government kicked over the electronic anthill, and that precipitated the formation of electronic rights interest groups, whose influence continues to grow in today's information age.

And you couldn't find a better writer for the job than Bruce Sterling. His writing is clear, incisive and often funny. Even though he is clearly outraged at the police abuse, he gives fair consideration to everyone's viewpoint, and the result is a superb book that illuminates computer security like few other books before. Strongly recommended. It is still, and will remain relevant. Parallels with current cases involving entertainment cartels versus internet startups (Napster, MP3.com, 2600.com...) under the guise of "piracy" when really it's all about "consumer control" are chilling, to say the best.  Except that this time, civil-rights groups aren't facing an opponent bound by the constitution... and they can't compete with their dollar-fuelled lobbyists.

But don't take my word for it; go check out the electronic version at http://www.lysator.liu.se/etexts/hacker/

 

 

Poor Richard's Web Site
Peter Kent

Top Floor, 2000, 422 pages, $47.95 Can., ISBN 0-9661032-0-3

You're a small businessman. You own your own little-to-medium company, but lately you've become concerned that this Internet thingy might be hurting your sales. Or, at the very least, that you're missing out on some great marketing opportunity. Whatever the reason, you want to get a piece of the e-action. But building a web site is complicated stuff, right? Expensive too, if you're to believe the stories in the newspapers.

Don't.

As Peter Kent points out, the dirty little secret of the Internet is that "it's a giant jobs program for computer geeks." A bit unfair as a statement, but not quite as ludicrous as you'd imagine. Kent's point is that most of what you really need to know about a web site can be learned quickly, and practiced cheaply. So here's a fifty-Canadian-bucks book to teach you how to be cheap. Poor Richard's Web Site is a giant ad for Peter Kent's business.

All kidding aside, this book condenses in easy-to-read format a whole bunch of things most small business owners would be grateful to know about the Internet. Kent doesn't do technical stuff (as he rightfully points out, there are plenty of other books that do that, and it's not rocket science in any fashion.) but rather focuses on overarching business and design issues, plus spends a full third of the book on marketing.

In its first two-third, Poor Richard's Web Site strikes an admirable balance between down-to-earth business advice, and technically correct information. People baffled by the techno-jargon of other more in-depth work should feel at ease here, while more technically-oriented persons won't be able to nit-pick the advice to death and even maybe learn a few new tricks or two.

All throughout, Kent's advice is sensible, often irreverent (if wholeheartedly supporting Microsoft can be considered slightly edgy) and often brought with a humorous slant.

So far so good, but the book is contaminated with the stink of shameless self-promotion. As the book advances, it becomes obvious that Peter Kent is trying to sell you something: A contract with his own web hosting company. One or two mentions would have been fine, but when the URL of his own business is brought up every chapter or so, enough is enough.

Things devolve in the last section, about marketing your web site. Though Kent at least has the decency to discourage spamming -noting that it may result in your web site being wiped out the face of the Earth-, his recommended "soft-sell" practices tend to run on the annoying side, especially when practiced on established communities that don't really enjoy this type of thing. (eg; Usenet, where similar tactics are usually scoffed at.) At least Chapter 18 mentions real-world PR, which is where most of web promotion dollars should be going anyway.

But I'm being once again too hard on the book. Naturally, it will appeal more to those with a business-and-marketing oriented mind. Naturally, techies are better off reading something more specialized. On the other hand, Poor Richard's Web Site does manage to fulfill its goal of providing a one-stop business web primer.

Just consider the opening five (!) full pages of blurbs as an advertisement of what you'll learn inside...

 

 

Vertical Run
Joseph R. Garber

Bantam, 1995, 305 pages, $29.95 Can. hc, ISBN 0-553-10033-5

Some books seem naturally destined to become movies. Then again, some books are directly ripped off from some movies.

Both of these statements are true in the case of Vertical Run, a thriller taking place in a high-rise building, where a lone man is pursued by a team of special operative who will stop at nothing to kill him. DIE HARD, anyone? No matter, because Vertical Run takes us places John McClane hadn't seen.

It begins early in the morning, just as ultra-average senior executive Dave Elliot steps into his office to begins his workday. It's not a Monday, but his day starts sucking right away anyway as his boss enters the room and points a gun at him. One fancy move later, the boss is knocked out cold (wish-fulfillment is an essential part of all good thrillers) and Dave has more questions than ever. Let's hope he's had his morning coffee, because soon afterward he'll have to face a whole team of crack operatives all intent on his untimely death.

Unfortunately for them, Dave Elliot's an ex-Green Beret. That's gonna hurt.

And so begins Vertical Run. This is one of those books which perfectly define the expression "page-turner". Garber knows his stuff, and the pacing of the book is relentless, driving you to read later and later in the night.

Thrillers are built on premises, and Garber knows how to milk his carefully. Pretty much every detail sounds authentic and he effortlessly builds suspense and excitement out of a few simple actions by his protagonist. The book is filled with these "oh-so-cool" scenes that elevate the novel from a run-of-the-mill thriller to something that readers will remember with a certain affection long after they've read the final line.

There are a few problems, such as the lessening of tension in the last third, the slightly underwhelming conclusion or the fact that the protagonist has so much trouble figuring out why everyone wants to terminate him with prejudice. (Most seasoned readers will immediately recognize the crucial hint as soon as it's mentioned. Unfortunately, this information is withheld until well past the halfway point, and the protagonist doesn't figure it out until more than fifty pages after.)

There have been persistent rumors, ever since Vertical Run's original publication, that the novel is headed for the silver screen. It certainly has all the ingredients required for a big thriller: Sympathetic-but-competent protagonist, evil-but-clever antagonist, love interest, action set-pieces and clear narrative. While final release is probably a while away -Hollywood development processes being what they are-, you can do the next best thing right now and grab the book.

Don't skip out on the epilogue, which send a nice little curveball in what you'd expect.

 

 

The Making of a Cop
Harvey Rachlin

Pocket, 1991, 302 pages, $5.99 Can. pb, ISBN 0-671-74740-1

For most North American citizen, all contacts with policemen are limited to the occasional speeding ticket (if that), for which cops are seen as annoyances at best.

That's too easily forgetting that cops are there for things that are in fact quite a bit more dangerous than simple traffic regulation. And nowhere is this truer than in New York City.

"In 1988 there were 1,915 murders and manslaughters (10 percent of the U.S. total, and more than Great Britain and West Germany combined), 45,824 felonious assaults, 3,412 forcible rapes, 86,578 robberies, 128,626 burglaries, 110,717 grand larcenies, 119,659 grand larceny car thefts, and 43,434 other felonies involving drugs, forgery, arson, prostitution, gambling, and kidnapping" [P.2] If New York isn't the most dangerous city in the world, it must be close.

[July 2001: After a particularly pleasant trip to New York City and some knowledge of recent statistics, I am pleased to report that this isn't true any more.  Mayor Guiliani's reforms of the nineties have truly had an effect.  In fact, New York doesn't even rank in the top-100 per-capita most dangerous American cities list!]

Against this tide of crime, acting as public defenders, exists the New York Police Department. 28,000 policemen, making the NYPD larger than most national armed forces in the world. But these policemen come from somewhere. They must be trained. Ordinary civilians from all areas must be re-modeled and re-educated so that they can wear a blue uniform, a badge and a gun.

The Making of a Cop is a meticulously detailed documentary on this training process. Author/journalist Harvey Rachlin was granted unprecedented access to the NYPD training academy during one such training session which turned out 650 candidates into pure true NYPD blue. Through the eyes of four very different students, we follow the whole process, from the first to the last day.

There is the expected fascinating chapter on the gun range, but that's only a small part of the training to become a police officer. They must also follow classes in Law, Police Science, Social Science, Physical Training, Driver training, Car-Stop workshops... and all of these subjects, from the most academic to the most physical, are essential to a policeman's training.

But The Making of a Cop is not only a dry affair of academia. The world of a police officer is made of difficult decisions that -for the most part- are completely alien to civilians. What is a crime? While that decision is clear when a crime has been committed, it is far more murky when a police officer is witness to potentially suspect behavior. The book details such an occasion, which starts by a policeman watching a bum trying out car doors, and ends with a life-and-death struggle.

But these finer points of conduct are nothing compared to the training aspirants are required to go through in preparation to busts. While civilians may be put off by the behavior of police officers in day-to-day operations, it's worth remembering that if we don't reasonably expect police officers to shoot us in their work, policemen must allow for a degree of definite danger in their line of duty. The Making of a Cop is adept at pointing out the delicate balance between self-protection and service to the public.

Technically, this book is nearly perfect, giving a compulsively readable account of almost all facets of training from beginning to end, with plenty of tasty anecdotes and first-person testimonials to hook us into the narrative. Rachlin wisely stays in the background, only directly integrating himself in the narrative in the introduction and the conclusion, letting the policemen speak for themselves during training.

But most significantly, The Making of a Cop is a splendid testimony to the often-ungrateful, often-dangerous job of policemen. It's nearly impossible to read this book without coming away from it with a renewed respect for police forces, with the types of dangers and decisions that is their daily workload.

Remember that the next time you get a speeding ticket.

 

 

Reliquary
Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

Tor, 1997, 464 pages, $9.99 Can. pb, ISBN 0-812-54283-5

Something is loose deep under New York. Again.

Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's first collaboration, Relic, was an unqualified success. Their thriller received good reviews, sold well and was adapted to cinema under the direction of Peter Hyams. (Okay, so the film wasn't all that great and tanked at the box-office, but that's not fault of the book itself.) It was inevitable that they'd eventually write a sequel.

The logical premise, of course, is to expand the action. Relic had one monster, why not have more in the sequel? The original was confined to a Museum, why not let the monsters loose under the entire New York in Reliquary?

As I said, obvious but effective. In this volume, the remnants of the monster, glimpsed in Relic's epilogue, surface some time later as a wave of creepy homeless death occurs under New York. The novel opens as the crisis reaches a boiling point: This time, no mere bum has been killed, but the daughter of a wealthy socialite was mysteriously murdered. Socialite raises hell, policemen investigate, creepy evidence is brought to Relic's heroine Margo Green and here we go again...

Fortunately, Reliquary not only does thing slightly differently than its predecessor, but does them better. This time around, the characters are more clearly defined and more sympathetic. The writing is snappier, even improving upon the lean style that was so successful in The Relic. Scenes are more spectacular, belief is more easily suspended... in short, Preston and Child have improved since their first novel, and it shows. Reliquary is in many respects a more enjoyable book than Relic.

Special mention should be made of the eeriness of subterranean New York so effectively used here. A relatively old city by North American standards, Preston and Child easily populate New York's underground with forgotten subway tunnels, service tunnels, multi-level outposts and entire underground populations. They state that most of it is true... who knows? Sort of the setting for that old TV show, "Beauty and the Beast", adapted for a horror tale.

Fans of the first volume will be delighted to find more about Margo, Penderghast, Smithback, D'Agosta and Frock. New characters also join them, including a delightfully feisty NYPD officer named Hayward.

Plus, the novel packs the required chills. There are dead bodies, creepy dark places, riots, carnage, last-minute twists, the promise of world-wide destruction and other sort of fun stuff.

Through it all, one can't really shake the prefabricated feel that also plagued The Relic, but then again it's better to have a professional but mechanical thriller than an incompetent one. Preston and Child might build their novels with flowcharts and mathematical models, but the end result is good enough that it doesn't really matter.

What is a bit more annoying is the unwillingness of the narrative to truly use all the elements it so lovingly sets up. At one point, there's a congregation of wealthy bourgeois, police squads, monsters, bums and oodles of water all headed for the same point. What happens next isn't quite as spectacular as what you might think.

Nevertheless, Reliquary exemplifies the type of novel which gave rise to the expression "beach reading". Undemanding, exciting and unusually readable, Reliquary gets top marks as a thriller. If you liked the first one, don't miss it.

 

 

Margin of Error:
Pollsters and the Manipulation of Canadian Politics
Claire Hoy

Key Porter, 1989, 234 pages, 24.95$, ISBN 0-55013-172-9

Politics have changed considerably during the last century, and nowhere is this more true than in the now-omnipresent usage of polls. Media use them to boost viewership, establish predictions and build up front-page stories. Politicians use them to gauge the popularity of policies, track down their popularity and plan campaign strategies. Regular polls have become a regular part of the process, protected by an aura of scientific respectability in a field where impressions can often be more important than facts.

Claire Hoy is a well-respected Canadian journalist who, in 1988, reached his boiling point regarding this issue. How is it that the methodology of polls is never questioned? What is the impact of regular polling on Canadian politics? What are the implications of media/pollster relations when some pollsters are obviously biased in favor of political parties? Margin of Error is an attempt to answer these questions, and it makes for fascinating reading.

If you're like this reviewer, Hoy's central thesis -that pollsters have enjoyed uncritical admiration for too long, and that they now occupy a central position as decision-shapers- is initially suspect, if not outright paranoid. How can these friendly people with the Numbers be in any way dangerous to the democratic system?

The first section of Margin of Error paints an historical portrait of polling in Canada. Beginning during World War II by way of exiled American specialists, polling quickly established itself as an instrument of knowledge, and soon as a replacement for decision-making; Hoy traces the evolution of the usage of polls from being simple indicators for politicians, to smoke-screens behind which true vision can disappear and where the "best" politicians simply follow the polls.

Ah, but if only it stopped there... As Hoy demonstrates through chapters about the largest Canadian pollsters, the very perception of pollster impartiality ("just the numbers, ma'am") is ludicrously absurd. Pollsters have long been associated with political parties, courting leaders to become official party pollsters.

It gets worse. Hoy clearly demonstrates, through example and a bit of logic, how questions can be slanted to obtain desired results, how precise formulation can affect results and how special-interest groups can, for a relatively low price, get "official" validation for their viewpoint by hitching a carefully-worded questions onto a "general survey". Pollsters, despite their reputation as number wizards, can independently skew results with bad survey methodologies in an effort to save a few dollars. (Margin of Error shows, dollar-figures in print, just how expensive a good survey truly is, and how badly results are affected by skimping.)

Not only does it stop there, but as Hoy shows -again through several mind-boggling examples-, media outlets who report this information are most often than not incapable to make an accurate usage of these statistics. They'll often misrepresent the question (forgoing the precise wording for a more audience-friendly "meaning"), ignore the shaky methodologies and try to buy results on the cheap, resulting in news that are, at best, not paining an accurate picture of reality.

Your reviewer, somewhat of a stats geek himself, started the book with a decidedly skeptical mind. But Hoy does his job properly, and the overall accumulation of facts, citations and -yes- statistics are simply too revealing to ignore. The misuse of polls represented in Margin of Error borders on the actionable, and yet, with eleven year's insight, things have most probably gotten worse, not better.

In any case, Claire Hoy has produced, with Margin of Error, an essential piece of reading for anyone too easily trusting of polls. As it is showing significant age, an update might be in order. But don't let that stop you from picking up the book and getting an eye-opener on statistical abuse.