Michael Kodas' HIGH CRIMES in Washington Post

Sports Roundup
Offbeat sports sagas, including one that is perfect for Hollywood.
Reviewed by Allen Barra
Sunday, March 23, 2008; Washington Post

HIGH CRIMES The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed By Michael Kodas | Hyperion. 357 pp. $24.95

Some of the characters in Michael Kodas's High Crimes seem to want not only the moon and the stars, but the summit of Mt. Everest and all it can be exploited for. In 2004, on assignment for the Hartford Courant, Kodas joined an expedition to scale Everest led by two veteran climbers. Whatever the paper paid him, it wasn't enough. As if the constant threat of death weren't sufficiently terrifying, he discovered more deceit, thievery and double-crossing among his climbers than you find in a Martin Scorsese gangster film.

High Crimes is both an adventure story and an expos¿ of a sport riddled with danger and corruption that have mostly gone unnoticed because so few can afford to play. Rich folks from all over the world pay $65,000 or more to unqualified, disreputable types who promise to take them to the top of Everest. (The fate of eight who died in 1996 was the subject of Jon Krakauer's bestseller Into Thin Air.) Kodas's book is exhilarating, though at times a tad confusing. He doesn't make clear why his party's expedition unraveled, as if the rarefied air clouded his senses; he's better at the big picture, bringing into focus a world where "virtually every guide on Everest has turned away clients who didn't have the skill, experience, or the cash to climb the mountain, only to have them show up there anyway with whatever agency offered up Everest at a price they could afford." Why do they do it? For the same reason that English mountaineer George Mallory ventured onto Everest in the first place -- because it's there.

For the rest of the books reviewed in this article, click here.

Moying Li's SNOW FALLING IN SPRING in New York Post

REQUIRED READING
By BILLY HELLER
March 16, 2008 -- New York Post

Snow Falling In Spring

by Moying Li (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

From 12 to 22, Moying Li witnessed children turning in their parents for insufficient fealty to Mao and the Communist Party; city dwellers and intellectuals sent to the countryside for forced farm labor; marauding Red Guards. Her school headmaster hanged himself. But she survives to become of one of the first Chinese students to study in the US, and now lives in Boston. She tells the story with simple eloquence.

For the other books reviewed in this article, click here.

Warren Goldstein on Eliot Spitzer for The Huffington Post

Roger Clemens and Eliot Spitzer: Hubris and the Cocoon
By Warren Goldstein
Posted March 12, 2008, The Huffington Post


Like most New Yorkers, I've been watching the news over the past few days with a mixture of astonishment and, well, astonishment, as Eliot Spitzer has completed the Tri-State Trifecta of disgraced gubernatorial resignations. That's right -- you forgot about John Rowland, right? So here's a prediction: voters and pols are going to start paying a lot more attention to a job just about no one says she or he really wants -- Lieutenant Governor!

But the Spitzer saga is really a boon to literature and religion teachers everywhere. Where else can you see such a classic, right out of Shakespeare and the Greeks, absolutely textbook, flesh and blood demonstration of hubris, the overweening pride that leads, inevitably and inexorably, to the collapse of a public figure?

Pride goeth before a fall, says the Good Book, and who in a state full of A-list Alpha males and females, had more pride oozing out of his pores than our ex-Governor? The first Jewish President? What was he thinking about?

And of all the whorehouses in all the world to patronize. Let's see. Spitzer is (until Monday) governor of the Empire State, and has tried running it as though it were his little kingdom, so of course he spends his high rolling roll at the Emperors Club! We don't even need Tom Wolfe any more to make this stuff up!

Which brings us, believe it or not, back to Roger Clemens, who lives in such a cocoon spun out of his own pride and wealth that he thinks he can make the steroids charge go away with bluster and assertions that are even internally contradictory. Even though he'd "never discussed" HGH with Brian McNamee, turns out he'd had a major discussion with him about his wife and HGH. So was it a discussion or not? Not in Roger-land, where the only measure of truth is what Roger says it is or was. Roger, too, mistakes himself for a god who can make the world believe what he says. He too, I don't mind predicting, will be hoist on the petard of overweening pride.

But the cocoon for ballplayers -- and we should be thinking about this as the season gets closer -- gets respun every spring. Even Andy Pettite, who at least had the good grace to admit he'd done what he'd done, says he wasn't cheating -- he was just doing it for the team, just trying to heal a little quicker to help out the team. Say what? If taking banned drugs is cheating, then the whole point of taking them is to heal quicker to help out the team so the team will WIN.

Yet more hubris. More cocoons trying to protect the wealthy and talented from the realities of human life, the realities most of us live with every day.

Richard Thompson Ford's THE RACE CARD Reviewed in Washington Post

Crying Wolf
A law professor argues that it's dangerous to make unfounded claims of racism.

Reviewed by Daniel J. Sharfstein
Sunday, March 9, 2008; Washington Post

THE RACE CARD

How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse

By Richard Thompson Ford. Farrar Straus Giroux. 388 pp. $26

I've been accused of being a racist once in my life, shortly after a street vendor in Dakar, Senegal, asked the equivalent of $50 for a seashell glued onto a piece of maroon leather. I was 22 and no expert on African art, but this tchotchke did not look like a big-ticket item. When I declined in halting French, the man leaned close, looked me right in the eye and said, "Why do you hate black people?" After a slow second of guilty panic, I walked on, chalking up that exchange to the glory of capitalism. Given the sensitivities of young white Americans traveling through West Africa, the accusation was smart business.

In The Race Card, Stanford Law professor Richard Thompson Ford suggests that there is an equally robust market for unfounded claims of racism in the United States, but the consequences are more serious. As Ford sees it, the successes of anti-discrimination laws and the civil rights movement not only have encouraged African Americans to overplay the race card, but have also spawned legions of dubious imitators. For example, Michael Jackson accused Sony of a "racist conspiracy" when his album sales slackened. And People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals compared beef industry practices to slavery and lynching. As a result, legitimate claims of bias are undermined and political capital is diverted from what Ford terms "the persistent and destructive legacy of overt racism of the past": segregated schools and neighborhoods and epidemic levels of poverty, unemployment and imprisonment.

For the rest of Daniel J. Sharfstein's review, click here.

William A. Link's RIGHTEOUS WARRIOR reviewed in Washington Post

Southern Man
Jesse Helms was an archetype. Now is he an artifact?
Reviewed by Michael Skube
Sunday, March 9, 2008; Washington Post

RIGHTEOUS WARRIOR
Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism
By William A. Link
St. Martin's. 643 pp. $39.95

A visitor to Jesse Helms's campaign headquarters in Raleigh, N.C., in 1984 would have noticed something curious. Helms, seeking a third term in the Senate, was in a bitter race against North Carolina's two-term governor Jim Hunt, a Democrat. Helms, of course, was the Republican. But nowhere in his headquarters did you see the word "Republican." No GOP elephants were in sight.

On the red, white and blue banners that festooned his office you saw just "Jesse Helms" and "Conservative." That was the political identity he had fashioned early on in the small town of Monroe, N.C., where his father was chief of police, and in more than 50 years of political activism, Jesse A. Helms Jr. never strayed from it.

William A. Link's Righteous Warrior is a scrupulously fair biography of a man who gave himself entirely to protecting a way of life he saw as endangered. To Helms, that meant conservatism more than it meant one political party or another.

Helms, who left the Senate in 2003, is now 86, retired and ailing. His legacy will be much disputed, with no shades of gray. He was -- depending on your education, your race, your station -- either a defender of the way things should forever be, or a retrograde and faintly dangerous feature of the Southern landscape, like those tacky roadside fireworks stands. He was either a courtly gentleman who loved children and old people, or he was, as the essayist Hal Crowther once described him, "a kind of navigational marker, a fixed thing to steer away from if you want to keep yourself from grounding on dangerous shoals."

Link, a professor of history at the University of Florida, attempts to explain Helms's importance without engaging in either veneration or caricature. In his view, Helms was an architect of the conservative reshaping of politics in the 1970s and '80s, a conduit of regional support for Ronald Reagan and a source of organizational know-how for conservatism nationally. "The rise of the new American right," Link argues, "cannot be properly understood without coming to terms with Helms's role."

But conservatism comes in many stripes. Helms's values owed little to Alexander Hamilton, whose espousal of a strong central government Helms would have found uncongenial. Nor would he have had much in common with, say, the philosopher Michael Oakeshott, for whom conservatism was a disposition more than a creed.

Rather, Helms thought conservatives had a duty to proselytize, to persuade, to confront the enemy at every turn. And the enemy was, in various guises, liberalism, socialism, communism, atheism, women's rights, homosexuality, forced integration, secularism -- anything, in short, that might be catalogued under Modernity.

And yet there was another side, seldom seen. Link describes Helms watching appreciatively as his granddaughter shot baskets with former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley, a liberal Democrat, in Washington. More surprising still was his bonding, late in life, with U2's Bono to seek greater financial assistance for AIDS victims in Africa. With his granddaughter, he was even a guest in Bono's skybox at a U2 concert; the audience, Helms said, was "moving back and forth like corn in the breeze." None of this altered his views of feminism, homosexuality or anything else he opposed.

Before he became a symbol of a particular brand of uncompromising, racially tinged social conservatism, he was a high school tuba player, the graduating senior voted "most obnoxious" by his classmates and an aspiring sportswriter. Some thought he had a promising career in newspapers. His reporting and commentary in the now-defunct Raleigh Times was, as Link describes it, alternately "hard-hitting and personal."

This would seem to be giving him more than his due. One could say, just as fairly, that he had positions more than he had ideas. He was never given to reflection, and he was not intellectually curious. He knew what he needed to know, and that was that. If he had gifts as a communicator, they were for pungency and for understanding his audience. He entered politics in the early 1950s as a Senate aide and later worked as a lobbyist for North Carolina bankers. But his big break was becoming an editorial commentator at a Raleigh television station, WRAL, in the '60s. It provided him a visibility the state's political establishment underestimated, and in 1972 he upset Democratic Rep. Nick Galifianakis for a Senate seat. He held it for three decades, rising to the chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee, where he brokered administration appointments he wanted and blocked those he didn't.

For the rest of the article, click here.

William A. Link's Righteous Warrior In Chicago Tribune

A life of 'Senator No'
Biography of North Carolina's Jesse Helms may be a bit too kind to its subject

By Eric Arnesen
Chicago Tribune, March 8, 2008


Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism
By William A. Link
St. Martin's, 643 pages, $39.95

The modern conservative movement owes much to the political innovations, persistence and crusades of former five-term Republican U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina. First elected to the Senate in 1972, Helms staked out a position on the far right that allowed him to demonize his liberal opponents and promote a deeply conservative agenda. For more than a quarter of a century, he assumed the role of an ideologue who eschewed pragmatism and denounced compromise. His limited legislative accomplishments were vastly outweighed by his role in advancing an anti-government ideology, unquestioned American nationalism, strict social conservatism and the new grass-roots right.

In "Righteous Warrior," William A. Link, a historian at the University of Florida and author of numerous books on the South, has produced a judicious and comprehensive biography of Helms, a man who "left a permanent stamp on late-twentieth-century American public life." Link shares few if any of Helms' political sensibilities. "I disagreed with him profoundly," he says at the outset. Helms "represented everything that I dislike in modern politics, his policies represented polar opposites of everything I believed in." "Righteous Warrior" is a balanced, respectful (if overly detailed) study in which Link largely holds his politics in check. In fact, the book is, if anything, overly kind to its subject.

Born in Monroe, N.C., in 1921, Helms grew up imbibing small-town conservative values of "self-reliance, discipline, and hard work" and developing a deeply held Baptist faith. In young adulthood he allied himself with conservative Democrats who opposed the emerging civil rights movement. As executive director of the North Carolina Bankers Association in the 1950s, he preached against communism, liberalism and racial integration. Turning to broadcast journalism at conservative TV station WRAL in the 1960s, Helms was able to take his message to as many as a million households in his state. Along with many Southern whites unhappy with the civil rights revolution, Helms abandoned the Democrats and pursued his conservative crusade under the banner of the Republicans. "Helms saw the coming conservative backlash as the backbone of the new anti-liberal revolution," Link writes, and rode that resentment to a Senate victory in 1972.

Over the next three decades, Helms doggedly promoted his agenda in the international and domestic arenas. An advocate of unilateral American power and an "aggressively nationalist" foreign policy, he exhibited "unwavering and unequivocal support for waging the Cold War" against the Soviet Union and its allies. Toward that end he relentlessly denounced detente and arms control with the Soviets, viewing America's communist enemy as a barbarian force over which the U.S. should maintain unquestioned military superiority. Rejecting collective security agreements, he opposed treaties that would in any way restrict America's "freedom of action." His conviction that the Soviets were up to no good in the developing world led him to embrace and even champion authoritarian regimes with abysmal human-rights records in Latin America and Africa.

For the rest of the article, click here.

Christopher Lane's Shyness mentioned in BBC News Magazine

Is being shy an illness?

By Anna Buckley
BBC News Magazine, Tuesday, 4 March 2008

Most of us are shy to some degree, but acute shyness is one of the most under-recognised mental health problems of the modern age, say some. So when is being shy an illness?

Walking down a busy high street with your cheeks painted like a clown isn't normal behaviour for most people. But it's precisely what is being prescribed for one group of people who desperately want to feel more normal.

People suffering from acute social embarrassment are encouraged to wear ridiculous amounts of blusher in public as part of their treatment at one hospital. It's an unlikely cure for a condition called social phobia. ...

But while some health care professionals argue the condition is under-recognised, others worry the problem is psychiatry itself - labelling people who are just plain shy as having a mental illness.

"Social phobia is yet another example of normal behaviour being re-branded as an illness," says English professor Christopher Lane, author of Shyness: How Normal Behaviour Became a Sickness.

For the rest of the article, click here.

Richard Thompson Ford THE RACE CARD Briefly Noted in New Yorker

Books Briefly Noted
The Race Card
by Richard Thompson Ford (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $26)
New Yorker, March 10, 2008

Ford, a professor of law at Stanford, argues that ubiquitous accusations of discrimination in the United States frequently distract from serious racial injustices, which, in the ambivalent aftermath of the civil-rights era, “stem from isolation, poverty, and lack of socialization as much as from intentional discrimination or racism.” Drawing on examples from popular culture and the law, Ford guides the reader through the worst of these abuses, and articulates a bold strategy for dealing with systematic injustice in a world of “racism without racists.” Ford’s pragmatic approach will irk those for whom ideological concerns are uppermost, but few would object to his emphasis on the need for long-term solutions to persistent segregation and poverty or to his call for discussion of “the more ambiguous cases of bias in the cool tone of technical expertise rather than in the heated cadence of moral judgment.” ♦

For the article, please click here.

Michael Kodas' HIGH CRIMES Reviewed in NYT

The Higher They Climb
By BRUCE BARCOTT
New York Times Book Review, March 2, 2008

In 2003, on the 50th anniversary of the first ascent of Mount Everest, Sir Edmund Hillary, who died in January, returned to the mountain. He looked around at base camp’s satellite dishes, electric generators and free-flowing booze, and despaired. “Just sitting around in a big base camp, knocking back cans of beer, I don’t particularly regard as mountaineering,” he said.


HIGH CRIMES
The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed.
By Michael Kodas.
Illustrated. 357 pp. Hyperion. $24.95.

MOUNTAIN MADNESS
Scott Fischer, Mount Everest and a Life Lived on High.
By Robert Birkby.
Illustrated. 342 pp. Citadel Press/Kensington Publishing. $24.95.


How did we get from Hillary’s noble ascent to a Himalayan version of Burning Man? Two new books lend some insight. One is a biography of a man who helped open the era of guided climbing on Everest; the other offers a portrait of the mountain as a magnet for selfishness and bad behavior. ...

Privacy was the least of the losses. In the years after Fischer’s death, camaraderie and common decency all but disappeared too. According to Michael Kodas, the author of “High Crimes,” base camp today is a lawless village, complete with thievery, extortion, prostitution and occasional violence. In 1996, 98 climbers made it to the top. In 2007, more than 500 summited. “Along with that rush of visitors,” Kodas writes, “has come a new breed of parasitic and predatory adventurer.” It’s gotten so bad that some expeditions hire Sherpas to stand guard against burglars.

Kodas, a reporter for The Hartford Courant, knows the situation firsthand, having tried to climb Everest in 2004 and 2006. (He was turned back by bad weather and poor health.) “High Crimes” looks at the mountain through the eyes of a fascinated and appalled climber. Kodas weaves accounts of his own hilariously awful adventures with the not-so-funny story of Nils Antezana, a 69-year-old American doctor who fell victim to the underhanded practices now common on the mountain. (Both attempted Everest in 2004 but never met. Kodas climbed the mountain’s north side, from Tibet; Antezana took the southern route, from Nepal.)

Like too many of today’s Everest climbers, Antezana wasn’t a mountaineer. He was a man with a dream: to conquer the world’s highest peak. To reach that goal, he hired an Argentine guide named Gustavo Lisi. In climbing circles, Lisi was known as a scoundrel who once stole a dying climber’s Everest summit photo and claimed it as his own. Antezana was unaware of Lisi’s history because he hadn’t spoken with any climbers who could have clued him in. He knew only that Lisi’s Web site claimed — falsely — that he had conquered Everest.

For the full article, click here.

Michael Kodas' HIGH CRIMES First Chapter on NYT Website

First Chapter, New York Times
High Crimes
By MICHAEL KODAS

MOUNT EVEREST, NEPAL — MAY 18, 2004

Along the highway of rope that leads above 8,000 meters on Mount Everest, the Balcony is probably the most accommodating rest stop, but Big Dorjee Sherpa and his teammates never planned on taking in the sunset from this perch. Climbers who see the end of the day here are often facing the end of their lives as well.

Most climbers on the south side of the peak, in fact, hope to see the dawn rather than the dusk of their summit day from the frigid overlook that hangs 27,600 feet above sea level. Even at daybreak, they have been climbing for four or five hours by the time they get to this ridge of snow that stretches out like a runway toward the climb ahead. The rising sun bloodies the sky behind Makalu, the fifth-tallest mountain in the world, but the jagged tooth would be hard to miss even if it weren't so massive and highlighted in crimson and saffron: The peak of the Balcony's triangular ridgeline points directly at it. Below and to the south, the lighted tents of Camp Four, the highest camp on the route, glow yellow in the still-dark desolation of Everest's South Col, the highest refuge on the route in all but the most desperate of circumstances. To the north, the remote, immense, and relentlessly steep wall of the Kangshung Face stretches nearly two miles beneath the mountaintop, blushing with first light as it plummets into Tibet. Even mountaineers focused only on their ascent do well to take in this vista anyway. If they can't see these things, they probably shouldn't be here at all; the most benign clouds that obscue this view can turn deadly higher on the mountain.

Those who continue up from the Balcony often take advantage of the wind break provided by a couple of large boulders at the edge of the ledge. They take off their backpacks for a few minutes, often sitting on them while they regroup. Virtually every face is hidden behind a mask connected to a tank of oxygen in their pack. At the Balcony, most climbers on oxygen take the bottle they are sucking on, unscrew it from the system's regulator, and spin a full bottle on in its place. There's often some gas left in that first tank, so they plant it in a carefully noted spot in the snow to retrieve on their return from the summit around midday. When they get back down, they'll switch their last bottle of oxygen, which is probably nearly empty, for the one they started with, using the dregs of that first tank's gas to get through the home stretch of their descent to the relative safety of the South Col. On a busy summit day, orange and blue oxygen bottles awaiting their owners' return poke up out of the snow like buoys bobbing in a wave. For mountaineers who arrive at the Balcony late, or exhausted or stormbound, that last bottle of oxygen can make the difference between survival and death. When Big Dorjee returned to the Balcony from the mountaintop that day, he and his teammates were all of these things. And sometimes, he knew, even a bottle of oxygen isn't enough to buoy a faltering climber.

It had been more than six hours since the four-man team stood on the summit, and they had been climbing in the mountain's notorious "death zone" for more than twenty. Their descent had run hours late, and the other climbers who had made it to the summit that morning had been back in the shelter of the high camp for hours. Help was impossibly distant. Mingma Sherpa, standing beside his friend and coworker Dorjee, had made his first ascent to the top of Everest that morning. He knew enough to be terrified, but lacked the experience to recognize the myriad ways in which the mountain was trying to kill them. Dorjee, however, was coming down from his tenth trip to the top, and could see death coming at them from every direction.

A cloud cap was dropping on top of the mountain, stirring up a fierce wind and threatening snow. Below them the dark shadows of night were climbing up the peak like frozen specters that would drop the temperature to 20 below zero or colder. Dorjee and Mingma's last oxygen tanks had run dry hours earlier. The man they would later say was dead when they left him grabbed at their legs like a zombie as they walked off the Balcony. But that was the least of their worries.

For the rest of the chapter, click here.