Benjamin Taylor's THE BOOK OF GETTING EVEN reviewed in Seattle Times

"The Book of Getting Even": Young man's tale fascinates, until he graduates

By Mary Brennan
Special to The Seattle Times

"The Book of Getting Even" by Benjamin Taylor
Steerforth, 166 pp., $23.95

Benjamin Taylor's "The Book of Getting Even" is elegant and beautifully evoked, right down to the pediatrician — "the worst, the noisiest Nixon-lover in town" — who appears only in a couple of paragraphs. Set in the 1970s, "Book" follows brilliant, odd Gabriel Geismar, a kid with — literally — two left thumbs and a passion for mathematics, as he leaves his home in the South and heads for college in Philadelphia.

Gabriel is a rabbi's son who grows up in a New Orleans household ruled by his handsome, tyrannical father, who saves all his charm for strangers. At home, his tirades are awful but also funny and cartoonish. "He'd carry on in third person, like a sports hero or gangster: 'Tell a lie to Milton Geismar? You'll wish you hadn't!'"

On Gabriel's last night before leaving for college, he determinedly loses his virginity in a dim cubicle at a gay bathhouse, with eager Clarence Rappley, cold-heartedly described as a "king-sized cracker." After their brief encounter, Gabriel stills his racing mind with a foray into mathematics: "His mind veered to numbers, clean things, the cleanest indeed anywhere in or out of the world." It is a theme — the lifelong duel between mind and body — that resonates through the novel.

At Swarthmore College in Philadelphia, Gabriel meets the eccentric, irresistible brother-sister twins, Marghie and Daniel Hundert, who both fall in love with him. This strange, powerful triangle offers him everything he lacks: Danny and Marghie's parents are literate, worldly, opera-loving Hungarian émigrés — everything Gabriel's family isn't. Their father, to Gabriel's amazement, is a Nobel laureate. Gabriel quickly incorporates himself into the family.

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Ronald Florence's LAWRENCE AND AARONSOHN reviewed in Reform Judaism Magazine

Ronald Florence recreates the Middle East in the First World War. by Bonny V. Fetterman

Lawrence and Aaronsohn: T. E. Lawrence, Aaron Aaronsohn, and the Seeds of the Arab-Israeli Conflict
by Ronald Florence (Viking, 512 pp., $27.95)

For anyone who thinks the Arab-Israeli conflict started with Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, Ronald Florence’s history of the Middle East during World War I is an important corrective. It takes us back to a time when none of the borders we now recognize on the map existed—only a vast region called “Arabia” held by the Ottoman Turks. Florence tells this story through the biographies of two men who tried to help the British wrest this area from Turkey and win the war.

T. E. Lawrence (later known as “Lawrence of Arabia”), an Oxford-trained archaeologist, was a young second lieutenant attached to the British intelligence desk in Cairo. In the spring of 1917 he tried to organize the army of Bedouin irregulars (called the Army of the Arab Revolt) under the Hashemite Emir Faisal for a raid against Turkey at Aqaba. Faisal’s father, Sherif Hussein, the religious ruler of the Hejaz (which included the holy cities of Mecca and Medina) envisioned a new Arab caliphate on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire; Faisal himself had eyes on an extensive kingdom based in Damascus. Lawrence hoped that a successful raid on Aqaba would serve their political aspirations, despite British colonial designs in the region and wartime agreements with the French.

Meanwhile, Aaron Aaronsohn, a Palestinian Jew and an internationally known agronomist (his parents were among the founders of Zichron Ya’akov when they came from Romania in 1882), was convinced that the Jews of Palestine would fare better under Britain than Turkey. Fearing that Jews would suffer the same fate as the Armenians under the Turks, he offered his considerable skills to the British. Giving up his scientific career, he converted his research institute in Athlit, the Jewish Agricultural Experiment Station, into a spy ring for the British (called NILI). Aaronsohn knew every inch of Palestine, having served Turkish commander Djemal Pasha as a scientific consultant during the locust invasion (a crop-destroying insect infestation); he recommended the plan of attack through Beersheva that General Allenby ultimately used to take Jerusalem in December 1917. At the war’s end, Aaronsohn drafted a map of Palestine—not based on arbitrary borders, but on topographical features that would permit the development of a viable state. He carried this map with him when his plane went down in the English Channel on his way to the Paris Peace Conference.

This gripping narrative captures so many facets of this history that suspense remains high even though we know the outcome. The victors of the Great War shaped the Middle East even as their conflicting promises shaped its political future. The stories of Lawrence and Aaronsohn remind us of a time of flux between the waning of the Otto­man Empire and the birth of the modern Middle East.

Bonny V. Fetterman is literary editor of Reform Judaism magazine.

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Paul Goldstein's A PATENT LIE in Washington Post BookWorld

FLAWED REPRESENTATION

By Patrick Anderson,
whose e-mail address is mondaythrillers@aol.com
Monday, June 16, 2008; p.C08

A PATENT LIE
By Paul Goldstein

Doubleday. 293 pp. $24.95

Michael Seeley, the intellectual property lawyer at the center of this legal thriller, is down on his luck when we meet him. Seeley grew up in Buffalo, the son of a drunken lout who beat him and his younger brother, but he made his way to Harvard Law School and then to a fast-track firm in Manhattan. He won some celebrated cases, but drink brought him down. One day, blotto, he called a judge a pompous toad to his face and was nearly disbarred. He returned to Buffalo and embraced the joys of sobriety and a solo law practice. This novel starts when his younger brother, Leonard, whom he hasn't seen in nine years, arrives to make Seeley an offer he can't refuse.

Leonard is the chief medical officer for Vaxtek, a mid-size biotech company in San Francisco. Vaxtek, he explains, has developed and patented the most effective AIDS vaccine yet devised. But now his company is suing St. Gall, a giant Swiss drug producer, for infringing its patent. The trial starts in three weeks, billions of dollars are at stake, and Leonard wants his brother to be Vaxtek's lead lawyer. Seeley asks the obvious question: Why, at this late date, don't you have a lawyer? He died, his brother says. How? "He threw himself in front of a train." At that point, veteran thriller fans will suspect that Seeley risks leaving more than his heart in San Francisco if he takes this case, which of course he does.

Seeley is greeted by suspicion and hostility at Vaxtek, and he begins to fear there is something profoundly wrong about the case. He distrusts his star witness, the Vaxtek scientist who claims to have invented the vaccine. When the trial begins, Seeley is pitted against a canny old lawyer named Emil Thorpe as well as a glamorous but tough-minded judge, Ellen Farnsworth. The author, Paul Goldstein, is a professor at Stanford Law School and an authority on intellectual property law, and among the novel's pleasures are his insights into lawyers and the games they play.

Here, for example, he reflects on the sexy judge: "Federal judges are usually smarter and more able than most of the lawyers who come before them and, with their lifetime tenure, possess a detachment not unlike the composure of a beautiful woman who knows the effect that her good looks have on men. Judge Farnsworth had both." Elsewhere, the sly old lawyer Thorpe, who adopts a melancholy mien in court, lightens up for a moment, whereupon: "Having now seen the phantom of a smile from this austere, sorrowful man, the jurors would work to please him if that was the price to see him smile once more."

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Marlene Zuk's RIDDLED WITH LIFE reviewed in BioScience

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Moying Li's SNOW FALLING IN SPRING in The Boston Globe

'The good and the bad are part of each other'
From author, a child's-eye view of China's Cultural Revolution

By David Mehegan
Globe Staff / June 9, 2008.

Once upon a time in faraway China, a little girl lived with her father and grandparents in a house with a courtyard in Beijing. She was happy, playing with her schoolmates and little brother. Then hard times came. She lived through them safely, grew up, and came to America to study. Now she lives happily with her husband in a house with a courtyard on Beacon Hill.

That's the story of Moying Li, 53, author of the just-published "Snow Falling in Spring: Coming of Age in China During the Cultural Revolution." Published in the young-adult category, the book is written in a style that could appeal as readily to adult readers. It begins with China's disastrous Great Leap Forward in 1958 and ends in 1977, with the 26-year-old English student crossing the Luohu Bridge into Hong Kong en route to a flight that will take her to a new life in America.

There are many accounts of the Cultural Revolution, which ravaged Chinese society from 1966 to 1976. What sets Li's witness and memory apart is its simplicity, lack of clutter or moralizing. It is almost entirely about relationships, with little of politics or history. She does not look back in anger. "I see it in a Taoist way," she said in an interview at her home. "The good and the bad are part of each other, somehow. Even though I and my generation went though hard times, without it I wonder if we would have gained maturity and reflection. In one sense, the experience of the Cultural Revolution has become to me a strength."

Li's mother, assigned to teach in another city, was often absent, so the key adults in the child's life were her father, who was a screenwriter for an army film bureau and a book lover, and her dynamic grandmother, Lao Lao. Both lavished warmth on the two children, and encouraged them to be students and readers. But they were not immune from the troubles around them. In the late 1950s, the family built a backyard furnace, part of a delusional national campaign to build a steel industry that would overtake the productivity of the West. That and other policies of national mismanagement led to failure and famine.

In 1966, when Li was 12, the Cultural Revolution burst over her school as it swept the country. Groups of fanatical students, called Red Guards, engaged in a witch hunt, seeking to root out perceived enemies holding back the communist revolution. Students, teachers, and administrators were denounced and attacked. In one incident, an older girl who had previously befriended Li presided over a kangaroo court where a 7-year-old child was forced to beat her father, the assistant headmaster, with a stick. After similar attacks, the headmaster hanged himself, and one of Li's uncles likewise committed suicide. A squad of Red Guards burst into her house, destroyed her father's record collection, and took away his books. A group of thugs threatened Li's widowed grandmother.

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James Galbraith's THE PREDATOR STATE in Publishers Weekly

Nonfiction Reviews: Week of 5/19/2008
-- Publishers Weekly, 5/19/2008

The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should, Too
James K. Galbraith. Free Press, $25 (228p) ISBN 978-1-4165-6683-0

In this involved but highly readable manifesto, economist Galbraith (Created Unequal) argues that only liberals remain in thrall to conservative economics, insisting that doctrines such as monetarism, supply-side economics and balanced budgets have failed the test of evidence and time. Republicans, he contends, have tacitly dropped them to create a swollen “predator state” that plunders public resources for corporate profit through such nostrums as private health insurance, No Child Left Behind, and Social Security privatization. He exhorts liberals to stop kowtowing to market solutions and budget-balancing and embrace a bold (though frustratingly nonspecific) New Deal featuring aggressive government planning and regulation and massive growth-promoting federal deficits. Galbraith's tour of economics abounds in arresting facts and opinions (tax cuts do not stimulate savings or investment, he argues), but his conclusions are not always clear: after demolishing justifications for free trade, he then urges readers not to worry about America's vast trade deficits—even though they threaten, he notes, to cause a catastrophic collapse of the dollar. His is a stimulating if sometimes scattershot challenge to conventional wisdom. (Aug. 5)

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Ronald Michael Green's BABIES BY DESIGN on LibraryJournal.com

LIBRARYJOURNAL.COM ANNOUNCES BEST SELLERS IN MEDICINE

Best Sellers in Medicine, October 2007–present, as compiled by YBP Library Services
(13-digit ISBNs in brackets)

4. Babies by Design: The Ethics of Genetic Choice
Green, Ronald Michael
Yale University Press
2007. ISBN 0300125461 [9780300125467]. $26.00

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