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Thane Tierney

Fiction

The world turned upside down

Review by Thane Tierney

The legendary comedy troupe The Firesign Theatre once based an album on the premise that “everything you know is wrong.” And if that record was the sound of an alternate-universe gauntlet being dropped, novelist Matt Ruff has picked it up in The Mirage and run with it to a very distant and completely unexpected place.

Ruff, author of the critically lauded Set This House in Order, Fool on the Hill and Bad Monkeys has constructed a funhouse-mirror mash-up where H.G. Wells and Graham Greene collide with The Arabian Nights and The Matrix.

Consider this: In Ruff’s world, not only did 9/11 not happen, but on 11/9 of the same year, Christian fundamentalists—whom some would call terrorists—flew planes into Baghdad’s iconic Tigris & Euphrates World Trade Towers. Saddam Hussein is a gangster. Osama bin Laden is both a murderer and the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The Israeli homeland is in the northern half of Germany, and America is a disjointed jumble of fiefdoms with no cohesion and little global influence, save perhaps for the Evangelical Republic of Texas, which is a member of OPEC. You’ll recognize many of the names and places in The Mirage, but with Ruff’s bizarro-world spin on them, you’ll want a notepad handy to keep track of friend and foe. Fortunately, the book includes a convenient set of sidebars graciously provided by The Library of Alexandria (a user-edited reference source not unlike Wikipedia) to give the reader a hand when the ground seems unsteady, which is often.

As the post-11/9 war in America is winding down, the novel’s three main characters—Amal, Samir and Mustafa, working on behalf of Homeland Security—must track down the source of some “artifacts” that threaten to tear aside the veil concealing a world very different from the one they inhabit. From Baghdad to Riyadh to the “Green Zone” in Washington, D.C., their progress is being monitored not only by their superiors, but by forces that have a markedly different agenda.

It’s no easy task to recreate the universe in its own, if slightly distorted, image, yet Ruff has succeeded handily, dizzying and dazzling the reader with a fantastic—and fantastical—story. But in some ways, the most remarkable element of The Mirage is that its Muslim protagonists aren’t remarkable. Neither saints nor demons, heroes nor villains, they’re just everyday cops trying to do a difficult and often thankless job in a world that seemingly loves to pitch obstacles in their path.

Thane Tierney lives in Los Angeles, and has visited both Alexandria, Egypt, and Alexandria, Virginia.

The legendary comedy troupe The Firesign Theatre once based an album on the premise that “everything you know is wrong.” And if that record was the sound of an alternate-universe gauntlet being dropped, novelist Matt Ruff has picked it up in The Mirage and run with it to a very distant and completely unexpected place. […]
Fiction

Head-to-head comedy

Review by Thane Tierney

Scriptwriting guru Syd Field is said to have honed the three-act structure down to a few simple sentences: “Get your protagonist up a tree. Throw rocks at him. Then get him down.” In Lunatics, authors Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel impose their distinctive mutation onto that formula. They get their protagonists up a tree. They throw rocks at them. Then they fire automatic weapons at them. Then they lob hand grenades in their direction. Then they chop the tree down, feed it through a wood chipper and pursue their protagonists with flame throwers and a colony of rabid vampire bats . . . you get the idea.

One would expect no less from a duo that styles itself as the “League of Comic Justice.” Dave Barry is a Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist who (along with the likes of Stephen King, Amy Tan and Scott Turow) is a member of the celebrated all-author band The Rock Bottom Remainders. Alan Zweibel is an Emmy- and Thurber Prize-winning author who spent a half-decade writing for “Saturday Night Live” during what is considered the show’s golden era. Putting one in close proximity to the other is sort of like juggling torches while walking a wire over a vat of kerosene; sooner or later, there’s gonna be a big, big bang.

Lunatics starts off innocently enough. Mild-mannered pet shop owner Philip Horkman, refereeing a youth soccer match, calls back a game-tying goal, claiming the forward was offside. Her father, a highly belligerent (and aptly named) forensic plumber named Jeffrey Peckerman, begs to differ, at some volume. One might presume that the match’s conclusion would be the end of the matter, but oh, no. When Peckerman mistakenly shows up at Horkman’s pet shop and absconds with the owner’s favorite lemur, who soon thereafter slips his cage and pilfers the plumber’s drunken houseguest’s insulin pump, the stage is set for international hijinks that involve (among others) the Mossad, Sarah Palin, Chuck E. Cheese, Donald Trump and a black ops squad so tough that they refer to Navy SEAL Team 6 as “the Campfire Girls.”

Like The Defiant Ones on a three-week bender, adversaries-turned-abrasive-and-reluctant-allies Horkman and Peckerman manage to stay, astonishingly, one shaky misstep ahead of catastrophe. At every turn, just at the exact moment you think things can’t possibly go further off the rails—they do, in a whitewater-swift cascade of errors, goofs, foul-ups, bad luck, dumb luck, happy accidents and miraculous flukes. Through it all, Barry and Zweibel bring on the funny in a rocket-fueled romp whose pages practically turn themselves.

Scriptwriting guru Syd Field is said to have honed the three-act structure down to a few simple sentences: “Get your protagonist up a tree. Throw rocks at him. Then get him down.” In Lunatics, authors Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel impose their distinctive mutation onto that formula. They get their protagonists up a tree. They […]
Mystery & SuspenseFictionSuspense

The Hannibal lectures

Review by Thane Tierney

“Aren’t all novelists liars?” asks the noted—and notorious—Professor Richard Aldiss during his seminar Unraveling a Literary Mystery. Well, yes. Yes they are. And sometimes the people who study them might be not only liars, but murderers as well. LIT 424, despite its unassuming title, is no ordinary class. Aldiss is conducting it from his jail cell, where he’s serving time for killing two of his former students.

In Dominance, the follow-up to his New York Times bestseller Obedience, author Will Lavender returns to a campus setting for a novel that pulls the reader into a world where words like “text,” “meaning” and “narrative” contort into funhouse-mirror grotesques. And the consequence of misplaced trust, whether in an individual or in one’s own intellect, could be a matter of life and death.

The story, which jumps back and forth between the 1994 class and the present day, attempts to answer the question that was the central "literary mystery" of the seminar: Who is Paul Fallows? The short answer is that he’s a novelist, now deceased, whose aptitude for secrecy and seclusion makes J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon seem positively gregarious by comparison. But the nine students in the class, and most particularly the protagonist, Alexandra “Alex” Shipley, are destined not only to uncover Fallows’ myriad riddles, but to engage in a sort of shadowy lit-crit technique known as the Procedure.

Seventeen years out, the class has seen its number reduced by two; the remaining seven gather, Big Chill-style, at the home of Dean Stanley Fisk prior to the funeral of murdered classmate Daniel Hayden. There’s no Motown soundtrack for this particular movie, though; it’s more like Bernard Herrmann's score for Psycho. Alex, now a professor of literature at Harvard, has been tasked by the police and by her former professor to be their eyes and ears among the assembled mourners, since it’s possible that someone from a long time ago has a grudge to settle.

Lavender is Houdini-level dexterous at the sleight-of-verb necessary to keep the reader guessing, doubting, perplexed and attentive throughout the book. Characters lie, memories lie, senses lie, and underpinning it all is the game-that’s-not-a-game, this enigmatic Procedure, that pulls like an uncontrollable undertow from beyond the grave. Who is Paul Fallows? Maybe the students in Dominance would have been better off never knowing the answer, but Lavender’s readers will be abundantly rewarded.

 

Thane Tierney is a former employee of the University of California, Irvine, one-time home of literary deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, who would have loved this book.

“Aren’t all novelists liars?” asks the noted—and notorious—Professor Richard Aldiss during his seminar Unraveling a Literary Mystery. Well, yes. Yes they are. And sometimes the people who study them might be not only liars, but murderers as well. LIT 424, despite its unassuming title, is no ordinary class. Aldiss is conducting it from his jail […]
Nonfiction

Retracing the steps of a legend

Review by Thane Tierney

As the actor Carleton Young declared in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” That’s exactly what happened in the April 1913 issue of National Geographic, when the entire magazine was devoted to explorer Hiram Bingham III’s “discovery” of ancient Inca ruins in Peru. In his meticulously researched and marvelously readable book Turn Right at Machu Picchu, author and adventurer Mark Adams retraces the steps that led Bingham to the famed site 100 years ago this July.

Adams, whose Mr. America was named a Best Book of 2009 by the Washington Post, goes beyond merely printing the legend: He studies it, he lives it . . . and he debunks it. At first glance, it seems like Adams might have been following in the footsteps of Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, given the book’s “maybe-I-should-have-worked-out-just-a-little-bit-more-before-starting-this-physically-demanding-quest” setting. Like Bryson, Adams peppers his book with interesting anecdotes, trenchant observations and frequently hilarious asides. But as the chapters (which more or less alternate between Bingham’s and Adams’ expeditions) fly by, both the book’s scholarship and its organization also call to mind John McPhee’s excellent history/travelogue of Alaska, Coming into the Country.

Even if you’ve never traveled farther than the Jungle Cruise at Walt Disney World, you’re guaranteed to be swept up in Adams’ vivid descriptions of the near-unpronounceable sights along the Inca trail, as well as the remarkable amount of information he tactfully packs into a single paragraph:

“We walked down the mountainside beneath Llactapata and crossed the Aobamba River—an important milestone, because we were now officially inside the Machu Picchu Historical Sanctuary. Technically, this zone is a haven not only for ruins but for the diverse flora and fauna of the region. (This is one of the few safe places for the rare Andean spectacled bear, which looks like a cross between a raccoon and a black bear cub.) There is one important eco-exception—the gigantic hydroelectrical plant on the backside of Machu Picchu. John and I walked past dozens of men in matching hard hats and coveralls driving heavy machinery; a funicular ran up the mountainside. KEEP OUT signs were posted everywhere. None of this is visible from the sacred ruins directly above. It was like stumbling upon a Bond villain’s secret hideout while hiking in Yosemite.”

Perhaps, in the best-case scenario, Adams’ book might impel you to adopt the motto of one of his former employers, Adventure magazine: “Dream it. Plan it. Do it.” And at the very least, you’ll get an unparalleled insight into how demanding, and how rewarding, following that dictum can be.

As the actor Carleton Young declared in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” That’s exactly what happened in the April 1913 issue of National Geographic, when the entire magazine was devoted to explorer Hiram Bingham III’s “discovery” of ancient Inca ruins in Peru. In his meticulously researched […]
Fiction

Big sky, small lives

Review by Thane Tierney
There comes a point in every examined life that one can’t avoid looking back at a whole series of choices and coming to grips with what RL, the late-middle-aged protagonist of Kevin Canty’s Everything sees: “All those people he could have been. All those hundreds of doors closing, one by one, until there was just the one door left, the last one.”
 
Canty’s no stranger to the midlife crisis; his last novel, 2005’s Winslow in Love, wrestled with the same existential questions that seem to face men of a certain age in our post-John Wayne, post-Alan Alda era. Cynicism and heroism, duty, guilt, and hope wrap in a stranglehold around one another like the briar and the rose.
 
Like many of his kind, RL sees his salvation in the opposite sex, in this case a trio of women bound intimately to his existence. One is his daughter, Layla, a college student making her way out into a wider world for the first time. The second, June, is the widow of RL’s long-deceased best friend, ready to break out of her decade-plus sleepwalk. And to close out the trio, ex-girlfriend Betsy reappears in RL’s life, hoping for a little moral support in a long-odds fight against cancer.
 
Much like Raymond Carver, Canty has a finely tuned ear for emotional nuance, and paints his characters with small, deft strokes rather than a broad brush. Their individual mini-dramas are skillfully contrasted with the seemingly limitless expanse of the novel’s backdrop, the big sky country of Montana.
 
Maybe it’s the emptiness of that night sky that leads a man to feel like “the edge of town that trails off into tank farms and trailer parks and switching yards, a wilderness of cold steel . . . not even hell, but just abandoned, uncared for.” But even on those blackest of nights, Canty leaves out a North Star to guide his weary wanderer to a better place, and us with him.

Thane Tierney lives in Los Angeles, and numbers Montana among the five states he has not yet visited. 

 

There comes a point in every examined life that one can’t avoid looking back at a whole series of choices and coming to grips with what RL, the late-middle-aged protagonist of Kevin Canty’s Everything sees: “All those people he could have been. All those hundreds of doors closing, one by one, until there was just the one […]
Fiction

Final kicks on Route 66

Review by Thane Tierney

There comes a point in life when your bucket list has narrowed down to a single item, and that’s just where John and Ella Robina find themselves in The Leisure Seeker. She’s riddled with cancer, his mind’s in tatters from the latter stages of Alzheimer’s, but over the protests of their kids and doctors, they decide to take their camper van—and what’s left of their dreams—on one final great adventure: a cross-country trip from Detroit to Disneyland, on the fabled Route 66.

Michael Zadoorian, author of Second Hand and The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit, serves up an affectionate, clear-eyed peek at a pair of self-styled “down-on-their-luck geezers” who just aren’t ready to go gentle into that good night. Zadoorian’s real-life struggle with his father’s case of Alzheimer’s informs the story in a funny, sad, poignant way that cuts very close to the bone.

John and Ella aren’t saints and they aren’t fools; they’re just a couple of middle-class folks who worked hard, raised a family, hung together in good times and bad, and came to the realization that the clock that has already run out on so many of their friends and acquaintances is ticking louder for them with each succeeding sunrise. While many of their adventures would be tame by the standards of Bourdain, Iyer or Theroux, the Robinas encounter a few genuinely life-threatening situations, handled with the quietly tenacious aplomb of a couple who have spent a lifetime in the shark-infested waters of suburbia. And the moments of tenderness that pass between the AARP-card-carrying pair are achingly sweet without ever straying into Hallmark territory.

As John notes, in his suite at the Flagstaff Radisson, “This is the life,” to which his wife acerbically rejoins, “What’s left of it.” Here’s to hoping we all handle our last days so well.

Thane Tierney lives in Los Angeles, not even a day’s journey from Disneyland.

There comes a point in life when your bucket list has narrowed down to a single item, and that’s just where John and Ella Robina find themselves in The Leisure Seeker. She’s riddled with cancer, his mind’s in tatters from the latter stages of Alzheimer’s, but over the protests of their kids and doctors, they […]
Fiction

A wild ride through the past

Review by Thane Tierney

"History," according to Junior Ray Loveblood, "is an amazing thing. Once I got started, it just more or less begun to write itself." Well, not exactly. The Yazoo Blues, the sequel to John Pritchard's critically acclaimed debut, Junior Ray, is as funny as it is foul-mouthed, and as insightful as it is infuriating. When we left Junior Ray, he was a deputy sheriff in the sort of town where you expect to find a mutant playing "Dueling Banjos" out on the front porch, but Junior's law enforcement career went off the rails, and he now finds himself patrolling the parking lot at the Lucky Pair-O-Dice Casino. But our hero's not just any broken-down good ol' boy on the downward slide; he's also a historian. Imagine, if you will, Hunter S. Thompson's taste for the surreal, married to Paris Hilton's academic acumen, all shoveled into Buford Pusser's bod, and you can just bet that hijinks are rarin' to ensue.

The subject that holds Junior Ray in thrall is the Yazoo Pass Expedition of 1863, a failed (some would call it doomed) attempt by the Union Army to skulk into Vicksburg via a network of rivers, lakes and swamps that proved inhospitable to Yankees and impassable by ship. (Didn't they know that "Yazoo" came from the Native American phrase meaning "River of Death"?)

And in true gonzo fashion, Ray's journey of discovery takes him (and his comical sidekick, Mad Owens) up to "Meffis"—you know it as Memphis—and into a gentleman's club, where Mad falls madly in lust with an ex-cop turned stripper bearing the unlikely name of Money Scatters.

Just like a story from Yazoo City's most famous resident, the late comedian Jerry Clower, The Yazoo Blues takes its time getting around to its point, by which time you may not even remember—or care—what its point was. If ever a book proved that the joy is in the travel and not the destination, The Yazoo Blues is it. We can only hope that our potty- mouthed philosopher will come back for a third hilarious helping of hell-raising.

Thane Tierney lives in Los Angeles, although he's traveled through the deep South, frequently at high speed.

"History," according to Junior Ray Loveblood, "is an amazing thing. Once I got started, it just more or less begun to write itself." Well, not exactly. The Yazoo Blues, the sequel to John Pritchard's critically acclaimed debut, Junior Ray, is as funny as it is foul-mouthed, and as insightful as it is infuriating. When we […]

Want fries with that grease?

Review by Thane Tierney

As Kermit the Frog taught us so many years ago, it's not easy being green. That's not going to deter journalist Greg Melville, who converts his 1985 Mercedes – Benz 300TD wagon to run on waste cooking oil and lives to tell about it in Greasy Rider. Yes, the fries that you order at your local McKing In The Box can ultimately power the car that propels you back to the drive – in window. Very symmetrical, that. If the idea of filling up at the fast – food joint rather than the gas station is perplexing, consider this: 108 years ago, when he premiered his creation at Paris' Exposition Universelle, Rudolf Diesel filled its tank with peanut oil, not petrodiesel.

After negotiating, pleading and arguing with his wife, Melville undertakes a semiheroic quest: to make it from coast to coast without ever stopping at a gas pump. (And no cheating by buying a couple gallons of Wesson at the supermarket, either.) Playing Sancho Panza to Melville's Don Quixote, college pal (and part – time diesel mechanic) Iggy enlists for the duration, and this truly odd couple chugga – chug off to – quite literally – tilt at windmills on their cross – country journey. Along the way, we meet Ryan and Mike Wolf, whose five wind turbines pump over six megawatts of electricity back into the grid near Rushmore, Minnesota. We visit Google's solar – powered HQ. We discover how Fort Knox is home not only to the treasure of Goldfinger's dreams, but also to the largest geothermal heating system in the world.

Like every great tale about every great quest, Greasy Rider isn't really the story it pretends to be. What our heroes learn along the journey is far more important than whether they get to California, entertaining though that may be (and, incidentally, it is). At a time when greenhouse gases, global warming, declining petroleum reserves, high gas prices and the size of our individual and collective carbon footprints are the subject of cocktail chatter and election – year rhetoric, Melville deftly taps into America's can – do zeitgeist … perhaps the greenest, most renewable energy source of all.

By the way, Melville wasn't the first to do the coast – to – coast grease – burning run. Filmmakers Joey Carey and JJ Beck did in 2006, and made a film about it called – Greasy Rider.

Thane Tierney lives in Los Angeles, where he contributes to a cleaner environment by telecommuting.

As Kermit the Frog taught us so many years ago, it's not easy being green. That's not going to deter journalist Greg Melville, who converts his 1985 Mercedes – Benz 300TD wagon to run on waste cooking oil and lives to tell about it in Greasy Rider. Yes, the fries that you order at your […]
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Thor’s super man returns

Review by Thane Tierney

Remember what happened when those Danish cartoonists drew caricatures of the Islamic prophet? Just imagine what could happen when an American novelist, New York Times best-selling author Brad Thor, does roughly the same in The Last Patriot.

Ex-Navy SEAL turned Homeland Security operative Scot Harvath (who Thor fans will recall from The First Commandment), is enjoying a little R&andR in gay Paree with his slightly damaged but healing girlfriend, Tracy Hastings (herself a Naval Explosive Ordinance Disposal tech) when things turn, well, not so gay. After a bungled car bomb blast and a narrow escape with an Islamic scholar in tow, the bodies begin to stack up like cordwood.

Why all the fuss? Seems that an addendum to the Koran, allegedly written by the prophet himself, makes an unexpected – and to a group of jihadists, entirely unwelcome – appearance. If allowed to become public, it could "stop militant Islam dead in its tracks." Tough times demand a tough hero, and they don't come any grittier than Thor's. Facing down a recalcitrant target who stands between him and the French pokey, Harvath employs Jack Bauer-like tactics to persuade his captive that confession is good for the soul. With not just a license to kill, but a license to wound, disrupt, maim and explode, Harvath is, virtually single-handedly, more than a match for any who would seek to overthrow our republic by means of force or violence. The only things he's missing are a cape and vulnerability to Kryptonite.

Fans of "24" and other high-adrenaline escapist fare will find Thor's latest cinematic page-turner a must-pack for this summer's vacation.

Remember what happened when those Danish cartoonists drew caricatures of the Islamic prophet? Just imagine what could happen when an American novelist, New York Times best-selling author Brad Thor, does roughly the same in The Last Patriot. Ex-Navy SEAL turned Homeland Security operative Scot Harvath (who Thor fans will recall from The First Commandment), is […]
Memoir

Bend it like Bruce

Review by Thane Tierney

English journalist Sarfraz Manzoor peeks behind the curry curtain in modern U.K. Pakistani culture in his memoir, Greetings from Bury Park. As the rope in a tug-of-war between two cultures pulling in strikingly contradictory directions, he finds himself in a situation similar to that of Jesminder Bhamra, the young Brit of Sikh descent at the center of Gurinder Chadha's film Bend It Like Beckham. Instead of being infatuated with a now-aging footballer, though, he's infatuated with a now-aging rock icon.

Even for those of us rock fans no farther than a bus ride from the Jersey shore where he ascended to Bosshood three decades ago, Bruce Springsteen has come to represent all things American: hard work, hard play, hard rock. Oh, and one more item, even more precious to a young misfit whose hard-toiling immigrant dad regarded his passion as frivolity at best and wastefulness at worst – freedom. While Manzoor may have taken his obsession with Springsteen's lyrics and lifestyle several leagues beyond simple fandom, he does uncover a simple truth: No engine has sufficient horsepower to permit us to slip the surly bonds of our upbringing.

In some ways, Sarfraz's journey mirrors Springsteen's own: first rebellious, then reflective, finally reconciled. InManzoor's case, the last came a bit too late, as his father passed away the very same day Sarfraz's first byline graced the pages of the Manchester Evening News, proof positive that the Vauxhall assembly line – Manzoor senior's path – wasn't the only road to respectability.

When Manzoor visits America, both pre- and post-9/11, he's forced to confront the fact that his Muslim heritage and his British residency have conspired to tangle him in the roots he once longed to sever, and which now seem more comforting than confining. The mature Manzoor is now living out his own Springsteen lyric: "Some folks got fortune, some got eyes of blue / What you got will always see you through / You're a lucky man."

 

Thane Tierney's musings on The Boss may be found in the "World of Bruce Springsteen" feature on the Apple iTunes website.

English journalist Sarfraz Manzoor peeks behind the curry curtain in modern U.K. Pakistani culture in his memoir, Greetings from Bury Park. As the rope in a tug-of-war between two cultures pulling in strikingly contradictory directions, he finds himself in a situation similar to that of Jesminder Bhamra, the young Brit of Sikh descent at the […]
Fiction

A Milgram headache

Review by Thane Tierney

The two most famous social science experiments of the post-WWII era—designed, incidentally, by a pair of former high-school buddies—ended in disaster. Philip Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment had to be shut down when the volunteer "guards" and "prisoners" plummeted into a frenzy of psychotic behaviour. And Stanley Milgram's study testing the limits of compliance with authority, in which subjects administered what they believed to be potentially life-threatening electric shocks to Milgram's confederates, led the American Psychological Association to overhaul their code of ethics. In his tautly strung debut novel, Obedience, literature professor Will Lavender tears a page out of Milgram's notebooks and sets into motion a chain of events that escalates far beyond its intended intellectual exercise.

At the first meeting of Winchester University's Logic and Reasoning 204, the enigmatic and somewhat ill-tempered professor Leonard Williams lays out a missing persons case in much the manner of television's Dr. Gregory House: Here is the background, here are some clues, figure it out in six weeks or the girl dies. Along the way, Williams doles out enough red herrings to gag a pod of dolphins, deliberately blurring—or exposing?—the line between the ivory tower and the real world as a trio of students is drawn into a vortex of imaginary hazards that seem real and real dangers that seem fabricated. All the while, the clock's ticking and the students' pursuit of the shadowy truth flashes into hyperdrive.

Mystery fans will be satisfied to hang on around the story's hairpin turns as the list of suspects swells and narrows with the unearthing of each clue, but Lavender, like Zimbardo and Milgram, is aiming at a broader target and posing deeper questions. Where do we set the boundaries between academic experimentation and real life? How will we react to authority figures' demands? And perhaps most tellingly, what are the consequences of being unable to separate truth from lies? In Obedience, as in Milgram's famed experiment, the answer comes in the form of a shock.

Thane Tierney is a former employee of the University of California, Irvine, whose faculty doesn't generally engage in these sorts of shenanigans.

The two most famous social science experiments of the post-WWII era—designed, incidentally, by a pair of former high-school buddies—ended in disaster. Philip Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment had to be shut down when the volunteer "guards" and "prisoners" plummeted into a frenzy of psychotic behaviour. And Stanley Milgram's study testing the limits of compliance with authority, […]
NonfictionPolitics

Margaret Mead, meet Harry Reid

Review by Thane Tierney

Scots poet Robert Burns, a keen observer of human behavior, once wrote, O wad some Power the giftie gie us/To see oursels as ithers see us! (The poem it was taken from, incidentally, is entitled To a Louse. ) Washington Post columnist and frequent MSNBC pundit Dana Milbank doffs his reporter's trench coat in favor of an Indiana Jones-style jacket in his vastly entertaining, seriocomical anthropological prowl through our nation's capital, Homo Politicus: The Strange and Scary Tribes That Run Our Government. The chief difference between his observations and Burns' is that Milbank is not illustrating a single louse . . . he's depicting the whole nest.

Anthropologists, says Milbank, have observed that many cultures experience a gap between ideal behavior, perceived behavior, and actual behavior. Nowhere, however, is the gap more yawning than in Potomac Land. No kidding. The Post columnist breezily recounts cautionary tales of embarrassing, antisocial, amoral, duplicitous, criminal and just plain stoopid hijinks ensuing in and around I-495. His cast of characters reads like a Who's Who of Who Shouldn't Have, from comedian/commentator/drug addict Rush Limbaugh to former congressman/current federal inmate Randy Duke Cunningham. Hillary Clinton's ham-fisted fundraising soirŽes at Maison Blanque Cheque and the back-to-back Nannygate scandals of Democrat attorney general nominees Zo‘ Baird and Kimba Wood are also held up to mockery er, scrutiny. And while some hardcore conservatives, already dubious of Milbank's alleged liberal bias, may feel they have been unfairly singled out, felon Willie Sutton's explanation of why he robbed banks aptly applies to the pages of Homo Politicus: That's where the money is.

Hidden among its myriad and hilarious sins of omission and commission, arcane rites and ritual sacrifices is one key line that crystallizes the whole circus for those not particularly inclined to obsess on the mercurial nature of Beltway fortunes: Politics is show business for ugly people. Hmm, Voting with the Stars : Now there's a reality TV series for the upcoming election cycle. Hollywood, are you listening?

Thane Tierney lives three time zones away from the nation's capital: just about far enough.

 

Scots poet Robert Burns, a keen observer of human behavior, once wrote, O wad some Power the giftie gie us/To see oursels as ithers see us! (The poem it was taken from, incidentally, is entitled To a Louse. ) Washington Post columnist and frequent MSNBC pundit Dana Milbank doffs his reporter's trench coat in favor […]
Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

Making Money

Review by Thane Tierney

Conman and condemned prisoner Moist von Lipwig cheated the noose once, but it’s not the sort of thing you really want to get good at; while practice makes perfect, mistakes make cadavers. You can imagine why von Lipwig is particularly attentive when his benefactor, Lord Vetinari, tyrannical Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, favors him with a Godfather-style offer that he dare not refuse . . . and why would he want to? Like the fox being given the henhouse key, the former swindler is appointed to the post of Master of the Royal Mint.

English satirist Terry Pratchett apparently found our universe too mundane, so he invented seemingly, in fact, lives in one of his own. Making Money is the 36th novel in the venerable Discworld series, and the second to feature Moist von Lipwig, who had previously displayed a talent for wrangling bureaucracy in 2004’s Going Postal. When Royal Bank chairman Mrs. Topsy Lavish (née Turvy), whose death may or may not have been untimely, leaves a 50 percent share in the bank to her dog, Mr. Fusspot and leaves Mr. Fusspot in von Lipwig’s care, hijinks ensue.

Much like certain Helmsleys you may have read about recently, the members of the Lavish clan who have been, as they see it, unfairly cut out of the will in favor of a canine, are not pleased. And when 10 tons of gold bullion disappears from the bank’s vault under Mr. Fusspot’s and von Lipwig’s four suspect eyes, it’s a race to see which will collapse first: Ankh-Morpork’s economy, Lord Vetinari’s dictatorship or Moist’s windpipe, as the noose tightens around it for a second, and presumably final, time.

Pratchett can always be counted upon for a high-spirited romp, and his observational skills seem only to sharpen with each succeeding novel. With equal doses of Molière and Michael Moorcock, Pratchett holds up a funhouse mirror to our own culture and leaves us with a simple question: Which universe would you rather live in? No wonder so many of us, three dozen times now, have joined him in his.

Thane Tierney makes his money in Los Angeles. He just has trouble passing it.

Pratchett can always be counted upon for a high-spirited romp, and his observational skills seem only to sharpen with each succeeding novel.

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