Public Enemies
Directed by Michael Mann

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences recently announced their intention to increase the number of nominees in the category of Best Picture, from five nominees to ten. This, no doubt, pleased the producers of Public Enemies. With the expanded nomination process, this slickly produced, well directed but uneven drama will probably snag a coveted Best Picture nod.

The Best Picture field is not new to Michael Mann, Public Enemies’ director and producer. His masterpiece, 1999’s The Insider, walked away empty handed, as did his well-crafted follow up, Collateral. Fans of those films will recognize immediately that this is Mann’s work. He uses his handheld camera often and to great affect, something that most directors working with his budget wouldn’t dare to try. Mann’s expert camera work creates scenes that are both graphically violent and cartoonish, moving quickly, leaving the audience to wonder what hit them.

Where many films are cursed with a lack of good ideas, Public Enemies is stuffed with too many. The film starts in 1933 and follows the FBI, specifically Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) and J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) pursuit of bank robber John Dillinger (Johnny Depp, handsome as ever) and his gang. Bullets fly at regular intervals as the Feds chase Dillinger and Co. across the Midwest before famously getting their man outside Chicago’s Biograph Theater. What the movie never makes clear is why the audience should care about any of this.

When the film opens with an enraged Hoover ordering his publicist to leak information about Congress to Walter Winchell while Dillinger receives a hero’s welcome en route to an Indiana prison, it seems that Mann is maybe making a film about the nature of celebrity. However, the point is dropped, and we never see Depp’s Dillinger received this way again.

At times, the film seems poised to be a cog in the machine of Dillinger’s legend, portraying him as a depression-era Robin Hood. At one robbery about 40 minutes in, he refuses a bank customer’s change, claiming he’s only after the bank’s money. But once again, this focus is dropped, another facet of the character we do not see again.

The film seems to find its focus as a cat and mouse thriller in the last hour, as the audience can see the noose tightening around Dillinger and his crew. But at this point, one hour and forty minutes have ticked by, and we’re lost. We could have been watching Bale’s cat chase Depp’s mouse, but instead we were stuck watching a cat chase its tale.

The production design, by Nathan Crowley, and the costumes, by the always dependable Colleen Atwood, are marvelous, making Public Enemies beautiful to look at. Depp and Bale square off nicely against each other and Jason Clarke, as one of Dillinger’s most trusted men, is excellent. Marion Cotillard is onscreen too briefly but manages to make an impression in the throwaway role of Billie Frechette, Dillinger’s lady love. Billy Crudup, underused as always, is spectacular as J. Edgar Hoover but occasionally seems to be in a different movie, a movie I might have liked better. Note to producers: Just because Crudup has leading man looks, don’t be afraid to make him a character.

Watching Public Enemies felt like a chore, something I don’t think a movie should ever feel like. At 2 hours and 40 minutes, the film is too long, considering the best moments were in the trailer. Part of the frustration is that there is a great film buried in Michael Mann’s generally mediocre effort.

The Bottom Line: The exquisite production deserves to be seen on a big screen but no one will blame you if you sit this one out.

–Sarah Hudson

Look for Sarah Hudson’s movie reviews every Friday on the Open Letters Blog

Reality Check
Peter Abrahams
HarperCollins, 2009

When handsome young football star (former star, actually, since getting his knee blown out) Cody Laredo’s ex-girlfriend Clara disappears, Cody figures he has a duty to go and investigate. He certainly has nothing to hold him back: once his dreams of an NFL future evaporated, he saw little reason to stay in high school and dropped out.

Cody doesn’t believe that Clara was lost on a routine riding excursion (the story being put about by the local police), and when he reaches the town in question, he’s immediately confronted by a cast of potentially shady characters that would do a Hardy Boys book proud. But it’s the differences between Peter Abrahams’ Reality Check and the usual run of teen-hero mysteries that make this book so gripping, so smart, and so completely worthwhile.

You haven’t been reading two dozen pages before you notice those differences piling up. For one thing, Cody isn’t some sweater-vested suburban scholarship student – he’s big and tough, and he knows his way around fighting, as in fight scene between him and Clara’s current boyfriend:

Townes was strong –– maybe not as strong as Junior, but much quicker. Cody didn’t even see the second punch, left-handed, which caught him flush on the jaw. A bell-ringer; but Cody had had his bell rung before, more than once, on the football field. The important thing was not to panic.

And for another, Cody’s not all that smart (as he himself admits), at least in the formal, academic sense. Eight years of President Bush may have given American readers a bad reaction to characters real or imagined (to say nothing of presidents, who are both) who think with their ‘gut,’ but nevertheless, that kind of character has a long and fairly noble history in American literature –– and certainly in American mystery fiction; Cody’s in some fine company. And he has one thing in common with his Hardy Boys predecessors, the most important thing:

Cody gave up trying to see the future. He chose the truth, maybe because it seemed easier, or maybe – he got a sudden glimpse inside himself – because that was his default setting.

Abrahams’ book is fast-paced and engrossingly told, with lots of very sharp dialogue and a hero worth cheering whether he’s on the football field or engaged in murkier contests. Here’s hoping Reality Check is the first in a long line of amiable young Cody’s adventures.

—Leah Lambrusco

Corvus: A Life with Birds
Esther Woolfson
Counterpoint, 2009

“Familiarity doesn’t dull me to the wonder of birds,” writes Esther Woolfson at one point in her beguiling book Corvus, which mainly concerns the rook she takes into her home and names Chicken:

…what they are and what they do. Chicken becomes more mysterious, more miraculous the more I learn, the more I observe. I spread her wings in my hand. She grunts and, briefly, objects. Before she tugs it back under her own control, I look at the lovely arc of it; feel the fine bones under my fingers, feathers all in their symmetrical and asymmetrical orders.

There are other birds than Chicken in this avian memoir – there are starlings and parrots and magpies, all taken into Woolfson’s home for varying lengths of time, all watched with her lively curiosity and observed (and often sketched – the book is delightfully illustrated) in intimate detail, by a bird-enthusiast so ardent she feels only sympathy even for the much-maligned Lord Byron when she reads a passage in his journal where he laments that “some fool” trod on his pet crow’s foot. “I salute the man,” she says. “I am unmoved by Lady Caroline Lamb’s famously designation of him, because nothing can alter the fact that it speaks well of a man when he cares about his pet crow’s toe.”

In Corvus, Counterpoint has published a book sure to become a classic of the bird-book genre, something to put on the same shelf as Owl by William Service or That Quail Robert by Margaret Stanger, and the reason is the same: like those authors, Woolfson has done more than simply take a bird into her home – she’s paid scrupulous attention to the person her guest quickly becomes, and she’s done it in graceful, affecting prose: “On a late-November afternoon, I see a hawk flying against a cold, silvered sky, the half flap, half smooth glide, the silhouette that can reduce a safe, protected indoor bird to shrieking terror.”

Bird aficionados won’t want to miss Corvus, but it has a much greater appeal than that. Anybody who’s ever shared their life with another species will find a wonderful, insightful sympathy in these pages, a book to recommend and pass along.

–Honoria St. Cyr

Our June photograph (the eerie womb of a hotel room on our main page) came to us from Chris Marstall, creator of Tourfilter.com and friend of Open Letters. We had some questions about his photographic work and he was kind enough to share his thoughts.

OL: How often do you take pictures, Chris? Is it a part of your daily life, or something you save for unique occasions and excursions? and what kind of equipment are you swinging around?

Chris: These days, very occasionally. What is the point? I sometimes ask myself. So many pictures have already been taken of anything i might want to photograph. If I am dating someone, I will take a thousand pictures of her in every kind of place.

I don’t have a film camera now. I have a slim Sony Cybershot T7 digital camera but I lost the charger; so if i take photos these days, and it’s rare, i will buy a disposable camera. Sometimes the results are amazing. I bought one on a recent trip to South America and it malfunctioned, leaving all of the photos looking instantly ancient, and not in a good way.

OL:Where was the hotel room picture taken? What’s the story there?

Chris: Cairo. it was my first night of a 6 week trip to the Middle East in 2003. I was scared of what might happen to me, an American, in the Middle East, so I gave my worrying mind an unusual luxury and reserved a room at the Nile Hilton for the first three nights of my stay. It’s the grandest, coolest, old-schoolest hotel in Cairo, right on the river. I thought my room was beautiful so i took a picture of it.

OL: What drew you to the Middle East? What did you see?

Chris: I went to Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Israel for 6 weeks in 2003. I wanted to see this place which I was suddenly being told was our enemy, a new USSR. I also had visions of classic North African romance from movies like Casablanca and Lawrence of Arabia. As it turns out those classic places are rare in Cairo and have become tourist museums, for the most part. There are a lot of new rebar concrete towers, etc. However it was still a dense, multilayered place and there were lots of beautiful things to look at and peer into. Everything was new to me. I tried to capture some cultural things and photograph people I encountered. Like the young men who invited me into their home (which was scary at first) and smoked me out. Or the clueless Italian tourist in a short skirt who fell asleep at the port and flashed her panties at 200 Palestinians on a religious pilgrimage.

OL:For a time you were keeping a sort of photo journal online. Do you think it changed you as a photographer? What kind of feedback did you generate? How did you decide which pictures to post?

Chris: A few years ago I got this amazing camera, a Sony Cybershot U30. It was about the size of half a pack of cigarettes and charged through its USB port. I could carry it everywhere and it was a minimal hassle to get photos onto my PC. I told myself I would take a photo every day and have an evening ritual where I chose one and uploaded it to my photoblog. I kept it up for a year or two and at one point about 80 people were viewing each photo. It was an exciting time in my life because my best friend and his family were living with me and I had a new girlfriend and a new job, so there was lots to take pictures of. i would love to have that camera back and get back into the habit. I really appreciate your featuring my photo and it inspires me.

I used to make personal videos — much in the same way i described my photography process: taking a compact video camera with me everywhere and becoming known as someone who would and could whip out a video camera in any unexpected occasion. I edited together several 5-20 minute short diary films. i was living in San Francisco and everything around me was so exotic and beautiful. At that time i developed a brutal approach to choosing what clips to keep and what clips to toss. Basically, i kept only clips that worked on every level. technical, visual, emotional, etc. if i caught myself saying “oh but that was such an amazing night i have to put something from that in there” i would say no, only good stuff goes in. I use the same approach with photos; nothing matters except whether it’s a good photo.

I enjoy writing captions for photos and I think they can add a lot. i was inspired by Bill Owen’s Suburbia and Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, among others. I admire their neutral, minimal, yet piercingly personal approach to caption writing. They focus on the reportorial four W’s, yet in a way that makes you love, understand and admire the people in the photo. I think the best photography takes you inside.

OL:The hotel room shot is an exception, since the balance of your best shots frame your subject off-center. The way you do it often conveys motion — these things were seen in passing — but you’re also interested in depth: there is usually either a brightness or a darkness that the image plunges into (the doorway of the bookshop, the street beyond the arch, the darkness around the wall). What catches your eye when you’re out with your camera?

Chris: My ideas about composition are pretty basic and instinctive. Get close to the subject, but not so close that you don’t get a sense of their setting. Look for strong lighting. Hunt around in the frame for visual balance. Take pictures of beautiful, interesting things.

I try to take myself out of the moment and ask if someone would find an image interesting, not knowing any of the context, or knowing only minimal information, like what you would put into a caption.

OL: What kind of shots do you throw away?

Chris: I throw away almost everything I shoot. If a photo is bad, or if it makes the subject appear unattractive, there’s no reason to keep it, even if it’s a picture of someone or something you love.

Flight From the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933-1946
Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan Van Pelt
W.W. Norton, 2009

In 1938, just weeks after the Anschluss that united Germany and Austria, successful and respected Dr. Lothar Furth, who operated one of the most prestigious obstetric clinics in Vienna, wrote to an acquaintance of his in England, asking of if his acquaintance could offer work –- even menial work –- to him and his wife, since he was certain he would soon be losing his job under the rapidly-expanding Nazi regime. The friend in England wasted no time in contacting the German Jewish Aid Committee in an attempt to expedite the Furths’ emigration, only to learn that a mob had dragged the doctor and his wife out of their clinic and forced them to clean the sidewalk with toothbrushes. The following day, the two killed themselves.

The despair of the Furths was shared by thousands of German Jews who realized their initial optimism in the face of Hitler’s rise to power was gravely wrong. The Furths never got a chance to flee that new power, but the doctor’s desperate letter, the heartbreaking certainty that they hoped to flee, brings them squarely into the focus of Flight From the Reich, the masterful and horrifically riveting new book by Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan Van Pelt. As Dwork and Van Pelt point out, that initial optimism wasn’t purely fantasy. “On average,” they write, “governments after 1918 had lasted less than nine months and no one had any reason to think this one would be any different.” Even when the darker reality began to assert itself, those with the means to flee did so in the explicit expectation of return. Berlin Alxeanderplatz author Alfred Doblin speaks for many such:

It would just be a brief trip abroad. You’ll let the storm pass over you, just three or four months, someone will have dealt with the Nazis by then … I left the house with one small suitcase, alone.

The fate of the six million Jews who fell victim to the Nazis is exhaustively documented; the fate of those who fled or were displaced is less so, mainly because it comprised many many thousands of different fates. Drawing a coherent picture on such a vast canvas is a task Dwork and Van Pelt prosecute with enormous energy and commendable spirit. Flight from the Reich may be dark in its subject matter, but it’s a bright shining accomplishment in Holocaust studies. Its authors begin with the clearest possible assertion that Holocaust studies is exactly what they’re doing:

All European Jews who came under the control of Germany and its allies were targeted for death. Some six million were killed. The remaining three million survived camps, endured life in hiding, “passed” as a gentile, fled to safety, or experienced some combination of these. All were victims of the Holocaust. Had Jews not hidden or passed, they too would have been deported. Had they not sought asylum elsewhere, they too would have been caught in the machinery of death.

Fleeing does not write refugees out of the story; it simply takes the story elsewhere. Indeed: it takes it everywhere. The history of refugee Jews during and after the Nazi era is literally, from the Latin centrifugal, to flee the center.

That flight from the center landed refugees in thousands of far-flung and improbable destinations, and Dwork and Van Pelt follow them everywhere. The shame of the niggardly welcome extended by England and the United States is well known; the tales of other destinations will be less familiar to readers. As their civil rights were systematically curtailed and then erased, German Jews grew more and more frantic to find a way out of the trap closing on them … even if that way out led to places none of them had ever thought about before, except perhaps as a name on a map, such as Shanghai:

Panic-stricken German and Austrian Jews continued to buy tickets issued by Nord Deutsche Lloyd, Lloyd Trieste, and Nippon Yusen Kaisya, knowing that upon arrival they would have to fend for themselves in an utterly strange metropolis that promised nothing but the most destitute and temporary refuge from persecution -– a squalid waiting room for better times. Abandoning the idea that learning a trade would help them earn a living and giving up on acquiring the local language, Jews clutched at hope and set sail. By the outbreak of the war, seventeen thousand Jews had arrived in the city, without a future, but safe from the Germans.

Flight from the Reich, almost by definition, has a sister-subject living alongside its main one, because as Dwork and Van Pelt follow the exodus of their subjects, they must also chart the slowly growing and changing awareness of the Holocaust in other countries. This picture is usually not pretty, but our authors don’t flinch from reporting the worst, even though Americans who’ve learned their history from Hollywood movies just might (as when General Patton repeatedly refers to Jews as a “sub-human species”). But no matter: this is a great and powerful book, a fitting bookend for Richard Evans’ recently completed trilogy on the rise and fall of Nazi Germany and a masterpiece in its own right.

–Steve Donoghue

Now is a good time to recommend Margo Jefferson’s nonpareil On Michael Jackson. She does what the past two afternoons of blog posts have been trying, she puts her finger on it:

Think of Michael Jackson’s mind as a funhouse, and look at some of the exhibits on display: P. T. Barnum, maestro of wonders and humbuggery; Walt Disney, who invented the world’s mightiest fantasy technology complex; Peter Pan (”He escaped from being human when he was seven days old”); a haggard Edgar Allan Poe (he was the only character besides Peter Pan that Michael Jackson planned to play in a movie); the romping, ever-combustible Three Stooges; a friendly chimpanzee named Bubbles who has his own wardrobe of clothes; and a python lying coiled between white llamas.

Jefferson recalls watching the pre-teen Jackson thrust and roll on the Motown stage at exactly the point in his life (as in any boy’s life) when he was half man and child, half androgyne. He was also a high-pitched, non-threatening sex symbol for women, many of them white women. Because he was a charming boy, he was an innocent (think “I’ll Be There“). Because he grew up on the Motown stage, surrounded by screaming girls in the front of the house and burlesque acts in the back, he was never innocent.

So he was a beautiful freak, a dangerous innocent, an aggressively masculine drag act. He was wonderful. And, of course, we’re free to remember him that way, now.

For the past few years, fans of his music have felt a little ashamed. I’ve been one of them. I jog to “Billy Jean.” I always play “Bad” on the Jukebox. But it had that rare whiff of the verboten that didn’t make it feel extra fun or extra good. It felt a little awful. I felt a little awful for enjoying it.

Andrew Sullivan wrote that Michael Jackson “died years ago.” It’s a good line but it’s hardly half true. I was shocked to hear the news, like everybody was, and I came home and found some of the dance scenes from The Wiz on You Tube and thought about his trademark breathlessness—his moves were nervous. I thought, like we always do, about phenomenal success, and how “the rich don’t have friends, they only have butlers.” Elvis also had a posse that kept him hopped up, and let him keep acting like an asshole.

But they’re playing “Smooth Criminal” and “Blood on the Dance Floor” today—which I always want them to do and which they never do—and of course both the songs and the videos are really good. (You know what else is good? “We’ve Had Enough” from The Ultimate Collection. Really.) Oh and “P.Y.T.” too.  And “This Place Hotel.” And “Dirty Diana.” Am I missing any?

We can go back over it all now. We can remember him (ironically? with relief?) at his best.

— John Cotter

“After Barack Obama’s victory in the presidential election last November,” Michael Tomasky writes in The New York Review of Books, “the question arose whether the result should be seen as a realignment—a fundamental shift in party dominance that would continue for a good many years.” He credits Obama and his team with holding their political coalition together, but

now we enter a new phase. Passing trillion-dollar legislation on, for example, health care reform, in which, by law, revenues have to equal outlays, is considerably harder than passing a stimulus bill on which no such demands were made (and even passing that legislation, as we saw, wasn’t easy). Big legislation makes walking the tightrope far more difficult, because “in legislation,” as one person told me, “there are winners and losers.” So now opposition will come not only from Republicans, but also from some Democrats. The next six months—especially with regard to health care, climate change, and the disposition of the Guantánamo issue—may go a long way toward determining the President’s fate.

Tomasky’s article is an excellent primer on the difficulties and implications of passing these bills (some of which are winding their way through Congressional committees right now). And what if they make it to the President’s desk?

Passing bills on health care and climate change and nailing down a deal to close Guantánamo would surely make for an impressive rookie year. But, to go back to where we started, would they herald Democratic dominance? No. The reforms, once passed, have to work.

And what then? Even if Obama’s (to the extent that they’re his; any bill ready for his signature will be a compromise) reforms work, will that usher in an age of Democratic Party dominance?

I don’t think so, at least not for any amount of time you could call an “age.” Suppose America adopts a reasonably successful system of universal healthcare. Suppose Obama and the Democrats get the credit for it. Entitlements are the “third rail” of American politics. If the system is popular, Republicans will be forces to adapt, as they were forced to do with Social Security.

If Obama’s reforms work, there probably wouldn’t be any long-term political realignment. But there would be an evolution. Party positions change but party names do not. In America, popular reforms drag Republicans and Democrats along with them. Demographics, on the other hand, are another story. Republicans are growing older and whiter, and that should scare them.

-Greg Waldmann

In his weekly column for Slate, part-time literary critic, part-time muckraker, and part-time dime-a-dozen political pundit Christopher Hitchens shares his two cents about the crisis in Iran, and draws a particular focus on Ayatollah Khamenei’s recent paranoid invocation of the “evil” British government. Hitchens points out that while America-hating is commonplace in Iran, it’s a youthful phenomenon next to the decades of anti-British rhetoric. Hitchens then calls our attention to the great book that lampooned Iranian Anglophobia:

The best-known and best-selling satirical novel in the Persian language is My Uncle Napoleon, by Iraj Pezeshkzad, which describes the ridiculous and eventually hateful existence of a family member who subscribes to the “Brit Plot” theory of Iranian history. The novel was published in 1973 and later made into a fabulously popular Iranian TV series. Both the printed and televised versions were promptly banned by the ayatollahs after 1979 but survive in samizdat form. Since then, one of the leading clerics of the so-called Guardian Council, Ahmad Jannati, has announced in a nationwide broadcast that the bombings in London on July 7, 2005, were the “creation” of the British government itself.

Hitchens goes on to recommend that we all get our own copy of My Uncle Napoleon, to which Open Letters can only agree. Recently, Bryn Haworth reviewed the book with an eye to the pre-election-crisis troubles in Iran, and found much to admire on both artistic and political levels:

The beauty of My Uncle Napoleon is that it is blissfully funny. Though it has the slapstick mayhem of many Egyptian comedies, it is more than pure farce. And although it has debts to European literature – My Uncle is very much like Don Quixote, or Sterne’s Uncle Toby (he even has his own Corporal Trim) - it is not a plagiarizing tribute to the classic comic novel. This is a book that manages to create memorable and believable characters while shamelessly sending them up, loading them with catchphrases and putting them in bizarre situations. Behind all its tomfoolery lie the serious issues of love, sexuality and, most importantly, paranoia on a grand scale.

Go here to read the rest of Haworth’s examination of a book given such abrupt and urgent relevance—and then, by all means, get a copy for yourself!

Heroes & Villains: Inside the Minds of the Greatest Warriors in History
Frank McLynn
Pegasus Books, 2009

British historian and biographer Frank McLynn has written many very good books. His 1066: The Year of the Three Battles is the best book on the oft-chronicled Norman Invasion; his biographies of Carl Jung and Napoleon are among the strongest ever written on either subject; his life of Robert Louis Stevenson is a towering achievement; his dual study of Richard I and King John is history at its thrilling best. His writing combines ironclad research with an accessibility that looks effortless.

That having been said, this recent book of his, Heroes & Villains, is easily the most frustrating book he’s ever written. It may well be the most frustrating book any professional historian has written in the last fifty years. It’s one thing to finish a work like this – it’s a comparative study of six great ‘warriors’: Spartacus, Attila, Richard I, Cortes, Shogun Tokugawa, and Napoleon Bonaparte – and wonder about some of the questions the book raises; it’s quite another to close it and say (out loud, plaintively, to one’s sleeping basset hound) “What the Hell did any of that MEAN?”

The book’s subtitle (for which McLynn may not be explicitly responsible, although the sentiment is echoed plentifully throughout his book) promises a look inside the minds of the greatest warriors in history – and then it fails to deliver, on both the points of that subtitle. Not only are the six men on display here only very arguably the greatest warriors in history (we’ll come back to that), but at no point do we get a good look inside the minds of any of them – even though three of the six left behind windy memoirs, for Pete’s sake.

The heart of the frustration here comes from the fact that McLynn is such a damn fine writer, such a gifted sifter of fact and anecdote, that he could windify on practically any historical subject and still be topographically fascinating even when he’s engaging in what’s referred to in Brooklyn as talking out his ass.

To put it mildly, a strong suspicion of exactly that activity hangs around Heroes & Villains, which steps right away into the deep end of the quagmire from which you keep expecting it to extricate itself. McLynn writes, “A leading scholar of Chinese language and history once told me he could never become interested in the Mongols, as their main contribution to the story of mankind was a mountain of skulls.” How can the reader take that statement other than as McLynn’s implication that his sextet somehow do more than create a mountain of skulls? What “contribution to the story of mankind” did Spartacus make? Or Attila? It’s faintly tenable to say Richard I and Shogun Tokugawa made such a contribution, but in both cases it was an enormously negative one, respectively exacerbating Christian-Moslem antipathy and mindless Japanese militarism. Cortes’ flag, riches, and empire vanished almost before his body was cold, and McLynn must surely be aware of the sheer number of historians to declare Bonaparte an essentially pointless historical anomaly.

But there is no questioning the mountains of skulls. Firm figures for Spartacus and Attila are impossible to find (mainly due to the exaggerations upward by Romans who always had to have the very worst, fiercest adversaries), but at the very least they were responsible for the deaths of their thousands of followers. At Sekigahara, Tokugawa was responsible for probably 50,000 deaths; at the great city of Cholula, Cortes and his allies slaughtered probably 180,000 civilians; and Napoleon eclipses them all – his wars caused a conservatively estimated 4 million deaths (100,000 at the Battle of Borodino alone). Once he reached the Holy Land, Richard lept into the killing with a very personal enthusiasm that McLynn finds entirely charming, as at one of the battles of Jaffa:

Even in a military career full of superlatives, this was the Lionheart’s finest hour. Throughout the day the issue was on a knife-edge, but the king’s energy, acumen, and bravery won the day. At one point he was completely surrounded and seemed certain to be captured but fought so ferociously that the Saracen ranks finally parted and gave him a wide berth; he emerged from the fray covered in arrows. After Jaffa even the Saracens concluded that he was no ordinary man but rather a creature of legend.

The narrative here is so breakneck that it seems almost boring to point out that a) the Saracens certainly thought no such thing, and b) the king wasn’t exactly alone when he was doing all that surrounded fighting, although you’d never know that from our author’s starry-eyed summary. And yet, even in the midst of such jingoism (it’s much stronger with Richard than with any of the others, tellingly), McLynn is endlessly fascinating – readers picking up this book who are new to military history will find it deeply compelling, and even those who know enough about the events McLynn’s narrating to question his conclusions will enjoy his technique, his wonderfully assured voice. “The great warrior,” he tells us,

…must be a master of strategy and tactics, have high military talents, boldness, cunning, self-belief, be lucky, fight in the right circumstances and against an almost equally matched foe. On these criteria Napoleon and Ieyasu would emerge at the top of the heap, while Cortes and Spartacus, because of the second-rate opposition they faced, would rank lower down. Despite his ultimate failure, one would be inclined to rate Attila ahead of them, if only because he had to contend with at least three first-rate figures who ought-fought him: Marcian, Aetius and Geiseric. Richard the Lionheart defeated the best the western and Middle Eastern world could throw against him, but just misses the first rank because of his showmanship and the gallery touch.

And that last-minute dismissal of Richard I (for his “gallery touch”?) brings us back to the question of whether or not this book even knows its own subject. “The greatest warriors in history”? Attila but not Belisarius? Cortes but not Rodrigo Diaz (‘el Cid’)? Richard I but not his mightier father, Henry II? Bonaparte but not Wellington or Nelson, the men who beat him? No Genghis Khan? No Boadicea? No Trajan? No Elizabeth I? No Marlborough? No Patton? No Hitler, for all that? Spartacus? What the Hell did any of that MEAN?

The basset hound is silent.

-Steve Donoghue

BoneMan’s Daughters
By Ted Dekker
Center Street, 2009

If you’re going to inflict such a creaky and ham-handed thing as extended religious allegory on the long-suffering modern world, you’d bloody well better be as good a writer as John Bunyan.

Creepy pseudo-messianic religious fiction author Ted Dekker is no John Bunyan, and his new book, BoneMan’s Daughters

• gods of earth and heaven mp3 download

, is no Pilgrim’s Progress. It barely qualifies as Pilgrim’s Regress. And as if reading a breathless, predictable narrative filled with paper-thin caricatures and megaphoned emphases weren’t bad enough, the experience is constantly given an extra-gummy sheen by carrying a freight of Biblical and quasi-Biblical double meanings. Reading it is like listening to that annoying co-worker who’s constantly making sexual double-entendres, except without the guilty pleasure.

Difficult to know what pleasures BoneMan’s Daughters could impart, even though Dekker’s numberless fans (call them legion?) will no doubt claim it’s a masterpiece. The story concerns intelligence officer Ryan Evans, whose teenaged daughter Bethany falls into the clutches of the serial killer Alvin Finch, called BoneMan, who’s intent on horrifically killing young women until he finds his perfect daughter. BoneMan exercises a certain allure over poor confused Bethany, whose relationship with Evans has been troubled. And all of that might have worked as a simple straight-up thriller (Dekker has some glimmerings of talent in that direction). But in BoneMan’s Daughters it all gets served up so heavily slathered in encoded religious double-speak that every single passage – like this climactic confrontation between hero and villain – feels like some queasily hysterical Sunday morning revivalist melodrama:

“So you admit you’re not really even her father.” [said BoneMan]

“Yes.”

His answer seemed to confuse the man. This was the kind of reason and control that would give them hope, he realized. And although BoneMan knew how to hate with more passion than most men, real love would confuse him.

“I admit, I’m not her father, not really,” Ryan said. “But that’s changing now.”

“Now that you’re in my house.”

“Now that I’m pursuing her love.”

The words seemed to take Alvin Finch off guard. He was a man of exceptional control but now he blinked; he began to sweat.

“She hates you,” BoneMan said.

No. No, she couldn’t possibly hate him. Maybe on a hot afternoon when harsh words about who she was dating were exchanged, but not now when they were both fighting for her life.

Alvin Finch was so devoid of love that he didn’t know how to recognize it. He was indeed the Satan in the mix, bent upon winning the heart of his victim, though no one could possibly love him. His victims might show him a mirror of love to win his kindness, but they would never be able to return real love any more than he could receive it.

BoneMan’s Daughters contains hundreds of passages like this, stretches that make you feel like there’s a second conversation being whispered just underneath the first one. In the audible portion, the motions of an ordinary serial killer novel are being enacted. In the inaudible portion, prophesies and revelations are being canted for the faithful. Readers sane enough to be terrified of eternal truths should consider themselves forewarned.

Get thee behind me, John Bunyan.

–Steve Donoghue