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Clytemnestra weds Agamemnon, catching him on the rebound after being rejected by Helen, Clytemnestra’s sister. They become rulers of Mycenae, and have three daughters, including Iphigenia and Elektra. Agamemnon and the other suitors assuaged their disappointment at Helen’s rejection by pledging to defend her should anyone sully her honor. This sets a trap sprung by Paris, who flees with Helen to Troy. Keeping the pledge, Agamemnon assembles an army and sails off to the Trojan War. During preparation, Agamemnon betrays Clytemnestra and Iphigenia, leaving Clytemnestra prostrate with rage and grief that burns into an implacable urge for vengeance against her husband.

Elektra sees her father off to war and spends the next ten years pining for his return. Her mother tires to get her to understand Agamemnon’s betrayal, but Elektra finds her father’s conduct honorable and grows impatient with her mother’s insistence. Elektra also learns of the curse on Agamemnon’s family, and so on her. When Clytemnestra takes a lover connected with the curse, Elektra sets her course against her mother. Her father returns in victory, her mother has her vengeance and Elektra gets a turn at the family curse.

Cassandra, a princess of Troy, is fascinated by her mother’s spells of foresight. Ignoring her mother’s warnings, she becomes an Apollonian priest in hopes of receiving foresight too. Apollo obliges, but she rebuffs him when he tries to claim what he considers his due. Enraged, he curses her so no one will believe her prophecies. Her inability to convince anyone of the impending doom for the Trojans and for Troy slowly drives her mad.

Elektra is a story of the Trojan War as experienced by Clytemnestra, Elektra and Cassandra. The three stories are interwoven, chapter by chapter, with Clytemnestra carrying the majority of the story until Elektra takes over towards the end of the book. Clytemnestra has the motive, means and method to drive the story forward. Elektra is less successful, mostly being sulky and bratty until her mother is done, leaving her to drive the story. Even then she is sunk in her monomania to a degree that exceeds her mother’s. Cassandra is a puzzle. She is tangential to the Trojan War. She is unable to prevent it, or change it in any significant way, and ends up claimed by Agamemnon as a spoil of war. Her story is interesting allegorically — people who are disbelieved are still called Cassandras, usually by those who forget that the other half of Cassandra’s curse was to always tell the truth — but the connection between her and the Mycenian women is at best coincident.

For two of the three women, the Trojan War is at a remove; they hear of it only through messengers and the occasional returning combatant. For Cassandra the war is immediate, but as an observer until the end when she becomes a prisoner. This lets Elektra emphasize the women’s conflicts, both internally and externally: Clytemnestra and Elektra with each other, and Cassandra with everyone. Saint’s writing handles these currents well, delineating and distinguishing the three women, and exposing their inner drives. Readers familiar with the Trojan War may feel a tinge of guilt when Clytemnestra rages against those in on Agamemnon’s betrayal of her and Iphigenia. Saint makes a nasty little reversal against Cassandra sting: her father perceives she will act against the Greeks’ horse, and convinces some guards to stand alert to the possibility. Cassandra is thwarted when she tries to burn the horse; her father's successful prophecy places a final check on her attempt to react to her unheeded prophecies, sealing Troy’s fate.

When Marek was born, his mother died, or so he was told. He lives with his father, a shepherd, in Lapvona, the fiefdom of a corrupt, feckless and incompetent lord. Marek is the line that runs through Lapvona. He was born with skeletal deformities that earn him the contempt of Lapvona villagers, including his father. However, he makes friends with the lord’s son, although the prince treats him more as a hunting dog than as a friend. The relation between Marek and the prince is the feeble engine driving whatever plot there is in Lapvona. Overall, Lapvona reads like a truly terrible year, from spring to spring, at a tyrannically-run Ren Faire: murderous bandit raids, drought and starvation, relentless poverty and grinding work. Add to that humanity’s propensity to lie, and the almost impossibility of meaningfully connecting with another person, and you get a Boschian horror-show from which there is no escape but death, and no dignity even in death.

It’s hard to say what kind of story Lapvona is telling. Despite the corrupt, feckless and incompetent lord, it’s not a political allegory because there’s no politics. Although the fantastical happens, it’s not a fantasy because there’s no quest or rescue. It might be a fairy tale — a pauper does become a prince — but there’s no moral, and it’s hard to make up an edifying one that’s even tenuously connected to the story. It might be journalism, but the narration is omniscient and shifting, and the fantastic moves it into some other world despite the medieval-like, middle-European-like setting. It might be satire — the priest and the lord examine a pregnant nun and conclude she’s a virgin, even though they have no idea what they’re looking at, or what they’re looking for — but repeatedly hammering the same few nails becomes numbing. The story’s God-soaked, but not in any way that can be considered sacred. It’s more accurate to consider it an anti-God story, but the arguments against are a thin thread of commonplace hypocrisies. Probably the best way to take Lapvona is as it’s offered: a carnival ride of gross-outs and horrors.

So, are there trigger warnings? Oh yeah, there are trigger warnings out the ass: rape, incest, body horror, child abuse of various kinds, animal cruelty, blasphemy, cannibalism and its aftereffects, some kind of crypto-Aryanism, shit play of various kinds (you thought that “out the ass” was gratuitous, didn’t you?). Fortunately, Moshfegh’s prose style works well with this problematic litany. The flat and characterless descriptions efficiently move the reader from one gross-out or horror to the next, and give no reason to tarry; on the other hand, they also provide no place for the reader to hide. Occasionally Moshfegh waxes lyrical, usually about nature, and only for a sentence or two, otherwise it’s this atrocity, then this one, then this one.

Somebody cracks wise on the Internet (I know, I know, but stay with it, it’s fiction after all), and it goes viral. Interviews, guest lectures, panel discussions and world travel ensue until... Until something terrible happens, and everything collapses to the point of disruption. In Ohio, so you know it’s serious. Then, maybe, we see what matters in this big ol’ world of ours.

That’s mostly the story; as you read along, that’s what you’re reading. The story’s written in two parts: the happy part and the sad part. The happy part is happy, jouncing along with one-liners, wry observations and winsome meditations, a bit like a Steven Wright routine, except more Internetty. The sad part is sad, and, unlike the happy part, is capable of being spoiled, which cramps the review a little. It’s probably safe to point out if you’re familiar with Oscar Wilde’s (alleged!) comment about little Nell, then you’re equipped to handle the sad part, except you probably won’t laugh, but more like eye-roll, because Internet.

No One Is Talking About This is written like it’s from the Internet, which it calls the Portal. The effect is possibly supposed to be Twitter-like, but it reads more like it’s from an earlier era: Flutterby, Wonkette or — St. Berners-Lee protect us — InstaPundit. That works fine for the happy part (assuming you overlook the meme-slippage, which, if you couldn’t, they wouldn’t be memes), but it cuts into whatever it is the sad part is supposed to be doing; the pitch turns somber, but the register remains the same. Unless that’s the point: even the Portal-poisoned can recover their humanity, or maybe the hive-mind strength of the Portal can help you through tough times, something like that.

A Tunisian reporter is machine-gunned at sea, and a retired Sicilian is knifed in an elevator. Inspector Montalbano avoids the first case and investigates the second, but eventually finds the threads from his case weave through the other case.

Camilleri was apparently still finding his way around his characters in the story, the third in the series. The plot is good, complex and integrated yet clear, but overlaid with fussy, scene-setting business. Montalbano is particularly assholish: hair trigger, jealous and moralistic. His northern-Italian girlfriend Livia has a role in the story, and is also burdened with outlining the contours of her and Montalbano’s relationship; Montalbano chips in by writing her a letter explaining how he sees things. And, for some reason, Montalbano has a dying father to contend with. Camilleri is wandering around a lot in the telling. This story also signals the commissioner’s retirement, which is doubly unfortunate. The relation between Montalbano and the commissioner was a warm and humane part of the first three stories, a respite from frenetic aggression otherwise in play. In subsequent stories Montalbano’s relation with the new commissioner is buffoonish and ridiculous. On the positive side, Catarella is still a background character, his shtick not yet developed and hardened into the annoyance it will become in later stories.

He’s acutely aware of the confusion surrounding one of MoviePass 2.0’s biggest innovations: a new feature called PreShow that will play ads on users’ phones in exchange for credits toward the purchase of movie tickets. PreShow’s facial-recognition technology tracks people’s eyeballs to ensure subscribers are really watching — as opposed to putting their phones on the sofa and walking away

MoviePass 2.0 Wants (to Sell) Your Attention by Chris Lee in Vulture, 2022 Mar 11

Delaney Wells got screen-addicted in her early teens, but recovered. Her parents’ health-food store was driven out of business by a national chain acquired by the jungle, the world’s biggest on-line department store. Delaney becomes a foe of the source of these problems: the Every, a merger of the jungle and the Cirlce, the world’s largest social-media/indexing service. She wants freedom from the Every, and schemes for a decade to join the Every and destroy it from the inside. With the help of her friend and co-conspirator Wes, she lands a job; Wes later follows her coattails to an Every job too. Once inside, Delaney begins her orientation by rotating through several Every departments, all the while looking for leavers to wrench and gears to spike.

First and foremost The Every is satire. There’s lots of low-hanging fruit, and Eggers makes sure he puts an arrow through every one, sometimes to good effect, and sometimes more like St. Sebastian. The Every’s using eye-tracking software, spandex and social-media canceling to vanquish a political antagonist was clever and funny. New employees have to arrange a field trip, and Delaney organizes a trip to watch sea lions, which comes together with all the usual difficulties, falls apart spectacularly during the trip, and has a long, drawn-out postmortem. This too is funny, but the humor runs a little too close to “wow, look at all these weirdos and dimwits.”

The Every also wants to be novel of ideas, with concepts like freedom, autonomy, and privacy rubbing up against concepts like security, safety, and transparency. In this The Every is less successful. Ideas clash several times throughout the book, but it usually goes like this: Surveillance capitalism good: you won’t forget to take your pills. Surveillance capitalism bad: freedom.

Early in the book it becomes clear Wes is going to drink the Kool-Aid, and many of these arguments are between him and Delaney. Occasionally Delaney engages a co-worker, but because she’s undercover, those arguments are even more tepid and over reliant on irony. Delaney has a favored, Shoshana-Zuboff-like professor who sends an occasional (snail-mail) letter, but those grow more despairing.

The third role The Every tries to play is as a dystopian warning, but for that to be compelling it has to wrestle with the satire and win, which it doesn’t (a truck bomber wears a Tim Berners-Lee mask to foil surveillance cameras). Delaney’s attempts to spark revolution-fomenting dystopias show diminishing returns; it’s hard to ramp up much further after introducing a lie detector into a friend app. And the ending, though foreshadowed, is completely unearned. The intention was probably to produce a “gosh, how terrible and ruthless and ominous” cliff-hanger for a likely third book in the series, but instead produces (at least in me) a feeling of “huh, Eggers went there” (readers of The Parade are rolling their eyes and thinking, of course he went there).

The Every follows up The Circle, which I haven’t read. I don’t know if it’s necessary to read The Circle before The Every, but I don’t think so. The Every’s satire is so broad there isn’t anyplace to hide subtle call-backs to the earlier story (the reference to the movie was not subtle); the story is so thin it needs no other explanations than Delaney vs. the machine; and the main human character in The Circle hardly appears in The Every.

Gilda, the main character in this story of debilitating obsessions, is a woman in her late 20s unable to get it together enough to establish a reasonable life. She checks out a therapy group at a Catholic church, is mistaken for a job applicant and is offered an administrative assistant position recently opened by the previous assistant’s death. Despite being lesbian and an atheist, she accepts. Apart from having a job, this seems like a disastrous decision, but it becomes clear further into the book, if it wasn’t already, that there’s not much that can slow her descent into despair and dissolution.

Putting someone like Gilda at the heart of a story is tricky because she’s incapable of generating plot. The plot shreds that exist are the result of other people or things bumping against her, and watching what happens: she searches for a missing cat, she’s fixed up with an obnoxious male life coach, and, in the most serious shred, questions come up about the previous assistant’s death. Left by herself, she obsesses about death — hers and particularly her pet rabbit’s when she was ten — about her having a skeleton under her skin and about being an infinitely small object in an infinitely large universe. Other people paralyze her with the fear of causing sadness or disappointment. She got an inappropriate job because she didn’t want to embarrass a priest, it’s why she goes out with an obnoxious male life coach and why she continues an e-mail correspondence with a friend of the former assistant who doesn’t know she’s dead.

This sounds grim, and from one point of view it probably is, but Austin’s straightforward, sharp writing uses basic shapes and primary colors to present delicate matters. The story is schematic — How tall is Gilda? What color is her hair? — which moves it along at a good clip, unobstructed by sentimentality or pathos. It isn’t black comedy, but it has its moments. Like a good prole, Gilda steals stuff from work, but in her case it’s the blood and body of Christ, which she discovers when she goes on-line to leave a negative review at the web site of the manufacturer of the bland and insubstantial crackers she’s been eating. And, of course, the ol’ favorite: at confession she admits to eating pork. In the other direction, there’s her horrible family, the shameful way she treats her girlfriend, and her habitual lying. And her mental health. Austin’s firm, sure grip turns all of this into a good, if not necessarily edifying, ride.

A British intelligence agent gets shaken up while on assignment. Soon after the agent retires to a coastal resort town, but it provides no relief, and the agent's restlessness attracts the attention, and later the concern, of former intelligence colleagues.

The story is straightforward spy vs spy, but it has an interesting structure. The two peripheral characters — the daughter and the book-seller — are made central and the two central characters — the rogue-spy mouse and the internal-affairs cat — work in the periphery. It takes about half the book before it dawns (at least it did for me) that the internal-affairs agent is something more than a device for advancing the plot by going around and interviewing people to reveal backstory.

The book reads like a second draft in need of a third, and possibly a fourth. This is not only because the jacket copy says the book’s posthumous, but because of the story. The book-seller is cryptic: a successful financial shark gives it up in the prime of life and takes over a book store in a resort town. A common fantasy, but perhaps not among financial sharks, successful or otherwise. He’s in a resort town and wants to run a high-end bookstore that makes money moving Tom Clancy and Mary Higgins Clark (or whoever the British equivalents are) to the summer crowd. I don’t think you get to be a successful financial shark by misreading the market that badly. Plus, the high-end book-seller has never heard of Chomsky or Sebald or his book The Rings of Saturn. All of this looks like masterful story-telling misdirection, but the more you read into the book the more you realize it’s not: this is the way the book-seller is.

The killer, however, is the ending. Positively, it’s a satisfying ending, depending on your politics; negatively, it relies on a great gaping plot hole. I read the ending three times to make sure I wasn’t missing anything or being excessively obtuse, but no: the ending turns on a ridiculous twist. I worked up a fool-me-once explanation from a prior event in the story, but it requires turning the intelligence service into a Monty Python skit. On the other hand, Le Carré’s son writes in an afterword that he found the manuscript “fearsomely good,” and made only a few minor changes before publication, so maybe there’s something I’m not seeing, or seeing something that isn’t there.

Jorge Luis Borges’ short story On Exactitude in Science points out the perfect map has a 1:1 relation to the territory mapped: 1 map inch to 1 territorial inch. It’s easy to imagine even more perfect maps at greater scale; someone interested in an aspen forest’s root system or the neocortex’s neural arrangement might want maps at 2, 5 or 10 map inches to the territorial inch. In our modern world of bits, such maps are easy to produce (when ignoring the cost of gathering, vetting, and transmitting enough detail to keep the maps accurate). In the old-fashioned world of atoms, however, perfection is impractical, and maps end up scaling 1 map inch to 10s or 100s of thousands of territorial inches. Such radical compression brings abstraction into cartography: selecting features of the territory — for example, those that from a distance look like flies — to be omitted from the map. And abstraction doesn’t stop with feature selection. On a perfect map each feature looks exactly like it does in the territory (when ignoring map medium), but under abstraction representational details have to be omitted.

These two forms of cartographic abstraction — feature selection and feature representation — are the subject of How to Lie With Maps, emphasizing the mischief that can arise when abstraction is incorrectly applied or incorrectly interpreted. The first third of the book deals with feature representations — the forms, shapes and colors used to represent features on a map — and the problem of projecting a large spherical terrain onto a small planer map. The middle third deals with feature selection, both in the general case and for specific map types, such as topographical maps or soil-type maps. The final third deals with the various ways abstraction can be tilted this way and that to emphasize features to be promoted or obscure features that are embarrassing. Although the book calls out lots of lying, it also covers the less malignant distortions resulting from the trade-offs arising from abstraction, as well as from the mistakes that must occur when humans engage in an activity as exacting and as detailed as cartography.

The most serious criticism to lay against this book is that it’s ugly. I think most people would agree that most maps are beautiful, but you’d be hard-pressed to be convinced of that by flipping through this book. The drawings, in addition to being poorly designed, are poorly executed on software that doesn’t seem much more capable than Mac or MS Paint. The map excerpts can be cut a little more slack because they’re illustrating cartographic malpractice, but even then you’d expect some beauty because that’s what greases the eyeballs, making it easier for them to slide off the under-emphasized and onto the over-emphasized. Maybe it’s unreasonable to expect quality at the level of Edward Tufte’s books, but it’s completely reasonable to expect something better than How to Lie with Maps delivers.

Monmonier is writing for map users, to alert and inform them about the distortions that can arise from cartographic abstraction. But it’s easy to see he also has his eye on what he calls lay cartographers, people who can generate maps using software running on their personal computers. The more he writes into the book, the more his attention turns to lay cartographers, warning them about questionable features of desktop cartographic software and urging them to iterate over map design and construction. All of this is interesting, but it tends to split the focus between map users and map makers, which is less helpful to map users, particularly towards the end of the book.

Despite the scary word “romance” in the title I decided to read this because I thought it might help me understand what people mean when they say they’re a Communist. Turns out my initial instincts were correct. Gornick talks entirely to people who are former Communists, although some claim they’re still communists. This is not necessarily bad — most of the story-tellers are recalling decades of Party experience — but it gives the book a slant the reader has to be aware of and adjust for.

Because Gornick was one of them, the talk wafts through an atmosphere of shared, tacit background. “Socialist,” “Marxist,” “Communist” and “communist” float around seemingly context free. What’s the difference between a communist and a Communist? A Marxist and a Communist (or a communist)? A socialist and any of the others? Is there any difference? The reader can, at best, speculate almost completely unguided by anything Gornick writes.

Contrary to what the previous point suggests, there is analysis, but it’s almost entirely emotional and therapeutic. Gornick consistently asked her story-tellers how they felt about joining the Party and leaving the Party. Occasionally they relate tales of anger and injustice, but predominantly they’re looking to assuage feelings of emptiness or anomie. And that’s fine, it’s great comrades are able to find a home or complete themselves or whatever in the Party, but Gornick leaves the reader to wonder by themselves how all this relates to the upcoming, world-wide proletarian revolution.

This is not to say that Gornick doesn’t reveal anything about Communism. Meetings and bureaucracy are two aspects that come across with clarity in the stories told. Another aspect is sexism, both at the Party level and individually. Some ex-comrades haul out the ol’ argument from meritocracy: women that do well are recognized and rewarded by the Party. That may be true, but the reader easily imagines that one of the things “doing well” entails is working through the habitual and unrelenting sexism of their male comrades.

That such sexism existed is also clear from Gornick’s reporting; what’s interesting is she doesn’t interrogate it — she occasionally speculates on it, but doesn’t investigate it. It’s interesting because after she left the Party, she found her way into second-wave feminism, and wrote this book under that involvement. A partial explanation may come from a story she tells to end the book. She attended a feminist conference, and became increasingly upset as speaker after speaker presented a litany of crude, anti-male dogma. Finally she expresses her dissatisfaction over the approach taken and offers the behavior of comrades in the Party as an alternative that is more humane, constructive, and effective. It seems Gornick still carries the torch for Communism, and is more alert for the sins against than the sinning.

In 1975 officials of the state of Baja California in Mexico expressed interest in architect Christopher Alexander’s work. Alexander parlayed their interest into an agreement to support a new housing development in Mexicali, thirty houses built according to Alexander’s principles of architectural design and construction. The development was organized into six clusters of five houses each, and this book — the forth volume in the series on Alexander’s work — is a detailed description of the design, implementation and management of the first cluster. In addition, at the front Alexander describes his view of mid-1980s housing development and how his principles improve on them, and at the back extrapolates the principles to examine fit for other demographic, cultural, and environmental conditions.

Alexander’s approach has those affected by an outcome involved in producing the outcome. The five families chosen for the first cluster collectively laid out their plots, then each family designed their house. Once designed, each family helped build their house. The designs were guided by a language of 21 patterns. The book is a mixture of process and outcome, and the interplay between them as matters progressed. The material is covered in detail: how the blocks were made, how the houses were built. The design is also covered in detail, but the extent to which the pattern language was a driver is unclear. The book interprets the resulting designs in terms of the pattern language, but the how much the owner/designers embraced the pattern language and used it to guide the design is left mostly implicit (one telling exception is the story of the porches, in which Alexander runs a little too close to Howard Roark). The more interesting, and potentially more troublesome, interpersonal aspects are mentioned in passing and around the edges. The initial analysis is a rehash of the first volume in a contemporary context, and the extrapolations are straightforward back-of-the-envelope calculations that are more suggestive than convincing. Overall a thought-provoking book, particularly with respect to extrapolations, and perhaps an inspirational one, at least with respect to the five houses built.

Content warning: I am not a philosopher.

The logical positivists formed during the early 20th century with the objective of purifying philosophy by purging it of anything not supported by evidence. Ayer, an English philosopher in his early 20s, joined the cause in the early ’30s; by the mid ’30s this book appeared. Ayer’s advance to logical positivism was to weaken evidentiary standards to accept statements as meaningful if they allowed for the possibility of having evidence. A logical positivist says the statement “There are no swimming pools on Jupiter” is meaningless because it is accompanied by no evidence. Ayer assigns the statement meaning because it’s possible, albeit not necessarily practical, to imagine how such evidence could exist. Armed with this and a few other refinements (the non-empirical a priori, probable truth, linguistic equivalences), Ayer goes on to excise swaths of philosophy — metaphysics, aesthetics, ethical inquiry, theological reasoning — and settle long-running debates: rationalism vs empiricism, realism vs idealism, monism vs pluralism, the vexing yet delicate question of the self and others. Later editions have an Introduction, which is better read as an afterword due to forward references, that addresses the critics and makes a few clarifications.

The joke is logical positivism failed (to the extent that a philosophical discipline can be said to fail, as shown by the recent panpsychism revival), and this book lives on as its monument. It’s a pathological book, symptomatic of a young firebrand filled with piss and vinegar for the cause. The writing is clear in its words, but the words are often chained together into sentences and paragraphs of daunting length and structural complexity. The absence of metaphysical underbrush, except for target practice, makes reading relatively simpler, or at least more straightforward (and the metaphysical is still around, but now more like the water through which the little fishies swim). Ayer’s claims are plainly stated and boldly argued; the subtlety comes when figuring out why he isn’t obviously wrong, or why obviously correct matters have any value.

The first volume in this series describes a timeless way of building realizing the quality with no name by organizing patterns of local habit within a languages of local custom. The second volume describes patterns and languages for designing and constructing towns of predominantly residential buildings. This third volume applies these techniques to a single large project: revising the University of Oregon’s campus master plan.

The case study deals largely with the hows and whys of project organization and management. Oddly, these matters are handled as lists of procedures and rules, not as patterns and languages. It may be that project management is antithetical to the quality with no name, or maybe applying the timeless way to the timeless way would make things too recursive and meta. There are some examples of designs developed by patterns and languages, but the emphasis on higher-level matters seems to make them less lively than the examples given in The Timeless Way. There is also no evaluation; even a casual student of architecture knows it’s easy to build something that photographs well, but is much harder to build something for which people express long-term satisfaction. Alexander's approach is far enough outside mainstream architectural practice that it’s important to see how it fares when run up against what is possibly a worst-case circumstances for the timeless way: a public-works project run by a state bureaucracy.

The Malones — dad, mom, son — are very Irish and very Catholic. Dad works for American Airlines, which transferred the family to Dallas in response to airline deregulation (the story takes place from late 1987 to mid 1988). Dad also has multiple sclerosis and is on his way to becoming an alcoholic. Then he gets laid off. As a young woman mom answered the call, but was driven from the church by priestly abuse. She has a degree in social work, but ends up as an under-appreciated housewife. She gets pried out of her tight orbit when selected for jury duty on an attempted murder trial. The son is fifteen, is an honors student at an all-male Catholic school, is on the swim team, is a virgin, and so on, and so forth.

The story is a mash-up. Each of the main characters has a story, and the family together is a fourth story. The son’s and the family’s stories are banal: the son wants a girlfriend, and to ace honors English; will the family survive dad being a drunk, mom being a shrew, and son being tormented? Dad’s story has slightly more going on, at least potentially, in the interaction of his three problems, but the focus on alcoholism moves the story along well-worn ruts. The story picks up at the end as the deus ex machina drop in, but the book’s almost over. Mom’s story is genuinely interesting, simultaneously resolving her injuries from within her faith and applying her faith in circumstances unreceptive to it. But the wellsprings of her faith are never deeply interrogated, and seem to lean towards inculcated habit buttressed by maudlin sentimentality (she has two bed-side vigils for women in comas).

Like most mash-ups, this one isn’t all that good. The seams between the parts are obvious, and the whole doesn’t hang together to provide an unexpected surprise like well-crafted mash-ups do. Part of the problem is the loose threads flying around, and the untidy ending in which almost nothing is resolved. But frowzy stories aren’t inherently bad; the main problem is in the telling. There isn’t enough sinew to keep the individual stories yoked together and working towards a common end. And the cliché bank is horrendously overdrawn. Starting with alcoholic Irish Catholics creates an immediately debt, one not retired by throwing in an eccentric (to the verge of sociopathy), driven honors English teacher. There’s plenty more to whine about — characterization, vocabulary, writing style, plot — but this review has already gone on too long.

Three brothers — a mechanic, a healer, and a warrior — turn divine, and each forms a cult. Then the mechanic kills the warrior, and the warrior and healer cults combine to kill the mechanic and subjugate most of his followers except for a small, break-away sect of assassins called the Betrayers. Or, at least, that’s how I imagine they tell it to the children in Sunday school. The story begins with Eva Forge, the warrior cult’s last Paladin, accompanying the cult’s elder on a trip the healer’s cult to requisition a mechanic for unspecified purposes. On their return trip they are attacked by persons and things unknown, except for the Betrayers, and the elder and the mechanic disappear, which sets Eva off on a rambunctious scramble to rescue them. It also marks the beginning of Eva’s gradual enlightenment, in which she learns not only the secrets and truths, but also the lies. Eva recovers the mechanic, and together they dive into the heart of it.

The story is a combination of steampunk, hack ’n’ slash, and magic. One of the more interesting parts is Eva’s development from an EVA SMASH character to a relatively more thoughtful and rational one. The tale spinning does the job; the story starts off mysterious and tangled; by mid-book the threads have been picked apart and laid out semi-neatly; the rest of the book weaves some of them into something resembling a satisfactory ending. The other threads are left for what feels like a set-up for the next book in the series, but as far as I can tell this is a one-off — which means the ending could also be considered sloppy and unsatisfactory. The story has some other amusements/annoyances. Cult members get power by “invoking” their ancestors. Eva starts a battle with an ivokation for strength, then swings her sword around for a while, then stop and invoke a stronger shield, then continue the battle until the next invokation — not the kind of pacing you want in an action scene. Towards the end Eva gets run through by a sword from behind, yet she doesn’t die, and, in fact, kills the Betrayer who runs her through and guts the Betrayer she was originally fighting. There’s a good, spoiler-filled reason why she doesn’t die, but even so that kind of thing tends to run roughly over a reader’s charity, or at least it did this reader’s charity.

Four millennia of Chinese history, running mainly along three tracks. The first and primary track follows the ruling class: what they wanted to do, what they ended up doing, and why. The second track is the revolutionary peasant class, people who stirred rebellion and eventually declared themselves the new ruling class. The third track is history from below, of the peasants and lowest officials as represented by letters, genealogies and other ephemera. The thread along all tracks is the Confucian mandate of All Under Heaven, which held until the fall of empire in the early 20th century. The analysis is consistent but not deep; Wood covers a lot over a long time for a general audience. This may render history suspiciously homogeneous, but it also helps align the reader with Wood for the long haul.

The bibliography is full, and the end-notes provide pointers to entries of interest. The maps are helpful, but there are no timelines, nor is there a pronunciation guide. The writing reflects the book's heritage as a video series for the BBC and PBS. As Wood puts it (p. 5), “But it still has a thrilling story to tell, one of fabulous creativity, intense drama and deep humanity, and I hope some of that filmic verve comes over in these pages.” And it does, mostly in the form of aggressively deployed adjectives and adverbs as the quotation suggests. Wood keeps things moving quickly and smoothly; if a topic begins to flag, within a few pages something else will come along to revive interest.