[Book Reviews] More spies and superheroes
Here's two from my recent trip. At the Spy Museum bookstore, I picked up "Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad". It was a detailed and troubling read through history, which helpfully filled in many of the gaps in my knowledge of late 20th century geopolitics. It's a very detailed work, which contains several never-before-disclosed discussions of Mossad's involvement in several headline-making stories for which they did not want credit. As a lay reader it's nearly impossible to determine the veracity of many of the claims... I think the author has done a wonderful job of trying to address uncertainty, truthiness, and due diligence in reporting there. But whenever you're writing about undercover spies, well, you take the risk of being lied to and many "never before disclosed!" storylines are essentially unverifiable. The major actors all have their own agendas and it is difficult for someone who has not studied that deeply to have an educated guess as to what actually went on. So there's a lot of well-documented highly footnoted history in there, but there's also a lot of room for speculation on the part of the reader.
One of the most interesting things to me about the book was the unintentional social aspect of reading it. I read it over the course of my lunch breaks from work for a week and finished it on the way home. This meant that I read 90% of the book in public, and that attracted a lot of interest. Everyone wanted to have a conversation with me about it. While I'm pretty sure that actual spies don't read books about being a spy in public with a bookmark that says Spy Museum, it didn't stop some folks from asking if that was what I did. [laughing] Lots of people wanted to ask my opinion on Middle Eastern politics. I realized belatedly that perhaps I should not have had lunch at the Middle Eastern restaurant down the block while wearing a Krav Maga t-shirt and reading that book... I was unpopular and it took me a bit to figure out why. Many Jewish people could apparently look at me and tell that I was not Jewish, and asked why I would be interested in reading that. So it was a surprisingly good way to meet people, but I was worried about giving offense without meaning to since it's a subject that inspires strong feelings and has a lot of weight of history behind it.
The transitions between chapters are kind of contrived at times, and the opening 30 pages on Princess Diana's death was a baffling starter to me (it was pretty much the least interesting section of the book). I particularly appreciated the sections about the flouting of international treaties by pretty much everyone's intelligence units, and the diplomatic wrangling that followed getting caught or having an operation blown. I feel like I need a good book on diplomacy and foreign policy now, in order to better contextually understand if there are agreed-upon norms or consequences for acting in bad faith. It was pretty depressing to get a concentrated dose of how often that happens, and the regularity of rendering people for torture in third-party nations. Really, the major takeaway from the book is "you probably do not want to be a spy". Four awful possible-truths out of five.
Balancing the difficulty of that read was the delight of discovering new-to-me author Samit Basu's foray into the world of superheroes with "Turbulence". Every passenger on a flight from London to Delhi falls asleep, has vivid dreams, and when they wake up they have superpowers related to what they dreamed about. The rest of the book is the fallout... superheroes are new to this world, so our protagonists have all the coming-out/secrecy issues as well as the what-now of emergent life changes. I really enjoyed how Basu handled the genre -- some of his heroes have unexpected reactions to their powers (Tia!), and handle them with far more aplomb than I would have imagined likely. But I was impressed by the casually pragmatic, unconflicted superhero. "Turbulence" has too much food for thought for me to call it an airplane book, but given its premise I feel like it might want to qualify anyway. [grin] At the least, I read it on a plane. I failed to fall asleep and dream anything interesting, though... if I got superpowers based on my dreams, I'd probably end up able to resolve the anxieties of your average six year old. Heh. Four wish fulfillments out of five.
This entry was originally posted at http://ivy.dreamwidth.org/363885.html and has
comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock.
One of the most interesting things to me about the book was the unintentional social aspect of reading it. I read it over the course of my lunch breaks from work for a week and finished it on the way home. This meant that I read 90% of the book in public, and that attracted a lot of interest. Everyone wanted to have a conversation with me about it. While I'm pretty sure that actual spies don't read books about being a spy in public with a bookmark that says Spy Museum, it didn't stop some folks from asking if that was what I did. [laughing] Lots of people wanted to ask my opinion on Middle Eastern politics. I realized belatedly that perhaps I should not have had lunch at the Middle Eastern restaurant down the block while wearing a Krav Maga t-shirt and reading that book... I was unpopular and it took me a bit to figure out why. Many Jewish people could apparently look at me and tell that I was not Jewish, and asked why I would be interested in reading that. So it was a surprisingly good way to meet people, but I was worried about giving offense without meaning to since it's a subject that inspires strong feelings and has a lot of weight of history behind it.
The transitions between chapters are kind of contrived at times, and the opening 30 pages on Princess Diana's death was a baffling starter to me (it was pretty much the least interesting section of the book). I particularly appreciated the sections about the flouting of international treaties by pretty much everyone's intelligence units, and the diplomatic wrangling that followed getting caught or having an operation blown. I feel like I need a good book on diplomacy and foreign policy now, in order to better contextually understand if there are agreed-upon norms or consequences for acting in bad faith. It was pretty depressing to get a concentrated dose of how often that happens, and the regularity of rendering people for torture in third-party nations. Really, the major takeaway from the book is "you probably do not want to be a spy". Four awful possible-truths out of five.
Balancing the difficulty of that read was the delight of discovering new-to-me author Samit Basu's foray into the world of superheroes with "Turbulence". Every passenger on a flight from London to Delhi falls asleep, has vivid dreams, and when they wake up they have superpowers related to what they dreamed about. The rest of the book is the fallout... superheroes are new to this world, so our protagonists have all the coming-out/secrecy issues as well as the what-now of emergent life changes. I really enjoyed how Basu handled the genre -- some of his heroes have unexpected reactions to their powers (Tia!), and handle them with far more aplomb than I would have imagined likely. But I was impressed by the casually pragmatic, unconflicted superhero. "Turbulence" has too much food for thought for me to call it an airplane book, but given its premise I feel like it might want to qualify anyway. [grin] At the least, I read it on a plane. I failed to fall asleep and dream anything interesting, though... if I got superpowers based on my dreams, I'd probably end up able to resolve the anxieties of your average six year old. Heh. Four wish fulfillments out of five.
This entry was originally posted at http://ivy.dreamwidth.org/363885.html and has
comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock.