In the late 1960’s, there was a wave of “sky­jack­ings” — where lone gun­men would force air­planes to fly to Cuba. This book was a con­tem­po­rary psychiatrist’s attempt to ana­lyze the moti­va­tions of the Sky­jack­ers, based on inter­views with them in jail. In most cas­es, Cuba sim­ply extra­dited them to Cana­da, which then extra­dited them to the Unit­ed States. Even at the time, it was under­stood by every­one that the sky­jack­ings were not ini­ti­ated by, or encour­aged by the Cas­tro regime, which was actu­ally rather embar­rassed by the phe­nom­e­non. The author rejects the idea that there was any seri­ous polit­i­cal moti­va­tion behind the sky­jack­ings. In most cas­es, the polit­i­cal procla­ma­tions of the per­pe­tra­tors were far too shal­low and sil­ly to be tak­en seri­ously as motives. He goes through the per­sonal his­tory of each sky­jacker and finds that they are remark­ably uni­form. The typ­i­cal sky­jacker was the child of a vio­lent, bul­ly­ing father and a deeply reli­gious moth­er, who sub­se­quently failed mis­er­ably in carv­ing out any kind of suc­cess. They were usu­ally obses­sively reli­gious, and social­ly and psy­cho­log­i­cally extreme­ly con­ser­v­a­tive. Their sex­ual lives, most of the time, were pathet­ic. After some par­tic­u­larly dev­ast­ing fail­ure or betray­al, they quite spon­ta­neously con­cocted a scheme to cre­ate a dra­matic event that would some­how, they felt, resolve their dif­fi­cul­ties, at least in a sym­bolic sense. The idea of the sky­jack­ings seems to have occured to them sim­ply because oth­ers had done it, and it was a big thing in the news. The sim­i­lar­ity to the psy­cho­log­i­cal pro­files of ser­ial killers, dis­cussed in Elliott Leyton’s work, is strik­ing. Ley­ton would have had a more com­mon-sense approach to the case his­to­ries. Hub­bard used his data to con­coct a rather lame the­ory from the pseu­do-sci­ence of psy­chother­apy which was then still very influ­en­tial. But the case his­to­ries speak for them­selves, and it’s inter­est­ing for a read­er in 2006 to be remind­ed that air trav­el was not par­tic­u­larly safe forty years ago.

This is an extreme­ly imag­i­na­tive and well-writ­ten nov­el, pulling togeth­er sev­eral themes that would not nor­mally work well togeth­er. Doc­torow com­bines a real­is­tic rep­re­sen­ta­tion of life in Toronto’s pleas­antly chaot­ic Kens­ing­ton Mar­ket neigh­bour­hood with night­mar­ish fan­tasy ele­ments that have the feel­ing of the grim­mer parts or Norse, Ger­man or Native Cana­dian folk­lore, and throws in a lit­tle cyber­punk, as well. These dis­parate com­po­nents are not set apart in blocks, but flow and blend into each oth­er on a para­graph-by-para­graph, some­times a sen­tence-by-sen­tence basis. I won’t sum­ma­rize the plot: it will just sound arbi­trar­ily grotesque, and will not give you any hint of the human­ity and the effec­tive lan­guage of the book. The book gives me some hope, because I was feel­ing that Sci­ence Fic­tion writ­ing in North Amer­ica was mori­bund, and this is an exam­ple of a return­ing vigour.

14719. (Bri­an Doyle) Easy Avenue
14720. (Mary Mapes) Truth and Duty ― The Press, the Pres­i­dent, and the Priv­iledge of Power
(Wal­ter Mosley) Future­land: Nine Sto­ries of an Immi­nent World:
. . . . 14721. (Wal­ter Mosley) Whis­pers in the Dark [sto­ry]
. . . . 14722. (Wal­ter Mosley) The Great­est [sto­ry]
. . . . 14723. (Wal­ter Mosley) Doc­tor Kismet [sto­ry]
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This is the sem­i­nal work on the anthro­pol­ogy and soci­ol­ogy of ser­ial killing. I read it in con­junc­tion with an NFB doc­u­men­tary film “The Man Who Stud­ies Mur­der”, which puts a face to the voice of the book. Ley­ton is a coun­try boy from small-town Saskatchewan (who looks and sounds dis­tinctly Metis, though I can’t say for sure that he is) and now lives in New­found­land. New­found­land is rur­al, poor by North Amer­i­can stan­dards, and vir­tu­ally every house has a gun. Eco­nom­i­cally, it’s the Cana­dian equiv­a­lent of Arkansas. But it has one of the low­est mur­der rates in the world. In the film, Ley­ton dis­cusses the rea­sons why he con­sid­ers cul­tural choic­es and mores the prin­ci­pal deter­mi­nant of mur­der rates and styles of mur­der, often using his home as a laboratory.

The book on ser­ial and mass killers, deal­ing with the “clas­sic” cas­es, attempts to get beyond the kind of unver­i­fi­able psy­chi­atric spec­u­la­tions that dom­i­nated the issue before Ley­ton came on the scene. As he demon­strates, psy­chi­a­try has been of lit­tle use in under­stand­ing the phe­nom­e­non. He shows the fun­da­men­tal sim­i­lar­i­ties in most ser­ial killings, and does his best to deflate the non­sense gen­er­ated by Thomas Harris’s “Han­ni­bal Lecter” fan­tasies. Ser­ial killers are invari­ably pathet­ic, inef­fec­tive losers, usu­ally pret­ty dumb.…. nev­er the suave super­ge­niuses of fic­tion. Ley­ton rejects bio­log­i­cal and psy­chi­atric expla­na­tions in favour of a cul­tural one, and argues it per­sua­sively. He may not have the last word on this issue, but his opin­ions are more worth read­ing than most. He is also a wit­ty and enter­tain­ing writer ― and from the evi­dence of the film, has the same qual­i­ties in person.

This book caught my eye because it’s heroes are from the coast of Hudson’s Bay, a nos­tal­gic place for me. Two Cree lads from Moose Fac­tory fight in the trench­es of World War I. Boy­den writes beau­ti­fully, is famil­iar with Cree cul­ture, and researched WWI trench war­fare with a historian’s skill. The book com­pares well with the clas­sic Cana­dian nov­el of WWI, Tim­o­thy Findlay’s The Wars. The Great War of 1914–1918 had a tremen­dous impact on Cana­da — far more than on the Unit­ed States. Cana­da was involved dur­ing the entire length of the war, had twice as many sol­diers on the front per-capi­ta as the U.S., and one Cana­dian fam­ily in five suf­fered a casu­alty. The war end­ed the desire of most Cana­di­ans to keep any seri­ous polit­i­cal ties with Britain, and scarred an entire gen­er­a­tion. So it isn’t sur­pris­ing that WWI nov­els con­tinue to be writ­ten, and loom large in Cana­dian lit­er­a­ture. This is a wor­thy exam­ple. Read more »

Edward is a pale­on­tol­o­gist who did impor­tant work on the Per­mian Extinc­tion, a peri­od in Earth’s his­tory that seems to have under­gone a cat­a­stro­phe even more spec­tac­u­lar than the bet­ter known Cre­ta­ceous mete­or impact that turned the dinosaurs to toast. In the mass extinc­tions that took place 248 mil­lion years ago, nine­ty to nine­ty-five per­cent of marine species were elim­i­nated, and on land a com­plex pro­to-mam­malian fau­na was wiped out. Edward’s book con­tains only a sim­pli­fied sum­mary of the sci­ence. It’s pri­mar­ily auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal. He did most of his research in the Great Karoo region of South Africa, and his vis­its there coin­cided with dra­matic peri­ods in South Africa. He describes the total­i­tar­ian atmos­phere dur­ing the late Apartheid era, and then the chaot­ic one of the post-Apartheid era. This, and descrip­tion of the phys­i­cal and emo­tional chal­lenges of doing hard sci­ence in the field are the rea­son to read the book.

[If you want to learn more about the Per­mi­an Extinc­tion Event, a good place to start is the Hoop­er Vir­tual Nat­ural His­tory Muse­um, run by Carl­ton Uni­ver­sity, Ottawa. It’s a user-friend­ly site, geared to the gen­eral pub­lic. A sec­tion devot­ed to “Cre­ation­ism” makes no attempt to pussy­foot with the tide of igno­rance: it begins with a primer on the four­teen most com­mon log­i­cal fal­lac­ies of argu­ment, straight out of Aristotle]

Writ­ten in 1984, when the Cold War was heat­ing up again, this is a nar­ra­tive of an Eng­lish teenager’s sur­vival after a nuclear war. Swindell attempts to con­vey the utter hope­less­ness of the sit­u­a­tion. Steeped in the British class sys­tem, he assumes that the rich and pow­er­ful would do every­thing to pro­tect them­selves. and sim­ply exter­mi­nate any­one incon­ve­nient to them. Per­haps this would have been true — I don’t know British soci­ety well enough to judge. The book gives a rea­son­ably accu­rate por­trayal of the effects of a nuclear war on an ordi­nary region (at least in terms of the sci­en­tific knowl­edge then avail­able). As per­sonal dra­ma, it is very effec­tive. Peo­ple who now imag­ine that the world is a new­ly ter­ri­fy­ing place, mere­ly because a hand­ful of ter­ror­ists can plant bombs in planes, have either for­got­ten, or are inca­pable of imag­in­ing, the kind of anx­i­ety peo­ple lived under dur­ing the peri­ods when the immi­nent incin­er­a­tion of the plan­et was some­thing to wor­ry about.

Mey­er pro­vides a basic primer on the his­tory of Cen­tral Asia and the Cau­ca­sus. It’s a short vol­ume, so it can only suma­rize the com­plex­i­ties. Still, even a well-edu­cat­ed read­er is like­ly to know noth­ing about this large por­tion of the Earth. New­shounds usu­ally refer to the post-Sovi­et Cen­tral Asian republics as “the Stans”. Well, at least a flip­pant nick­name is more atten­tion than these places got before.

Despite its low pro­file in pub­lic dis­course, Cen­tral Asia has got­ten plen­ty of atten­tion from geopoliti­cal schemers and impe­r­ial pow­ers, invari­ably cre­at­ing dis­as­ters. Some­thing about the place gen­er­ates fan­tasies and delu­sions. And no coun­try is more prone to liv­ing in fan­tasy than the Unit­ed States, the lat­est impe­r­ial pow­er to decide it is going to bring enlight­en­ment to the land of the moun­tain war­rior clan and the pop­py. As Mey­er demon­strates, the delu­sional chat­ter com­ing from Wash­ing­ton is iden­ti­cal to that which emanat­ed from Britain and Romanov Rus­sia, and the Sovi­et Union when they began the same dis­as­trous projects, end­ing in defeat for them­selves and end­less mis­ery for the peo­ple of the region. Read more »

14695. (N. A. M. Rodger) The Safe­guard of the Sea ― A Naval His­to­ry of Britain, Vol.1, 660‑1649
14696. (John Dille –ed.) Time Cap­sule 1925, A His­to­ry of the Year Con­densed From the Pages
. . . . . of Time
14697. (Jon George) Faces of Mist and Time
14698. (Ray­mond W. Bak­er) Capitalism’s Achilles Heel: Dirty Mon­ey and How to Renew the 
. . . . . Free-Mar­ket System
14699. (Jared Dia­mond) The Third Chimpanzee
14700. (Mervyn Peake) Gormenghast
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