Don't Shoot! We're Republicans!

Memoirs of the FBI Agent Who Did Things His Way
Jack Owens

And now the end is near
And so I face the final curtain
My friend I'll say it clear
I'll state my case of which I'm certain
I've lived a life that's full
I traveled each and every highway
And more, much more than this
I did it my way
(Jacques Revaux, Paul Anka, Gilles Thibaut and Claude Francois)

Which of course he didn't or he would have quickly been out of a job. Don't Shoot! We're Republicans! is a memoir of his career in the FBI by an agent who retired after 30 years of service. He made some arrests without calling for backup and once used an old yellow Volkswagen and a pair of jeans to get close enough to a fugitive to grab him. He did need a haircut in the '70s, but then who didn't? Jack Owens writes with self depreciating humor and expresses some strong opinions. He is especially opinionated about the relative merits of the several FBI directors that he worked under. J. Edgar Hoover topping the list. Owens joined the FBI in 1969, while Hoover was still alive. Hoover had headed the FBI since the late 1920s and was famous for the demands he put on his agents; white shirts, blue suits, wing tip shoes and no coffee in the office. He was also famous for blackmailing members of Congress and dressing up in women's clothes, but Owens doesn't believe any of that. He liked directors that had been field agents and not those that were appointed despite a lack of law enforcement experience. Who would have guessed?

Owens stories of chasing down fugitives, cosying up to Soviet spies and subduing rioting federal prisoners with the SWAT team are well told and interesting. He gives the impression that every day is an adventure, glossing over the long hours of report writing and unproductive cold call interviews. He does mention the reports in passing and a few stake outs in his BuCar (Bureau car). Did I mention there is a lot of FBI jargon in the book?

I discovered through Google search that Jack Owens was briefly on the 1993 season of the CBS "reality" show Big Brother. The news of his being voted out of the house still reverberates through the reality show bulletin boards. Perhaps Owens was more of a loose cannon than thought.

The title of the book comes from a story of a road block, where a group of blue haired old ladies is rousted out their car at gunpoint. They had been driving right behind the suspect and were at first thought to be accomplices. I don't think Owens would have shot them, even if they had been Democrats.

Charm City

Laura Lippman

This is the second book in Lippman's Tess Monaghan series. It was originally published in a mass market paperback. My eyes don't do well with mass market paperbacks anymore, so I'm happy to see that Lippman's early efforts are swimming against the tide and coming out in hardcover, years after their mass market releases. I have become a big fan of charm city's own murder mystery writer.

Writing a review of a mystery novel without spoiling the plot is always difficult. I will attempt to be very vague on the details and leave you with no idea what is going on. Charm City features the first appearance of Esskay, the hungry greyhound. The dog's sudden appearance in Tess' life begins one thread in the story, a thread that involves greyhound racing, oddly enough, since there is no dog racing in Baltimore. The other thread involves the famous Beacon Light, the fictional newspaper, which Lippman points out in a disclaimer bears no resemblance to the Baltimore Sun, where she still worked in 1997, when the book was first published.

Crow, the younger hipper, musician boyfriend is already present. I am going to need to track down Tess story #1, Baltimore Blues to see where he actually comes from. There is a bit of difficulty between Tess and Crow which is unresolved at the end of the book, a great teaser for book #3, Butcher's Hill. From reading later Tess stories I know that Tess and Crow resolve their differences. A sign of a good mystery series is that the reader gets sucked in and starts to care about the lives and relationships of the stock characters. Lippman's Tess Monaghan books qualify on this count, big time, Hon.

Lippman's books meet the other two criteria, which I just made up, for a better than average mystery series. Local color: Lippman uses Baltimore and the rest of Maryland in a totally authentic, charming and attractive way. She makes gentle fun of the way Bawlmurruns speak. Real locations, real local food and real sounding local situations are all through the book(s). Most importantly, for mysteries, as opposed to mere crime novels, you won't figure out who did it until the very end. I'm not even going to tell you what they did, but of course, people are killed.

Supreme Courtship

Christopher Buckley

Christopher Buckley turns out novels even faster than William F. did. In fact, since I read what I thought was his latest, Little Green Men, he has published five more. Perhaps I wasn't paying as much attention as I should have.

Generally Buckley's books revolve around the sordid side of life in Washington, DC. Usually they are funny. Mostly they hang together pretty well. This book, published in 2008, revolves around an unpopular President, (not that one) an ambitious Senator and a TV judge, appointed to the Supreme Court.

The TV judge is a wise cracking, colorful lady from Texas. She is highly entertaining until the President's handlers get a hold of her and manage to get her through the confirmation hearings. As a confirmation candidate and a Supreme Court justice she becomes a boor, not to mention a poor judge. I was hoping to hear her speak up and use some of those borrowed Ratherisms in the Senate and during oral arguments. No, she is as polite and as quiet as a church mouse. The plot takes a bunch of twists and turns, there is (shocking!) sex, alcohol consumption and a bit of intrigue. The Senator gets his own TV show. The President wins reelection, mostly because he tells the country that he doesn't want it. Naturally the election goes all the way to the Supreme Court and our TV judge must cast the deciding vote. Everything comes out right in the end.

Buckley's use of language is superb. He fills the book with clever plays on words. Don't worry, ecxept for some Latin, thrown in (with bogus translations) for legal color, he does not go in for his dad's polysyllables.

I was a bit disappointed. I liked the idea of a Judge Judy stirring things up among the Supremes. Still, although no Thank You For Smoking, it was an entertaining quick read. Give it about a 73.

The War Within

A Secret White House History 2006-2008
Bob Woodward

This is the forth book about the Bush White House by the Washington Post's most famous reporter. I think by now the secret is out. His 2002 book Bush At War was very complimentary toward the President and his white house team, dealing with the events of 9/11/01, the invasion of Afghanistan and the preparations to invade Iraq. Woodward was convinced, as most of us were that weapons of mass destruction would be found and destroyed. When no WMDs were discovered Woodward's coverage toward the Bush team turned increasingly negative.

In The War Within Woodward portrays the Bush administration as a dysfunctional family. Each of his senior advisers is shown to be playing a separate game, the enemy is found in the other branches of government and not on the battlefield of Iraq. There is little mention of Afghanistan at all in the book. Woodward portrays Bush as a man who is unable to grasp the implications of his own decisions, going with "his gut" and ignoring contradictory facts, having unshakable faith in his generals, until they are replaced, then having unshakable faith in his new generals. Donald Rumsfeld is shown to be so wedded to his small lean military concept that he is unable to concede the value of increasing troop strength in Iraq even as the sectarian violence grows exponentially. Condoleeza Rice is portrayed as being excluded from the decision making process.

How the "surge" came about is the central focus of the book. Woodward shows that this was an amorphous concept, basically just "lets throw a bunch more soldiers and Marines into Iraq and see what happens." It was not until after the "surge" was decided upon, when it was decided that a new commander and a new Secretary of Defense would be needed, or it wouldn't happen, that David Petraeus was chosen to lead in Iraq. Petraeus' tactic of moving US troops, with their Iraqi counterparts, into the neighborhoods of Baghdad and his willingness to accept the assistance of both Sunni and Shia militias into the defense structure were key to the success of the "surge" in reducing the level of violence in Iraq.

One has to wonder how President Obama will fare in Iraq. Can he successfully reduce the numbers of US troops to 35,000 by August 2010? The political situation in Iraq remains unsettled. The Maliki government is laughably weak. There has been no reconciliation between Sunni and Shia factions. The Kurds remain a part but apart. Iran continues to stir up trouble. Will the violence return or will the Iraqi's begin to build a civil coalition to address their own governance?

Butchers Hill

A Tess Monaghan Novel
Laura Lippman

I have become a Laura Lippman addict. I first heard Laura Lippman being interviewed on the Marc Steiner Show on what was then Baltimore's WJHU radio station, at John's Hopkins University. (It's called WYPR now and is no longer owned by the University) I found her to be engaging and was motivated to go read the new novel she was hawking and then every Laura Lippman book I could lay my hands on ever since.

Butchers Hill is an early Lippman novel that was published in paperback only, in 1998. It has recently been released in hard cover, reversing the usual procedure. One might expect an early attempt to be less well written, more tentative, not as good as an author's later work, especially if that early book was a paperback only potboiler. This is not the case. The character of Tess Monaghan is fully rounded already, and easily recognizable. The plot has twists and turns of great complexity, yet complete, after the fact, logic. Other characters are believable. It was a thoroughly enjoyable read. Baltimore is a city that I know mostly from the local TV news. I live in another world, across the Chesapeake Bay from there. But I love to see places and even people from that news appearing in print. If there is a writer who lives and sets novels in your area you may be able to enjoy the same experience. Of course, I also enjoy reading the late Tony Hillerman's New Mexico based novels for their setting, even though my exposure to New Mexico was only a two week vacation almost twenty years ago. Go figure.

You will never in a million years guess who done it, which makes this a real mystery and not just a "crime novel." In fact, it's not at all clear what the real crime that is being solved is until the denouement, but not in a bad plot kind of way.

Since starting to write fiction, with her Tess Monaghan mysteries, Laura Lippman has written novels that are not in the mystery genre. She has shown that she can develop complex characters and hold a reader's interest without having the plot device of a detective with a crime to solve. Yet, her Tess stories, even this early one, already stand up as complete novels on their own.

Fine Just The Way It Is

Wyoming Stories 3
Annie Proulx

This is the first work I've read by the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Shipping News. I suppose now I'll have to go ahead and read everything she's written. Not all at once, though.

Fine Just The Way It Is is a collection of short stories, mostly set in Wyoming, although there are two set in Hell, with the Devil as the central character. Maybe that's Proulx's real opinion of Wyoming? She visits 19th century homesteaders, an old cowboy in a nursing home, 21st century ranchers, back country hikers. Each has a story to tell and in each story the place is an important element. Most of the characters seem to end up in a condition best described by the title of one of the stories Tits Up In A Ditch. They die in childbirth, catch pneumonia, get trapped by a falling rock high on a mountainside. Or old and tired in a nursing home, like Mr. Forkenbrock in the opening story, who would rather die of exposure, sitting with his back aginst a fence post, like an old man he remembers from his youth. Sitting comfortable on my sofa I can enjoy sympathizing with all these characters, knowing that they are fictional and I won't suffer brain damage from a roadside bomb in Iraq and be sent home to my unprepared parents on a ranch in the middle of nowhere.

I have the same objection to this book as I do with any well written collection of short stories. About the time that I really start to get involved with a group of characters, that story is over and I have to start over with a whole new set.

The title of the book comes from something said repeatedly by one of the characters, "Wyoming is fine just the way it is." Every story, although each reveals something beautiful about the state, show how very difficult it is to live there. It should be depressing, but it isn't.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

David Wroblewski

This is another book that I learned about by listening to the Diane Rehm Show on the radio. The author was on for an interview and aroused my interest because Diane, David Wroblewski and I are all dog people. Wroblewski has written a novel set in an unusual dog breeding kennel which produces unusual dogs and the dogs are central to the story he tells. The founder of this kennel, the grandfather of it's central character, had the idea to breed dogs based on behavior instead of conformation. He took dogs of many, and sometimes no breed, that had performed unusual and sometimes heroic acts, dogs that got written about in the newspaper, and he created his own breed of dogs. He clearly researched both breeding methods and obedience and service dog training for the book, although the results achieved by this fictional kennel are probably not possible.

The book is written from many points of view, sometimes even that of one of the dogs, but never sinks to a level of cuteness or anthropomorphism while doing so. The difference between us and our animal companions is one of degree and not of kind, Descartes notwithstanding. The idea of creating these dogs that are intelligent and loyal but able to to make moral choices is a fascinating one. It gives the book a kind of Sci Fi speculative edge. What if you bred and trained dogs for intelligence and judgment? How far could you take them? What part of their behavior is learned and what effect does inheritance have? This question is played out in the dags and in the humans in this story.

This is a coming of age novel, as many first novels are. A young man, Edgar, grows up on this farm, where his parents are engaged in breeding and training these amazing dogs. Edgar is unable to speak, although he hears normally, and communicates with a half made up sign language, to everyone, including the dogs. Edgar is destined to take over the kennel and continue breeding and training these amazing dogs.

But this coming of age novel takes a wrong turn when Edgar's uncle Claude comes home after a long absence. In fact, not until Edgar's father suddenly dies and Claude starts paying unwanted attention to Edgar's mother, does the reader realize the Wroblewski is re-telling the story of Hamlet on a dog breeding farm.

Like the play, the novel ends tragically. I won't spoil it by telling you how. It is a satisfyingly thick book, a good long read, and I highly recommend it.

Note: revised 12/22/08

What You Should Know About Politics But Don't

A Nonpartisan Guide to the Issues
Jessamyn Conrad

Let me say first, that there was not a lot of new information in this book and I found the title only slightly less offensive than the "for dummies" series of books, which I refuse to consult on principle. I've read over a couple of them, meh. It went downhill from there.

The book starts off talking about elections and explains about voting districts and political parties and the electoral college. Then it gets into voter suppression and fraud, gerrymandering campaign finance and the trouble with electronic voting machines. The following chapters take on a long list of hot button issues: recession. stagflation, the mortgage crisis, isolationism, health care, homeland security, no child left behind, all the while maintaining a neutral non partisan tone, the News Hour with Jim Lerher, on Prozac. "Some believe that torture is inherently morally repugnant and is never justifiable. Others think there may be some very restricted circumstances in which torture is morally acceptable, while still others contend that those conditions are broader."

Some people bend over backwards to not have an opinion, too, and Jessamyn Conrad is one of them. Some people think torture is sometimes OK? Let's put it out there, Jessamyn. The Bush Administration denies that it ever tortured anyone and if it did, then they must have deserved it. And besides, if the President does it, it's legal.

I became weary of the neutrality. None of the burning issues of the day have any relevance weight, meaning or value in this book, just on the one hand and on the other.
The publisher got blurbs from Barack Obama and Bob Dole for the front cover. I guess John McCain was too busy to answer the email.

The Invisible Constitution

Laurence H. Tribe


There is a great deal more in constitutional law than is contained in the spare, sparse language of the U.S. Constitution. Or at lease Laurence Tribe believes so. Mr. Tribe is a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School. Other than the justices on the supreme court, there is really no better authority on what constitutional law contains. Yet there is disagreement about this. Justice Antonin Scalia is well known for his strict adherence to the written words of the Constitution.

Consider, however, the words of article IX of the Bill of Rights: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. Professor Tribe argues that the words of this clause are a huge gap through which truckloads of rights, unknown to James Madison or John Marshall, can be driven. How, then can we decide what is a right retained by the people and what is a kooky, left wing idea, best left in the dust bin of history?

Tribe offers six methods that jurists have used to think about, and argue for, these invisible constitutional rights. First the geometric construction, connecting the dots between different articles of the constitution. This is how the much argued right to privacy has been derived. Nowhere does the constitution mention the word "privacy." It does say, though "No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law. " and "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." When you put them together you get a more general concept that the government should leave people alone, especially in their own homes, but also in their possessions and their bodies, in short - privacy.

Another method of constructing constitutional rights described by Tribe are the geodesic - building a dome, like Buckminster Fuller, again out of already existing rights, to protect the freedoms of the individual. The global is another, reinforcing ones argument by reference to laws and practices in other countries. Justice Scalia has been guilty of this practice himself, according to professor Tribe. The geological, unearthing evidence of the intent of the founding fathers in historical sources is the fourth method. The gravitational, where he makes an argument based on Einstein's relativity theory and argues that laws create distortions of the social space time continuum is another. (did I mention that some of this is kind of hard to follow?) And finally the gyroscopic, in which the force of previously made decisions in the court help to stabilize the interpretation of the constitution by weight of their precedent, even when they are wrong.

Professor Tribe is obviously a really smart person and he has had the help of some other really smart people over the years, including a young research assistant who has gone on to bigger things, a fellow named Barry Obama. I tended to go all glassy eyed reading some of Tribe's explanations. Me and Sarah Palin are probably not destined to sit on the Supreme Court, I would guess. He has almost made me a strict constructionist, but then he did convince me that strict constructionists are most strict when construction arguments against things that the personally don't care for and are a lot looser when they argue for something that suits them.

Please Don't Remain Calm

Provocations and Commentaries
Michael Kinsley


Back in the dark ages of the 1990s, Michael Kinsley was Pat Buchanan's punching bag on the CNN news-talk program Crossfire. The show was so archaic in it's format that the two adversaries would often be seen to smile at one another and shook hands publicly on many occasions.

Kinsley left Crossfire to become the editor of a newfangled magazine on your screen called Slate, something invented by Microsoft. He has since written for real newspapers like the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and even Time magazine. Please Don't Remain Calm is a collection of some of Kinsley's writings for all of these various publications dating from 1995 up until 2007. I would guess that another collection won't be appearing until some time in 2020. This will give you plenty of time to work your way through this one.

Many of the early pieces are quite clever and stand the test of time better than a stained blue dress. It is interesting to look back and remember how worked up we all were over issues that seem, frankly, to be trivial by today's standards. Midway through the book we are introduced to the misadventures of George W Bush. Things I would rather forget are on almost every page from that point on.

The book's title is derived from a piece written in 2006, reflecting on the actions of the passengers on United Flight 93 on September 11th 2001. Kinsley concludes that, unlike those passengers, he would have followed instructions and stayed in his seat. I'm not so sure. Those were a random group of ordinary people and hey acted as they did. Why not any other random group, even one including a journalist and bon vivant.

Generally I don't consider these collections of editorials as real books, and this is no exception. It was a bit like reading an out of date blog, except for the anachronistic use of paper as a medium of expression. And no YouTube videos.

A Freewheelin' Time

A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties
Suze Rotolo

The photo on the cover of this book is instantly recognizable, to persons of a certain age, as the cover photo on the 1963 Colombia Records album "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan." The author is in fact the young girl shown clinging to the arm of the soon to be famous singer-songwriter. Susan "Suze" Rotolo was a seventeen year old emancipated minor, house sitting a friend's apartment in New York's Greenwich Village when, in 1961, Robert Zimmerman arrived from Minnesota and began to invent the mythical character we know as Bob Dylan.

Rotolo's memoir gives an interesting insight into the process and into the mind of the developing artist that became Bob Dylan. Memory being a tricky thing, however, she begins the book with a disclaimer: Secrets remain. Their traces go deep, and with all due respect I keep them with my own. The only claim I make for writing a memoir of that time is that it may not be factual, but it is true.

Keeps them with her own what? Dylan like she doesn't say. Like a poet, like Dylan himself, Rotolo's language sometime eludes understanding. This book was definitely not ghost written. I bears the marks of a non-professional, veering from one subject to another unexpectedly, leaving the reader wondering what just happened. Fragmented sentences and abandoned thoughts pepper the narrative. In a perverse way, this is perfect for a memoir about a time spent with this master of evasion and misdirection.

Rotolo was a red diaper baby. The passages that deal with her own family, her involvement with radical politics in the 1960s and her visit to Cuba, as a test of the travel ban imposed on American citizens, could have been expanded into a book themselves, if she had never met Bob Dylan. Another book certainly could be written about the folksingers, Pete Seeger, Dave Van Ronk, Phil Ochs, Mary Travers, Ian & Sylvia, who wander in and out of her Dylan centered story. The story of her work in the avant-guarde off off Broadway theater could make a third. Perhaps a career as a memoirist is being born here.

What this memoir is, though, is an impression, looking back 40 years in memory, of a time when a young man and a young woman were embroiled in a moment of extreme pressure and confusion and the way that they tried, with difficulty to deal with it. Some things are glossed over and some things are left unsaid.

Man In The Dark

Paul Auster
Henry Holt and Company
ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-8839-7
ISBN-10: 0-8050-8839-3

I detect a pattern in Paul Auster's novels, and that's bad, and after reading only two of his books! There is an older man who is writing something, but what he is writing of of no particular significance, even to himself. The women in his life are going through tough times, as is he. People have died, left them, cheated. The old guy most likely cheated on his either dead of ex wife or else he behaved like a schmuck in some other way. There is some kind of fantasy thread that runs through the old guy's head, or more than one, but they don't go anywhere. Everyone decides to just keep soldiering on because it isn't unbearable. Then the book ends.

I had heard an interview on the radio with Auster about this, his newest book, which is what got me interested in reading him. In the interview Diane Rhem made much of the alternate universe in which there was a civil war in the U.S. which started after, and because of, the way that George W. became President in 2000. That alternate universe is a story the the old guy in Man In The Dark is telling himself, it's not the thing that he's writing. About halfway through the book Auster gets tired of it and has the old guy kill off the character in his little story, who had crossed (back) between universes with orders to kill the old guy. Then the little story of the little civil war is just dropped.

Alternate history is a respectable sub genre of science fiction. Auster did not do justice to that sub genre. In fact it was a waste of time reading it. Repetitive, self referential writing about a fictional author who writes about himself is what turned John Barth from a brilliant novelist into a crashing bore. Auster is well on his way to joining Barth in that category.

The Brooklyn Follies

Paul Auster
Henry Holt & Company
ISBN-13: 978*0-8656-7714-8
ISBN-10: 0-8050-7714-6

Paul Auster is an author that I have just discovered, despite the fourteen novels that he has already published. I have a couple of his others on hold at the library, so you'r likely to hear more about him here. Actually I my go on an Auster binge as I have with other writers and make you thoroughly sick of hearing about him.

The Brooklyn Follies takes place in the months leading up to the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and ends on the morning of 9/11 just before those events take place. There are a number of threads to the story, mostly having to do with the family o the narrator, Nathan Glass. Some of those threads are never tied up in the end, much to my, and Anton Checkov's dissatisfaction. What about the Hotel Existence? Why'd he even bring it up? The found the perfect place to open this magical realist hotel, and then dropped the idea without another thought. The religious zealot husband of Nathan's niece, when she leaves him, quietly files for divorce. Zip, gone. What good is he to the story? The forgery scam involving a supposed manuscript of The Scarlet Letter causes Nathan's friend, the rare book and manuscript dealer and ex convict, to die of a hear attack. Good, Nathan's nephew will inherit the bookstore, which should be worth enough money to enable him to buy the hotel which he is no longer interested in, even though he married the daughter of it's owner.

Not that I'm complaining. Auster writes marvelous prose and his characters are wonderfully sympathetic. All the twists and turns of plot are just thought experiments which Auster tires of after a while and goes off on another tangent, just as interesting. And perhaps that's the point of the book. Nathan busys himself writing what he calls "The Book Of Human Folly" which remains an unfinished manuscript throughout the novel. Projects and ideas fail or are dropped or succeed or not. People drift in and out, just as in real life, and, even though Nathan may or may not know what happened to them, he doesn't tell us.

What about 9/11 you ask? Nathan, fresh out of the emergency room, after suffering from an inflamed esophagus he thought was a massive heart attack, is planning to open a business selling "biography insurance" to people who would otherwise have no way of being remembered beyond their children or perhaps grandchildren. He is admiring the beautiful morning and mentions, as the omniscient narrator, that this is the morning of and just an hour or so before Brooklyn was rained down upon by the ashes of thousands of incinerated innocents. Then the book ends, boom.

The Bin Ladens

An Arabian Family In The American Century
Steve Coll
The Penguin Press
ISBN: 978-1*59420-164-6

After the September 11 attacks of 2001 there were rumors circulating about members of the Bin Laden clan whisked out of the country by the CIA and of secret connections between the Bin Ladens and the Bush clan. Conspiracy theorists have spun elaborate tales based on these stories. So who are these Bin Ladens and were they really here and why? Steve Coll reveals the true story of the Bin Laden family as much as it can be known.

Osama is one of 54 sons and daughters of Mohamed Bin Laden, a building contractor from Yemen who built a business empire by serving the needs and the whims of the Al Saud dynasty for whom Saudi Arabia is named. Under his leadership and that of his oldest sons, Salem and Bakr the Bin Laden companies have grown into an international multi-million dollar operation, building highways, renovating the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and the major mosques in Mecca and Medina, creating the Saudi telephone system and investing in satellite communications, fitting out luxury private aircraft in Texas and buying commercial real estate and condominium developments in Florida. Returning from Afghanistan in the early 1990s, Osama Bin Laden became disenchanted with the society he found in his native Saudi Arabia. He soon broke with the Al Saud and king Fahd and exiled himself to Yemen and then Sudan. His family formally removed him from the Bin Laden business at this time. Theoretically he has been cut off from the Bin Laden family fortune since this time, before the embassy bombings, before the USS Cole and certainly before 911. By breaking with the Al Saud Osama broke with the golden goose from which the Bin Laden family fortune was laid. There is some question whether Osama has received funds from any family members however. Al-Qaeda has relied on donations from within the Arab world for it's operating funds and Bin Laden has been a major factor in getting those donations.

Those mysterious Bin Ladens who were spirited out of the country? A half brother living in Beverly Hills, another attending Harvard Business School, many nephews and a few nieces attending various colleges throughout the country. They were taken to Paris on a flight chartered by the family, with the cooperation of, and after being questioned by the FBI. No connection to Al-Qaeda was found for any of them.

The Bin Laden business empire continues to prosper, building airports, palaces condominiums and resorts in the middle east. Osama continues to live in exile, somewhere in the Afghanistan/Pakistan borderlands.

The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments

George Johnson
Knopf
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4101-5

Johnson is a science writer for the New York Times and has written this book as a top ten list of science experiments. I guess that makes him the Letterman of science. Johnson's list is not the ten greatest discoveries of science but rather a list of experiments done by individuals that he finds to be important, elegant and accessible. They are experiments conducted by individuals and were done on a very human scale, often on a table top.

Do you remember hearing about Galileo dropping things from the leaning tower of Pisa? Johnson believes that never happened. He gives a detailed account of the experiment that Galileo did, rolling balls of different materials down an inclined track, timing their descent by singing. This allowed Galileo to show that heavier objects do not fall faster than light ones and to figure out the math for the acceleration of falling bodies. Newton would develop his laws of motion based on Galileo's work. He talks about Isaac Newton but not about gravity. Newton did a series of experiments using prisms which revealed that light is made up of waves and showed that color is derived from white light.

There are several experiments in electromagnetism, Michael Faraday, James Joule, A.A. Michelson, Robert Millikan. Millikaa's experiments with oil droplets, magnetic fields and radium, in which he discovered the electron, are the most complex in the book. Johnson tried to duplicate them and was not successful, blaming himself for being unable to control the apparatus properly.

I don't know whether the experiments Johnson chose were the most beautiful or not. He left the impression that he wasn't so confident in his choices either.

Founding Faith

Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America
Steven Waldman
Random House
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6437-3

Was the United States founded as a Christian Nation or did the founders intend to erect a strict barrier between church and state? Steven Waldman explores this question by examining the lives, work and writings of five of the founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Not surprisingly, Waldman discovers that the founding fathers disagreed with each other on the subject.

The chapters on Madison are the most enlightening. Madison was deeply involved in the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, was the author of much of the Federalist Papers and, again was one of the authors of the bill of rights, including the first amendment and it's prohibition of the establishment of religion by Congress. His own view was that state support of religion weakened the church. Making the church lazy and dependent and making the people contemptuous of it. Madison felt that separating church and state made both stronger. Madison built an alliance between enlightenment intellectuals and evangelical Christians to gain votes to ratify the Constitution in Virginia. He promised those evangelicals a bill of rights which wold guarantee them freedom to worship as they pleased, in order to get their votes. It's almost as if James Dobson and Diane Rhem were to join in common cause to guarantee their Constitutional rights.

Evangelicals, at that time were worried that state support would go the the Episcopal Church and/or the Congregational Church, the two dominant denominations at the time. Such support did exist in most of the colonies and many of the new states. In Virginia, until the passage of the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776, the Church of England was supported by taxes, and until 1833 the Congregational Church was state supported in Massachusetts. It was not until the passage of the 14th amendment in 1868 that the provisions of the Bill of Rights applied to the states and not just the national government, thus making state support unconstitutional.

All of the founders studied in Waldman's book used conventional, nondenominational Christian language in letters and, four of them, officially as President of the United States. All of them had evolving sets of religious beliefs, none of which were particularly conventional. Jefferson and Adams became more and more Unitarian in their outlook. In fact the Congregational Church which Adams belonged to all his life, became officially Unitarian during his lifetime. Washington was a conventional Episcopalian in outward appearance but didn't attend very often. He believed that religion was needed in order to promote god behavior in the citizenry and appeared to be more concerned with outward appearance than inward salvation. Franklin postulated a supreme creator who delegated each solar system to an attentive subordinate gods. Franklin would fit right in in California. Madison mostly kept quiet about his personal faith but was comfortable with Baptists, Unitarians and Jews as well as the Episcopalians and Congregationalists who dominated the scene at the time. He wanted them all to be independent and self supporting. He even got along with the Catholics, who were almost universally hated in eighteenth century America.

The term "Wall of separation between church and state" was coined by Thomas Jefferson in a letter to a Baptist coalition in Connecticut, who wanted Jefferson's help in ending the state funding of Congregationalism there. The letter was meant to reassure them of Jefferson's support for their cause. How deliciously ironic that the descendants of those Baptists now deny the existence of such a wall.

HaltinG StatE

Charles Stross
Ace Books
ISBN: 978-0-441-01498-9

The latest in my light summer reading series is a cyberpunk novel. You will note the cool, trendy, inappropriate capitalization in the title. It has a blurb from William Gibson on the cover. William Gibson is the Pete Seeger of cyberpunk. All the cyberpunks go to him for his blessing, just like the folkies get their records blessed by Pete.

Halting State is a near-future novel. One in which, not surprisingly, the internet has penetrated every facet of people's lives. It starts with a virtual reality bank robbery committed by a bunch of orcs and a dragon. The poor non-gaming cop, in Edinburgh, Scotland of all places, who takes the call, is nonplussed, even though she wears he interfacing glasses and operates in "cop space" all the time. Everyone wears these glasses that give them access to GPS, their address book, email, virual reality games, etc. through their web 3.whatever mobile phones. Cops have their own channel which gives personal information, including rap sheets, of everyone everywhere.

There is a bit of fantasy roll playing, some techophiliac nerdlings, a bit of international intrigue, some cyber crime, quite a lot of action and violence, a touch of love, a bit of implied sex, tastefully handled in a 1940 Hollywood sort of way, something for everyone. I particularly liked the way people were slightly disoriented when the net went down and they didn't have their GPS stream telling them were they were. Just think 20 years ago people could find the bus stop on their own.

Another Thing To Fall

Laura Lippman
Morrow
ISBN: 978-0-06-112887-5

Laura Lippman lives in, and writes about, Baltimore, Maryland, just across the Bay from me. I don't often get over there but there is a kind of appeal to reading a novel with a setting that is sort of familiar. Another Thing To Fall is the latest in her Tess Monaghan series of crime novels. Tess Monaghan may be the only fictional female private detective who rows a racing shell as a hobby. She is also a fictional graduate of Washington College, which is within walking distance from my house.

Another Thing To Fall is not so much a whodunnit as a "What the heck are they doing?" story. There are several people who commit crimes ranging from vandalism to faking a kidnapping to, of course, murder. They all revolve around the filming of a silly sounding TV seriec called Mann of Steel. It's fairly clear, even before the crime is committed, who the perp is going to be, but hard to figure out why. The motives ov the various characters are revealed in the end and the book moves forward on a series of revelations about each of them. Lippman uses the filming of a television show as the setting for her story. Baltimore has become known as the setting of gritty cop shows with The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Steets having long runs on the air. There is a new medical docudrama coming out called Hopkins, too. Baltimore really is a film industry town.

In the fictional show, Mann of Steel, the male lead is transported to the early 19th century by receiving a head injury and somehow is able to bring the female lead back to the 21st century with him. One of the themes of the novel is the difference between homage to earlier writing and theft of intellectual property, yet Lippman does not acknowledge the previous, and best known, example of time travel by head injury in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court. This may be an oversight, or a very subtle irony, I'm not sure which.

Kidnapped

An Irene Kelly Novel
Jan Burke
Simon & Schuster
ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-7385-5
ISBN-10: 0-432-7385-0

Well, the new Laura Lippman was out at the local library so I put a reserve on it and I took a chance on this one, which I found while poking through the James Lee and Alafair Burke titles. Kidnapped is a pretty decent crime thriller except for the absolutely absurd premise, which makes it difficult to suspend disbelief. I suppose I shouldn't tell, in case someone wants to read the book after seeing this post. I'll just say that the motivation for the criminal conspiracy uncovered by the intrepid Irene Kelly is a bit far fetched. Irene Kelly is the protagonist of a series of books written by Jan Burke. A newspaper reporter married to a police officer, she gets herself into a lot of trouble investigating crimes that she is not supposed to be writing about. This book also features forensic lab work and search and rescue dogs and a dog trainer hat I believe is a regular part of Burke's books. The forensics and SAR material seem to be well researched. Burke is involved in forensic science as a member of the California Forensic Science Institute.

I did get caught up in the hunt for the missing persons and the excitement of capturing the trained to kill with bare hands and crack shot ultra smart super villain, which Irene Kelly subdues with a non stick pan and a bottle of bleach. Oops, I just said too much.

Real Change

From the world that fails to the world that works.
Newt Gingrich
Regnery Publsihing
ISBN: 978-1-59698-053-2

Here's how the Newt starts his new book:

The media tell us America is a nation divided between conservative red states and liberal blue states. They tell us that red and blue are qqually divided - which is why elections are so close, why Congress seems gridlocked, and why nothing ever seems to get done in Washington.

But this is simply not true. The reality is the American people are united on almost every important issue facing our country. The real division is between red-white -and-blue America (about 85 percent of the country) and a fringe on the left (about 15 percent of the country).

Translation: I know that your, dear reader are a true patriotic American, not like those elitist lefties on your TV, telling you what to think. You are going to agree with me because I'm a true patriotic American, too. You and I know what's really going on, they can't fool us. Can I interest you in used car?

The Newt goes on to explain how a new less partisan politics is needed and how only the Republican party can bring this about because Republicans stand for truth, justice and the American way, unlike those evil Democrats, plotting their tax and spend takeover of the world by trial lawyers from Holywood. Real Change means more of the same in prettier packaging brought to you by the party of Exxon and Peabody Coal.

Real Change is a piece of excrement written by one of the architects of the current partisan, all or nothing, party loyalty before national interest, politics. Don't bother to read it. If you're a dittohead you can get the same stuff more entertainingly from that big mouth on your AM radio. If you're not it will be bad for your blood pressure. Newt is one of those politicians who is so crooked he has to screw his socks on in the morning.