Cairo by G. Willow Wilson

This graphic novel begins in The City of Victory from the perspective of several characters. Ashraf is attempting to transport drugs hidden in a truckload of beets. A wounded Israeli soldier finds herself in Cairo a after a firefight near the border. Shaheed, an American teenager, is stranded in the city when his flight to Beirut is cancelled. An Egyptian journalist and a young American journalist are kidnapped by thugs looking for Ashraf. Believe it or not all of these characters along with a Jinn (genie), a magician and a slew of bad guys are seamlessly intertwined in Wilson's story.

The adventure begins when a piece of drug paraphernalia that actually houses Shams the Jinn goes missing. Ashraf has to find the teen he sold it to in an attempt to placate some mystical thugs and save his kidnapped friends. The story seems almost straight-forward for a while but then takes too many twists and turns to note.

Wilson has injected a lot of things to think about in her debut graphic novel including some really enjoyable humor. Fear is one of the main themes, both as its use as a political tool and as a weapon evil uses to combat the heroes of the story. The characters also frequently move from our world to places like the Undernile, forcing them to overcome barriers through thought and reason not just brute force, though that is also used.

Wilson deftly makes her characters seem real despite surreal circumstances. The crux of the story is how complicated it can be in the modern world to do the right thing and make it a better place. While trapped in the Undernile, Kate says, "Everything is a mess and I don't know how to fix it, not a single thing..." Ali replies, "No one does, but brave people are trying." Along with Shaun Tan's Tales from Outer Suburbia, Cairo is one of my favorite graphic novels of '08.

What to Watch After the Watchmen

As I have no doubt that you've already hurried out to see the Watchmen, I respectfully submit some reading suggestions to follow up the experience.

First, cleanse your palate with Superman: Brainiac (by Johns and Frank). This is a straight up, mainstream, super-hero adventure. But . . . Johns captures a sense of grandeur and a depth of emotion that will catch you by surprise. He manages to capture the best of Superman, making the book feel both classic (recalling the feeling of Superman: the Movie, in particular) and completely fresh at the same time. This has got Superman and his cousin Supergirl facing a terrifying threat from long-dead Krypton in a battle which has unexpected, and tragic, repercussions. It doesn't hurt that Frank's figural work and action are about the best in modern mainstream comics. I swear, you will be able to hear Christopher Reeve speaking when you see his Superman.


Then, dip into something decidedly darker and stranger with Omega the Unknown (by Lethem and Dalrymple). Novelist Lethem updates the obscures 1970's hero with the story of an alienated teen who starts off by learning that his recently deceased parents were actually robots and ends up with a connection to one very, very unusual super-hero. Intelligent, disturbing and filled with characters that are complex in both motive and morality, Omega is one of Watchmen's worthy successors.

Finally, if the movie has prompted you to take a look back at your much-thumbed or brand new copy of Watchmen, here's something you might not have noticed. Chapter 5 ("Fearful Symmetry") is perfectly visually symmetrical. The first page composition and color scheme matches that of the last page exactly. The second page matches the second to last, and so on, right to a dramatic meeting right in the middle. Just one more way that Watchmen used the sequential art form like nothing before it ever had.

Hopefully, this will keep you until you head back to the theater for a second viewing.

Thought You Should Know

Did you know that malaria, tuberculosis and other diseases produce false positive results on HIV tests? Christine Maggiore reports in her book, What If Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong, that "Many antibodies found in normal, healthy, HIV-free people can cause a positive reading on HIV antibody tests." She also notes that "Canada's Laboratory Centre for Disease Control does not recognize the American T cell count criteria for AIDS. This means that 182,200 American AIDS patients - more than 25% of all people in the US ever diagnosed with AIDS - would not have AIDS if they were in Canada."


This book is an eye opener: "Can you imagine receiving a fatal diagnosis without being told the diagnosis is based on an unproved idea and an uncertain test? Being instructed to take powerful, experimental drugs without being told these drugs compromise health, destroy functions necessary to sustain life, and were approved for use without adequate testing? Being informed that you have, or should expect, deadly illnesses without being told that these same illnesses are not considered fatal when they occur in "normal" people?"

The HIV/AIDS hypothesis was introduced at a press conference, not a peer-reviewed scientific journal. I knew that. So not everything I thought I knew about AIDS was wrong.

This surprised me, though: HIV tests are not required for an AIDS diagnosis in Africa.

The author is not making this up. She provides 10 pages of references, from the World Health Organization, and from publications such as the Journal of the American Medical Association, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Infectious Diseases, and Lancet (one of the top British medical journals).

"AIDS is not a new disease or illness; it is a new name or designation for 29 previously known diseases and conditions. As the NIH (National Institutes of Health) states in its comprehensive report on AIDS, 'the designation AIDS is a surveillance tool.' Since 1982, the surveillance tool AIDS has been used to track and record familiar diseases when they appear in people who have tested positive for antibodies associated with HIV."

On page 11 of her book, Maggiore lists 65 other "Factors Known to Cause Positive Results on HIV Antibody Tests". I think people need to know this.

1993 Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis said of this book, "Christine Maggiore writes clearly for any reader the simple truth about AIDS."

Grift, Where is Thy Sting?

Listening to news reports of the recent Wall Street scandal involving Bernard Madoff, I kept hearing the same descriptions about the man who scammed and scammed big. He was charming, likable, distinguished. He treated his employees like family. He also happened to manage a $50 billion dollar Ponzi scheme that has wreaked havoc with investors, many of whom were non-profits that are suffering from investments made on their behalf. Over and over people wondered how this well-respected Wall Street investor could have charmed and snowed so many people.

The simple answer is he was a con man trying to pass in the real world.

Con is short for confidence, and the con man runs games that snare unsuspecting marks in a web of trust that eventually ends with the individual being separated from their money. In most cases, though there is a great deal of deception involved, the con man is not considered a thief because the victim hands their money to the con and his outfit. Where Madoff differs from traditional cons is that usually the con involves a greedy victim who knowingly involves themselves in shady activities, so that when the deal goes south they are too embarrassed to report it to the police. Madoff was simply using his existing experience and connections to manipulate people for no known reason and broke many finance laws doing so. He may simply have been playing a high stakes game for the fun of it.

To understand how elaborate these confidence games can be, and how seemingly innocent people can get snared into these webs of deception, I found myself returning to David W. Maurer's classic The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man. Originally published in 1940, Maurer's examination of the inside world of classic confidence games is a fascinating look at the real world machinations that inspired movies like The Sting and The Lady Eve, and fiction like Jim Thompson's The Grifters. For a book that is 60 years old, with con games that stretch back even further, it's surprising how relevant this book still is today.

Maurer's look at this non-violent criminal underworld is built from a collection of oral histories by those who knew the creators of the original con games, or participated in them. Tracing the history of "big store" games - con games that originated in fake storefronts at the end of the 19th century - we get the full run-down of the three big cons: the rag, the wire, and the payoff. These games - and they really play out like games when you read them - took places in fake betting rooms and fake stock brokerages, with a full accompaniment of fake banks and fake telegraph offices to match. There could be dozens of players involved, organizations pulled together to create a very convincing world of high stakes gambling and finance, that would lure in marks to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars (in 1930's dollars, mind you) in one lump-sum payout. And once that payout was made those storefronts were gutted and shuttered within the hour, the players scattered to different cities where they would pick up parts in new games.

Toward the end Maurer also drops the dime on some short-con games, games where a few con men can make a quick buck on whatever a mark has on him. Things like three card monte, crooked card and dice games, and the occasional hot-seat - a con that involves the mark putting up money as a bond against splitting the profits toward a larger amount like a found suitcase full of cash. The modern version of this is the advance-fee scam, often called the Nigerian Bank letter scam that takes place in people's email boxes all over the world. Big and small, cons fleece them all.

As Maurer was professor of linguistics it shouldn't be surprising that the book is packed with the lingo of the con's world, with full explanations provided when known. Familiar terms like mark (victim) and roper (a scout) and the fix (paying off police) bump alongside colorful terms like cackle-bladder (a fake a murder used to scare off marks), plinger (a street beggar), and a fitted mitt (a bribed official). The joy in reading Maurer's book is that he lets the cons play out on the pages, allows the players to tell the composite stories he's constructed, butting-in to explain details only as necessary. The chapters read like classic short crime fiction full of characters who, with a change of venue and only slightly different methods, are still among us and plying their trade on Wall Street and through our junk email.

Forewarned is forearmed, as they say.



The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man
by David W. Maurer
with and introduction by Luc Sante
Anchor Books edition 1999

Brains Brains Brains - ZOMBIE HAIKU

Anyone can write haiku, right? It's so simple that schoolchildren learn it. In fact, it's so simple that even zombies can write it.

ZOMBIE HAIKU by Ryan Mecum tells the story of a zombie plague. It is presented as a journal full of poetry by some guy. At first, he's just a guy writing haiku (a lot of which are parodies of other people's poems, including those of Robert Frost and William Butler Yeats), but he continues to write haiku as he becomes a zombie and starts hunting for brains. However, right at the start, in the margins around the poems, there's some blue handwriting by a human guy who has been bitten by a zombie, but has grabbed the journal. So he sets up the scene (zombie plague, some people hiding out at the airport, all of them dying one way or another), and then he gets out of the way so you can read the story of the zombie plague straight through. The note-making guy comes back in at the end, with rather tragi-comic consequences.

Here, some samples of what you can expect from ZOMBIE HAIKU:

Little old ladies
speed away in their wheelchairs,
frightened meals on wheels.

Wheelchair pile-up!
Five old women on the ground,
helpless as babies.

That's from an episode where our zombie poet is in nursing home. From a bit later, here's this tidbit:

Blood is really warm.
It's like drinking hot chocolate
but with more screaming.

Here's another general observation:

Brains are less squishy
and a tad bit more squeaky
that someone might guess.

And another, which appears inside the book with a "his skull", but is on the cover as follows:

Biting into heads
is much harder than it looks.
The skull is feisty.

A general warning: This book is full of zombie murders and mayhem, including descriptions of zombies decomposing, maggot infestations, and gruesome injuries. Interestingly enough, Ryan Mecum, zombie haiku-writer extraordinaire, worked as a youth pastor at a Presbyterian church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Gotta love a youth pastor who writes about zombies. Coming this summer, Ryan's next opus: VAMPIRE HAIKU.

Graphic Genetics

Did you ever wish that you understood what the heck people were talking about when they mentioned DNA, RNA, genes, and chromosomes? Do you hear things about gene therapy and cloning and wonder how stuff like that really works? Or maybe you’ve just gotten to a section on genetics in your science class in school and the teacher isn’t presenting it in quite the best way for you. If any of this applies to you, or if you’re just curious about the amazing story of human life, and life on earth, check out The Stuff of Life: A Graphic Guide to Genetics and DNA by Mark Schultz, with illustrations by Zander Cannon and Kevin Cannon.

A graphic novel about DNA? How detailed could it get? Let me assure you, this is NOT a dumbed-down version of science—this book will give you all the info you need to pass a test, have an intelligent conversation, and decide if you want to do further reading on any specific topic, and its presented in a way that you’ve probably never seen it before. Framed as a report by an alien who has been to earth researching strategies for combating his own species' pervasive genetic disorders, The Stuff of Life covers everything from the origins of DNA to modern breakthroughs such as gene therapy and evolutionary genetics. While the format may seem a bit cheesy, it serves a great purpose. Just when you feel like you’re being bogged down with too many new words and concepts, there’s a break in the story as the king asks his subordinate to clarify what he just said. This allows for alternative metaphors and a slowing down of the information to allow you to take it all in. Having the information presented as both text and pictures gives you twice as many chances to understand both the building blocks of cells, genes, chromosomes, and DNA, and the more complex concepts of how inheritance works and how we are applying our knowledge of genetics. In addition to the main story, there are one-page detailed explanations of things such as the human team who first described the DNA structure, mutations, and how genetic information has been used (and manipulated) by politicians.

The format of this book makes it a fast read, though you may want to go back and look at things again as all the information sinks in and you start to make connections. There is also a thorough glossary, as well as a suggested further reading list (which includes magazines, books, and web sites) at the end of the book. Hear author Mark Schultz discussing the book in an NPR interview here, or check out an animation on What is a Nucleus here if you want to get more of an idea of what this unique book is all about. The Stuff of Life is a great introduction to the concepts of DNA and genetics for both teens and adults.

The Running Man -- Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman

When I finally got around to reading The Hunger Games a few weeks back, I mentioned that it made me want to re-watch The Running Man and Death Race 2000, re-read Stephen King's The Long Walk, read Battle Royale and get my hands on any other dystopian story that dealt with reality television and our role as audience. A commenter suggested that rather than watch The Running Man, I should read it, as the book was far, far superior to the movie. So I did.

And he was right.

The year is 2025. Ben Richards hasn't been able to find regular work for years. His young daughter comes down with the flu, and it's so bad that she clearly needs a real doctor -- not, as Ben puts it, "a block midwife with dirty hands and whiskey breath".

So he heads across town to the Network Games Building. Contestants on Free-Vee shows like Treadmill to Bucks, Swim the Crocodiles and How Hot Can You Take It rarely survive, but their families get the winnings. And there's always a chance that he'll make it -- he's a powerful man, smart and determined.

But he gets assigned to The Running Man. Which is basically a death warrant. In the six years it's aired, not a single man has survived. He'll get a twelve-hour head start. After that, he'll be fair game. Not just to the Hunters that The Network will send out -- regular citizens will get reward money for providing tips on his whereabouts, and they'll get even more if they kill him. If he survives for 30 days, he'll win one billion dollars. If he doesn't, his family will receive one hundred dollars for every hour he's free -- and one hundred dollars for every pursuer he kills.

This was a one sitting book for me -- I actually tried to go to bed with twenty chapters unread, but after tossing and turning and tossing some more I finally resigned myself to a serious lack of sleep, got up and finished it. I ended up exhausted but content. It's a very fast-paced book -- none of the chapters are more than three pages long, and rather than chapter titles, there's a countdown. By the time I hit ...Minus 020 and COUNTING..., I was so amped up and tense that it's ridiculous that I even attempted to go to bed.

As per usual with Stephen King, I felt this story in my chest and in my gut -- reading him is almost always a very visceral experience for me. And there were a couple of passages that made my stomach flip around in an extremely unpleasant manner. One of them involved intestines. But The Running Man was more than action and gross-outs -- this extremely ugly vision of the future isn't exactly enjoyable, but Ben Richards is. He's angry and smart and unpredictable, all traits I enjoy in a hero. And the world, while bleak, is an interesting one -- obviously there's the futuristic aspect, but there's also a huge class divide, and within the classes, there seems to also be a huge racial and cultural divide as well -- and rather than do any explaining at the beginning, Stephen King just drops you into the thick of it.

In the introduction (when it comes to Stephen King books, the introductions are always worth reading), he discusses all of the books he published under this pseudonym. About The Running Man, he says, "...which may be the best of them because it's nothing but story--it moves with the goofy speed of a silent movie, and anything which is not story is cheerfully thrown over the side." I don't think he's giving himself enough credit.

Lesson learned? Reality television is evil.

(cross-posted at Bookshelves of Doom)

Book Review- Project Sweet Life by Brent Hartinger

Project Sweet Life by Brent Hartinger
"For most kids, fifteen is the year of the optional summer job: Sure, you can get a job if you really want one, but it isn't required or anything. Too bad Dave's dad doesn't agree! Instead of enjoying long days of biking, swimming, and sitting around, Dave and his two best friends are being forced by their fathers into a summer of hard labor.

The friends have something else in mind, though: Not only will they not work over the summer, but they're determined to trick everyone into believing they really do have jobs. So what if the lifeguard doesn't have a tan or the fast-food worker isn't bringing home buckets of free chicken? There's only one problem: Dave's dad wants evidence that his son is actually bringing in money. And that means Dave, Curtis, and Victor will have to get some . . . without breaking the law and without doing any work!"

I loved this book and there's no doubt about that. I read it so quickly- I started it yesterday and finished it just a few hours ago. I've been a fan of Hartinger's previous work and this one didn't let me down. This was a very funny book and it was extremely creative of Hartinger to come up with all the schemes that Dave and his friends try to do to get the money they need without having to get a summer job. The ending was unexpected, but not so much that it seemed like it popped out of nowhere. The clues throughout the novel that hint at the ending are very cleverly placed. It's a wonderful ride from beginning to end, and this is a prime example of why Hartinger is one of my favorite YA authors. Definitely a recommend book, and I'd strongly suggest his previous novels too!

You got your Alternate History in my Sci-Fi

I'm normally not a huge fan of Sci-Fi. I love Ender's Game like most everyone and Feintuch's Hope series has some nice moments (more about that in another post). But as a whole it isn't a genre that speaks to me. I love the idea behind alternate history, but I've not seen it executed very well. Turtledove has some very interesting ideas, but I can't stand his writing, and other authors never seem to do as much with the stories as I would like.

Then I read the Destroyermen trilogy by Taylor Anderson. It begins in 1942 with the USS Walker, an obsolete American destroyer fleeing desperately from the Japanese onslaught in the company of the remainder of the Allied forces in the South Pacific. Harried and overwhelmed by overwhelming Japanese naval and air forces she slips into a passing squall for shelter and emerges in a totally different world. The sea is somehow different and more dangerous, the landforms don't quite match the charts, and there are no radio signals or any evidence of human presence.

As they explore the new world they find themselves in the men of the Walker come across a race of lemur-like seafarers known as The People and hear of the all-consuming Grik, a race of predatory lizards. They will be forced to choose between searching for a way out of their untenable situation or confronting a terrible and implacable enemy. And they will find out they weren't the only vessel from their world who passed through The Squall.

Filled with interesting characters coming to grips with a strange new world the three books of the series, Into the Storm, Crusade, and Maelstrom provide no shortage of fierce creatures, jury rigged solutions, and frantic battles. Anderson creates a savage world creepily similar to our own and populates it with characters you care about and root for. If you like militaristic sci-fi, or WWII action Destroyermen might be the perfect blend for you.

The Tripods

As a youth, I discovered John Christopher’s Tripod trilogy the way I discovered most books, by browsing the fiction section and dismissing everything not adorned on the bottom of the spine with a rocket ship sticker, indicating its inclusion in the Science Fiction genre. (I visited a small town library which didn’t feature a separate Sci-Fi section, or not in the YA stacks anyway.) I had virtually no interest in realistic fiction. A few titles were OK. I enjoyed the realistic novels of Madeleine L’Engle which I found via her better known science fiction and fantasy works. But most realistic YA fiction was either about kids coping with trouble--booze or sex or drugs—or kids’ arguments with adults, usually their divorced parents. I had enough of my own crap to get depressed over, I reasoned, without having to engage in the traumas of a pretend person.

And so I escaped with escapist fiction. True to its characteristic flaws, the fiction that I read was somewhat predictable, and its characters tended to be a little one-dimensional and its themes rather black and white. I could not have cared less. I knew what I liked and that’s what I was going to read. So I judged the Tripod series by its covers, which promised sci-fi adventure. I gobbled up those library copies of The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead, and The Pool of Fire, and then I reread them again and again. I doubt I could have voiced just what it was about them that I liked so much. They certainly contained all the elements I looked for in a book: a setting in a world vastly different from my own, a fast-paced adventure plot, fascinating and strange new concepts, and themes of overcoming great adversity while staying true to ones friends. But now rereading them again, thirty years later, I think I understand better what attracted me to them.

The White Mountains, the first in the series, opens with the image of a stolen watch. The watch is a prized possession of Will Parker’s father. The watch doesn’t work, but is an artifact of “the ancients,” people who once knew how to make such things. Will’s world is vaguely medieval, lacking in the technologies driven by the invention of the steam engine and everything that followed. Instead, the lives of Will’s largely agrarian people revolve around a coming of age ceremony called Capping in which a metal net is fused with the flesh of a person’s skull. All this takes place inside a Tripod, a giant machine which strides into town on Capping Day, and draws those old enough to be Capped inside itself. Once Capped, each individual continues with his or her life but becomes completely loyal to the Tripods, stops asking questions about their origin and authority, and ceases to be curious about the world, preventing the discovery of dangerous things like explosives and electricity. For a few, the Capping is unsuccessful, and these people, called Vagrants, are left to wander, mad, about the countryside. Will, thirteen, and rapidly approaching his Capping Day, still has a free mind which begins asking questions. A man disguised as a Vagrant, but wearing only a fake Cap, finds Will, explains to him what the Caps do, and recruits him to escape to a stronghold of free men who are planning to revolt against the Tripods. His journey will take him across a deteriorated Europe, to a completely alien city (The City of Gold and Lead), and turn him from a boy into a dedicated freedom fighter (The Pool of Fire).

The appeal of this transparently veiled metaphor to a young man is plain: all the adults, with their rules and their loyalty to their jobs and their stress over bills are simply tools of the system, brainwashed into accepting a world that only wants to control them. Even today, although most outside observers would identify me as most like the Capped, I strongly identify with the freedom-loving, free-thinking Will Parker and his comrades. (I’m not really Capped; I’m just living undercover.) The story is blatantly one of resistance to the status quo. In contemporary terms, the Tripods represent The Man. And what self-respecting youth doesn’t want to stick it to him?

But what is most intriguing and ultimately most powerful about the series is that John Christopher never leaves the concept of freedom alone, never lets his characters, or his readers take it for granted. Christopher's idea of freedom is distinct from that referenced in country music songs. For Will, the cost of freedom, of free-thinking, of challenging the status quo, is very great; he pays with the loss of his family, his predictable life, several of his friends, his first love, and in many ways his childhood. For Christopher, living freely flies in the face of much of what we desire as humans—the wish to belong, the desire for comfort, the need to self-aggrandize. The struggle for freedom, throughout all of these books is both an external battle against the domination of the Tripods, and an internal one, of Will fighting against his own ignoble tendencies. At one point in the story, Will is offered a life of complete comfort, to be adopted into a family of royalty, as long as he is willing to be Capped. It’s not so simple for him to walk away.

The books are not perfect. The pacing is often uneven and the weirdly formal tone which works so well to help establish the setting sometimes slips into something more casual. Occasionally Christopher’s political messages can get a bit heavy-handed, as when Will discovers the aliens’ collection of beautiful women placed under glass like an insect collection, or when we learn that the original brain-washing of humanity was conducted through television. But for each of these conks over the head, Christopher illuminates other issues—e.g., the weirdness of tourism, and humanity’s own drive to “colonize”—with real subtlety.

Throughout the adventure, Will Parker is a wonderfully flawed hero on which to rest the hopes of mankind. He is often petty and too quick to temper, sometimes childish and even lazy. He is, thus, easy to identify with. A young man will recognize his own flaws in Will (as will a still-seeking adult) even as Will becomes more and more aware of these deficiencies and learns to correct them. At the same time, it is Will’s stubborn, youthful rebelliousness that empowers him. His job, after all, is to help save humanity, as it is all of ours.

See also:
Arthur C. Clarke has written that no trilogy should contain more than four books. This trilogy has a fourth book tacked on to the front, twenty years after the original series. The prequel, When the Tripods Came, details the initial conquest of earth. I have not yet read it.

Sam Riddleburger recently reviewed another of John Christopher’s books, the ecological thriller, The Long Winter.

Cross-posted at http://mrchompchomp.blogspot.com