Author: gcaw

Growing (Up) at Eight

Australian novelist Peter Carey’s new book His Illegal Self tells the story of the kidnapping of the eight-year-old son of radical parents.

The boy at the center of this novel is a sort of Sixties royalty, a princeling of the radical left. The son of two figures sufficiently extreme to have concocted bombs and appeared on national news, his name is Che (“Jay,” insists his patrician grandmother, his legal custodian after abandonment by his mother), and he’s too young to know that the obligations of royalty are manifold, and rarely chosen.

The plot skips around, chronologically, but reveals quickly that the woman he thinks is his mother — arrived to pick him up from Grandma — is a Radcliffe bookworm and erstwhile friend and employee of the family. She finds herself, seemingly against her will and judgment, shepherding the boy through a world of radicalism, codes, and shadows, made more obscure still by the confusion of Che, whose tortured perspective we share.

The political aspects of the novel have attracted much of its reviewers’ attention, but its real grace is the bold portrayal of a timid child at the center of an adult drama. This is too rare in fiction about kids. Huck Finn, read by Che and his kidnapper on their journey, keeps good humor and self-confidence even when tormented morally. That sort of exuberance graces only some children in real life. In Che we feel his shivers of fright and self-doubt, his longing for familial love even when those closest to him have all found something they value more. Its depiction of Che and of Dial, the ‘Cliffie kidnapper, are sufficient to make this novel a beauty.

Originally appeared at TheAtlantic.com

Tags books

Atlantic Monthly

Need a Lawyer, Stat

A paper in The Lancet argued that developed countries’ recruitment of health-care workers from Africa constitutes an international crime.

Sub-Saharan Africa has it bad. The Lancet notes that it “carries 25% of the world’s disease burden yet has only 3% of the world’s health workers.” The doctors tend not to get paid on time, and they often have to fight the world’s ghastliest diseases with the medical equivalent of bows and arrows. A tropical disease specialist in London once advised his patient to save airfare: rather than visit the Congo, he said, just open your mouth and leap into a cesspool.

Tags Africa, law, medicine

Atlantic Monthly

Hagatna, Mayday

A B-2 bomber, at $1.2-billion apiece the most expensive bird in the US Air Force, crashed in Guam. The crew ejected safely.

Over a billion dollars, and all that’s left is a pit of ashes. Defense appropriations is tricky, and there are hidden costs to funding — or not funding — programs. Will the B-2 prove indispensable in a war with Iran? Is the US edge over its competitors in an air war too slim to permit slacking off in our quest for the most fearsome, and fearsomely expensive, plane the world has ever seen?

Atlantic Monthly

Unencrypted?

Princeton researchers published a paper describing a devastating attack on standard encryption — including encryption used to secure government secrets.

Data remain safe, most of the time. The attacker needs access to the computer minutes after the user has walked away, and if he arrives later the data stay locked. If the user guards the computer jealously, by clutching it close to the chest, or, as Atlantic employees with company-issued laptops are required to do, entrusting it during nights and weekends to a Gurkha security team, then even the geeks of Princeton can’t get in.

Tags science

Atlantic Monthly

Elsie’s Revenge

The USDA recalled 143 million pounds of beef that had passed through a California plant — more than all the recalled meat in the previous decade combined.

Workers at the Westland-Hallmark beef factory poked very sick cows, prodding them into the abattoirs with with the prongs of forklifts. What makes a cow non-ambulatory? Mad cow disease, for one thing. The dreaded kuru relative attacks the central nervous system and leads to immobility and a terrible demise.

Tags animals, food and drink, medicine, science

New York Sun

Why We Fight

The New York Sun

Review of Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory (Princeton University Press).

Violence is rarely what we expect it to be. “It was so new and senseless that we felt no pain, neither in body nor in spirit,” Primo Levi wrote of his first experience of Nazi brutality. “Only a profound amazement.”

Sociologist and amateur martial artist Randall Collins starts his wonderful, rambling book, “Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory” (Princeton University Press, 584 pages, $45), by pointing out that violence baffles us, and that it rarely resembles our imaginations, or what we see in films. Between individuals, combat often looks goofy and undignified, more slappy flailing than solid punches. For group violence, the saloon brawls in Westerns have taught us to expect bystanders to join in and smash chairs over each other’s backs; but in real life, bar patrons tend to back off from the melee, staring inertly.

Tags books, war

Smart Set

Mengele in Paraguay

The Smart Set

On the jungle trail of the Nazi doctor.

Eugene, a Belgian computer programmer, has retired to a cottage in southern Paraguay, and the pride of his golden years is his view. From his stone patio, he sees forested hills, the fringes of yerba mate plantations, and, in the distance, the crumbling ruins of a Jesuit settlement two centuries old. “Like a picture,” he says, and I nod to agree, even though my mind is not on the beautiful vista, but on the dark figure who once shared it.

The Nazi doctor Josef Mengele cheated justice for decades by hiding out in South America, sometimes in these very hills. Had he stayed in Germany he would almost certainly have died by the noose. Jews and Gypsies at Auschwitz called him “the Angel of Death”: He killed men and women for the dubious medical value of dissecting them, and for pleasure. He injected dyes into children’s eyes to see if he could change their color. When he ran out of Jews, he sent memos asking for more, and he got them.

Tags Germany, Nazis, Paraguay, travel

GOOD

Let’s Harvest the Organs of Death-Row Inmates

Post author By gcaw
Post date 1 February 2008
1 Comment on Let’s Harvest the Organs of Death-Row Inmates

GOOD magazine, issue 009 (“All You Can Eat”)

An unfortunate side effect of hanging or poisoning a man is that his organs go sour before they can be transplanted. Death-row inmates have repeatedly asked to donate their organs, but their requests are always denied. The simple reason is that execution generally ruins organs before they can be harvested. By the time you cut someone down from the gallows or pronounce the injection lethal, the heart and lungs will have thumped and puffed for the last time. Soon after, the kidneys start rotting, and before long nothing is useful but the corneas. Even with beheading— still practiced in Saudi Arabia—the heart and lungs probably wouldn’t make it, says Douglas Hanto, chief transplant surgeon at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

Tags crime, medicine, science