Month: December 2018

The fourth in the series starring journalist Danny Churchill and fashion photographer Anna Burgin, “Fade to Silence” is an engaging, immersive adventure involving Balkan thugs, British  corporations, crooked cops, and a complex murder. Danny and Anna are wonderful, engaging leads and the interplay between them is nuanced and absorbing. The plot is Byzantine, the locales strike true, and Bradwell has a sure sense of pace and plot. For all that dire situations abound, this “thriller” is not gritty, indeed it has the feel of a semi-cosy, if that’s a correct term, but I didn’t need blood and guts and terror to thoroughly enjoy the tale.

The second in a series featuring Washington reporter Beck Rikki, “Naked Truth” has a plot more twisty than any I’ve read this year, which should have been a boon. The story revolves around a dead U.S. chief justice and seems to involve every major politician and lawyer in the country, and the sequences of doublecrossing rivals some of those old Ludlum thrillers. The various settings are pithily described, the dialogue froths with wit and energy, and the unwinding of the plot is pleasingly relentless. But our hero Beck, while dogged and smart in the way that crime solvers need to be, rarely came alive to me, and Pullen’s machinations with different points of view merely moved from one cardboard character to another. I liked the intricacies of American reportage and, until towards the end, enjoyed trying (unsuccessfully) to second guess the plot surprises, but the one-sitting reading left me cold.

Robert Plomin, a prolific and longstanding behavioral geneticist (itself a relatively new profession) has, with “Blueprint,” announced an Eden-facing (in his eyes, that is) grand theorem, namely that nature (aka our genes) trumps nurture (aka our environment). “I hope,” he writes, “this no longer sounds like just another pop-psychology claim without evidence to back it up.” He takes the reader steadily and stylishly through his work on twin studies, which purportedly dramatize the unexpectedly high influence of genetics – on so many matters of interest, from depression to braininess, from introspection to insomnia, from addiction to marriage stability. Then he and his peers tried and failed to find links between particular genes and psychological traits and outcomes. Now, they aggregate tens of thousands of “SNPs,” genetic morsels each contributing (he claims) a miniscule amount, into a grand “polygenic score.” One’s polygenic score causes (not just correlates with) a raft of psychological features. I enjoyed the book: Plomin writes clearly, with stylish gusto but also with precision, in a tightly organized fashion. I also recommend “Blueprint” as a layperson’s intro to this burgeoning field. Read it because you must. However, as a confused but numerate layperson, I caution you on his societally explosive conclusions. Two possible blind spots occur to me. Firstly, Plomin admits his results depend on the “environment” of a given time and place. Might it not be true that in a “better” environment, the influence of the gene becomes muted? Perhaps his results reflect our cruel, unsupporting world. Secondly, a “trust me” indecipherable “score,” without explanatory roots, has to be suspicious. What hidden complexities will be revealed with further time and enquiry, and will they rubbish his claims? Look, I’m dubious and suspect he is swept up by his own amazement, but I heartily recommend the scintillating read.

A historian enlists the aid of Helen Oddfellow, a London tour guide, the lure being a lost Marlowe masterpiece, and rapidly the two are in jeopardy, murderous jeopardy. If this sounds like Dan Brown territory, Unlawful Things is not like that at all, entirely to its credit. Debut thriller writer Anna Sayburn Lane plots like a dream, weaving together high-action drama and a fascinating historical puzzle. Helen is a splendid character, as is Nick, the journalist who teams up with her, and the supporting characters are complex and real. The settings in London and the countryside are beautifully evoked. The climax and postmortem are both timed to perfection. A great example of a thriller with intellectual panache.

The visual arts elude this reviewer, so I’m normally unlikely to read Sebastian Smee, prominent Washington Post art critic, but his topic “Net loss: The inner life in the digital age” (the cornerstone piece in Quarterly Essay 72) is right up my alley. What an inspired impulse to read this nuanced, undogmatic, sharp look at the modern world of Facebook, Twitter and their kin! Smee tentatively labels himself a materialist like me but, as I do, he uses the language of spirituality and creativity as he proceeds to explore “the inner life with its own history of metamorphosis – rich, complex and often mysterious, even to ourselves.” His method isn’t didactic or technically philosophical. Instead he meanders through and around the short stories of Anton Chekhov, the films of Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch, a portrait by Paul Cezanne, a Rachel Cusk novel, Gillian Wearing’s paintings, and so on. How is social media altering the slippery “inner life,” he asks, and chips away at familiar charges of social media’s adverse impacts. Never more than hesitant, his explorations intoxicated me. In the end, he sees our modern response to mortality and aloneness is “to disperse ourselves, by being as widely visible as possible,” facilitated and urged on by the internet. Are we “excavating too much…?” Can “we find ways to pay attention again to our solitude…?” I cannot recommend too highly this exhilarating, wise reflection.