Month: May 2021

Michael Lewis’s portfolio of superb journalistic books revolves around analytical data in the everyday world plus smooth readability underpinned by compelling storytelling instincts. You cannot go wrong with a Michael Lewis book but some are more stellar than the others. “The Premonition: A Pandemic Story” is Lewis on song: a tale snatched from global headlines; brilliant real-life stories garnered from interviews; and vital analysis. Focusing on the Wolverines, an informal band of professionals and administrators obsessed with protecting us, the global corpus of humanity, against pandemics, Lewis sets the scene back in the Obama era, then walks us through how the Wolverines assembled the first data on Covid-19 and concluded with fervid urgency that it would sweep America and the world, and how they attempted to shift America, beset with a president and administration hellbent on doing less than nothing, into survival mode. Lewis is a master explainer of anything of complexity, and his narration of how the nature of Covid-19 revealed itself in fuzzy numbers from China and the world is magnificent. With the pandemic still raging, The Premonition is a real-life thriller more exciting than James Bond and essential reading for anyone with a mind and a conscience.

Imaginatively, Joseph Knox, in his fourth novel and his first standalone one, “True Crime Story,” has seized upon our passion for true crime podcasts and the like. A Manchester girl goes missing without resolution, a podcast investigator conducts an investigation years later, and then an author (named Joseph Knox, of course) needs to mop up the interlaced stories and evidence to finally seek justice. Comprising interview snippets with all the various suspects and acquaintances, and memos between podcaster and Knox, the plot is a maze inviting the alert crime fiction reader to piece together the vital clues. Knox is an energetic, talented stylist who nails all the various characters and maintains high tension throughout. I greatly enjoyed the antics of True Crime Story until … until the race homeward in the final ten percent of the novel. The trouble was, such episodic narrative construction stymies genuine character identification; in particular, “author Joseph Knox” eluded this reader. All up, True Crime Story is a stylish hoot of an experiment that many genre readers will lap up, but its experimental limitations can leave one flat after the final revelatory climax.

Should billionaire philanthropists issue books from their elevated towers? Normally, I would counsel them not to, but “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need” is an apt, honest, quirky take on a subject that Bill Gates is throwing money at, the biggest topic of them all, the climate emergency. Very early on, Gates cautions that his expertise is in tech and analysis, not politics (even though he meddles in the latter necessarily) but even with that bracelet of modesty, it’s clear that How to Avoid a Climate Disaster is an uber geek’s synthesis. So if you’re after radicalism or political ire, this narrative might disappoint, but I found it to be a tonic. Using the kind of geeky focus I myself might attempt (no doubt ineffectually), Gates sets up, in effect, a huge spreadsheet in which he dissects our current annual global 51 billion tons of carbon emissions between five macro categories and then explores what the current “green premium” (how much more expensive the carbon-free options are) is for each cell. Some will find his emphasis on technology too emphatic, others will bridle at broad-brush simplifications, but geeky old me found the whole explication refreshing and fascinating. Even if you disagree with his analysis, or his remedies, and I’m sure we’d all find such disagreements, the analytical generosity and clarity he employs means that evaluating his dissection is open and useful. And if he pushes those solutions he has invested in, why not? His work with poverty and pandemics shows his approach is not only generous but rigorous. How to Avoid a Climate Disaster is an individualistic must-read at the start of the 2020s, our decade of destiny.

Behold “The Fall of Koli,” the final, remarkable instalment of M. R. Carey’s destined-to-be-a-classic Rampart trilogy. New to this superlative world builder and science-fiction stylist, I swooned from the very first words of The Book of Koli, then rocketed through The Trials of Koli, and have now put aside all else to check out the series’ triumphant closer. The trilogy is set in a distant future Earth dunked back into primitivism, an Earth blighted by human-created ecological madness and dotted with remnants of once-near-magical technology. In the first book, young Koli, writing in a simplistic dumbed-down voice, is thrown out of his struggling clan, and finds the three companions gracing the trilogy: an AI music player, a tetchy healer, and an angry warrior. At the start of The Fall of Koli, the quartet finds itself aboard a boat searching for the origins of a signal across the ocean from long-drowned London. From then on, the storyline escalates into a baroque, beautifully realized series of plot twists involving genetic foretelling, cyborgs, long-dormant metal armies, primitive battles, and massed countryside battles. Nothing is predictable, all fits like a glove. Koli is a classic sci-fi hero out of the mold of Gene Wolfe, the author writes a dream, and the emotional heft of the grand theme of humanity’s reach overstretched and perhaps restored is deep, and … well, as you can gather, I consider The Fall of Koli to be the capstone of a transcendent three-volume work. Buy all three today and sink in, dear reader.

Crime writer Garry Disher is a consummate craftsman and all his series have blessed the genre. His latest police procedural series, featuring hardworking, earnest country policeman Hirsch (aka Constable Paul Hirschhausen), transcends the usual narrow field. Set in the rolling hills and wheat fields and bleak terrain north of Adelaide, on the way towards the Flinders Ranges and thence the great inner deserts of the Australian outback, it’s a small-time world with everyday rural folks, and it could have been boring as shite. Instead, the first of the series, Bitter Wash Road, got me hooked and the follow-up, Peace, complexified and deepened the body-strewn tales. “Consolation” is even stronger. Disher is a master at spooling out plots fit to baffle even the most conscientious mystery reader, while at the same time enriching the read with a huge cast of absorbing characters, an immersion in the rich setting, and his muscular, almost poetic prose. Let me not spoil the plot beyond tantalizing you with the dust jacket crumbs: Hirsch receives a query about a possibly mistreated schoolgirl while hunting a snowdropper (someone stealing women’s underwear off clotheslines), then an irate father blows off steam, then … then Consolation takes off. The finest mystery I’ve read this year.