Reviews of New Books
By Blake Hurst, Randy Boyagoda, and Paul Mrockowski
Green Fictions
By Blake Hurst
State of Fear
By Michael Crichton
HarperCollins, 603 pages, $27.95
On the cover of his latest book, State of Fear, Michael Crichton's name appears in type at least three times the size of the title. Mr. Crichton is now a brand, like iPod, Dell, and Grisham-and a good thing too, or this valuable book would never have been published. As an addict of disposable fiction, I can safely attest that most bestselling novels today are infected with political correctness. Absent the long string of hit novels and blockbuster movies based on Crichton's work, it seems unlikely that this decidedly unfashionable book would ever have been allowed into print.
Although State of Fear doesn't really work as a page-turner, as a painless primer on the environmental wars it's a masterpiece. Page-turners work best when the plot moves so fast that the fantasy washes effortlessly over the reader as he races to discover the two most important unknowns: Will the hero save the world? And will he bed the (fiercely independent, yet extremely fit and lissome) maiden?
Crichton's hero and the "Magnificent Seven" who join with him to protect the world from environmental terrorism make an extremely unlikely special ops team. And the fate of one character (obviously modeled on Martin Sheen) is particularly hard to digest. Mind you, I loved what happened to the Sheen figure. Readers willing to suspend a little disbelief will find this figure a hoot.
At the end of the book, Crichton provides an extensive list of observations on the environment that he distilled from his three years of research prior to writing his book, believing the reader may want to know what his own conclusions are on the public issues that underlie State of Fear. Some readers will be shocked by his lack of sentimentality. Others will feel that frisson that comes from having their own thoughts stated with special eloquence. Even without reading his afterword, no one will have any doubt about what Crichton believes.
Adding to this novel's unusual nature is the fact that it is replete with footnotes and charts and an extended bibliography -very useful to those of us who want to atone for our escapist reading by supplementing it with something substantial. In this case, our adventurous dessert comes with a pouch of factual vitamins.
Michael Crichton is a doctor, and most of his previous novels have a technical theme. He's also the creator of the television series "ER," so he is practiced and adept at presenting technical matters to a lay audience. Two years ago, when he gave a speech at Cal Tech looking skeptically at global warming, it traveled around the Internet at virus speed, and I remember marveling at the way he encapsulated many of the logical snarls in conventional environmental wisdom. In this novel he has expanded that critique in a manner that will bring his skepticism to a much larger audience.
The first few conclusions stated in his "author's message" are straightforward: "We know astonishingly little about every aspect of the environment-from its past history, to its present state, to how to conserve and protect it. In every debate, all sides overstate the extent of existing knowledge and its degree of certainty. Atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing, and human activity is the probable cause. We are also in the midst of a natural warming trend that began about 1850. Nobody knows how much of the present warming trend might be a natural phenomenon...and how much might be man-made."
Crichton then requests that we wait until we've had a chance to check the accuracy of various climate models before basing momentous decisions on them. He makes the brilliantly simple observation that the "precautionary principle" (the environmentalist argument that it is better not to change anything than to risk causing harm), properly applied, forbids the precautionary principle!
By the end of the novel, the world is saved, at least for now. In real life, Crichton and other sensible people have got a lot of work to do before the world is safe from scientifically illiterate and economically damaging hysteria about the environment.
TAE contributing writer Blake Hurst devours fiction from his home in Missouri.
Deep in the Middle East
By Randy Boyagoda
From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East
By Bernard Lewis
Oxford University Press, 349 pages, $28
This distillation of a lifetime of writing from Bernard Lewis on Islamic history, the Middle East, and their relationship with the West is lacking in one respect: there is no index. But this is probably a virtue, because foraging through the writings of the West's foremost scholar of Islam for isolated references to Osama bin Laden or Baathism would be to undervalue, profoundly, the achievements and insights of Lewis's scholarship. However much today's convulsive global situation tempts us to go rummaging for topical sound bites, this must be resisted, for Lewis rewards patient reading.
To understand the long, slow dance between Islam and the West, we should follow his example and adopt a respectful, exacting, and deep historical approach to studying one of the world's major religions and the civilizations it has bequeathed. From Babel to Dragomans is as rich and intricate as a sheaf of Ottoman illuminations, and ought to be required reading for thoughtful students of twenty-first-century world affairs.
In this book, selections from Lewis's vast published repertoire have been divided into three sections: "Past History," "Current History," and "About History." The third group speaks to a more specialized, scholarly audience and ends the collection rather dryly. One essay, "In Defense of History," does stand out: Lewis briskly skewers the "self-flagellating history" practiced by many Western scholars, which ascribes the world's ills to the West. Throughout this collection, Lewis eviscerates ivory tower fashions like the modern academic tendency to celebrate non-Western cultures while ignoring the garish inequalities-between rich and poor, ethnic and religious groups, and men and women-that often cripple them. Lewis brooks none of the historical distortions that are often employed to puncture First World presumptions of enlightenment and progress.
Indeed, he is best known (and reviled in some circles) for his thesis on the flaws of Islamic civilization, which he has credited to an "inability to keep pace with the rapid advance of the West in science and technology, in the arts of both war and peace, and in government and commerce." Lewis's critiques, consistently buttressed by voluminous evidence, do not seem motivated by sectarian animosities. His goals, revealed in the "Current History" section, are to help Westerners better understand the complexities of Islam while helping Muslim societies come to terms with history's bruises and the bruising realities of modern life in their countries.
In a reflection written shortly after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Lewis urges: "The effort must be made to penetrate beyond the catchwords and slogans and to see the Middle East, not as a battlefield in an ideological, racial, or great power war, but as it is. Then perhaps men of good will may find it possible to be pro-Israel without being anti-Arab, and to be pro-Arab without endorsing the clowns and tyrants who have degraded and dishonored a great and gifted people."
Sadly, nearly four decades later, the palaces of the Arab world are still overrun by clowns and tyrants. Thankfully, Lewis's recommendation remains relevant. It remains our great challenge in this tense time to be pro-West without being anti-Islam, and vice versa.
Lewis doesn't raid the history books to ornament contemporary arguments. He conducts painstaking research into the past in an attempt to discover the recurrent characteristics of the long conflict between Judeo-Christianity and Islam. In the process he corrects many blinkered understandings and confronts us with the truth that Islam and the West have been in tension for more than a thousand years, and will continue to be for some time. Essays from this collection that can help us fulfill our current roles in this millennial drama include, "A Taxonomy of Group Hatred," "Islam and the West," "The Middle East: Westernized Despite Itself," "The Middle East in World Affairs," "The Shia," and "The Roots of Muslim Rage." Compared to these riches, some of Lewis's recent op-eds, also reprinted in the book, seem like over-skimmed milk.
Beyond the gravity of much of this material, this collection also provides deep intellectual pleasures. Sections from "Past History"-on Middle Eastern food and East/West tourism from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries-teem with wonders and peculiarities. They help us understand why upon his first visit to the Middle East in 1938, Bernard Lewis happily "felt like a Muslim bridegroom meeting the bride with whom he is to spend the rest of his life."
Such joy linked to the Middle East seems strange these days. Yet we are fortunate to have a scholar who is simultaneously smitten, intelligent, and honest enough to write testaments of enduring value on a historical relationship that is very complicated, and, he would have us know, very important.
Randy Boyagoda recently completed his Ph.D. in English at Boston University.
How Businesses Get Big
By Paul Mrockowski
Deals of the Century: Wall Street, Mergers, and the Making of Modern America
By Charles R. Geisst
Wiley, 330 pages, $29.95
Charles Geisst's Deals of the Century is a chronology of 100 years of mergers and acquisitions, and their effects on America. He presents a synopsis of major deals that illustrate Wall Street's contributions to the growth of U.S. firms across three distinct eras of corporate dealmaking. Geisst plays his history straight, but leaves a bitter taste with his insistence that mergers are bad for everyone except investment bankers and corporate officers.
Beginning at the height of Pierpont Morgan's empire in the early twentieth century, Geisst wanders through the evolution of mergers and acquisitions, attempting to extract conclusions about the motivations of the parties involved, and the economic effects of the deals. Though the typical takeover and the role of the Wall Street establishment have changed over the last hundred years, the end result, according to Geisst, has remained consistently disappointing.
According to Geisst, before the Federal Reserve System, bankers held sway over corporations through access to cash. Without a central bank to increase the money supply and decrease interest rates, corporations were laid prostrate before their bankers in times of economic disruption. The banks, notably Barings in Europe and J. P. Morgan & Co. in the U.S., used this to their advantage with clients struggling to remain in the banks' good graces. They exploited their power by demanding seats on corporate boards and advising the heads of the companies. Bankers were thus able to force the geniuses of American enterprise-the Carnegies, the Edisons, and the Bells-to abdicate control and agree to be sold by merger or acquisition. Banks made windfall profits.
The roaring stock market of the 1920s allowed bankers to attract investors into financing merger deals, and "trust banking" continued to spur mergers in retail, automobiles, and utilities until the Depression. When the market finally crashed, it was only a matter of time until government regulators ended the party by passing the Banking Act of 1933, which fenced off economic sectors banks were allowed to participate in.
But after World War II there was another wave of mergers that created conglomerates, and bankers took on a new role. Without direct access to capital from the insurance companies with which they used to be intertwined, bank merger specialists turned themselves into corporate technical advisors. They explained how financial rules and accounting practices could be used to allow a company to grow its bottom line.
Massive corporations spanning many industries emerged with the assistance of their banking consigliore. Unlike the merger boom of the early 1900s, bankers no longer drove the process. Now, the impetus came from corporate boardrooms; bankers were the engineers. Bankers like Felix Rohatyn of Lazard Freres helped create octopi like ITT and Tyco.
Rohatyn, later prominent as the architect of New York City's 1970s bailout and Bill Clinton's ambassador to France, emerges in Geisst's tale as a key enabler of misdeeds by giant conglomerates. Big firms preyed on smaller companies in pursuit of a leviathan-esque chokehold on American consumers, Geisst argues. He claims that big merged companies often tied employees and consumers to products from sister companies even when economically inefficient. When stock market problems in 1970 put ice on the mergers market, the high stock valuations of conglomerates evaporated, and sheep-like investors were left holding the bag, says Geisst.
Geisst is gleeful in depicting the final years of the twentieth century as a time when predators ended up preying on themselves. Investment banks began to acquire one another, sacrificing each other's foot soldiers on the altar of "synergy," in merger-related layoffs. But Geisst turns dark in arguing that the megamergers that created sprawling banks like Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase dangerously erode the walls built in 1933 to keep investment banking separate from tamer businesses like savings banking, securities retailing, and life insurance sales.
But Geisst's gloominess seems unwar-ranted. Though certain descriptions are irrefutable-such as that job reductions often follow a merger-there are also plenty of benefits that Geisst overlooks. He mocks the idea that mergers can produce economic efficiencies-though this is precisely what makes most of them lucrative. He ignores that corporate restructurings and shutdowns of failed operations, while hard, might help the economy by eliminating redundant or poorly managed operations, freeing up resources for more sensible allocations.
Geisst seems especially fixated on portraying the individual American investor as a sheep led to slaughter by manipulative investment bankers seeking capital for ill-conceived empire-building.
But if Geisst's picture were correct, the whole American economy would now be a mess. Happily, the expansions and recombinations of American businesses over the century chronicled here have had much more positive results than this author would lead us to believe.
Paul R. Mrockowski works for an investment advisory firm in New York City.
