Forsyth takes one what is usually misnamed drug trade but ought to be properly referred to as narcotics, and Forsyth does not mix the terms, to be fair - drugs include those that are in fact legitimate sold in a pharmacy with or without prescriptions from medical authority, and the term ought to be reserved for that part of substances, whether abused or not. For instance in poorer social strata people have been known to abuse fuel meant for stoves (less refined variation of petroleum) or glue, and they certainly do not qualify as drugs in any way, but have lethal effects along the lines of narcotics (hence the abuse). A better term in general would be abusive substances.
Descriptions of the narcotics and especially cocaine industry are extensive as are the financial and trade organisation structures involved along with logistics, and its well known social devastating consequences are given briefly since most of western society is by now all too familiar with those.
As usual there is excellent and well thought out plans about what can be done to cripple the said trade in a few short devastating blows - although this book sort of nullifies the effectiveness of them, so if anything such procedures must either have been gone through already or they are of little use (yes, the drones and gps etcetera can take out the small planes and sea vessels, but the disinformation requires lack of forewarning to be totally effective, as does the surprise "normal" raid to capture any corrupt officials). Possibly they have been used, or there are better variations not leaked here.
Devastating is the anticlimax where it becomes all too obvious why such measures must and do fail in US, which is, politics and dependence of politicians on elections by a populace unwilling to stomach the death throws of the narcotics trade which involves gang wars and innocent people caught in crossfire. So just when the whole thing is about to collapse effectively, it is reigned in, and the cocaine trade resumes - with a surprise or two yet by the pair that made the war against it happen.
A fortunate by product of the paranoia pervading US in particular and the aviation industry in general since about a decade ago is the inability of huge streams of carriers of narcotics to get through various entry channels into countries where markets offer a high payoff, all too believable. Then again, there is always the spectre of the corrupt baggage handler who can choose your bag at random. But now that such baggage is always x-rayed at point of boarding, that ought to be clearly impossible. So one hopes. Plight of the innocent Miss Arenal is a separate horror. Here it is a conspiracy, but it could very well happen to anyone caught in a war of a rich nation against another, less powerful one.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Monday, February 7, 2011
East of Eden; by John Steinbeck.
John Steinbeck is not only one of the most famous writers, and generally also a very respected one, but more than anything he transcends often from good writer to a great one. This is one of the works that is evidence of his quality that is at once magical and great both.
East Of Eden rises above the mundane and the unusual, the common and the evil, the different characters that it describes, by the good and the superlative, the aspiring human spirit and the calm, comprehending one; the courage of one and the silent tragedy of another.
It is not just the mirroring of Adam and Charles with slightly skewed images in Aaron and Caleb, and the questionable source of the money fo Adam's father mirrored in the beyond question source of Cathy's - it is the whole lot of people.
Especially Samuel and his whole clan, on one hand, with Adam's chinese housekeeper and cook on the other with his elders who went through years of learning to ponder on a question that had nothing to do with their ancestral culture. And found the answer, too!
It is Olive, with her stoic encouragement of a pilot she thought was in trouble; her sister who spread delight and peace and joy like a delicate but definite perfume in hearts and lives and brought smiles of expectation to those that expected to meet her, and herself died silently of a heartbreak. Another one who married an inventor, who went on trying, at the expense of making money - in fact spending all he had for his experiments.
Samuel's horse who had a grand name because he had nothing else. His wife who cared for her large family with the very little that their land could provide, and did not worry, only worked and provided and organised. Samuel who knew that Adam's Chinese housekeeper was more literate and erudite than his pretense to the contrary for sake of conforming to the local social prejudice, in order to blend into the background.
So many characters unforgettable - and so many lessons implicit and otherwise.
Of course, one may complain Steinbeck went with the more socially acceptable norm, in depicting evil in the accepted form in prevalent cultural prejudicial terms of Christian and Islamic heritage, by personifying it as a female - while evil rages far more often and far more visibly out there in garb of male gender. Think nazis, think Stalin, think kkk, think pedophiles and other abusers.
But one cannot expect everything from everyone, and if Steinbeck did not rise above all of his upbringing limitations, he was only human.
Friday, September 26, 2008
...............................................................
It is sometimes surprising how time changes perception with a widening and a lesser acceptance of morose, morbid love of grief that youth might tolerate under the assumption of such an attitude being the more grown up; one then suddenly realises that Divine is above all such attitudes, is about Bliss, and in fact love of morbidity or grief merely attaches one to heavy loads that keep one weighed down since that is precisely their function - and they keep one from Divine in fact.
An abridged or Readers' Digest version of the book keeps some beautiful prose bordering on poetry that Steinbeck is good with, but it also keeps one from the less appealing aspects of this book in particular, perhaps his writing in general. When re-reading it in the full version one is sickened with his obsession with sin, his entirely negative portrayals of women in general - those not related to him, that is; his portrayals of his mother and her sisters are free of this blemish - conforming with the semitic religions' identification of all that is negative with the female. This obsession with the semitic religious view - and by that I mean all the religions that originate with the old testament as their first book, that is to say chiefly three religions and otherwise a good deal larger number if one counts all branches as separate - keeps him in the fixed attitude of innocent being pigheaded idiots that are loved but do not love and are murdered, while those that love are the ones that get into murderous rages and survive with a permanent guilt weighing them down as if their being unwanted were not enough.
These obsessions of the author take away what beauty pervades the book on the whole and one is sickened by the end of it enough to wish one could hit him on the head with the book and say, get over this fixation, you have other heritage that can lead you to light, stop obsessing with the darkness. Divine is about Beauty and Light, not this sin-guilt load designed to keep you weighed down.
East Of Eden rises above the mundane and the unusual, the common and the evil, the different characters that it describes, by the good and the superlative, the aspiring human spirit and the calm, comprehending one; the courage of one and the silent tragedy of another.
It is not just the mirroring of Adam and Charles with slightly skewed images in Aaron and Caleb, and the questionable source of the money fo Adam's father mirrored in the beyond question source of Cathy's - it is the whole lot of people.
Especially Samuel and his whole clan, on one hand, with Adam's chinese housekeeper and cook on the other with his elders who went through years of learning to ponder on a question that had nothing to do with their ancestral culture. And found the answer, too!
It is Olive, with her stoic encouragement of a pilot she thought was in trouble; her sister who spread delight and peace and joy like a delicate but definite perfume in hearts and lives and brought smiles of expectation to those that expected to meet her, and herself died silently of a heartbreak. Another one who married an inventor, who went on trying, at the expense of making money - in fact spending all he had for his experiments.
Samuel's horse who had a grand name because he had nothing else. His wife who cared for her large family with the very little that their land could provide, and did not worry, only worked and provided and organised. Samuel who knew that Adam's Chinese housekeeper was more literate and erudite than his pretense to the contrary for sake of conforming to the local social prejudice, in order to blend into the background.
So many characters unforgettable - and so many lessons implicit and otherwise.
Of course, one may complain Steinbeck went with the more socially acceptable norm, in depicting evil in the accepted form in prevalent cultural prejudicial terms of Christian and Islamic heritage, by personifying it as a female - while evil rages far more often and far more visibly out there in garb of male gender. Think nazis, think Stalin, think kkk, think pedophiles and other abusers.
But one cannot expect everything from everyone, and if Steinbeck did not rise above all of his upbringing limitations, he was only human.
Friday, September 26, 2008
...............................................................
It is sometimes surprising how time changes perception with a widening and a lesser acceptance of morose, morbid love of grief that youth might tolerate under the assumption of such an attitude being the more grown up; one then suddenly realises that Divine is above all such attitudes, is about Bliss, and in fact love of morbidity or grief merely attaches one to heavy loads that keep one weighed down since that is precisely their function - and they keep one from Divine in fact.
An abridged or Readers' Digest version of the book keeps some beautiful prose bordering on poetry that Steinbeck is good with, but it also keeps one from the less appealing aspects of this book in particular, perhaps his writing in general. When re-reading it in the full version one is sickened with his obsession with sin, his entirely negative portrayals of women in general - those not related to him, that is; his portrayals of his mother and her sisters are free of this blemish - conforming with the semitic religions' identification of all that is negative with the female. This obsession with the semitic religious view - and by that I mean all the religions that originate with the old testament as their first book, that is to say chiefly three religions and otherwise a good deal larger number if one counts all branches as separate - keeps him in the fixed attitude of innocent being pigheaded idiots that are loved but do not love and are murdered, while those that love are the ones that get into murderous rages and survive with a permanent guilt weighing them down as if their being unwanted were not enough.
These obsessions of the author take away what beauty pervades the book on the whole and one is sickened by the end of it enough to wish one could hit him on the head with the book and say, get over this fixation, you have other heritage that can lead you to light, stop obsessing with the darkness. Divine is about Beauty and Light, not this sin-guilt load designed to keep you weighed down.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
The Confession; by John Grisham.
Grisham used to give satisfactory if fantastic but not unrealistic endings to his tales of horrors and travails suffered by innocent and good people due to life and law in US, and then he went on to give some realism by doing away with the satisfactory endings in a couple of comparatively recent books; in this one he sort of finds a midway by describing how the legal and political (which is far too entangled in US at almost every level) system works like a beast of prey intent on finding a satisfactory victim to sacrifice for a crime and keeps the sacrifice on when the doubts about the identity of the criminal are overpowering, especially when the victim is the "right" race and the person caught in the legal net and browbeaten into signing a false confession is of the "other" race. That is the major gist of the background machinery crushing justice and people alike in the story, but it is all the more horror as well as satisfactory solution combined with a clever adaptation of the Count of Monte Cristo with the identity of the criminal brought forth via a confession to a pastor by the said criminal, and the posthumous honour bestowed on the executed young boy (since he was taken in at eighteen and executed at twenty seven with no relief in the interim, he never really experienced being a young man or an adult) by the total exoneration is as tragic as the satisfactory prosecution of the secondary criminals in the story - the police officer who manipulated the innocent boy into confessing to something he did not do and repeatedly said so, the prosecuting attorney who knew the case was weak and got through on the basis of the affair he had with the judge, the subsequent judges who refused to consider the appeal on merits of the case and the new evidence submitted by the defence, the governor of Texas who refused to reprieve a mere day or week or month to consider the new evidence and his henchmen who lied, and so forth.
One does wish Grisham would show a downfall of the governor as well, but we know how Texas is. It is miraculous enough in this story that the exoneration was so clear and so quick, although the politico-legal machinery executed the innocent man nevertheless. The execution set in motion a huge storm against the whole process nationwide but was used in the wrong way by the guilty governor and his men for political survival (give reprieves to all the next guys for whatever flimsy excuse their attorneys bring up, never mind the total lack of doubt about the crimes).
One does wish Grisham would show a downfall of the governor as well, but we know how Texas is. It is miraculous enough in this story that the exoneration was so clear and so quick, although the politico-legal machinery executed the innocent man nevertheless. The execution set in motion a huge storm against the whole process nationwide but was used in the wrong way by the guilty governor and his men for political survival (give reprieves to all the next guys for whatever flimsy excuse their attorneys bring up, never mind the total lack of doubt about the crimes).
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