The Kill Artist

This is an Israeli secret service thriller featuring retired agent Gabriel Allon. The good guys are the men of the Israeli secret service led by retired but not tired spymaster Ari Shamron, with his retired protege Gabriel being called back to active duty. The bad guys are renegade Palestinian terrorists who would rather kill Jews than settle for peaceful existence with them, led by Gabriel’s arch-enemy Tariq. The goal of the battle is elimination of Tariq by all covert means possible before he caused further damage to a planned peace deal between the Israelis and the PLO. The battle is waged from Europe to America. In the end the good guys come out victorious, but with Gabriel nearly paying with his life and then discovering with some anger that Ari had kept him much in the dark while the battle lasted.

After Tariq murdered some Israelis in Europe including an ambassador, Shamron is called into service by the Israeli leader, to do something about it without further damaging the reputation of the Israeli secret service. He in turn recalls Gabriel from retirement in England, where he’s been making money restoring old damaged paintings. Shamron convinces Gabriel that Tariq, his old foe was behind the murders, and starts him on a chase for Tariq. Gabriel had assassinated Tariq’s terrorist brother when Tariq was young, and in retaliation Tariq had later bombed Gabriel’s wife in Europe, fatally injuring her and killing their baby. So Gabriel had a score to settle with him. The chase becomes a battle of wits between the Israeli secret service, and terrorist Palestinians who would rather have the whole land for themselves than share it with Israel. While Gabriel thinks he is watching Tariq, Tariq is in fact leading him on, with his own plans of death. The chase ends bloody in New York with Tariq shot to death and Gabriel shot but not dead.

Woven in is the story of Jacqueline, a beautiful “French” model. In actual fact she was Jewish, named Sarah at birth. Her grandfather was only a baby in 1945 and managed to survive the holocaust because a kindly French neighbor claimed him as hers when the police came to take the parents forcefully to their death camp. Jacqueline had been recruited by Shamron for undercover operations and had in fact accompanied Gabriel in one of his various killing missions against the Palestinian fighters. Now she is getting old for a model and so looking for a new sort of existence and identity. Shamron made it possible for her, getting her in with Gabriel in the chase for Tariq. And she it was that actually killed Tariq, after Tariq’s unseen shot disabled Gabriel. Her cover was blown as a result of publicity given to the shootings and she could no longer return to Paris to continue life as it used to be, settling in Israel after the operation.

The aim of getting Jacqueline into the act was so she could get close to Yusef, a top member of Tariq’s organization, one fabled for his like of women. Through her the Israelis would be learning secrets about getting to Tariq. But this was where Shamron deceived Gabriel. Right from his boyhood, Yusef had been an undercover agent of Shamron himself, playing a double-edged game. Gabriel only got to discover this with a lot of disbelief and anger at the close of the story. And much as Shamron would like him to remain in the secret service in Israel, he preferred to return to his quiet life of retirement in England in the end.

June 19, 2015. Review initially written in 2010. Novel first published in 1998, this Signet (New American Library) edition being published in 2004. Picture source: Yahoo (Images).

The Potter’s Wheel

This is a character-molding story about a spoilt kid in the village some miles from Onitsha during the early forties while the second world war was on. Obuechina, an only son, was a joy to his parents as the previous five kids were girls. His mother therefore pampered him. His father was not always at home to supervise his upbringing. Around his ninth birthday the father decided to send him to a strict teacher with a childless and wicked wife to teach him common sense.

At Teacher’s house, Obu learns from the servants the rules of survival in the house. He hates the hard life and wishes to escape. After a year he visits home and tells his parents he isn’t returning to that wicked house. But his father finally convinces him that living with Teacher is his insurance for future education and greatness.

June 18, 2015. Review initially written in 1992. Novel first published in 1973. Picture source: Yahoo (Images).

Guanya Pau

This is supposed to be the first novel written by an African. It is the story of a Liberian princess, the daughter of a reputable leader. After her father’s death her mother gives her out in marriage at 4 years. She grows up with a mind of her own and wants nothing to do with the ugly old man with many wives who wants her as his next wife. She has fallen in love with a guy her age, and to avoid being taken by the old man runs away with her closest friend.

As they run from town to town, village to village, they are faced with the same custom that placed women at a level not higher than cows. They are eventually captured in the end, but jump into a river to die rather than go back and be forced to live a life they despise.

June 16, 2015. Review initially written in 1999. Novel first published in 1891, reissued by the University of Nebraska Press in 1994, with a forward by Oyekan Owomoyela. Picture source: Yahoo (Images).

Megatrends

Subtitled Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives, this is about ten new trends research revealed to the author for the American society of the 1980s and beyond. The first of these is the change from an industrial to an information society, where the product of sale (and the subject of work) consists of information or knowledge rather than tangible items produced in factories. There is discussion about how Japan has overtaken the US as the leading industrial country.

CONTENTS
Introduction
1 Industrial Society ==> Information Society 1
2 Forced Technology ==> High Tech/High Touch 35
3 National Economy ==> World Economy 53
4 Short Term ==> Long Term 81
5 Centralization ==> Decentralization 103
6 Institutional Help ==> Self-Help 143
7 Representative Democracy ==> Participatory Democracy 175
8 Hierarchies ==> Networking 211
9 North ==> South 231
10 Either/Or ==> Multiple Option 259
Conclusion 279
Notes 285
Index 307

Chapter 2 stress that the more technology that is introduced the more human nature features need to be included otherwise there would be a “disconnect” and the new technologies would not be embraced. An example is how banking halls are being remodeled with cozy atmospheres to go with computerization. Chapters 3 and 4 bring out the superiority of the Japanese whose styles are to be embraced. Chapter 5 stresses that politically, more and more are happening at the state and local level where people are directly affected, than at the central government level. Chapter 6 explains that failures of certain institutions to meet expectations, such as not finding a cure for cancer, drives more people to take more responsibility over their lives. Chapter 7 is similar to the decentralization theme, where more and more people are voting directly on issues and even recalling their representatives that don’t represent them properly. Chapter 8 highlights the informal business management styles being championed by new IT companies, made possible by the collapsing of the “information float” or the time between when something happens and when people learn about it. Chapter 9 talks about the shift in population and wealth from the north (east) to the south (west) as the economy has shifted from industrialization in the north to information technology. And chapter 10 highlights the increase in available options in several areas of life in the society, including recognition of cultural diversity of the citizens and the possible introduction of Spanish as a second language in the nation.

I was rather surprised to see Nigeria mentioned as one of the possible “Third world” places where the chips that went into electronic calculators were manufactured before the “Made in Japan” label got stuck on them. Really? The discussion of the fight for rights between the different levels of government in the US, of federalism and states’ rights, was like the popular cries for “true federalism” in Nigeria today, where the center is accused of having too much wealth and power.

June 17, 2015. Review initially written in 2012. Book first published in 1982, this Warner Books edition being published in 1984, ISBN 0-446-90991-2.

2nd Chance

Seems the idea behind this story is that women can be brave and smart cops as well as men. Set in California, this police detective suspense and thriller story is positive about interracial love and promotes the belief that the good guys win in the end, with the climactic gunning down of a mad killer Stanford student who had taken on the hateful role of his father and decided to start killing black people shortly after his father finished his 20-year prison term.

The brave and smart cop is Lt. Lindsay Boxer whose dad Martin, also a cop, had absconded from home 22 years before. The period appears to be the 1990s. The story starts with a shooting at a black church, with one little 11-year-old black girl targeted and killed. Her uncle was a cop. Weeks before an elderly black widow, whose husband had been a cop, had been found hanging from a rope in a basement some town nearby and now it turns out she had been lynched by a white man with a tattoo. As Lindsay is trying to unravel these related killings, the mad man strikes again, this time luring a black cop to an ambush and shooting him dead. The search for “Chimera” escalates, the name coming from symbols linked to the killer, of a lion-goat-headed monster with the tail of a snake. Next in line to die is the black police chief Mercer, Lindsay’s boss. A suspect is finally found, Frank Coombs, an ex-cop. Then Lindsay’s run-away dad shows up, and it turns out he and Coombs were together the night Coombs strangled a black teenager, but while Coombs was punished no one mentioned Boxer’s name. Coombs had written threatening mail to Martin on being released and so Martin had come back to settle scores.

Now Coombs through his son was taking revenge for his fall and imprisonment, on black cops and their friends and relations. When Coombs Snr was finally gunned down as he tried to kill Lindsay, Lindsay noticed that there were no tattoos on him. The case that was then officially thought closed had to be reopened, especially after the real killer Coombs Jnr next went shooting at Cindy, one of Lindsay’s friends that was celebrating the end of the case with her black male friend. It was an overlooked evidence that finally nailed Coombs Jnr, a shooter’s price trophy found in his father’s hotel room bearing his own initials rather than the dad’s.

When the cops went after him at Stanford University, he relived his hateful life and decided to go down still killing. At least five people died before Lindsay braved the odds to go after him atop a bell tower and luckily was able to finally shoot him dead.

Probably the title was to indicate that the heroine’s dad had a second chance of proving his love to the daughter he abandoned 22 years earlier. Or maybe it was the fact that the heroine ended up facing a killer personally for the second time.

June 16, 2015. Review initially written in July, 2014. Novel first published in 2002 by Little, Brown and Company; this Warner Books edition being published in 2003; ISBN 0-446-61279-0.

Waiting for an Angel

Highlights the oppressive period of military rule in Nigeria under General Abacha, using Lomba, a journalist and political prisoner as focal point: His life in prison; the reckless violence visited on civilians by armed soldiers; his life in university terminated by fear of soldiers after his roommate runs mad, following student demonstrations against military rule that ended with attack by armed soldiers; the poverty on the street in which he lived; the peaceful demonstration organized by residents of the street that ended in violence and death when armed police and soldiers opened fire; the fire attack at his magazine employer’s and the murder or hounding into exile or detention of people perceived as threats to the military regime.

June 12, 2015. Review initially written in 2006. Novel first published in 2002. Picture source: Yahoo (Images).

The Little Drummer Girl

The problem was the bombing of Jews in Europe by Palestinian terrorists. The plot was about a plan by the Israeli intelligence people to locate the mastermind behind recent bombings, which involved the recruitment of a politically active English actress who was given an acting role as an agent. She was to pretend to be a follower of his who was in love with him. The plan was successful; the big guy was identified and located by the agent. He realized her true role at the last moment, but then it was too late, as her employers broke in and shot him to death.

An interesting thing about the plot is that the star wasn’t a trained agent but a rootless actress. Rather than acting on stage this time, she was acting “in the theater of the real.”

June 12, 2015. Review initially written in 1991. Novel first published in 1983. Picture source: Yahoo (Images).

The Lonely Londoners

This is a reflective story about the apparently aimless hard life of poor West Indians struggling to make a living in London in the fifties. It picks a set of hustling characters and tells successive stories about their encounters and experiences, at work and at poor neighborhoods and of sex with white chicks. It features interesting characters like Five, a loud-mouthed weed-smoker, Galagher, strangely feeling warm in winter and cold in summer, Captain, a Nigerian student drop-out who is too lazy for work yet stays fed all the time. Written in regional English prose; was not divided into chapters.

June 15, 2015. Review initially written in 1992. Novel first published in 1956, with the latest reprint in 1990. Picture source: Yahoo (Images).

A Judgment in Stone

The education of Eunice Parchman was interrupted when she was young, so much that she failed to learn how to read and write. To make matters worse her parents rather than get this problem corrected, encouraged her to skip school and hide the fact. And so she grew up a cold but hard-working woman with no loves, who used blackmail to get things for herself. Because she couldn’t read, she was threatened by anything that might require her to read. To avoid taking on the responsibility of living alone after her parents died, because she’d have to read bills and other documents, she took up sheltered employment in the home of the Coverdales, an upper-middle-class British family, as a servant. There she tried to conceal her disability by all means.

In an effort to befriend her, Melinda Coverdale, a young college girl, discovered her problem. But rather than agree to be taught, Eunice blackmailed Melinda, which led to her (Eunice) being sacked. A day before her departure, egged on by her fanatically religious and quite mad friend Joan, Eunice and Joan shot and killed the entire family of four while they were watching TV. Joan is nearly killed in an auto accident on her way home from the murders and ended up a hospital vegetable. Eunice tried to cover up their roles in the murders, but because she couldn’t read, she ignored evidence which eventually led to her conviction.

June 11, 2015. Review initially written in 1999. Novel first published in 1977. Picture source: Yahoo (Images).

The Street

A comical look at life in Brixton, London, woven around a select cast of characters. Dada of Nigerian descent is a freelance writer for a magazine for “crazy” people. He’s just fallen in love with Nehushta, also of Nigerian descent, whose father Ossie has made TV and print news for coming out of a coma after fifteen years, a period he seemed to have spent in the land of dreams. Then there is Biodun a.k.a. The Heckler, Dada’s cousin who gave up on life when his boyfriend Andre left him via death and he found out he was HIV-positive, choosing to become a street bum harassing streetside preachers, much to the consternation of his mother who then arranges a “symbolic funeral” for him.

Towards the end we learn that it is not all jolly frivolity, there’s some serious issues at stake. Dada has to come to terms with Nehushta’s other lover being a female. And The Heckler finally decides to go back to his job with a software company, though still refusing to tell his mother about his HIV status.

Like in his other story I read years ago, the author appears still to —through Dada—question the existence of God.

June 11, 2015. Review initially written in 2005. Novel first published in 1999. Picture source: Yahoo (Images).

A Question of Blood

At the heart of this story is the shooting to death of two seventeen-year-olds (Anthony Jarvies and Derek Renshaw) at a private school somewhere north of Edinburgh. A third student (James Bell), only got wounded in the shoulder, while the supposed killer (Lee Herdman), an ex-Army man also shot himself. Or so it seems.

It is left to Detective Inspector John Rebus and his colleagues to dig in and unravel the mystery behind the killings. And it turns out very astonishing towards the end. It wasn’t the ex-Army man that was supposed to have gone insane for some reason that did the killing of the two, but their fellow student James who’d harbored a deep dislike for them. He it was that shot his own shoulder as a last-minute cover-up act, seeing that Lee had taken the gun that was actually his own and then unexpectedly shot himself. James not only had a grudge against his fellow mates that he felt were better off the face of the earth, but he also hated his father, a rather dubious and noisy MP and his admitting his crime in the end was to spite the man.

The idea of “blood” in the title comes from different angles. The main one was that one of the dead students, Derek, was the son of a long ignored cousin of Rebus, so was his blood and family. Different families were interlinked as the story unfolded. And the nature of Rebus’s own family and those of some of his colleagues that were formerly in the Army or forces got inspected along the way.

June 8, 2015. Review initially written in 2011. Novel last published in 2003 by Orion; ISBN 0-75285-111-X.

Year of the Uprising

This is a historical novel about the uprising of the Mashona and Matabele in then-Rhodesia in 1896 and 1897. Their land was taken from them forcefully by Rhodes and his gang, but the organized rebellion was a lesson to the whites that these people were not going to be treated like dogs and do nothing about it.

The uprising did not succeed in driving whites out of the country, but it was successful in shaking the thinking of many whites into the realization that another rebellion in the future may not end well for them. It probably set the pace for future liberation struggles and the eventual birth of a Zimbabwe governed by “natives.”

June 8, 2015. Review initially written in 1993. Novel first published in 1978. Picture source: booklikes.com.

Cosm

The creation of a strange object in the rubble of an accidental explosion in a particle physics lab at Brookhaven in the East Coast, and its being spirited secretly away for study at UCI in the West Coast by the researcher and her students, is the meat of this story. It is quickly revealed that the object the size of a basketball is a window into a new universe just formed, and for want of a better name, our enterprising researcher Alicia calls it the Cosm. A battle for ownership wages for a while between the two universities East and West, and when Alicia refuses to give up the Cosm, the East Coast school repeats her exact experiment and turns up its own Cosm II. Alicia and her team could now study Cosm I in peace. Or not so much in peace, as she has become an overnight celebrity, the creator of a universe, a goddess! While some religious freaks denounce her for playing God, the President gets curious enough to pay a visit, encouraging her to learn more.

Molded in with the scientific exploits is a quiet love affair that builds between Alicia and Max, another scientist, the one that gives her the moral and professional support in deciphering the Cosm. In the end, even the Federal government wants to take over the Cosm, for reasons of “safety,” but without knowing exactly what they would be dealing with. We are now made to consider the reality that our own universe could have come about in exactly the same way as the Cosm—as an accident—but as one of many, one that has the right ingredients to support life.

Again Alicia secretly removes the Cosm on the run, just before the Feds confiscate it, only this time it is for the best. At the termination of the life of the universe it represented, the Cosm explodes in the desert creating a huge crater, and thanks to Alicia’s action of removing it from the university grounds, there is no loss of lives apart from a federal agent or two pursuing them. Although the ending is bad for the Cosm, in losing the universe she “created,” Alicia is able to gain a man, as she and Max set to marry.

June 7, 2015. Novel first published in 1998 by Avon Books; ISBN 0-380-79052-1.

The Rape of Lysistrata

This tragedy revolves around the love between a black Brazilian writer (Camilo) and a white American student (Mimi). Somewhere in between is Beth, Mimi’s friend, who apparently does not like the relationship and in a bid to influence Mimi plants an angry article very hostile to whites and contemptuous of black/white sexual relationships, for Mimi to read. The article was actually written by Obi, Camilo’s closest friend and the narrator, but Beth apparently hoped Mimi would assume it had been written by Camilo and take offense, as she had been doing some typing work for Camilo. This of course happens and the article nearly drives Mimi mad after she reads it.

She and Camilo were to be married in about nine days, but reading the article made her think that Camilo didn’t really love her, that deep down he was angry at her whiteness as manifested in the article. She decides to test him and asks him for sex the first time ever, endures the ordeal in revulsion, then goes straight to the police to report a rape. Camilo is arrested and due to a guilty conscience for his wife that died in prison from having stolen to keep them from starving to death in London years before, he pleads guilty, is jailed for life, and apparently commits suicide in jail. The story didn’t actually unfold openly like this. The arrest of Camilo was a great mystery to Obi and it took him to the end of the book to find out what actually happened.

June 7, 2015. Review initially written in 1992. Novel first published in 1980. Picture source: goodreads.com.

Dance Hall of the Dead

The title and the thrilling plot revolves around the traditional beliefs of the Zuni Indians of New Mexico on one hand, and the pursuit of fame at all costs by an archaeologist. The archaeologist Reynolds wanted to disprove an accepted theory about Folsom Man. To ensure this he was systematically planting artifacts in the ground at a research site, to be dug up by an undergraduate assistant for real. Unluckily for him Cata, one of the local kids, found the artifacts he’d hidden and took some away. Reynolds then set out to get the artifacts from the boy to prevent his returning them to his assistant (which would break his cover). He couldn’t go openly so he went under the mask of a Salamobia, a spirit that was supposed to cut off the head of anybody that had broken a taboo. In their encounter he murdered the boy (by nearly chopping off the head) and this became the genesis of the story. Who killed Cata and why?

Cata was a Zuni and had George, a Navajo, for a friend. Not finding all the missing artifacts with Cata and having killed him, Reynolds set out to get George, probably because Cata admitted giving George some of the artifacts. George on the other hand believed that a kachina or spirit had killed Cata for breaking a taboo (by telling him too much about their religion). He set out to visit the place where the Zuni spirits were supposed to go after death, to appease the spirits. This place was Kothluwalawa, or the Dance Hall of the Dead.

Leaphorn is the Navajo policeman on the case who tries to find the fleeing George. It is he who pieces the bits together and informs the Zuni about who had killed their son. Leaphorn sees George in the end but could not save him from Reynold’s bullet. Reynolds on the other hand had committed a grave offence against the Zunis, especially by wearing their sacred mask, and shortly after he shot George was himself killed conspicuously.

June 6, 2015. Review initially written in 1993. Novel first published in 1973.

Red Dust

Based on the work of the Truth & Reconciliation Committee in South Africa—why it was set up and what it could achieve and actually achieved. The evils of apartheid South Africa (separate housing and facilities, maltreatment of blacks by white masters, etc) and how things have changed with the arrival of black majority rule.

The story is told around the fictional town of Smitrivier, of how Sarah Bacant, an intelligent lawyer who’d been living in the US for the past fourteen years, is called back by her mentor Ben Hoffman to assist him help a black couple Mr/Mrs James Sizela to force an ex-police leader Pieter Muller to reveal the location of the body of their only son Steve whom they believed was murdered under his custody. Steve’s friend and mate during the freedom struggle Alex Mpondo who survived the detention to become an MP is also called to assist in this. In the course of a T & R hearing, we are told about the tortures and eventual death of Steve, and how another policeman Dirk Hendricks buried him at night behind a farm.

June 6, 2015. Review initially written in 2005. Novel first published in 2000. Picture source: Yahoo (Images).

The Black Album

This edition was published in 2000 with the action taking place in 1989. The story is set around a poor London college and its poor Pakistani or Muslim students and their neighborhood. The hero is Sharif, a young man of Pakistani parents, the son of an immigrant, caught in a conflict of identity.

On one side he is in love with Deedee, his white lecturer, an independent-minded woman who takes delight in enjoying herself with drugs and sex. On the other are some Pakistani Muslims led by a religious fanatic whom he gets involved with. Then there is his older brother, a drug pusher who has fallen victim to his own goods and is on the run from the police. Sharif has to decide between religious fanaticism of his colleagues and associating with Deedee, because she gives him an ultimatum. He finally decides to dump fanaticism after his friends rejoiced at the fatwah imposed on Salman Rushdie and began burning his book.

June 6, 2015. Review initially written in 2005. Novel first published in 1965. Picture source: Yahoo (Images).

Some Kind of Black

Probably the first book by a black British author of Yoruba descent, about contemporary black life in London, that I’d read.

It’s the story of Dele and his sickler sister Dapo, and their Nigerian immigrant parents. It is the story of Dele’s last days at college, his involvement with three girls, night life in London, cultural awareness, his involvement with a political organizer of bent ways, his reconciliation with his disciplinarian of a father, and his search for some meaning and direction in his life. It is a story that shows the discrimination against blacks in London as much as the possibility of true love between whites and blacks.

June 6, 2015. Review initially written in 1998. Novel first published in 1996. Picture source: Yahoo (Images).

Airframe

An eye opener into issues of safety and commercial aircraft manufacturing and competition mingled with boardroom in-fighting on the one hand, and the impact and modus operandi of (cable TV) journalism on the other. Norton is the manufacturer of aircrafts, and the chief operating officer (Marder) does not like the way he was passed over when the new president was picked, despite being married to the family of the founder. So he is secretly plotting to overthrow the president, using an accident involving one of their aircrafts as a ploy. While investigation is on to determine what caused the accident, the producer of Newsline, a weekly TV show, sees something worth selling to the public—the scary tale of a defective aircraft. Marder is very pleased with Newsline’s interest and does his best to both undermine discovery of the root cause of the accident and also leak confidential information to them.

But then Marder didn’t reckon with the dogged determination of our heroine, Casey Singleton, whose job put her in charge of QA/IRT (quality assurance and incidence review team) at the company. She succeeds in getting to the root causes of the accident after a tense fast-paced investigation: The captain of the aircraft had allowed his son to take his seat while he went for a coffee. And a bad part had given a wrong warning which the inexperienced son was unable to correctly handle, leading to the accident.

When Newsline could no longer air the story they had in mind, seeing Norton’s wasn’t actually an unsafe plane after all, the COO’s attempted coup had to flop in the end.

June 1, 2015. Review initially written in 2011. Novel first published in 1996 by Century Books, this Arrow Books edition being first published in 1997, ISBN 0-09-955631-6.

Burger's Daughter

This is a story of apartheid South Africa in the 1970s told from the perspective of the Burgers, a revolutionary white family fighting for black rights as communists.

It centers around the experiences of their only surviving child and graduate daughter, Rosa Burger, after the father died in prison: Her growing up used to being followed by cops, her loves, jobs, relations with friends of the parents, her visit to Europe to her dad’s first wife in France and then to London where an encounter with the black boy that had grown up in her house forced her to return and face life in South Africa.

June 1, 2015. Review initially written in 2007. Novel first published in 1979 by The Viking Press; this Bloomsbury edition being published in 2000, ISBN 0-7475-4979-6. Picture source: Yahoo (Images).