SILKEN PREY

Aug 14, 2013

John Sandford
Putnam
ISBN 978-0399159312
406 pages
$27.95

Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle, who is mysteries editor of The Washington Post Book World. He can be reached at drabelled@washpost.com.

It's easy to take John Sandford for granted. Like many mystery writers, he keeps cranking them out, and the list of his works lengthens with daunting regularity. But almost alone among such pillars of productivity (Ruth Rendell is another exception), Sandford doesn't just go through the motions to meet contractual obligations. "Silken Prey" is the 23rd installment of his Prey series featuring Twin Cities detective Lucas Davenport, and quality control remains virtually unimpaired.

Sandford prefers his villains on the barmy side, and this time he's created a nut job par excellence: Taryn Grant, the "silken Machiavelli," a gorgeous young Democratic politician - and sociopath - who has mapped out her reckless path all the way to the presidency of the United States. Step One is to wrest away the Minnesota Senate seat currently held by conservative Republican Porter Smalls. No trick is too dirty for Grant to play in carrying out her plan, no crime too odious to commit. Her guiding principle is pure expediency: If it's likely to work and can't be traced to her, she'll greenlight it.

Planting kiddie porn is the main tactic used by her and her henchmen in "Silken Prey." One of her operatives rigs up Smalls' Minneapolis office computer in such a way that, the next time anyone touches the sleeping keyboard, up comes a batch of vile photos. The plan works: Smalls is accused and vilified, and despite his denials, Grant pulls ahead in the polls. The state's Democratic governor senses something amiss and fears that if it turns out this is a frame-up, Democrats up and down the ticket will suffer in the upcoming election. By assigning the case to Davenport, who works for the state's version of the FBI and is known for his brilliance, the governor can assure one and all that the state is doing its best to achieve justice. (What a novel thought in this politically nihilistic age of ours: helping your party by doing the right thing!)

Murders soon complicate the case, and for help Davenport calls upon his regulars, including a rednecky cop named Virgil Flowers, who heads up his own line of Sandford novels (six so far). But the pivotal contributions come from Kidd, a wizardly computer hacker who is also the centerpiece of a burgeoning series (four novels), and his lady, Lauren. She's an ex-burglar who still misses the matchless excitement of prowling around a house she's broken into, shopping in a thrilling manner available only to wrongful intruders. (Next to her, workaday shopaholics and kleptomaniacs are bores.) As Lauren oils her burglar's tools, one wonders: Could a series starring her be taking shape somewhere on the Sandford assembly line?

As always in Sandford Land, his plotting is smooth, with few coincidences (or at least few that strike the reader as contrived). But I'd forgotten how shrewdly he assesses his characters, as in this description of a female staffer that should resonate in Washington: "He'd seen it often enough in government work, people who felt that they were better than their job, and better than those around them; a princess kidnapped by gypsies, and raised below her station." And Flowers gets off a good one when he hears what sort of things Citizen Grant has been authorizing: "The legislature runs on corruption. But a killer in the U.S. Senate ... an actual murderer? The prospect is the tiniest bit disturbing."

"Silken Prey" is so good that one is inclined to forgive the author his one concession to thriller-writer laziness, when Davenport logs on to someone's laptop by psyching out her password (which happens to be her daughter's first name).

A one-man media conglomerate, Sandford spins out tales and series in a way that makes the word "prolific" seem mundane. Perhaps to do him justice, we must switch to French. Yes, that's it: John Sanford is prolifique et magnifique!

Copyright 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

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INTO THE ABYSS: An Extraordinary True Story

Aug 16, 2013

Carol Shaben
Grand Central
ISBN 978-1455501953
311 pages
$25

Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle

The only weakness in this book is the title. There is no abyss. This is an account - gripping and emotionally affecting - of a plane crash and its aftermath. But the plane came down on a hillside, not in a canyon or the deep blue sea.

With or without the hype, journalist Carol Shaben's material, in which her own father plays a central role, is plenty sensational. On the evening of Oct. 19, 1984, Larry Shaben - a Cabinet minister in the Alberta provincial government and, as a second-generation Arab-Canadian, a role model for Canadian Muslims - was a last-minute addition to the passengers on a flight bound from Edmonton to a series of towns in the northwest part of the province. Another politician was on board, too, as were a Royal Mounted Policeman, a prisoner in his custody, and five others.

The 24-year-old pilot, Erik Vogel, was so happy to be flying for a living that he tended to accept whatever assignment was given to him, no matter how overworked and tired he might be. The airline was Wapiti, an outfit that had been accused of cutting corners when it came to safety. The kind of flying that Vogel and Wapiti practiced is called "bush" after the often treeless wilderness below, which for much of the year is gripped by extreme cold. As Shaben notes, bush pilots are "far from help if anything goes awry [and] must fend for themselves in inhospitable environments where the penalty for a mistake can be death." As a result, "bush pilots have the highest mortality rate of any commercial pilots and bush flying consistently ranks in the top three of the world's most dangerous professions, after commercial fishermen and loggers."

With heavily overcast skies and no co-pilot, not to mention his own fatigue, Vogel should not have taken a plane up that night. But as his boss used to say, "If we never pushed the weather, we'd never stay in business." When ice formed on the windshield, Vogel relied largely on his memory of the flight-path. In his mind, he placed the aircraft ahead of where it actually was, so that he began his descent toward the airport of a town called High Prairie thousands of feet too soon, with a socked-in hill sticking up ahead - the hill on which the plane plowed into a forest. "The plane finally came to rest upside down," Carol Shaben writes, "684 feet from where it had first hit the trees."

Though injured, Vogel survived, as did Larry Shaben, although he'd lost his glasses and was virtually blind without them. The other politician was among the six fatalities. The prisoner was alive and in the best shape of all, which was lucky for his captor, whom the prisoner pulled out of the wreckage. This might seem odd - culprit saves cop - until you remind yourself that these are Canadians. (The mountie had granted the prisoner's request not to be handcuffed during the flight - a kindness that may have inadvertently saved the mountie's life.)

Surviving the crash was one thing. Getting through a night of freezing temperatures without succumbing to hypothermia was quite another. Shaben skillfully switches back and forth between the rescue effort and the survivors' attempts to stay warm, which are complicated by the near-pitch blackness. At one point, unsure whether the plane's signaling device is in the ON or OFF position, Vogel returns to the wrecked plane and flips the switch the other way, his plan being to flip it back half an hour later, so that one way or another a signal will get through. Meanwhile, the rescuers are not only puzzled by the loss of the signal they had been relying on, but just about helpless until it goes back on.

I don't want to give away too much of the story, but suffice it to say that in many ways the best part of the book is the second half, when Shaben chronicles the survivors' post-crash lives. They were all affected profoundly, as one might expect, but not always predictably. Her writing is efficient and sometimes quite evocative, as in this description of what happens when locomotives rigged with snowplows clear buried tracks: "Snow flies off the rails in great white geysers that arch skyward and then curl away from the rails in big C's." Even without an abyss, this is a deep and satisfying book.

Dennis Drabelle is a contributing editor of The Washington Post Book World. His email address is dennis.drabelle@washpost.com.

Copyright 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

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JANE AUSTEN'S ENGLAND

Aug 16, 2013

Roy Adkins and Lesley Adkins
Viking
ISBN 978-0670785841
422 pages
$27.95

Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley

Ismail Merchant and James Ivory never laid their clammy hands on one of Jane Austen's novels - the closest they came was with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's original screenplay, "Jane Austen in Manhattan" (1980). But the temptation to see her as a Merchant-Ivory production is strong, what with the setting of her novels in rural and small-town England during the Regency, novels populated by well-mannered men and women dressed for polite occasions and seeking love and marriage but with emotions almost always well under control. Indeed, it is surprising, if not astonishing, that Merchant and Ivory never turned her into one of their patented period pieces, high on scenery and costumes and low on the more elemental human urges.

But as the millions of faithful readers of this universally beloved novelist are well aware, a lot simmers under the surface of her world, in part because that world was much darker and more complex than many of those readers probably realize. England during the Regency - beginning in 1811 with Prince George's appointment as regent in place of the insane George III and ending with the prince's assumption of the throne upon his father's death in 1820 - was a difficult, contentious and dangerous place, and though this is only rarely reflected in Austen's novels it surely influenced them. In "Mansfield Park" she wrote, "Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery," a rather strong suggestion that she was all too aware of quotidian realities.

Thus it is very good to have "Jane Austen's England," which provides a richly detailed portrait of those realities and should dispel any notions of sentimentality that may have attached themselves to Austen's work. It seems to me reasonable that Austen's keen awareness of the human capacity for evil - remember Wickham and Collins in "Pride and Prejudice"? - must have been shaped by the human evil that was all too present in the real world in which she lived. As Roy and Lesley Adkins write: "The novels and letters of Jane Austen provide realistic glimpses into the way of life in England, even if the world she depicts is largely the privileged end of society. But in order to understand the context of her novels, the rest of the nation needs to be considered." It was a "highly stratified" society in which "everyone knew their place or 'rank,'" one with "pronounced regional differences and much variety in the way people lived" and one in which change, much of it deeply unsettling, was everywhere." And:

"This place of radical change is the real England of Jane Austen and the subject of this book. We wanted to show how the mass of ordinary people, our ancestors, lived and fitted into her England. It used to be fashionable to trace your ancestry back to royalty, even if on the wrong side of the sheets, but even the most humble or most nefarious ancestors are just as interesting. They all had a part to play in shaping events and influencing history. Without them, history is nothing."

The Adkinses, whose many books include works of history and archaeology, depict an England more recognizable in the works of Charles Dickens than in those of Jane Austen, a place of pervasive inequality and exploitation, of piety and superstition, of small and often primitive houses crowded to the rafters, of bitter winter cold made even worse by what one contemporary called "the smoke of fossil coals" used for inadequate heating, of "personal hygiene or lack of it, [that] would undoubtedly shock us today, with the overpowering body odours and the stink of clothing, stale with sweat and often musty from damp houses." It may look lovely in a film of "Pride and Prejudice" with Keira Knightly and Matthew Macfayden or an episode of "Emma" or "Northanger Abbey" on "Masterpiece Theatre," but to most of those living in it loveliness was rarely if ever discernible.

Just about any British teenagers could have attested to that, though at the time there was no such thing as the teen years: "By thirteen or fourteen, if not sooner, childhood for the majority was over," and working life began. Small children were forced into dreadful work in the mines or as chimney sweeps, and the apprenticeships into which many were pressed were forms of slavery. One woman remembered her apprenticeship to farmers, when she was eight or nine: "Master made me do everything. ... My mistress was a very bad temper; when bad tempered she treated me very ill; she beats me very much; she would throw me on the ground, hold me by the ears, kneel upon me, and use me very ill; I used to scream. This has happened several times a week. ... My master beat me, and I went to my father's house. My father was afraid to let me stop."

Filth was omnipresent. "It will scarcely appear credible," a physician wrote, "that persons of the lowest class do not put clean sheets on their beds three times a year; that ... they never wash or scour their blankets and coverlets, nor renew them till they are no longer tenable; that curtains, if unfortunately there should be any, are never cleaned, but suffered to continue in the same state till they drop to pieces." And: "This was an era before antiperspirants, before the widespread use of soap, before a time when people washed their bodies and changed their clothing on a regular basis, and when virtually nobody immersed themselves in baths or showers. Everyone would have smelled, even genteel women like Austen, who in mid-September 1796 admitted to [her sister] Cassandra: 'What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps one in a continual state of inelegance.'"

Sewage ran in the streets. Press-gangs roamed the streets of London, kidnapping unsuspecting men and forcing them into service in the navy, sometimes for years. Starvation was common, often "caused by wars, industrialisation and enclosure of the countryside," all of which conspired to push up taxes even on the needy, trap men and women and children in brutal jobs, and increase both the cost and the scarcity of edible food. Travelers rode in bumpy carriages and slept in infested beds; one wrote, "I was bit so terribly with buggs again this night, that I got up at 4 o'clock this morning and took a long walk by myself about the City till breakfast time." In one particular respect, the cruel realities of the day do not impinge on the world of "Mansfield Park" and "Northanger Abbey":

"The novels and surviving letters of Jane Austen give an impression of a world barely touched by crime or warfare. Yet for much of her life Britain was at war and threatened by invasion, there was widespread fear of crime, and criminals were treated harshly. By the early Victorian era, the laws of England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were being referred to as the 'Bloody Code,' because of the number of offenses that carried the death penalty. Indeed, the phrase 'You might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb' arose when stealing a sheep was added to that list. There was more meat on a sheep, but stealing either a lamb or a sheep could mean execution."

Hangings were commonplace: "Gibbets with corpses suspended from them were such features of the landscape that they were landmarks for travelers, and [one] described the Sheffield neighbourhood '(BEGIN ITAL)adorned with men hanging in chains.'" Others met their deaths in more mundane ways, brought down by illnesses for which cures were unknown: "While medical knowledge advanced slowly, deep ignorance prevailed. The world of superstition merged imperceptibly into that of folk wisdom, and much was blamed on the weather or the moon."

Some were more fortunate than others, though their numbers were exceedingly small, probably even smaller than the 1 percent that now bestride these United States. "The idle rich were truly idle," the authors write, "as epitomised by Edward Ferrars in 'Sense and Sensibility.'" A fortune was headed his way, and he had chosen to enter no profession or employment. "Unfortunately my own nicety," Austen has him say, "and the nicety of my friends, have made me what I am, an idle, helpless being. We never could agree in our choice of profession. ... I was therefore entered at Oxford and have been properly idle ever since." Austen was amused by this 19th-century Bertie Wooster, and we certainly laugh along with her, but her humor was tempered by disdain. As this immensely useful and informative book makes clear, Regency England was no laughing matter.

Jonathan Yardley can be reached at yardleyj@washpost.com.

Copyright 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

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HUMAN TRAFFICKING AROUND THE WORLD: Hidden in Plain Sight

Aug 16, 2013

Stephanie Hepburn and Rita J. Simon
Columbia University
ISBN 978-0231161459
550 pages
$27.95

Reviewed by John Tirman

Human trafficking is one of those issues that rankle people even when they don't understand its actual shape and scope. At least a dozen books have appeared in the past few years describing the horrors of sex trafficking, a gruesome practice of enslavement and perversion affecting millions of (mostly) girls the world over, including, with alarming frequency, in the United States. But as Stephanie Hepburn and Rita J. Simon point out in their encyclopedic study of global trafficking, the larger crime is forced-labor trafficking, which is three times greater than that for sex commerce. The official response to each is inadequate - under-resourced, legally fragile and too often complicit.

The scale of these crimes is staggering. "As of 2005 this global phenomenon reaped an annual worldwide profit of $44.3 billion and affected more than 12.3 million persons," the authors write. About half are children. Other forms of trafficking are rampant - human organs, most prominently - but forced labor accounts for two-thirds of the cases. Victims are often recruited with promises of jobs abroad or within their own countries, but once in the grip of the traffickers they are essentially slaves. Various forms of subjugation are involved, such as debt bondage resulting from exorbitant "fees" for transportation, food and housing, but it all amounts to a system of violently enforced servitude from which escape is only a remote possibility.

While the common perception of trafficking tends to focus on sexual exploitation in places like Thailand and Dubai, the United States is among the top 10 destinations. Thousands of victims are brought into America each year from all over the world. They are used mainly for household labor, agriculture, food and care services, and in the garment industry. Those in industry are housed in substandard quarters and do not get paid, or owe so much because of the traffickers' "fees" that payment is irrelevant.

Sex trafficking to the United States is estimated to bring 50,000 women and girls to our shores each year, mainly for prostitution. The authors cite a case of Mexican women trafficked to Florida to work, they thought, as maids or waitresses. "Upon arrival in the United States, the traffickers raped the women and girls, confiscated their travel documents, and forced them to prostitute. Guards prevented them from leaving the brothels, and if the victims tried to escape they faced severe physical punishment as well as threats of deportation."

Forced labor follows similar patterns the world over. Hepburn and Simon march the reader through 23 countries, including several in Europe, to illustrate different dimensions of the problem. This is not just a pathology of "Ninotchkas" from post-Soviet Russia or sex-crazed sheiks or sex tourists in Bangkok. This is an enormous enterprise that touches every corner of the globe.

Most disquieting is how laws in many countries are used against trafficking victims. For example, in Italy, the United Kingdom and elsewhere, laborers brought in illegally, under duress, can be put in detention, fined and deported as illegal immigrants. Time and again, the authors explain, trafficking victims are charged and sometimes jailed for prostitution or using false papers, among other lawbreaking. In India (and elsewhere), the law enforcement system is so deplorable when it comes to prosecuting traffickers that it's the rare case that makes it to a conviction. The authors recount that "a rescued victim from Nepal was repeatedly deposed and continually asked embarrassing questions in an attempt to get her to withdraw the charges." Laws are changing, and some judicial and police practices are improving, but the pace is slow and incommensurate with the scale of the crimes.

Hepburn and Simon, lawyers associated with American University, parse the different causes and sources of human chattel - desperate poverty is the font of vulnerability, of course, but conflict-riddled countries are particularly prone to exploitation. In Iraq after the U.S. invasion, contractor immunity granted by U.S. officials in effect gave permission for the abuse of workers, who were imported from many of the same countries we see with large guest-worker programs: Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and so on. Reconstruction and the promise of good wages drew many workers who were then diverted to household servitude or worse.

Women in Iraq are "particularly vulnerable to a variety of crimes such as kidnapping, sexual assault, and human trafficking. One trafficking ring sold 128 Iraqi women to Saudi Arabia in 2008 and 2009. The ring was made up of Iraqi police officers, members of the Governorate's Council ... and security officials." Poor families are preyed upon by syndicates pretending to be adoption agencies or nongovernmental organizations that will take their children to better lives, only to sell them into slavery or the sex trade, or as child soldiers. "I did anything possible to keep them with me," a woman who sold two of her children explained, "but I lost my husband while I was pregnant with my fifth child and life became too hard." The Iraqi government estimates that there are at least 900,000 widows in Iraq, and poverty among them is high.

Throughout this grim account, the authors only rarely let emotions slip through. The book reads like a policy document, sometimes a legal one, organized identically in each chapter. Statistics abound. This is a bit off-putting but nonetheless valuable. It's a good companion to the 2010 book by Louise Shelley, "Human Trafficking: A Global Perspective," which emphasizes the role of transnational organized crime. Kevin Bales, an anti-slavery activist, has written several books, including "The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today" and "Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy," which use victims' stories to illustrate larger themes, humanizing this topic without sensationalizing. Many other books on the subject published in the past 10 years, as the issue of trafficking has become more prominent, rely on personal testimony. Among the best is the remarkable "Sold" by Patricia McCormick, about a 13-year-old sold into prostitution. It is being made into a movie, as a few others have been.

Among these tales of slavery and sexual depravity (some of them published in novels that seem a hair's breadth away from exploitation themselves), Hepburn and Simon's "Human Trafficking Around the World" comes off as a kind of reference book or college text. But it's an immensely learned and informative piece of work, much needed to prod and set aright the misperceptions and lethargy that beset this disturbing issue.

John Tirman is executive director and principal research scientist at the MIT Center for International Studies.

Copyright 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

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I WEAR THE BLACK HAT: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined)

Aug 16, 2013

Chuck Klosterman
Scribner
ISBN 978-1439184493
214 pages
$25

Reviewed by Justin Moyer

Before he scored his high-profile gig as the New York Times Magazine's ethicist, culture critic Chuck Klosterman wrote disarming nonfiction on unexpected topics, including Britney Spears, pro sports and how heavy metal shaped his childhood in Fargo, N.D. His latest book of incisive, funny essays is aimed at a predictably unpredictable target: villains.

In "I Wear the Black Hat," Klosterman writes of Machiavelli's signature work that " 'The Prince' can be read like a self-help book for someone who openly aspires to be depraved." For Klosterman, it's not Machiavelli's cynical advice that's repellent - it's the fact that he sounds so "cold." As Klosterman puts it, "In any situation, the villain is the person who knows the most but cares the least."

Armed with this definition, he turns his attention to a long list of widely disliked people and fictional characters: among many others, O.J. Simpson, Sarah Palin and, most memorably, Penn State football coach Joe Paterno. In the twisted saga of sex abuse at Penn State, Klosterman writes, pedophile Jerry Sandusky was the monster, but Paterno, who failed to stop Sandusky's depredations, was something worse - the man who "had to choose between humanity and sport, and picked the one that mattered less." "No normal person wants to hate a dead man he once admired," Klosterman adds about Paterno. "It feels abnormal and cheap. But what's the alternative?"

Klosterman attacks his subjects with intellectual rigor and humor, qualities rarely conjoined since David Foster Wallace hanged himself. Few readers will get everything here - I loved Klosterman's hilarious comparison of the gangsta rap group N.W.A. and the Oakland Raiders, but couldn't quite follow his detailed dissection of the team's running game. Whether you understand all of it or just some of it, though, you should read this thought-provoking book.

Justin Moyer can be reached at moyerj@washpost.com.

Copyright 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

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THE PHILADELPHIA CHROMOSOME: A Mutant Gene and the Quest to Cure Cancer at the Genetic Level

Aug 16, 2013

Jessica Wapner
The Experiment
ISBN 978-1615190676
303 pages
$25.95

Reviewed by Perri Klass

To tell the story in "The Philadelphia Chromosome," Jessica Wapner has to go back in scientific time and recreate the laboratory challenges of the 1970s and '80s. These eras are not so long ago chronologically, but the changes in genetic understanding and laboratory techniques in the intervening years mean that it can be tricky to evoke the magnitude of scientifically creative but technically laborious steps undertaken back when.

In 1959, David Hungerford, a scientist examining the chromosomes of a patient with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), noticed that one of those chromosomes had an abnormally short arm: Something was missing. Remember that this was happening only six years after the structure of DNA had been discovered; the field of modern genetics was just taking shape. CML was a disease without a treatment, a slow-growing cancer of the white blood cells that could lurk for a long time in a person's bone marrow and eventually develop into a "blast crisis," in which abnormal white blood cells proliferate, wiping out the bone marrow and eventually killing the patient.

This book tells the story of the complex research steps that led scientists from the observation of that abnormal chromosome in CML patients to the understanding of oncogenes, genes that transform normal cells into cancer cells, and then the steps that brought that understanding along toward the development of a pharmacologic cure. Wapner uses the details of this scientific journey to illuminate many different sides of the story of research and medicine as it has played out over the past three or four decades: The scientific steps along the way trace the highs and lows of research in progress, the sociology of organized science, the politics and economics of drug development and drug testing, and the bedside challenge of caring for patients, especially when they are taking part in a clinical trial.

The characters in "The Philadelphia Chromosome" include the scientists and the doctors who were drawn into this project following Hungerford's discovery - in particular Brian Druker, who started his fellowship in oncology in the mid-1980s: "Most of his patients would die, if not shortly after coming under his care, then in the easily foreseeable future," Wapner writes. "That was what happened with cancer: Almost everyone died from the disease."

Druker started from scratch as a lab researcher, at a moment when the genetic understanding of cancer was developing rapidly and new therapies were beginning to seem plausible - therapies that might alter those fatal outcomes.

The chromosome abnormality had led to the understanding of a genetic deviance, a different stretch of DNA found in the cells of people with CML. But what did that different gene encode? Again, a question that might be answered quickly and easily in today's world of rapid sequencing took arduous research - which helped elucidate not only the specific protein involved here, an enzyme called a tyrosine kinase, but also some of the mechanisms underlying cancer. As these pieces were understood, the challenge was to use that understanding to create a drug that would interfere with this specific kinase and block this specific cancer.

The scientists found a possible compound - a possible treatment. But then a new process of research and investigation had to begin, obedient to a new set of rules and constraints, since this time the goal was to experiment on people. Wapner is particularly good at evoking the promise and tension of the drug trials, as STI-571 is tested in rats, mice and dogs - and the researchers and the drug company have to deal with the news that it causes liver damage in both rats and dogs.

But if the book attends carefully to the extraordinary work of the scientists, it also pays attention to that first brave - and lucky - cohort of patients who not only volunteered to test a new and possibly dangerous drug, but organized themselves to demand a voice in their treatment, creating an online petition to the drug company to produce more of the experimental medication and speed up clinical trials. Or as one patient put it, "There is no way that there is a drug out there that can help me that's not going to be given to me."

Wapner's challenge as she turns a close eye on this complex chain of discovery, drug development and medical practice is to link the huge conceptual and experimental jumps to the details of the science. To follow the story, you have to care not only about the scientists and the patients, but also about the compound, which almost becomes a character itself: "From a genetic mutation to its haywire fusion protein, from the fusion protein to the leukemia, a path had been traced for the rational design of this drug. From CGP-57148B to STI-571 and finally to imatinib mesylate and Gleevec, the world's first drug targeted against a specific mutant protein that stopped cancer in its tracks was ready for wide release."

It's a model for a more targeted and intelligent way of treating cancer, in which the most sophisticated lessons of genetic research are applied to a kind of "personalized" drug development in which chemotherapeutic drugs attack very specific cancer cells. All this has happened with CML, though results with other forms of cancer have so far been much more limited.

Just as the story of the early research illuminates the byways of genetic research, the story of the development of the drug, Gleevec, involves collaborations between academic doctors and pharmaceutical companies, the fear of liability, even the politics of naming a new drug. Wapner uses her exhaustive research into this bench-to-bedside story to evoke controversies and complexities in science and medicine at every level.

This reporting takes in a huge swath of science and research, and it's a landscape that changes dramatically over the course of her story. Wapner's achievement is to help the reader understand why each development is huge in the context of its time and place - starting with Hungerford peering through his camera at the chromosomes and following scientists through the laboratory stories, through the drug development and animal testing, to the triumphant patient treatment when the drug becomes almost routine - a scientific miracle absorbed into the daily lives of a group of patients no longer united by a fatal diagnosis.

Perri Klass is a professor of journalism and pediatrics and the director of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University.

Copyright 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

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READY FOR A BRAND NEW BEAT: How "Dancing in the Street" Became the Anthem for a Changing America

Aug 16, 2013

Mark Kurlansky
Riverhead
ISBN 978-1594487224
263 pages
$27.95

Reviewed by Aaron Leitko

At this point, it's no longer a brand-new beat. It's a familiar beat, one that has woven itself into the fabric of American culture, staking out a permanent position on oldies FM, on your friend's bar mitzvah playlist and at your cousin's wedding reception.

Written by William "Mickey" Stevenson, Marvin Gaye and Ivy Jo Hunter and sung by Martha Reeves, "Dancing in the Street" is among the best-known tunes produced by the Detroit R&B label Motown. It was a hit, too: Released in 1964, it climbed all the way to No. 2 on the U.S. Billboard Pop Singles Chart. It never managed to snatch the No. 1 slot, which was held by Manfred Mann's cover of "Do Wah Diddy Diddy," but it has certainly eclipsed that song in terms of cross-generational appeal. If you missed Martha and the Vandellas' version, then you heard it a decade later, performed by Van Halen or the Grateful Dead, or as a duet between David Bowie and Mick Jagger.

In "Ready for a Brand New Beat,"Mark Kurlansky argues that "Dancing in the Street" is more than just a catchy tune: It was the anthem of a nation in the grips of political and cultural upheaval.

If you've ever found yourself at an airport bookstore, looking for a way to demolish six hours of idle time, then you're likely familiar with Kurlansky's work. The author has carved out a niche in the nonfiction world by finding drama amid banal subject matter. His formula is most visible in the titles of his best-sellers, which pit kitchen-friendly objects against civilization as we know it: "Salt: A World History" or "Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World." They provided entertainment under the auspices of self-enrichment - Wikipedia before Wikipedia existed.

Unfortunately, there's not much drama to "Dancing in the Street." The story behind the song is not particularly eventful. Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr. viewed his label as a hit factory, and in many ways the song was just one more tune that rolled off the conveyor belt. In July of 1964, Reeves showed up at Motown's Hittsville studio and was coaxed by Gaye, Hunter and Stevenson to sing a demo version of their new song. The producers liked her version and decided to release it. The process did not involve much in the way of blood, sweat or tears.

In fact, the parties involved in creating the song prove formidable foes to Kurlansky's thesis that "Dancing" captures the early '60s zeitgeist. In their opinion, it was just another song. Though Gordy supported the civil rights struggle, he sought to keep politics out of his label's music. "He wanted to show white people that in the age of dangerous, angry black people, of black power, and ghetto rebellions, Motown blacks were neither angry nor dangerous," Kurlansky writes.

Asked about the political events of the '60s, Reeves insisted that she wasn't involved. "I just want to be responsible for being a good singer."

Stevenson was political, but according to Kurlansky, he believed that the song's only message was that "all kinds of people could get along together." Gaye, who died in 1984, came closest to backing Kurlansky's view. He is quoted in a passage taken from his autobiography, saying that the song "felt political."

Kurlansky's strongest argument comes from analyzing what separated the song from other Motown singles. "The new R&B of the mid-1960s was making the old Motown songs of requited or unrequited love, such as those by the Supremes or Smokey Robinson, seem slightly old-fashioned," he writes. But "Dancing in the Street" was different because it was upbeat, positive and had lyrics that told a more general story. When it was played at a rally, it made sense.

A compelling case for "Dancing in the Street" as a generation-defining riff never quite emerges, though, and most of Kurlansky's arguments could be applied to other songs, like Gaye's "What's Going On," which addressed the times in a more direct manner.

Kurlansky spends much of "Ready for a Brand New Beat" explaining the cultural context of the mid-'60s music business, moving from the origins of rock 'n' roll and the racial tensions that it exposed, to the civil rights struggle and the rise and decline of Motown. In this environment, the purchase of a record could hold additional meaning, and, in a small but significant way, it promoted change in society. Martha and the Vandellas' "Dancing in the Street" was one of those records, but one of many.

Aaron Leitko is a freelance writer in the District of Columbia.

Copyright 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

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