THE HOCKEY STICK AND THE CLIMATE WARS: Dispatches From the Front Lines

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May 25, 2012 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

THE HOCKEY STICK AND THE CLIMATE WARS: Dispatches From the Front LinesMichael E. Mann
Columbia Univ
ISBN 978-0231152549
395 pages
$28.95

THE INQUISITION OF CLIMATE SCIENCEJames Lawrence Powell
Columbia Univ
ISBN 978-0231157186
232 pages
$27.95

WHO SPEAKS FOR THE CLIMATE? Making Sense of Media Reporting on Climate ChangeMaxwell T. Boykoff
Cambridge Univ
ISBN 978-0521133050
228 pages
$29.99

A GREAT ARIDNESS: Climate Change and the Future of the American SouthwestWilliam deBuys
Oxford Univ
ISBN 978-0199778928
369 pages
$27.95

Reviewed by Juliet Eilperin

When it comes to key warriors in America's battle over the causes of climate change, few rival Pennsylvania State University professor Michael E. Mann. Mann, who directs the Penn State Earth System Science Center, led a 1998 reconstruction of ancient temperature records going back thousands of years and showing that global averages had shot up in recent decades.

Featured in a 2001 report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the chart resembled a hockey stick, with the ancient temperatures running along the handle and the latest figures rising sharply at the base. It sparked intense debate over the human contribution to global warming and transformed Mann from a geeky geophysicist into a public fighter in a bruising political and legal war over how to conduct science and public policy.

Much of the industrial and developing world believes that the burning of fossil fuels, and other activities that release heat-trapping greenhouse gases, contribute to climate change. Even in the United States, more than half of poll respondents espouse this view. A March survey by Gallup, for example, shows that 53 percent of Americans attribute global warming to human activity. But in the past three years, some Americans have challenged this view, particularly conservative Republicans, and the political elite is sharply divided.

Some advocates have gone so far as to hack computers and steal the emails of Mann and other climate researchers in an effort to undermine global climate negotiations. A respected hydrologist retaliated by tricking a climate-skeptic group into releasing its internal documents.

Mann's new book, "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars," is part of a series of attempts by activists and others to answer the question of why global warming has become a political flash point. Mann has devised an analogy to explain why he and other researchers have become the objects of such fierce public scrutiny and vilification, which he terms "the Serengeti strategy." Likening climate scientists to zebras, he writes, "The climate change deniers isolate individual scientists just as predators on the Serengeti Plain of Africa hunt their prey: picking off vulnerable individuals from the rest of the herd." He asserts that he and others have become targets because their findings challenge the entrenched fossil-fuel industries, which have tried to discredit them.

There is no question that Mann has found himself in the crosshairs of those who promote the idea that global warming stems from nonhuman factors, such as sun spots and natural temperature variability. The hockey stick relied on proxy data derived from a range of sources - including tree rings, cores extracted from ice sheets, corals and lake sediments - to reconstruct temperatures from hundreds of years ago, times for which there is no written record. Mann and his team used a statistical tool called "principal component analysis" to tease out which factors are most responsible for a given change over time and to compare data from all over the globe.

Two Canadians, mining consultant Stephen McIntyre and economist Ross McKitrick, challenged the hockey stick on a variety of fronts. First they went after the proxy data; later they employed the same statistical tool that Mann and his colleagues did, but in what Mann considers an inconsistent way. The result was a smoothing out of the pattern embodied in the hockey stick. "If there is a lesson" in these sorts of fights, Mann writes, "it is that scientific findings that rest on such technical complexities are prone to abuse by those with a potential ax to grind."

Herein lies the problem with the current climate debate: It's an insider's game. The average American doesn't study principal component analysis and doesn't need to. But when that's what scientific experts - and lawmakers who have been briefed by their staffers - are talking about, it leaves most of the public in the dark. Mann makes this point several times, as when, for example, he describes Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) throwing around arcane scientific terms to challenge climate skeptics during a 2005 hearing: "I'm fairly certain that this was the first congressional hearing at which a representative uttered the phrase 'regularized expectation-maximization.' You could just hear statistics junkies everywhere doing their best (BEGIN ITAL)Beavis and Butthead impressions: 'Did he just say (BEGIN ITAL)regularized expectation-maximization(END ITAL)? Heh, heh, heh.'"

The strength of Mann's book lies in the light he sheds on how the scientific peer-review process works, along with his firsthand account of his role in the national political feud. Mann began working on his Ph.D. with the assumption "that natural variability might be more important than some scientists thought," and he takes the reader through his professional and personal conversion to a climate activist. Rather than confining his work to academia, he now battles his opponents on the Web, on talk shows and in print.

Mann dwells at length on editorial improprieties involved in the publication of a 2003 paper by Willie Soon and Sally Baliunas that challenged the notion that the past century was the warmest in 1,000 years. "The importance of the integrity of the editorial and peer review process cannot be overstated," he writes. "While it is not infallible and bad papers inevitably get published occasionally, the process is an essential component of the self-correcting machinery of science."

Mann's writing style feels strained at times - at one point, when debunking skeptics' claims, he writes, "In the climate change denial playbook, facts must never get in the way of a good smear opportunity" - but he manages to convey the disorienting sensation of a scientist suddenly coming under fire. Over the past decade he has had to answer questions from then-House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton (R-Tex.) about every grant he ever received; had his email correspondence posted on the Internet, in an incident that became known as Climategate; faced a lawsuit in which Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli unsuccessfully sought access to Mann's correspondence while he taught at the University of Virginia; and found himself the subject of a mocking YouTube video.

(For those seeking a climate skeptic's take on global warming, the Heartland Institute has recently released a book by sociologist Rael Jean Isaac, "Roosters of the Apocalypse," which declares that its side has won the public opinion and policy battle on climate change - and also attacks Mann.)

This experience - as well as his climate work - has turned Mann from a naive academic who dressed in his best suit for a 2003 Senate hearing into an outspoken advocate for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. Perhaps that's why he overlooks ethical lapses by some scientists who share his views. Describing how a British colleague urged Mann and others to delete emails they wrote each other about the basis for their scientific findings, to prevent them from becoming public, Mann calls that advice "ill-advised." And he details with pride how an increasing number of researchers have joined in the debate: "My fellow scientists will be fighting back, and I look forward to joining them in this battle."

One of those fighting back is James Lawrence Powell, a geochemist and former president of Reed College and Franklin and Marshall College, who has detailed every possible misdeed he can identify within the climate-skeptic community in "The Inquisition of Climate Science." Resting largely on research done by others, this highly polemical book is clearly aimed at the converted, rather than anyone who might be on the fence.

As climate researchers, their allies and their opponents debate the science in the blogosphere, lecture halls and other forums, how good a job has the media done in reporting on the conflict? That is the question University of Colorado at Boulder professor Maxwell T. Boykoff addresses in his book "Who Speaks for the Climate?" Although he provides a thoughtful analysis of British and American climate coverage over the past quarter-century, he uses too much academic jargon and too many references to French philosopher Michel Foucault to appeal to the general public.

Boykoff suggests that many mainstream reporters quote climate contrarians out of a misguided quest for journalistic balance. (Full disclosure: Some of my stories were included in his statistical analysis, though he doesn't explicitly critique them.) But this point misses the real reason that many journalists include comments from climate skeptics: They are trying to capture the political divide over global warming.

Yet Boykoff provides a helpful overview of how reporting on global warming has evolved as the scientific consensus has solidified, and why informed coverage matters. As he writes, "A more informed public and more wisely supported links between science, policy and media are in our collective self-interest." He also helps explain why the climate-change debates are so intense. "They cut to the heart of how we live, work, play and relax in modern life, and thus critically shape our everyday lives, lifestyles and livelihoods."

Non-experts who want a concrete sense of climate change's impact - and a lyrical reading experience - should turn to "A Great Aridness," by William deBuys. A natural storyteller who has spent most of his adult life in the Southwest, deBuys follows the trails of climate change's effects. Those trails "lead to the sidewalk-and-gutter, two-car subdivisions of Las Vegas and to the raw cinderblock and shipping-crate (BEGIN ITAL)colonias(END ITAL) of Ciudad Juarez," he writes. "They will lead to backcountry wilderness as well as ordinary backyards, to mile-deep canyons and to canals hundreds of miles long."

By reading books like deBuys's, Americans might begin to envision an end to the climate wars. In chronicling changing weather patterns and their effects on Southwestern history, he suggests that shifts might come in fits and starts, rather than in the straight line some might be looking for. "It seems that when the climate changed, it did not change in just one way," he writes. "Perhaps it never does."

Juliet Eilperin is the national environmental reporter for The Washington Post and the author of "Demon Fish: Travels Through the Hidden World of Sharks," to be published in paperback in July. She can be reached at eilperinj@washpost.com.

Copyright 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
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RUNNING WITH THE KENYANS: Passion, Adventure, and the Secrets of the Fastest People on Earth

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May 25, 2012 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Adharanand Finn
Ballantine
ISBN 978-0345528797
265 pages
$26

Reviewed by Benjamin Cheever

Every book, like every life, is a pilgrimage with one central question. Is this about the journey or the destination? The subtitle of Adharanand Finn's "Running With the Kenyans" promises "passion" and "adventure" but also "the secrets of the fastest people on earth." Are we going to wander and find enlightenment, too? Yup.

An editor at the Guardian, Finn waited until one night when the children were asleep before proposing a family outing certain to horrify their mother. An "adventure" he called it, meaning elephants and zebras - not malaria, poverty and tribal violence.

Finn's dormant passion for running had been inflamed when, on assignment for Runner's World magazine, he entered the Powderham Castle 10K near his home in Devon, England, and astonished himself with a win and a personal best. "Six months in Kenya," he told his wife, Marietta. "The kids will love it." The author, more writer than athlete, would train with "the greatest runners on earth. And if I find their secret, I can bottle it and make a fortune."

"Brilliant," said Marietta. She had a sister in Kenya, a brother in Tanzania.

And so the five Finns, two adults, two young daughters and a toddler, set their sights on the highlands above the Rift Valley. "In 2011 the top twenty fastest marathons of the year were (BEGIN ITAL)all run by Kenyans," Finn tells us. If his difficult-to-pronounce first name, Adharanand, throws you - as it did me - you should know that the author's parents were hippies and Adharanand is Sanskrit for Eternal Bliss. I don't know about bliss, but Finn is a pleasure to read. He learned of excellence early and he learned on foot. When he was 12, he broke the record for 800 meters at his school and won the 1,500-meter five minutes later.

Since then, he has slowed down along with the rest of the developed world. "Despite all the advances in training technology, nutrition and physiotherapy ... in the West we're stuck on a conveyor belt going the wrong way," he writes. In 1975, 34 marathons were run in under two hours and 20 minutes by Americans, 23 by Britons and none by Kenyans. "By 2005, however, there were 22 sub 2:20 marathon performances by Americans, 12 by Britons and a staggering (BEGIN ITAL)490(END ITAL) by Kenyans."

Energized for his adventure, Finn gets faster until he reads the best-seller "Born to Run," Christopher McDougall's investigation into the secrets of the Tarahumara Indians, great distance runners who run barefoot or in paper-thin sandals. Finn concludes that his shoes are inhibiting the natural action of his feet and tendons. He abandons the comfy shoes and heel-first style that has long been doctrine in the West. He changes his stride to mimic that of barefoot runners, and, not surprisingly, his legs hurt. He's aiming to take part in Kenya's Lewa Marathon, one of the most punishing in the world, but by the time the family bags are packed the farthest he can run is a pitiful three miles. Worse, he's distraught to see Kenyans striding comfortably in the footwear he's been struggling to do without.

The family rents a house in Iten, which lies in an area that is arguably the geographic center of long-distance running. They hire a guard, although almost everybody is kind to the Muzungus (whites). Home-grown and visiting running stars are thick on the ground. Even Joan Benoit is there with her son, Anders. She won the gold medal for the first-ever Olympic woman's marathon in 1984.

Caught in the first boom of adult-onset running fanatics during the late 1970s, I ran 60 marathons before I stopped counting. I still run at least one a year and wanted to visit the Rift Valley in the same way some Catholics want to visit the Vatican. My trip was lead by John Manners, a man who could - and should - write a book about Kenyan runners. A transplanted baseball fan, John came to Kenya with his anthropologist father when he was 12 years old, and saw the promise of the country's world dominance in running, before the world itself had any idea. He's one of the many whom Finn interviews in his quest for secrets.

The children who run to school here are fast, Finn learns, because if they're late they'll be caned. So toughness is one secret. Another is elevation - running in thin air increases the blood's ability to absorb oxygen. The doughy dish Ugali, which they make of cornmeal, may not figure in their running success, but there may be something in how little of (BEGIN ITAL)anything(END ITAL) they have to eat. They are hungry, but also hungry to win, and running is one of a very few ways to earn cash in a country without much. Rest is another secret. Lornah Kipligat, who has held several world records and operates a training center in Iten, is famous for sleeping 16 hours a day.

Finn and his newfound African friends all run the Lewa marathon, which is held in a wildlife reserve. Helicopters are used to distract the lions. He's not as fast as he had hoped, but we mustn't judge his transformation until he returns to the developed world and finishes the New York Marathon. How did he do? Well that's a secret.

Benjamin Cheever is the author of "Strides: Running Through History With an Unlikely Athlete."

Copyright 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE ART OF INTELLIGENCE: Lessons from a Life in the CIA's Clandestine Service

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May 25, 2012 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Henry A. Crumpton
Penguin Press
ISBN 978-1594203343
338 pages
$27.95

Reviewed by Peter Finn

In January 2000, the National Security Council directed the CIA to locate and track Osama bin Laden, in a possible prelude to a military strike. In the risk-averse world before 9/11, neither the Pentagon nor the CIA's leadership could countenance allowing even limited forces in northern Afghanistan or neighboring countries to carry out the directive. At the time, Henry A. Crumpton was responsible for the CIA's global counter-terrorism operations, and he and a small group of other officials pushed "a reluctant and even suspicious interagency bureaucracy" toward the position that unmanned aerial vehicles - drones - could provide a solution.

The CIA found a Predator drone, which had seen some service over Bosnia, gathering dust at an Air Force base, and moved it to a base in Uzbekistan. After a human source revealed that bin Laden was at the Tarnak Farms compound, near Kandahar, in a now-famous incident the Predator's cameras zoomed in on a tall man, dressed in white. "Holy Mother of God," said one of the operatives watching the video-stream. But the Predator was not then armed with Hellfire missiles. It would take six hours for cruise missiles fired from the Indian Ocean to hit the target, and the Clinton White House balked.

Crumpton's memoir, "The Art of Intelligence," is a lively account of his 24-year career in the CIA that charts one of the most significant legacies of the last decade of warfare: the rise of drones. The failure to strike in 2000 led to a renewed fight over arming the Predator, and as Crumpton notes, "Many were resistant to the notion that the CIA should have such lethal capability and authority."

That controversy endures, and Crumpton provides a small window into the early history of the program, describing how "mission-driven bureaucratic subversives, operating inside the huge and lumbering U.S. security establishment, had imagined and produced an armed UAV." After the United States invaded Afghanistan, Crumpton writes that "we cranked Hellfire shots day and night."

Crumpton likes to mix it up. He portrays himself as one of those bureaucratic subversives who, in the wake of 9/11, sometimes worked in a "barely-bounded rage." He also uses his book to slip the knife into some old in-house foes, particularly those deemed too timid for the struggle. And he periodically rails at the press, politicians and other repositories of fecklessness. That's standard fare for the Washingtonian memoir.

Crumpton's account of his life as a young recruit, his years in the Africa Division, and his close-up view of the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban is far more interesting and often entertainingly frank.

A native of rural Georgia, Crumpton left home at the age of 16 and headed to Alabama, where he found work on the evening shift in a carpet factory so he could study for a high school diploma by day. He was a kid who was passionate about learning and bursting with curiosity about the world. After graduating from high school, he drifted west and first attended St. John's in Santa Fe, but the college's Great Books program gave way to the "extracurricular opportunities" at the University of New Mexico after he transferred there. After graduation, he traveled through Asia, the Soviet Union and Western Europe, eluding law enforcement for various offenses, including "violent public disorder."

Since childhood he had pined for a life in the CIA, and a CIA recruiter saw some raw talent in the eager 22-year-old, who became the youngest and least experienced trainee in his class. Crumpton was assigned to the Africa Division where officers "thrived in fluid, unstructured and churning environments," he writes. It was in many ways an ideal environment for luring Soviet-bloc officials into working for the CIA. Crumpton describes breaking and entering to plant listening devices, bugging the hotel rooms of visiting foreign leaders, working with anti-Marxist guerrillas, and the dance of recruitment. One only wishes he could have been a little more specific about where he was operating and who the targets were, but one presumes the CIA's publications board sanitized some of this copy.

The Afghanistan campaign left Crumpton variously exhausted, exhilarated and embittered, and he moved on to calmer assignments in 2002. The CIA and Joint Special Operations Command's network of commandoes had briefly and brilliantly run the war but were, in the end, denied the resources to complete what Crumpton saw as the campaign's strategic objectives, goals that still define the conflict: killing the leadership of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, denying them safe havens from which to operate, and improving the lives of ordinary Afghans.

It is perhaps Crumpton's misfortune that his memoir arrives in the publicity-sucking slipstream of his colleague Jose Rodriquez Jr.'s "Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives," an apologia for "enhanced interrogation techniques," elsewhere described as torture. (Crumpton was not involved in the secret prisons set up overseas by the CIA after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.)

"The Art of Intelligence" combines the derring-do of old-fashioned spycraft with thoughtful meditations on the future of warfare and intelligence work. It deserves to be read.

Peter Finn is a national security correspondent for The Washington Post. He can be reached at finnp@washpost.com.

Copyright 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE EMERGENCY STATE: America's Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs

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THE EMERGENCY STATE: America's Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs May 25, 2012 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS Tweet

THE EMERGENCY STATE: America's Pursuit of Absolute Security at All CostsDavid C. Unger
Penguin Press
ISBN 978-1594203244
359 pages
$27.95

PERMANENT EMERGENCY: Inside the TSA and the Fight for the Future of American SecurityKip Hawley and Nathan Means
Palgrave McMillan
ISBN 978-0230120952
260 pages
$27

Reviewed by Karen J. Greenberg

Last year a Newsweek article made public Barack Obama's presidential reading list. Its message was promising: A third of the books focused on former presidencies. Yet according to "The Emergency State," David Unger's ambitious and valuable overview of 20th-century presidents and national security, Obama has unfortunately picked up the bad habits of his predecessors. They have created what Unger calls emergency state government - policies by which America's security interests are defined with an ever-increasing expansiveness. Over the last century, Unger argues, America's presidents have incrementally institutionalized the emergency state and in so doing have weakened the country morally, constitutionally, financially and most of all in terms of security itself.

According to Unger, a longtime foreign affairs editorial writer for the New York Times, the rationale for the emergency state emerged in the early 1900s with Woodrow Wilson's evangelical promise to make the world safe for democracy. But it took the personality and genius of Franklin Roosevelt, the godfather of the emergency state, to put into place its more unsavory elements. In the name of national security, FDR enhanced executive power; crafted foreign policy in secret and devious ways; authorized far-reaching and possibly illegal policies against Japanese-Americans; and misled the public about his true intentions and his behind-the scenes directives.

After FDR, both Republican and Democratic presidents set the pattern of the emergency state. Truman "locked in (its) policies and politics" by waging an all-encompassing cold war rather than pursuing a more nuanced relationship with Soviet Russia, and overseeing the passage of the 1947 National Security Act, which created the architecture of emergency state government: the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Council. Eisenhower authorized the CIA's policy of toppling governments around the globe. And, in a move that Unger finds unforgivable, Kennedy made the executive unaccountable for its decisions by creating the position of national security adviser, a post subject neither to congressional confirmation nor oversight.

For Unger, all this undermines the Constitution and violates the intent of the country's founders and 19th-century presidents to steer clear of foreign entanglements. By the time Lyndon Johnson entered the White House, all the elements of the emergency state were in place, and each successive president chose entanglements and evasion over transparency, legality and independence. Following "his political mentor and presidential model," FDR, Johnson lied to the public about his intentions to escalate the American presence in Vietnam, bypassing Congress and relying on covert operations to do so - and ultimately deciding not to seek re-election in 1968 as a result. Nixon and, to a lesser extent, Ford aimed to strengthen the emergency state but, in Watergate and its aftermath, accomplished the opposite, "discredit(ing) three crucial pillars of the emergency state - the White House, the CIA and the FBI." Then came Jimmy Carter, singular in eschewing the deceitful and destructive ways of the emergency state but politically naive and ultimately unwilling to give up presidential powers. He tried his best to pull the country out of the dark hole into which it had fallen, but was too ineffectual to do so.

It was up to Reagan to find a way to restore the glory days. Under his command, the emergency state reasserted itself with renewed strength, along with the telltale signs of secrecy, deceit and disregard for the law. With Iran-Contra, Reagan's NSC bypassed Congress and the secretaries of state and defense and reclaimed the confrontational stance taken by Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy. Once the Soviet empire - America's premier rationale for military expansion worldwide - began to crumble, it was left to George H.W. Bush to face the challenges of a new kind of foreign policy: one that focused on a new enemy, the "rogue state."

But no one seems to disappoint Unger as much as Bill Clinton, "the first American president born under the emergency state." Armed with the leadership qualities of FDR, the global vision of Eisenhower and Nixon, and a Carter-like suspicion toward the emergency state, Clinton nonetheless preferred "enlargement" to downsizing. He encouraged Americans who, "by 1993 ... were politically addicted to the role of leader of the free world," to intervene around the globe in places peripheral to U.S. interests, such as Africa, Haiti and Bosnia.

Unger's disappointment with Clinton overlooks the fact that, in Unger's narrative, Clinton, while committed to expanding America's global dominance, does not invoke the more nefarious mechanisms of the national security state such as implementing unconstitutional measures or encasing foreign policy in a never-ending web of secrecy. To maintain his position that all recent presidents have furthered excesses in the name of national security, Unger holds Clinton accountable not for constitutional violations or corruption, but largely for damaging America's economy by ignoring the foreign policy-related economic challenges, refusing to curtail the military budget, and failing to protect the domestic economy, which essentially "hollowed out the remaining competitive strengths of American industry."

Unger gives disappointingly brief treatment to the two most recent presidencies and, in so doing, unfairly conflates them. One might criticize Obama for failing to make good on his promise to close Guantanamo or to restore rights generally in the war on terror. But to link his tactics to those of the Bush administration when it comes to foreign policy decisions obfuscates rather than enlightens. To give the most glaring example, Bush's vice president, Dick Cheney, met repeatedly and secretly with intelligence officials to craft a deceitful story of WMDs in order to lead the country into war with Iraq. This seems a far cry from the use of sanctions and diplomacy that the Obama administration is now employing in Iran. Here as elsewhere, one can only wonder whether Unger sluffs over distinctions that might make all the difference.

In contrast to Unger's relentless pessimism, Kip Hawley and Nathan Means' "Permanent Emergency" provides a more upbeat story by focusing on one piece of the national security apparatus. In memoir fashion, Hawley's narrative traces the story of the the Transportation Security Administration, created in the immediate wake of 9/11 and charged with improving airport security. In matters of transportation, Hawley demonstrates, the trade-off is not security versus American values and constitutional protections, but security versus efficiency, effectiveness and public approval.

In 2005, Hawley inherited an agency whose workers were disgruntled and whose work was thankless in the minds of the consumers: the airline passengers. By 2004, TSA employees, routinely demoralized by passenger resistance, were overcome by "hopelessness." Meanwhile, the public itself was fed up, tired of delays and seemingly indiscriminate searches.

Hawley's solution was to professionalize the work by making intelligence a central part of the agency's mission. After his promotion to administrator, the TSA was newly included in the Department of Homeland Security's morning intelligence telephone call. Armed with insights into the updated plans of al-Qaeda, Hawley used this information in part to update the agencies' policies and practices.

Hawley's defensive account of the importance of the TSA extols, among other things, the passions of patriotism as a useful counterterrorism tool. Throughout his narrative he brings to life details of incipient threats around the globe in an effort to justify his agency and to motivate its workers. He brings to the fore the way in which the emergency state that Unger describes trickles down to the average man: Security is a rallying cry for patriotism, however much it undermines the country's legal and moral foundations.

Whether observed from the heights of the executive branch or the grittiness of the airport security line, the security agenda that defines 21st-century America continues to challenge the sense of safety and trust in its institutions that its citizens deserve.

David C. Unger is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School and the author of "The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First One Hundred Days."

Copyright 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
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The LOLA QUARTET

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May 25, 2012 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Emily St. John Mandel
Unbridled
ISBN 978-1609530792
279 pages
$24.95

Reviewed by Anna Mundow

At the satisfying conclusion of Emily St. John Mandel's "The Lola Quartet," the exhausted protagonist, Gavin Sasaki, contemplates the suburbs at night as he drives north from Florida. He sees "a continuous centerless glimmering of lights, shadows of palm trees on parking lots, malls shining like beacons. ... None of the cities had edges anymore, just a long slow reach across landscapes."

The same is true for most of the characters in this elegant, hypnotic novel. Their edges are blurred, their identities hazy, their grip on truth as weak as their hold on each other. Take Gavin, a junior reporter for the New York Star. Depressed, disillusioned and fearing the next round of layoffs, Gavin begins to invent quotes to animate his stories. "If you tell a lie it's easier to tell another," he quickly realizes, and we have the queasy sense of truth slipping its moorings, of imminent disaster.

Menace has already arrived. The novel opens with 17-year-old Anna "living in hiding with an infant" and almost $118,000 in cash concealed in the baby's stroller. We see her for an instant, and then we encounter a young man named Jack, whose "roommate has gone to Virginia to rescue a girl." Finally, we meet Gavin, whose quest forms the core of the novel. Their lives are connected and will reconnect, but only gradually, as Mandel tells her engrossing story of youthful mistakes that spawn adult crimes.

Here Mandel perfects the tantalizing, sidelong approach to characters and events that was so effective in her previous novel, "The Singer's Gun." But she wisely constructs a leaner plot. A flashback shows us a group of students at a performing-arts high school in Florida who play jazz together as the Lola Quartet: Gavin on trumpet, Jack on saxophone, Daniel on bass and Sasha on drums. Sasha's half sister, Anna, is Gavin's girlfriend and the school's troubled, wayward beauty. After the group's farewell performance, Anna disappears. Gavin hears a rumor that she has hit the road, pregnant.

Five years later, on a reporting assignment in Florida, Gavin visits his sister, who negotiates foreclosure deals with property owners. She shows him a photograph she recently took of a child who strongly resembles her. Like the creatures invading the Florida subdivisions ("pythons swimming in the canals sometimes, undulating ribbons with teeth"), Gavin's past slithers into his shaky present, and his hunt for Anna begins. It leads him back to his old friends and into an underworld of drugs and violence where "you pay with money, or you pay with your family." Mandel brilliantly modulates the heightening suspense in a novel that remains, above all, an elegy for lost - and perhaps only imagined - innocence.

Anna Mundow is a freelance journalist and reviewer.

Copyright 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
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Hot summer author: Stephen Carter

What if John Wilkes Booth failed in his assassination attempt — and Abraham Lincoln recovered, only to face an impeachment trial? That's the intriguing premise of The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Carter's courtroom drama featuring a determined young African-American heroine.

By Robert Deutsch, USA TODAY

Stephen Carter is a Yale Law School professor an author of a number of best-selling novels.

By Robert Deutsch, USA TODAY

Stephen Carter is a Yale Law School professor an author of a number of best-selling novels.

The book:

The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln: A Novel

By Stephen Carter

Knopf, $26.95

Why it's hot: Books about Lincoln's assassination still fascinate — see Bill O'Reilly's best seller. In his new novel, Carter draws on his expertise both as constitutional scholar and as the author of four best-selling thrillers including The Emperor of Ocean Park.

A taste: "He had been shot on Good Friday. On Easter Sunday, he had risen. By the middle of the week, the President was sitting up, meeting with his staff, once again in charge of the affairs of the nation."

On sale: July 10

The author

Quick bio: A professor at Yale Law School since 1982, Carter, 57, has also written eight non-fiction books, most recently The Violence of Peace: America's Wars in the Age of Obama. He and his wife have two grown children.

His inspiration: The idea of writing a "what if" Lincoln book has been in "the back of my head" since Carter was an undergrad. The man from Springfield has fascinated Carter since elementary school when he would flip through his father's copy of Carl Sandburg's multi-volume Lincoln biography. Today Carter has a bookshelf filled with Lincoln books in his Connecticut house.

Lincoln impeached? On what grounds? Lincoln is our greatest president, says Carter, "but because he faced a greater crisis than any other president, he did things that, in the light of history, don't look very good." Things such as suspending habeas corpus, shutting down newspapers and putting northern cities under martial law.

Would Lincoln have succeeded in politics today? "Not a chance. He would been been dismissed as uneducated and too folksy. He was not very telegenic and had a funny voice."

Any plans to see the summer movie Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter? "I don't know. It sounds like enormously silly fun," but he doubts his wife will agree.

Up next: A historical novel about the Cuban missile crisis.

His summer reading:An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies by Tyler Cowen; Attica Locke's The Cutting Season, a mystery set in Louisiana; and

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre McCloskey.

E-books or print? "I read mostly print. I love the feel of the books."

For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

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Mieville works ‘Moby-Dick’ on the railroad

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