Ten Years Ago Today...

...I was getting off the bus at the Taman Tun Dr Ismail bus stop, just after the traffic lights. My workplace was just a couple of minutes away by foot. That's the only detail I remember with clarity.

I'm not sure anymore whether it was the 11th or the 12th.

The front page of The Star looked different. It was spread out over two pages, and on it was the image of one of the burning New York World Trade Center towers.

I was still at my first job in IT. I was, at the time, based in the unfortunately named Plaza IBM.

I don't remember how many bomb threat alerts we received, but I'm sure there was at least one. I recall my colleagues streaming out of the building, some getting into their cars one day.

Did I stay behind on that occasion? I can't be certain. But I do remember the petulant voice on the other end of the line, chastising my department for not having someone on standby to take phone calls in case of emergencies - and I don't mean bomb threats.

The days afterwards just passed by. CNN kept replaying footage of the burning, then collapsing WTC Towers for days. The enormity of the event and its aftermath took a while to sink in. A very long while.

But the Islamic terrorism thing hit a lot closer to home with the Bali bombings in... 2002? And was I in a Jakarta food court, eating rice with beef in pepper sauce when the TV played footage of the incident, or was it some other date? Or was it all a dream?

I should've started blogging when the writing bug started twitching. I had lots to write about when I started travelling to Indonesia to work, but I can't accurately place names, addresses and events within the time frame anymore.

I remember seeing pictures of what appear to be Palestinians, cheering the collapse of the WTC. Many Arab governments, I was sure, could barely contain their glee. Iran didn't seem to bother.

Lessons were learnt, all right. Mostly the wrong ones. And it didn't take ten years to prove that bloodshed has done little to advance the misguided causes of everyone involved. But some still try. It's all so absurd.

The world will eventually tire of the fighting. Whomever will be chosen to lead will one day be ushering a war-weary generation into a peaceful but faraway age. This bunch with us right now won't cut it. And it'll be a long while before the fires burning right now will die.

...Ten years. Feels like last year. I've switched jobs twice since then. Plaza IBM is now Plaza VADS. I hardly hear about IBM these days; it's all Google, Twitter, Facebook and Apple now.

Those days get hazier by the day, retreating into the far corners of my mind. I suppose it's because I didn't experience it first-hand: the explosions, the fires and smoke, the falling debris and the ensuing chaos.

It's just as well. There's no point in "remembering 9/11" anyway.

Not anymore.

Moore Trouble Ahead

When I first read Stupid White Men, I thought, well, this is refreshing. But my interest in Michael Moore cooled somewhat after flipping through some of his subsequent books.

I stopped reading Counterpunch years ago because of similar feelings, though Moore's leftist Kool-Aid is less toxic; haven't they heard about the chill pill?

However, his films Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11 and Sicko were interesting and entertaining. You can't say that Moore doesn't know how to push his audience's buttons. At times I feel like he's that cartoon character standing in front of a shiny electronics panel bent on pushing every button, flicking every switch and turning every knob or dial until something finally breaks.

With the exception of Mike's Election Guide which I reviewed in my previous job, I never bothered with his other books. After a while, they all sound the same. At least he's consistent.

Then the Guardian published this excerpt from his upcoming book, Here Comes Trouble, just in time for the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Perhaps no other title aptly describes the memoir about America's most hated man, who panned his president when the nation was at war.

Given his uncanny button-pushing talents, the backlash was tremendous. He'd been verbally, digitally and physically assaulted; his property trespassed; and a whole lot more. It got to a point where he had to hire bodyguards, most of whom were former soldiers and SEALs - a bit ironic, considering his circumstances.

Then came the day someone was arrested for allegedly plotting to blow up Moore's house. Moore despaired over this for a time.

For me, it was the final straw. I broke down. My wife was already in her own state of despair over the loss of the life we used to have. I asked myself again: what had I done to deserve this? Made a movie? A movie led someone to want to blow up my home? What happened to writing a letter to the editor?

Yeah, why don't they write letters to the editor anymore? After all, not everybody is comfortable with the idea of parading and stepping on cow heads, burning churches, or throwing rubber snakes and newspapers into a possibly illegal bonfire.

That wannabe Guy Fawkes' plan was almost as sickening as former Fox News rabble-rouser Glenn Beck announcing his "urge" to kill Moore (and it seems, getting away with it), and Fox's Sean Hannity hosting a trespasser of Moore's house.

Are these are the kinds of freedoms that Dubya Bush said the "terr'ists" hate, the kinds that should be defended by toppling governments who don't like you - by force?

A decade after 9/11, Moore must feel vindicated. He'd been, at least, right about the Iraq war. But I find the closing anecdote in that Guardian extract a bit incredible.

As I do this over-the-top blurb on the book on the web site:

Moore is his own meta-Forrest Gump, at one moment he's an 11-year-old boy stuck on a Senate elevator with Bobby Kennedy, and the next moment he's inside the Bitburg cemetery with a dazed and confused Ronald Reagan. Changing planes in Vienna, he escapes death at the hands of the terrorist Abu Nidal.

In search one day for a bag of potato chips, he ends up eliminating racial discrimination in private clubs across America. He founded his first underground newspaper in the fourth grade. He refused to be on the CBS Evening News with Walter Kronkite at 16. And he became the youngest elected official in the country at age 18 by enlisting an "army of local stoners" as his campaign staff.

All of this makes for great fiction — but every one of these stories is true and from the life of one Michael Moore who became an iconic voice for progressives everywhere. But before Michael Moore became the Oscar-winning filmmaker and all-round thorn-in-the-side of corporate and rightwing America, he was the guy who had an uncanny knack for just showing up where history was being made.

Trouble, says Moore, is coming to you on 13 September. I might keep an eye out for it. With button-pushers like him, however, I'd do the pinch-of-salt thing because what he dishes out can be hard to swallow.

Big and Black

This morning, I replied thus to a colleague's e-mail:

Received it. It is heavy. It is black. It smells good. It's very long. It's interesting.

Make the phone call.

Though I could be talking about the Old Spice Guy, it's actually this:

Big, black, heavy, smells good and very long - Neal
Stephenson's latest, Reamde

Sorry to disappoint. I'm not like... that.

Won't be reviewing it for the papers, after all. They found someone else to do it. I get to keep my copy, though, so expect to see my own take on the book ... whenever.

More new books are coming out of MPH Publishing. Updates soon.

Another Stupid CSS Experiment

Whatever possessed me to go and drag these home with me during the long, long weekend?

Boredom and bravado, mostly. Never a good combination.

The Secret History of Elizabeth Tudor, Vampire Slayer
Lucy Weston
Gallery Books (2011)
304 pages
Fiction
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9033-3

The Facebook Effect
David Kirkpatrick
Virgin Books (2010)
374 pages
Non-fiction
ISBN: 978-0-7535-2275-2

State of Wonder
Ann Patchett
HarperCollins (2011)
353 pages
Fiction
ISBN: 978-0-06-207471-3

A Decade of Hope
Dennis Smith, with Deirdre Smith
Viking (2011)
356 pages
Non-fiction
ISBN: 978-0-670-02293-9

Columbus
Laurence Bergreen
Viking (2011)
417 pages
Non-fiction
ISBN: 978-0-670-02301-1


So yes, I'm trying a different way of presenting this. For the sake of symmetry, I've omitted the subtitles. It's always the heavy non-fiction books that have the longest subtitles, isn't it?

But this format also involves a lot of inline CSS code, which is quite messy when incorporated into normal posts. Maybe I should add new CSS definitions for this format into the blog template....

20/10/2014  I've abandoned this idea; too complicated. And I've also stopped publishing items from my reading list, which is probably longer than both my arms by now. But the CSS code might be useful for something else.

Not Quite Paradise

Overall, pleased with this, as I'd taken several days to draft and finalise it.

The title for this post was the original title of the piece; who knows why it was changed. Nor was the standfirst, shown below, used for the final versions. Perhaps I'm not obliged to provide either, but from my brief stint in journalism, both can be hard to come up with.

The review copy was not the one the bookstore wanted to promote, but the hardcover movie-poster version which you can buy online.

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Tale of human courage

From above, the hidden valley seemed like the Garden of Eden. Then the plane went down...

first published in The Star, 28 August 2011


Once upon a time, the US media went nuts over the abduction and eventual rescue of one Private Jessica Lynch in Iraq in 2003. But hers was not the only dramatic one of a female soldier in American history.

Professor of journalism Mitchell Zuckoff was doing some research when he stumbled upon an article about a rescue operation that took place towards the end of World War II. He eventually came back to it, did some reading and leg work and put it all into a book.

Zuckoff's Lost In Shangri-la: A True Story Of Survival, Adventure, And The Most Incredible Rescue Mission Of World War II – breathe, soldier, breathe! – also features a female member of the US Armed Forces. Corporal Margaret Hastings of the Women's Army Corps (WAC) was part of the Far East Air Service Command (shortened to "Fee-Ask") based in Hollandia in the Dutch half of New Guinea (the island is now split into West Papua and Papua New Guinea). But the circumstances from which she needed rescue were quite different from Lynch's situation.

On May 13, 1945, Hastings and over 20 crew members and passengers boarded the Gremlin Special, a C-47 transport plane, for a sightseeing tour of a remote jungle valley surrounded by mountains. Colonel Ray Elsmore, also based in Hollandia, supposedly discovered this valley which was later dubbed "Shangri-La" by two war correspondents, George Lait and Harry Patterson. Sightseeing tours of Shangri-La, inhabited by supposedly savage, spear-wielding Stone Age tribes, became a treat for those stationed at Fee-Ask.

At that time, the only way into Shangri-La was by plane, which was a risky undertaking. Mists often hid nasty surprises for unwary or inexperienced pilots. On the day of the crash, Zuckoff writes, such a pilot may have been at the helm of the Gremlin Special. Of the passengers and crew, which included nine members of Hastings' WAC unit, only three would ultimately survive: First Lieutenant John McCollom, Tech Sergeant Kenneth Decker, and Hastings.

Though meant to be a journalistic record, this book feels a bit like a documentary or film. A series of events come together to form a credible historical narrative of not just the rescue and the profile of the key figures, but also of the natives, the valley and those who were there before, and the war raging around them.

Among other things, we learn of C. Earl Walter Jr and his Filipino-American paratroopers who were sent to rescue the three. We discover that Colonel Elsmore was not the first to discover Shangri-La, now called the Baliem Valley. We observe breathlessly as the daring rescue plan unfolds. We look on in horror as a drunk rogue filmmaker parachutes out of a plane. We are also given a glimpse of the lives and cultures of the Papuan natives, who are more than what the reporters say they are.

And as more and more Yankees and their allies pour into the valley, a whiff of danger arises as the natives' regional leader feels threatened by the foreign presence and begins plotting....

Just as it was in the tale of Jessica Lynch, Margaret Hastings is very much the heroine and pivotal figure here, even though other key figures are given more or less equal time. The book starts and ends with Hastings. She was even crowned "Queen of Shangri-La" by the press then, a title she would come to loathe. Another edition of this book, Lost In Shangri-la: Escape From Another World, is done up with a movie poster of a cover (pictured here) that rubs that fact in.

One could perhaps sigh at the author's apparent sexing up of a dramatic rescue operation by centring the whole thing on the attractive female survivor. But Zuckoff keeps the narrative chaste by sticking to the historical and journalistic aspects of the rescue. And there's lots of history, with bits of anthropology and anecdotal accounts. However, some attempts at philosophising, like how the act of war is more crucial to the natives' way of life than ours, sound laboured.

It could've been written with a bit more dramatic flair, but judging from the extensive bibliography, one supposes that the author may have been worn out by all the research he'd done – look at all those notes at the back!

Then again, perhaps not. Poignant, gritty, engaging and occasionally comic, Lost In Shangri-La can stand on its own as a compelling tale of human courage, camaraderie and survival without any embellishment.

---

Lost in Shangri-La

A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II

Mitchell Zuckoff
Harper (2011)
Non-fiction
384 pages
ISBN: 978-0-06-209358-5

Too Much Information

Now that this review is out, here's a bit more information.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo in Central Africa was formerly known as the Congo Free State, Belgian Congo, Congo-Léopoldville, Congo-Kinshasa and Zaire (1971-1997).

It's not to be confused with the Republic of the Congo aka the Congo Republic, Congo-Brazzaville, Little Congo or simply the Congo, another state in Central Africa.

So, there is no "Zaire and the Democratic Republic of Congo". At present, there is, however, a "Republic of the Congo" and "Democratic Republic of the Congo".

I got confused. My bad.

---

Too much info

first published in The Star, 26 August 2011


What an iPad of a book, I thought, as I ran my hands over the cover that was tastefully done in white, black and red. And just like a real iPad, you will either get sick of it after a short while or be lost in it for hours, maybe days.

The Information is James Gleick's attempt to enlighten the masses about the subject of "information": its history, theories, and how technology that bloomed in the last 50 years has redefined our relationship with information.

Gleick kicks things off with the story of early forms of texting, which includes fire signals and African talking drums. While highlighting the latter we are introduced to Kele, a Bantu language spoken in parts of Zaire and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Inflections in speech can give the same Kele word or phrase different meanings, resulting in comical and potentially tragic consequences. For instance, one can end up saying "he boiled his mother-in-law" instead of "he watched the riverbank". Several revelations arise from this: language is complex; such complexities can form a basis for some kind of encryption; and it seems that mothers-in-law are hated everywhere.

The book explores other aspects of information, such as communication (telegraph and telecommunications), processing (19th century English mathematician and mechanical engineer Charles Babbage's difference engine, transistors and logic circuits), encryption (WWII's famed Enigma machine), and finally, "the flood" (social networks and Wikipedia).

The book gets harder to read as one goes along, however. Some parts are like a textbook or encyclopaedia, with diagrams, math equations, foreign words and special symbols. All that, plus the dry tone and inaccessible language clutter up and bog down what would have been an interesting book that might explain and contextualise, among other things, phenomena such as Fox "News", LOLcats, and Charlie Sheen. Digging up such gems, however, is like going through a mile of Google search results. One wonders if this is actually the sequel to Gleick's previous book, Chaos.

Those with the determination, patience and stamina to wade through the entire book will likely be rewarded with a clearer understanding of what we read, why we seek it, why we read some things more than others, and why we have that urge to "spread the word".

Some points to ponder: Our hunger for information can lead to an information hangover and apathy, so how do we sate the hunger while avoiding the side-effects? If DNA code is "information", does that make us "living machines", and gene-based treatments a form of programming?

For me, "information" connotes something that's shiny, intriguing and that invites exploration, but the task of unravelling the complex relationships between us and the information we produce and consume is much, much harder.

Though I feel Gleick has done his utmost to do this, I also fear he has been too successful. The Information may help us understand the origins of information and our ties to it, but it may also end up a victim of its author's apparent success – a book that's too smart for the casual reader, afflicted by some of the problems it highlights and tries to explain.

---

The Information

James Gleick
Fourth Estate
526 pages
Non-fiction
ISBN: 978-0-00-742311-8

Calling For Weird Things

Jen Campbell, who blogs at This is Not the Six-word Novel, is calling booksellers all over for weird things they've heard their customers say for her book, Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops.

What began as a single post about said topic eventually grew into a series. Weeks ago, Campbell accumulated enough weird things for a book. The latest edition will be published in the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand.

Later on, Campbell opened up contributions from several Commonwealth countries, including the aforementioned ones. What she got was so enjoyable, she decided to lengthen the list and include weird things from booksellers worldwide.

"If you have a bookshop in space, you may enter too. Extra kudos to you," she adds.

Alas, I'm a deskbound editor who's dream job (one of several) is to run a book nook one day. And there aren't a lot of indie booksellers in this country; fewer still, I think, have the knack for remembering the weird things their customers say.

Anyway, please send in your best "Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops" to weirdthingsuk[at]gmail[dot]com.

Set the conversation out in a chat window format as seen in these posts.

Please include your name, contact number, and the name and location of your bookshop (bookshop name, address, city, country).

Submissions should be sent to the said e-mail address before 30 September this year.

Non-booksellers can help spread the word about this call for submissions. Check Campbell's blog for more information.

I wonder if the bookstore people will bring it over here...