I was in Chicago this week (more about that later) and wasn’t near a computer.  But during those days I had reviews posted at the New York Journal of Books and CCLaP.  Here’s the rundown:

Zbig: The Strategy and Statecraft of Zbigniew Brzezinsky, edited by Charles Gati

As the son of a Polish diplomat and witness to both Nazi and Soviet military aggression upon his homeland, Zbigniew Brzezinsky brought a unique perspective as National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter. Like his predecessor Henry Kissinger, Mr. Brzezinsky was a foreign-born Ivy League intellectual that sharked up the Establishment’s ladder. Zbig: The Strategy and Statecraft of Zbigniew Brzezinsky, edited by Charles Gati, brings together essays by former students and fellow colleagues who knew Mr. Brzezinsky from his various posts in academia and in public service. Charles Gati also includes an extended interview with Mr. Brzezinksy at the end of the collection. A chronology, bibliography, and index wrap up the book.

Zbig functions as both a tool to increase awareness about Mr. Brzezinsky’s contribution to international affairs and a corrective to the dominant conservative mythology about President Carter’s foreign policy. The reigning conservative mythos asserts that Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy was a disaster, with the Iran hostage crisis as the most cited example. But the book illustrates that President Carter did more in one term than most presidents do in two terms. (The success or failure of the Carter presidency on the domestic front, while important to framing presidential portrait, are irrelevant to the discussions in this anthology.) It will be up to the reader to weigh the merits of President Carter’s foreign policy, since most of the essayists collected here are certainly biased in that direction. It doesn’t necessarily mean what they say is untrue, but the reader should always consider the source.

The essay collection is aimed towards a more academic audience, but a general readership would have not a difficult time with the essays. For armchair enthusiasts and those struggling to unravel the complicated issues of international affairs and foreign policy, Zbig is a good place to start. The essay collection also represents the lack of either academic or popular literature on Zbigniew Brzezinsky, unlike the literature surrounding the tenure of Henry Kissinger, which is vast.

One impressive thing about Mr. Brzezinsky is his commitment to the long-term goals of stability and freedom, beyond partisan loyalty and ideological purity. He doesn’t fit into specific slots like hawk or dove. He forwarded the notion of “peaceful engagement,” a kind of active foreign policy that doesn’t use military force as a primary tool. He backed Vice President Hubert Humphrey and supported intervention in the Vietnam War, yet, following his retirement from government service with Jimmy Carter, he supported Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. On the other hand, he was one of the first and most vocal opponents of President George W. Bush’s ill-fated invasion of Iraq. He spoke out against the fraud and deceit emanating from the White House even while such liberal standard-bearers like Senators Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden voted for the invasion. While ideological purists will bristle at his support for Reagan or his opposition for the invasion of Iraq, Mr. Brzezinsky has always spoke his mind with truthfulness and intellectual precision.

Despite its aim towards an academic audience, Zbig is an informative and challenging introduction to Zbigniew Brzezinsky. This striking figure in the political landscape, bridged the worlds of Old Europe and the New World, academia and public service, and totalitarianism and the open society. The essay collection should serve as prologue to a full-length critical biography and large-scale assessments of the Carter Administration’s foreign policy.

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Trade: a Novelette
By Lochlan Bloom
Self-published/Amazon CreateSpace
Reviewed by Karl Wolff

The narrator works for Crunkl, a Berlin-based social media start-up with a edgy-yet-meaningless name (Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook, ad infinitum). His boss is Svil, a Swede who is very pro-equal rights. The narrator has an “easy relationship” with Lis, a sometime girlfriend. While Crunkl is still a small operation (only ten people on staff), the narrator is tasked with meeting Chet Bull, CEO of Sympatico, another start-up. Following the business meeting, Chet takes the narrator to an orgy as part of a nightmare descent into booze and pills. And it is truly nightmarish. Chet comes across like a libertarian satyr, extolling the virtues of money without a trace of irony and crowing about his sexual conquests in developing nations. Chet talks about how he ended up severely injuring a woman during a previous orgy while the narrator slowly loses sense of time and place after a massive consumption of booze and drugs.

While initially horrified at the after-effects of the night’s debauchery. After a discussion with Andre, a friend of Lis’s girlfriend, Andre introduces him to the works of Michel Houellebecq. Then he hits upon the idea of creating a social network of his own. This social network would focus specifically on sex. Producers of explicit material could get credits when someone watches their material. The watcher, in turn, would pay debits. It has a nice economic symmetry to it. This new commodification of sex leads to strange consequences. Lis becomes LisabetA, a wealthy porn star, and human sexual relationships become monetized, commodified, and hyper-mediated. It also feeds on delusions of grandeur, since not everyone has either the body type or ambition to become a LisabetA porn mogul.

Trade is a great short novel (or novelette). It begins strong, with a snarky, cynical narrative voice and “insider baseball” gossip on the inner workings of start-up investments. The Chet Bull misadventure is a tour de force and worth the admission price. My only quibble is with the ending. If Bloom could have sustained the energy and attitude throughout, it could have been an incredibly good novel. The depressed office worker as narrator and the treatment of sexuality with clinical detachment made the story feel like a mad cross between Fight Club and J.G. Ballard’s Crash. The novel fell off the rails at the end. It devolved into an extended essay on how society changed after the narrator’s sexual social media platform takes off and becomes a global phenomenon. The energy that began the novel drained away and it became more didactic. That said, if Bloom could expand this world into a full-length novel, with the same energy and attitude, then he’d really have something. As it stands, the novel feels like it stops abruptly. Even with this criticism, I would still recommend it to fans of challenging speculative fiction along the lines of J.G. Ballard and William S. Burroughs.

Out of 10/8.1