Thursday, September 23, 2010

The Secret Fire













Title:
The Secret Fire
Author: Martin Langfield
Publisher: Penguin Books 2009 (First)
ISBN: 978-0-141-02507-0
Pages: 358
 

This one was supposed to be a thriller, which I took for a change from the library. The cover line about a secret weapon launched by the Nazis in 1944 threatening London in 2007 suggested endless possibilities on science fiction. Unfortunately, it turned out to be one of the most boring. Even the plot was lifeless and pushed on by the labourings of the author. The book extols psychic forces, magical chants, mind reading, witchcraft, alchemy and sheer miracles.

The plot of the story can be summarized in a very few sentences because it is too short and devoid of any genuine interest. The Nazis get hold of a paper describing ‘secret fire’, written by Newton during his alchemical experiments in the 17th century. This weapon unleashes psychic forces when attacked and will turn the subject population into raving mad lunatics who’d kill each other. Two British secret service agents operating in France against the German occupation couldn’t prevent the Nazis working under a psychic leader Isambard launching the weapon in a V1 rocket targeted at London. A witch, practising psychic things prevent the weapon from detonating by her prayer and assimilates the destruction on her own mind by becoming insane. When the witch died after 63 years in 2007, the weapon’s power she had withheld for so many years began to become apparent, unleashing destruction after six decades. The hero of the game who turned out to be witch’s successor rings a magic bell in a London church and stops the weapon for all time.

The author has totally failed to instil anything worthwhile or interesting in this hellish bore of a book. Since he relies on magical powers to force the plot forward, anything is possible. In one instance, when the son of Isambard touches a secret paper (without opening it), his father could see the contents of the paper by mind reading from a distance of 1000 kilometres. Such fantastic writing may go with a Harry Potter series, but not to a serious book read by the general public. How Penguin Books accepted this trash is beyond my comprehension. Except for some ghastly description of the German occupation of France and its enslavement of its people, this book lacks anything of value.

The work is not at all recommended as it will be a pure waste of time. When the final page is reached, we end up with doubts on the mental health of the author himself!

Rating: Unfit for rating

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

The Tiger That Isn't


















Title:
The Tiger That Isn’t
Authors: Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot
Publisher: Profile Books 2008
ISBN: 978-1-86197-839-4
Pages: 174


An interesting book on the facts (or absence of it) behind numbers we encounter in everyday life. We are usually taken aback by the overstated claims of vested interests who represent the figures making them appear to be extremely huge and alarming. This book goes behind the numbers and expose them for what they are worth. Blastland is a writer and broadcaster while Dilnot presents the series More or Less on BBC Radio 4. Even though both of them are not decorated with very high academic distinctions, the subject matter turns out to be extremely lucid and enjoyable. This work may also be called a page-turner, because the number of pages is quite small. In fact, one can finish, or tempt to finish it in one go.

Eleven major aspects of numbers presented before the public are analysed in detail. They are, size, counting, chance, averages, targets, risk, measurement, data, shock figures, comparison and causation. When we see large numbers as the size of some quantity, we should ask whether the number is really big. Several examples are given, one of which is the number 3.12 billion. Even though it may look huge, it turns out to be (in the case of amounts of money) one unit each for every British citizen for every week of the year! So, if the government spends such a sum, it can quite rightly be called paltry. In the case of counting, it may not be straightforward, as the definition of a parameter can be vague in everyday life and the sampler may find hard pressed to assign it to a particular group. We should follow the guidance of Aristotle in such matters, which says, “It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits”. Another numeral which frightens us most is chance. When the media report clustered cases of cancer near to mobile phone towers, we should not fall in the trap at once, but understand the nature of chance. In fact, it is not at all surprising to detect several cases in a neighbourhood, without any extraneous reason at all. Also, one case is analyzed to fine detail. When speed cameras were installed on highways, the accident rates came down. The authors argue that the fall may be due to a statistical fact called regression to the mean which means that the number of a particular incident falls after a peak. Normally, speed cameras are installed in those stretches of the road where there was a severe spike in the number of accidents.

Averages can be deceiving. For example, if we consider 100 people, one of them being single-legged, we can see that 99% of the people are above average when compared on the average legs per person. This is particularly faulty in the case of incomes, where most of the people will be above average. Median, the value which separates the upper 50% from the lower half is a more realistic parameter. Another witty example is the case of a drunkard zigzagging on the road. If we take his average position over a period of time, it will be on the centre of the road, he being safe there. But in actual life, he is most likely to be run over by a vehicle.

Risk parameter is one quantity which is almost always blown out of proportions. A good discussion on whether there is any finding by a research team on the effects of mobile phone radiation is given, as “In January 2005 the president of te British Radiological Protection Board announced that risks revealed in new medical research into mobile phones meant children should avoid them. The resulting headlines were shrill and predictable. He issued his advice in the light of a paper from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden that suggested long-term use of mobiles was associated with a higher risk of a brain tumour known as an acoustic neuroma. The news reports said that mobile phones caused it to double. With mobile phones you could begin with the reassurance that these tumours are not cancerous. They grow, but only sometimes, and often slowly or not at all after reaching a certain size. But how big was the risk? When we spoke to Maria Feychting of the Karolinska Institute, one of the original researchers, a couple of days after the story broke, she told us that the baseline risk was 0.001 per 100,000. This is how many would ordinarily have an acoustic neuroma if they didn’t use a mobile phone. With ten years regular phone use, the much-reported doubling took this to 0.002, or 2 people in 100,000. Would Maria Feychting stop her own children using mobile phones? Not at all: she would rather know where they were and be able to call them. She warned that the results were provisional, the study small, and quite different results might emerge once they looked at a larger sample. In fact, it was usually the case, she said, the apparent risks like this seemed to diminish with more evidence and bigger surveys. Two years later the worldwide research group looking into the health effects of mobile phones – Interphone – of which the Karolinska Institute was a part, did indeed produce another report drawing on new results from a much larger sample. It now said there was no evidence of increased risk of acoustic neuroma from mobile phones, the evidence in the earlier study having been a statistical fluke, the product of chance, which in the larger study disappeared.
When taking samples to base judgements on, it should be unbiased and data collected should be clean. Another aspect of media scare reporting is giving shock figures, which might not be pointing to the truth. Natural variations in the sampled data are not usually taken into account. An example is the doping test for sportsmen. The tests are to find out the level of testosterone in blood, as “The hormone testosterone occurs naturally and is typically found in the urine in the ratio of one part testosterone to one part epitestosterone, another hormone. The World Anti Doping Agency says there are grounds for suspicion that people have taken extra testosterone in anyone found with a ratio of 4 parts testosterone to 1 part epitestosterone. The threshold used to be 6:1, but this was considered too lax. However, there were documented cases where this level was up to 11:1. Also there are whole populations, notably in Asia, with a natural T/E ratio below 1:1, who can take illegal testosterone with less danger of breaching the 4:1 limit. In short, there is abundant variation”.
 
Causation and correlation are two factors which need to be studied in detail to obtain the linking criterion. The postulate that overweight people live longer than thin people is true, but the reason is not their overweight. Rather, the cause might be that the thin people be affected with more diseases.

A good work and recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Monday, September 6, 2010

Arafat - From Defender to Dictator













Title: A
rafat – From Defender to Dictator
Author: Said K Aburish

Publisher: Bloomsbury 2004 (First published 1998)
ISBN: 0-7475-4430-1

Pages: 332



Yasser Arafat (1929-2004) was the voice and face of the Palestinian people. For over 40 years, he filled the political space available for an occupied state and helped the flame of nationhood unextinguished. We come to think of him as the genial, gentle and patriarchal figure who hopped the capitals of the world in pursuit of recognition and support for his cause. Arafat earned the respect of the world through his steadfastness to the principle of Palestinian statehood and to the right of his people to self-determination. There was no way the outside world could’ve imagined that this man would be considered in any other way than respectfully by his own people. That belief would be rudely shattered by this book by Abu Rish, who is also a Palestinian. Being a journalist, he has produced several books and is marked by the sharp and unequivocal condemnation of Arafat’s policies. The criticism often seeps into his personal life and the author accuses the leader of corruption, nepotism, incompetence, dictatorial tendencies and self-aggrandizement.



The book is the biography of Yasser Arafat. He was born in Cairo as Mohammed Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al Qudua Al Husseini. In his effort to promote himself as a son-of-the-soil, he claimed later that he was born in Jerusalem and changed his first name to Yasser. He lived his early years as an Egyptian and fought battles along side their soldiers. When Gemal Abdel Nasser cracked down on Palestinian groups in the aftermath of the 1956 Suez war, he moved to Kuwait and obtained a job in a civil engineering consultancy. He amassed a good fortune there and even in his last days, he used to boast that he was living on the money he earned in Kuwait. Along with close friends, he formed Fatah. One incident which led to the murder of a close friend prompted the authorities to arrest him. Fatah planned and executed several armed incursions into Israel and caused strife between the Arab nations and Israel. The war in 1967 with Israel dealt a crushing defeat on the Arabs. The military might of Egypt, Syria and Jordan decimated before the clever, pre-emptive strike by the Israelis, and they had to concede West bank, Gaza and several strips of land. Until then, the Palestinian problem was handled as one of Arab nationalism, in the sense that Palestine didn’t have a separate identity. King Hussein of Jordan openly claimed that Palestine was a part of Jordan. But the 1967 war changed all that. The Arabs realised the futility of confronting a state with far superior military power and thought it best to engage the Palestinians themselves against Israel. After all, it was their own home land! Arafat rose to prominence during this period and assumed leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The group’s base was in Jordan and the terrorist activities they committed from Jordanian soil against Israel invited punitive strikes from them. Jordan found the situation unpalatable and strife existed between the hosts and PLO.



PLO and Arafat was confident that the King enjoyed no popular support in Jordan. In what came to be called the ‘Black September’ plot of 1970, the Palestinians conducted a coup against Jordan and tried to wrest power from the King. This was a miscalculation which backfired and they had to flee Jordan. Arafat moved to Beirut, Lebanon which also shared the frontier with Israel. PLO involved massively in terror tactics including random acts of violence against civilian targets and plane hijackings. The greatest blow to human conscience came in 1972 when armed Palestinian terrorists killed Israeli athletes in the Olympic Games village in Munich, Germany. International pressure mounted on him and he was forced to seek a peaceful solution to his problems with Israel.


The Arabs joined hands once again to deal a punishing blow to Israel in the Yom Kippur war of 1973. Even though the losses on the Arab side were far greater, the disproportionate loss of life and material was crushing for the Jewish state. Rejuvenated by the victory, PLO turned to highhanded methods in Lebanon, their temporary home, which had equal prominence to the Muslims and Christians. Fights between Arafat’s men and Christian militias became the order of the day and the Lebanese government was powerless to do anything. This escalated into a civil war between the two factions and the ensuing Arab mediation under the leadership of Anwar Sadat caused peace agreements to be effected. Israeli military intervened in the conflict and provided active support to Christian forces. Large scale massacre at two refugee camps at Sabra and Chatilla in 1982 by Christian fighters under the blind eye of Israeli army evoked international condemnation. Arafat dillydallied between peace and revolution and had to leave Beirut to Tunis. PLO’s involvement in the hijacking of the yacht Achille Lauro from Alexandria caused their image to be tarnished. King Hussein’s peace efforts also proved to be futile.



Intifada, the uprising by Palestinian children and women against the Israeli army began in 1987 which attracted world wide attention for the largely peaceful antics of the protestors. Arafat was hesitant at first to throw in his lot with the movement as he feared for the usurpation of his stature, though he later reversed his stand. However, this was a clear indication that the matters on Palestinian soil was going out of the hands of its leader in exile. Terrorist organisations, the Islamic Jihad and Hamas gained further ground. Arafat sought the help of Saddam Hussein at this juncture. He had to support the Iraqi dictator’s aggression into Kuwait and had to suffer loss of credibility. It was widely thought that Arafat failed to correctly judge the international response to Saddam’s blatant act of vandalism. U.S intervened heavily in support of Kuwait and Iraqi forces were wiped off from there.



The victory over Saddam in the 1991 Kuwait war prompted George Bush to seek ways to find a peaceful solution to the Palestine problem as he was sure that without solving it, a lasting peace in the middle-east wouldn’t materialise. Peace conferences were held in Madrid and Washington between the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinians and Israel. Though Arafat didn’t participate in the negotiations personally, he was desperate to arrive at a presentable solution. His miraculous escape from a plane crash while the discussions were progressing, enhanced his image. Unknown to his negotiators in Washington which included Hannan Ashrawi, Arafat was engaged in a semi-official dialogue with Israel in Oslo, Norway. When the Oslo negotiations succeeded, the official delegates in Washington resigned in protest. Arafat signed the historic peace agreement in Washington with Prime minister Yitshak Rabin under the watchful eye of Bill Clinton. Autonomy to Gaza and Jericho were admitted, but no statehood was granted. A Palestinian authority was to be formed to administer these territories. Arafat entered Gaza as the President of the Palestinian National Authority. His rule, however, turned dictatorial. He filled all governmental and NGOs with his sycophants and cronies. He controlled the flow of money from outside and it often ended up lining the pockets of his associates. The peace deal was not endearing to the muslims as Israel continued the settlement programme in violation of the accord. The Palestinians, under the guidance of terrorist organisations began bombing and rocket attacks against Israel, which prompted them to block all access to Gaza and forcing the labourers there without work in Israel. Matters were rapidly deteriorating. Arafat’s running of Palestine was riddled with corruption from the very outset. He muffled the legislative, frightened the judiciary, owned the executive and stifled the press. The legislators were not even allowed to raise charges of corruption in the assembly. His security service’s regard for human rights were observed in the blatant violations of it and the number of people in its preventive custody exceeded that of the Israeli period. Nepotism ran supreme, as the surest way to move up in the hierarchy was to be someone special to the leader. Arafat died in 2004 in France due to prolonged illness.



Aburish’s treatment of Arafat is very harsh and unsympathetic. He assails right from the leader’s pretensions to the nativity of Jerusalem, exposing the family details and the nuances with which the people interact in the middle-east. Every chapter is replete with countless accusations of megalomania, nepotism, self-aggrandizement and ignorance. Arafat’s use of foul language under stress is also mentioned on several occasions. Even if we accept all the author’s accusations at face value, there still remains the issue of who else could handle the difficult Palestine issue. True, the peace accord was not entirely satisfactory to the Palestinians, but it was also unacceptable to Israeli hardliners too! Aburish terms the deal a surrender, but fails to explain why it was so vehemently opposed by Benjamin Netanyahu, the right wing Likud prime minister of Israel. The author’s allies seems to be the Islamic terrorists like Hamas as he maintains an inscrutable silence about the merciless acts of terrorism conducted by the organisation. Aburish offers a review of every activity in the field, but resorts to simple statement of the facts when the atrocity was perpetrated by Hamas or Islamic Jihad. It is easy to find fault with a tall leader, who represented a nation in waiting, but to find viable alternatives is a tougher proposition which is evaded by the author. The style of the author is impeccable, while the content is doubtful. The entire book is delightful to read as it is full of scathing wordplay, though with contradictions every now and then. The work is however, commendable and is recommended.


Rating: 3 Star