The Dead Women of Juarez – Sam Hawken

Read as leg 4 (Juarez, Mexico) of the Bookpacking reading journey.

Ciudad Juarez on Mexico’s northern border is where ex-boxer Kelly Courter now calls home. He fled his real home in the US as a last desperate act in a downward spiral from potential contender to drugged-up punch bag with a felony charge hanging over his head.

Here across the border he ekes out a living in the ring as ‘white meat’ for up and coming local fighters, and out of the ring as gofer and accomplice to Estaban, a small time drug pusher. The good news is he’s off the drugs and has a good ‘friends with benefits’ relationship with Estaban’s sister Paloma. He’d like to cement that further and has upped his training and cut down the drinking. But Paloma has other priorities; she is deeply involved with a support group for women whose daughters, sisters or mothers are ‘missing’ – among the scandalous hundreds in the city who have been taken, raped and murdered over recent years.

More professionally involved with the ‘feminocidios’ is Rafael Sevilla of the State Police; he’s also involved with policing the drug-dealing ‘narcotraficantes’, so Kelly’s on his radar - more as an informer than a target.

So far, so atmospheric, with plenty of local colour, poverty, exploitation, petty crime and sex for sale in the heat and dust of the city. Then the book explodes in a frenzy of violence. The feminocidios strike near to home; the city police investigation is lazy, ham-fisted, brutal and possibly corrupt. Sevilla’s response is to work alone to find the truth and seek some small justice for the dead women of Juarez.

This is a thriller not for the faint-hearted. The few sex scenes are explicit if not erotic; the violence is more pervading and is described in disturbing detail. This is one Mexican city not on my holiday list. However the read moves quickly with short chapters, morphing midway from Kelly’s narrative to Sevilla’s, and building to an action-packed climax.

How well it serves in bringing the (true) dead women scandal to the world’s attention is uncertain, but the attempt is to be applauded.

The Program – David Walsh

David Walsh is the Sunday Times journalist who refused to accept that Lance Armstrong raced clean and made it his business to prove it. Walsh had been covering the Tour de France since 1982 and when he first met Armstrong in 1993 he was immediately impressed by the 21 year-old Texan’s force of personality and ambition to win.

The next four years were significant for both Walsh and Armstrong. Armstrong battled with and overcame cancer while Walsh was sickened by the revelations of widespread doping in his favoured sport of cycling. So, in 1999 when Armstrong returned to what was meant to be a cleaned-up Tour, and produced barely credible performances, Walsh smelt a rat.

Armstrong won that Tour, and then the next six, and while most journalists lapped up the story – cancer survivor overcomes odds for sporting success – Walsh became an increasingly lone voice in questioning its validity. He didn’t just question, he investigated and turned up evidence and witnesses; he also uncovered intimidation and cover-up.

In 2005, Walsh and like-minded French journalist Pierre Ballester published the detailed allegations in a book.  ‘LA Confidential’ could only be published in France due to Armstrong living up to his name with strong arm legal moves that threatened to sue any English language publisher. Armstrong rode out the storm and retired with his record (and prize money) intact. It would take another seven years and the testimony of team-mate Floyd Landis for Walsh’s position to be vindicated.

The book is detailed and meticulously referenced and cycling insiders may be comfortable with the constant asides and shifts in timeframe, but I sometimes found them difficult to follow. To me the book is more about Walsh than Armstrong and the author’s search for the truth and his battles to get it published.

As a result I now know quite a lot about how Armstrong suppressed suspicions and bullied the cycling world, but not as much as I would like about how he managed to avoid getting caught by doping control.

Forces of Nature – Brian Cox (with Andrew Cohen)

In this book based on his recent TV series Professor Brian Cox (aided by the programme producer) sets out to answer some simple questions about our everyday experiences – the shape of a snowflake, the motion of the earth, the origin of life, and the colours of the rainbow.

Inevitably the answers are not so simple, involving atomic and molecular structure, relativity and space-time, the biochemistry of LUCA (our last universal common ancestor) and the nature of light and the electromagnetic spectrum. But in Cox’s capable hands the explanations are revealed to rest on simple foundations – universal laws of physics and chemistry.

I did not see the TV series and only acquired the book (a Christmas present) having browsed it in a shop and been pleasantly surprised at the apparent depth of science in the text. First impressions were confirmed by the reading; there is nothing dumbed down here, there are equations aplenty and all the concepts are painstakingly but elegantly explained. I almost, briefly, understood general relativity – but that point (event) in space time has now disappeared into my personal past.

The large format hardback edition is lavishly illustrated with colour stills from the programme, and only some feature Dr Cox looking butch and moody in scuba suit, pilot fatigues or mountaineering gear. Most of the others are stunning nature shots although not all seem relevant to the text. Similarly some of the diagrams and figures, despite looking nice, lack proper explanation.

But these are niggles, forgivable product design features, that do not detract from the quality of the writing that manages to be rigorous, informative and entertaining. The four sections – symmetry, motion, elements, and colour – hang together remarkably well with a tangible progression that leaves the careful reader feeling better informed and in awe at how scientists have decoded nature without detracting from its wonder.

Fleshmarket Close – Ian Rankin

In this, the fifteenth outing of Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh based detective, Rebus and protégé Siobhan Clarke have been farmed out to the suburbs having lost their office space at their old St Leonards police station. Rebus feels sidelined, but at least it gives him freedom to operate as he does best – independently and unconventionally.

When a murder crops up in one of the outlying housing projects he is quickly on the scene. The estate has a high proportion of immigrants and asylum seekers, and the victim is one of them.

Meanwhile Clarke is contacted by the parents of a girl whose rape (and subsequent suicide) she had investigated some years ago; now the other daughter has gone missing.

Added to the murder and missing persons are two bodies found buried in a cellar in Fleshmarket Close, just off the Royal Mile. Both Rebus and Clarke attend but there is something fishy about the find as the bodies turn out to be just bones picked clean.

The three cases develop with the expected complexity, interweaving and connecting (or not) and with the expected complications for Rebus’s and Clarke’s personal lives (will a clinch in the previous book translate to more) and professional prospects (Clarke is on the way up, Rebus is treading water).

In these later Rebus books Rankin always injects some topicality and while this dates from 2004 the context of immigration still has resonance today. The issues are handled well enough – exposing prejudice and inhumanity – with Rebus characteristically cutting in his assessment of all those around him, be they do-gooder or bigot. While unable to do much to right all the wrongs he sees, he does what he can, while solving the crimes, to help those in need that cross his path.

Rankin rarely disappoints and this outing is well up to standard, benefitting from being a bit shorter (at 400 pages) and tighter than its immediate predecessors.

Billy Lynn’s Long Half Time Walk – Ben Fountain

Read as leg 3 (Texas, USA) of the Bookpacking reading journey.

Billy Lynn and the rest of Bravo Platoon are nearing the end of their ‘victory tour’, their last engagement at Texas Stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys, for the Thanksgiving Day game against the Bears.

The ‘engagement’ that got them here was a short, sharp and bloody firefight in Iraq, captured on newsreel footage which, being largely successful from the US viewpoint, has become an internet sensation at home and a totem for the war effort. Their reward is a short furlough back in the US – provided they perform in the media circus and accept their due as heroes of the nation.

Billy Lynn doesn’t feel like a hero, he didn’t exactly volunteer to serve, and the adulation is starting to wear thin.

There is a lot going on at Texas Stadium, a lot for Billy to process. Bravo now have an agent who is trying to cut them a film deal, promising big bucks but so far delivering nothing; their role in the half time show is vague and while it should include meeting the fabulously attractive cheerleaders, Beyoncé led Destiny’s Child will be on stage too; and the Cowboys owner has invited the platoon into his suite for hospitality among the rich and powerful, which takes them all far from their comfort zone.

Billy has two other preoccupations. He had twenty-four hours at home, down the road at Stovall, that reintroduced him to his family’s troubles and during which his sister Kathryn tried to persuade him to dodge his return to war; and now he’s besotted with one of the cheerleaders who to his surprise seems to reciprocate. More immediately he needs a drink and some pills for his headache.

Through the blur in his head the contradictions between his current treatment as a ‘hero’ and his previous as a ‘grunt’, a nobody, lead to half-formed questions about who he is actually fighting for; whose will the victory be? But though war is hell, and victory maybe hollow, could he walk away from his platoon, his comrades, his true loyalty?

The narration places the reader firmly in Billy’s consciousness, making the language authentic and providing a lot of buy-in to his situation and mindset.

Billed as “the Catch 22 of the Iraq war”, this takes a swipe less at the military than the civilian context of the war. There is humour but the out-loud laughs are fewer and the cynicism is more bitter – Billy is only nineteen so his eyes are just opening to the self-serving and exploitation that abounds.

Billy Lynn is a book of its time and one that deserves to be read and enjoyed on its own merits.

Periodic Tales – Hugh Aldersey-Williams

In this book the author shares his fascination with the elements that go to make up the periodic table. He follows no scientific order in introducing them, preferring to group them in sections labelled Power, Fire, Craft, Beauty and Earth.

In Power we have the traditional riches of gold, silver and platinum along with the energy providing likes of carbon and plutonium. Fire includes the most reactive of elements such as sulphur, potassium, phosphorus and radium; while Craft covers the malleable metals – long discovered tin, iron and copper along with more recent additions of zinc, tungsten and aluminium. Beauty looks at the colour giving elements, both the physical tints of cadmium, chromium and cobalt and the bright light producing argon and neon. The Earth, or ‘rare earths’ elements are more recently won from the ground, the likes of scandium, strontium and yttrium, unsung but increasingly useful in modern industrial processes. These are just examples - there are of course over a hundred to go at, and he covers them all.

Although the chemical properties are covered, of more interest to the lay reader are the cultural references that have attached themselves – how they arose and are perpetuated independent of updated scientific reality.

Another interesting strand of the book is the human stories behind the discoveries made; the search to fill the gaps predicted by the periodic tabulation and the research into the chemistry and physics behind its organisation.

The trends and fashions in naming new elements is also of interest – Greek & Roman mythology (cerium, promethium), places (germanium, francium, scandium, californium), recently discovered planets (uranium, plutonium), and scientists (einsteinium, rutherfordium, mendelevium).  Geology also gets a look in (mining engineers often at the forefront of discovery) with Samarium.

Aldersey-Williams gets the balance right between science, history, biography, economics and trivia, making for a book packed with interesting information, obscure detail and memorable anecdotes.

The Favourite Game – Leonard Cohen

Read as leg 2 (Montreal Canada) of the Bookpacking reading journey.

Is this highly stylised novel just a curiosity or one only for the musician’s fans? In it we follow the early life of Laurence (Larry) Breavman, through whom Leonard Cohen paints pictures of his own time as a child and young adult in Montreal.

Despite, or because of, his middle class Jewish origins Breavman indulges himself in what the city has to offer. In short chapters, some snappy some lyrical, his boyhood, adolescence and student experiences involve girls, poetry, music and the search for novelty and meaning, often expressed through dialogue with friend and soul mate Krantz.

Relations with women feature throughout. Boyhood fascination with the tragic Bertha and first love Lisa (whose favourite game it was to be flung on to snow, to land crazily and leave bizarre impressions in the drifts) gives way to more long lasting involvement with muses Tamara “whose thighs made him a fetishist of thighs” and then Shell.

He meets and falls at first sight for Shell during an interlude in New York, her back story revealed in some detail as they spend lazy days and nights holed up in an apartment.

In love but never content, Breavman returns to Montreal to take up the offer of a summer camp job with Krantz and we get a more mature view of the City. Here the temptations of the women, still Tamara but also the red headed Patricia, persist and conflict with his enduring need for Shell.

As to be expected from Cohen, the prose is captivating as he finds characteristically unconventional but apt ways to bring to vivid life landscapes, situations and people.

More than a curiosity and more accessible than his poetry, the book is a rewarding read whether or not you are a Leonard Cohen fan.