Northcoast Shakedown: Who’d Work At TTG

Posted by eviljwinter on January 17, 2012
Posted in: Books, Ebooks. Tagged: . 1 comment

BERJAYA

It’s no secret that Nick Kepler’s former employer and biggest client, TTG Insurance, is loosely based on the former employer I discreetly call BigHugeCo. But just how closely is it based? One former coworker told me there was no way someone could make up all those characters without basing them on real people.

I had to explain that basing a character on a real person becomes limiting because you start trying to force fit the real person into the imaginary character. Counterintuitively, the character becomes less believable. But the company?

TTG is a property/casualty insurance company, the people who insure your car, your house, your business. Like BigHugeCo, they have a life insurance division. Because BigHugeCo was large enough at the time to have the most common lines of business in insurance, it allowed me to pattern TTG’s structure after theirs. They had a personal lines (Home and auto), competing commercial and specialty insurance (Trust me. I worked there 11 years and that one still confuses me.), and, of course, life insurance, which is a whole ‘nother animal.

But what was the working environment like? Physically, very similar. BigHugeCo’s campus, before a major move last year, was scattered over several buildings in downtown Cincinnati. Likewise, I picked several buildings to house TTG’s various and sundry division and corporate units. The building where Nick works really does house the regional office of another insurance company. I altered the street address slightly to avoid implying that Nick worked for Chicago Title & Insurance, but still imply that TTG actually occupied the building.

As for the people there…

Well… No. My coworkers at BigHugeCo were pretty normal folks. The closest we ever came to a Ken Giamatti (the Commercial Lines exec who gives Nick a hard time in Northcoast Shakedown) was a middle manager who had some… um… interesting photos on his hard drive. Stupid, but not earth-shattering or even enough to put him on unemployment. Some of the more unpleasant characters in the book would not have lasted very long at BigHugeCo. Screaming was not considered a viable management technique. When it is, even in this economy, one generally updates their resume when it is.

But the resemblance also ends when you go back to what I said about basing characters on real people. I really dislike roman a clefs since inevitably, the story gets stilted trying to make fictional characters bend to the author’s perception of their real world counterparts. It’s one thing to write historical fiction and speculate on how real people behaved and acted. It’s entirely different when you write a novel that is, by definition, supposed to be fiction. I used BigHugeCo’s structure to design a fictional company, but every company has its own personality. I had to let TTG’s corporate personality evolve on its own.

Amazon | Nook

The Big Switch

Posted by eviljwinter on January 16, 2012
Posted in: Administrivia, Technical Stuff. Leave a Comment

If you clicked on jamesrwinter.net and ended up here instead, that’s not a mistake. As you can see from the recent redesign of the blog, Edged in Blue now contains all the same information as the old web site. It’s just easier to update everything in one place.

Plus, if jamesrwinter.com/.net all point here, and jamesrwinter.net becomes the most common address I give out, I can eventually move the blog to a private host or even WordPress Pro without confusing the hell out of everyone if and when that happens.

Of course, that might mean a few changes to how I generate content, but those changes are probably long overdue anyway.

So if you clicked one site and got this one, you’re in the right place. Welcome to my new cyberpad.

Thursday Reviews: Headstone, Nerve

Posted by eviljwinter on January 12, 2012
Posted in: Books. Tagged: , , , . Leave a Comment

BERJAYABERJAYA

Headstone

Ken Bruen

The Celtic Tiger that is modern Ireland is broke, and Jack Taylor wanders through the wreckage of it all. He’s battered, angry, and nursing addictions to Xanax and Jameson. Yet he’s about to be happy as he’s found a woman, an American writer, who accepts Jack for what he is – broken, flawed, but better than he gives himself credit for.

Naturally, author Ken Bruen loves to torture the poor soul. I’m convinced he sleeps with a Jack Taylor voodoo doll under his pillow. And the first needle Bruen sticks in his wounded warrior, first seen in The Guards, is the near-fatal beating of his nemesis, Father Malachy. Thus comes the opening salvo from Headstone, a gang of doped-up, privileged psychopaths who misread Darwin and see it as justification for a killing spree. And they’d like Jack to participate in their master plan – as a victim. But they don’t kill him right off the bat. They’re out to kill clergy, gays, and “the vulnerable” (as in the mentally handicapped.) Their leader is a self-styled Charlie Manson type who calls himself “Bine.” Makes him sound like a pathetic loser who thinks he’s a Batman supervillain, only Bine is dangerous as hell. His minions damn near kill Jack’s Guard friend, Ridge, and manage to shake the unshakeable Zen calm of Stewart, the one man in all of Galway who could actually save Jack from himself.

Headstone even manages to wound Jack physically in a way so horrific it still makes me cringe to think about reading it. Meant to scare Jack and corner him for the “big event,” Bine miscalculates. Because backing Jack Taylor into a corner puts him in the path of the most dangerous force in all of Ireland – Jack’s blind, unrelenting rage.

I’m not sure how much longer Jack Taylor can go on. There’s considerably less of him left at the end of the book. A couple of subplots drag him across lines one would swear he’d never cross, and of course, Bruen is never one for the happy ending. However, his poetic style is very much intact here, and the story is as much about Ridge and Stewart as it is Taylor, showing an evolution to the series.

BERJAYA

BERJAYABERJAYA

Nerve

Taylor Clark

Taylor Clark, an admitted neurotic journalist, has undertaken a study of fear. Why do we choke? Why do we worry? Why do we lose our cool? And one thing Clark learned in the process is that those who appear to be cool and calm under pressure, to somehow summon superhuman poise and concentration in the face of danger are just as scared as those who have curled up in the fetal position to whimper.

What Clark shows us, with the help of neuroscientists and combat instructors, is that the biggest mistake anyone can make under extreme duress is to fight fear. Because while you’re fighting your fear, the building is on fire and the bear has time to slice you into People McNuggets. What separates the heroes from the rest of us is embracing the fear. You’re in danger. You’re supposed to be afraid.

Clark also breaks down fear. The actual emotion, fear, is an automatic response to a sudden threat. There are two small sections of the brain called the amygdala that seize control to make us fight, fly, or freeze, depending on the circumstances. The amygdala are amazing in their ability to store instinctive and remembered fears. However, they’re very user unfriendly, not relinquishing fear memories easily. And some of the response defy logic. It’s why some people have bizarre phobias, like the color orange and so on.

Anxiety, which gives rise to obsessive-compulsive disorder, ADHD, and anxiety disorders (hence the name), is really the brain’s reasoning center trying to process and plan for a danger. Used properly, our impulses for anxiety help the amygdala automate desired responses to threats. It’s why some police officers can shoot a suspect when threatened yet not remember it. On the downside, anxiety causes us to worry about things like asteroid impacts and acts of terrorism that likely will never happen to us.

The third and final component is stress, which is simply the brain overloaded by various stimuli. Like fear – which keeps us from getting killed – and anxiety – which makes us think ahead, stress is not always a bad thing. Some people thrive on it. Others just shut down.

Clark goes through the mechanics of fear step by step and shows how some overcome performance anxiety or perform admirably in the face of extreme danger. It helps to embrace the fear and recognize it for what it is, to face what causes anxiety (which is anxiety’s evolutionary purpose: Hey, stupid, you might want to do something about that saber tooth tiger that’s been eyeing you for the last hour), and manage the stress. When that happens, some people discover that they perform better. Clark’s point: Avoidance, bad; confrontation (of the cause of fear), good. (But do please still run when the bear decides you’d make a nice chew toy.) He also shows how a sense of humor can diffuse a situation, such as when astronaut Gordon Cooper had to guide his dead space capsule back to Earth with no instruments long before Apollo 13 took a lifeboat to the moon.

For anyone paralyed by fear and anxiety, this book is a must.

Four More Years?

Posted by eviljwinter on January 11, 2012
Posted in: Politics. Tagged: . 4 comments

Let’s get this out of the way right now. I’ll be voting Obama in November. Yes, I know. I just made a bunch of Republicans howl in agony, but then I have the same reaction when I see the gang of morons they’re trotting out this year. And why should they run their best and brightest? Why run Rob Portman or Bobby Jindahl or Chris Christie against an incumbent? Likewise, what motivation did Hillary Clinton have to run in 2004?

Let’s be honest. Unless the incumbent is Richard Nixon, Warren Harding, or James Buchanan, canning the incumbent while there’s a war on or the economy’s in the tank is generally a bad idea. Why? Well, look at this year’s field. To a candidate, their chief position is “I’m not Obama.” Hmm… Very much identical to the John Kerry “I’m not Bush” platform. Do I have to reiterate why such a candidate’s every second on television is time stolen from my life?

If you want to oust an incumbent (Jerry Ford does not count.), you have to run a Lincoln or a Roosevelt or a Reagan, someone who can motivate the nation and move them to be better, even the opposition. Obama gets compared to Jimmy Carter a lot, but you don’t run Chester Arthur against Jimmy Carter (or, for that matter, Jerry Ford). You need FDR or JFK or Reagan. People want a leader. Like the Democrats in 1976, the Republicans are only putting up cannon fodder.

But my vote will be a vote for Obama, not a vote against (insert GOP cannon fodder here). Why?

There are a number of reasons. For starters, healthcare reform. And I just made a bunch of Tea Party heads explode. Doesn’t bother me. Most of what the Tea Party has said about healthcare bears little resemblance to fact anyway. (And I know some idiot is going to rattle off a bunch of “facts” in the comment section. Save your breath.) We didn’t get healthcare reform. We got insurance reform. Basically, you have to buy insurance and quit overburdening the ER because you wanted to wait until it’s almost too late to stick it to the hospital. And dude, I totally understand why people do that. I’ve done it. I like having insurance better. In return, insurance companies are not allowed to screw you quite so badly anymore. They can’t tell you they’re just going to let you die because you’re diabetic or had toe nail fungus when you were 25. Perfect?

No, but if you want perfect, I suggest Mother Goose. Oh, wait. Perfect does not exist in fairy tales, either. Oh, well.

Second, let’s look at the economy. Pinheads like Beck and Hannity have done a good job selling people on the idea that somehow, the junior senator from Illinois, through a Vast Left Wing Conspiracy (TM), caused the Great Recession in a bid to turn us into a socialist Islamic republic. For those of us not on crack, the truth is less spectacular, but it did light a fuse that started with the Tea Party and is now burning through the Occupy movement. Put the blame squarely where it belongs. Not on Obama or even Bush, not even the one percent. It’s the banking industry. If ever there was a business that had its head so firmly up its collective ass…

Well, there’s the recording industry, and I’m still outraged they didn’t all go bankrupt. But the banks have been in a collective stupor for a very long time now. They’re like your idiot drunken brother-in-law. Take the locks off the gun cabinet, and he gets into all sorts of trouble. The only problem is that if you don’t bail out your brother-in-law, Thanksgiving is a little quieter this year. If you don’t bail out the banks, well…

The problem is then you end up bailing lots of other people out because, well, the banks managed to lose everyone’s money and now wants all of theirs. So if the banks are whining because Mr. Obama won’t let them sell liar loans anymore, screw ‘em. If you thought Gordon Gecko was the hero of Wall Street, you’re too stupid to live.

But the thing that keeps me firmly in the Obama camp is that he’s not a hardliner. Let me be blunt here. Hardliners are worthless. Hardliners cause just about every bad thing that happens in the world. In American, hardliners (both left and right) love to invoke the Founding Fathers to justify their inflexible thinking and unyielding approach to governance (until some sweet, sweet pork comes their way. Don’t kid yourselves. Everyone who says they don’t take pork is a serial offender. Every. Single. One.) Never mind that said Founding Fathers agreed on virtually nothing and could only birth a nation and write a Constitution through debate and compromise. If you’re not open to compromise, would you kindly get the fuck out of my government and leave my country for someplace more your speed? Like North Korea?

That’s not to say I’m happy with Obama. I’m not. I’m disappointed.

For one thing, Obama is too wishy-washy. In the recent biography of Steve Jobs, Jobs told Walter Isaacson he was massively frustrated with Obama for constantly telling him why things can’t get done. OK, one of my complaints about George Bush was that he was The Decider. Not that I dislike decisiveness; I just want a bit more thought and finesse to go into the process. On the other hand, Barry needs to be more decisive. I need once to hear Obama look, not just at the GOP, but at his own party and go, “You know what? Fuck you. I’m the president. This is my job. Lead. Follow. Get the hell out of the way.” We haven’t had that for about twelve years. Not with any degree of nuance or skill, anyway.

Second, this is a horrible cabinet. Gates, followed by Panetta, and Hillary Clinton are the only ones who really shine. That’s it. The rest of them? Yes, these are better people than George W. Bush had around him, but hell, I’ve been on beer league softball teams that could do better than Bush’s cabinet. Geithner is even more wishy-washy than Obama. As Treasury secretary, he should have spent the last four years putting the fear of God into the banks and AIG. Instead, he does it to GM and Chrysler. You know. The companies that actually build stuff and employ people, not spend their days trying to con investors into financing liar loans. And then there’s Steven Chu, the genius behind the Solyndra deal that’s become a symbol of what people hate about Obama’s administration. That guy should have been fired the day Solyndra filed for bankruptcy.

And let’s look at the stimulus, shall we? In principle, pumping money into the economy is classic Keynseian economics. Even Milton Friedman cited it as part of the basis for his own hands-off approach to the economy. But you have to put money into things like highways and the power grid and the Internet. Stuff that will generate income and jobs when they’re finished. (Hmm… Didn’t Clinton do this? Oh, yeah. He presided over a boom.) You don’t fund cops and teachers for a couple of years only to have them laid off again when there’s no more money coming in. And you don’t let idiots like Steven Chu make deals with companies like Solyndra. If you’re going to go that route, you might as well send out those stimulus checks Bush was so fond of. On second thought, don’t. My taxes are going to go up enough as it is when that bill finally comes due. (Yes, Virginia. Your taxes already went up 10 years ago. You just haven’t gotten the bill yet.)

And finally, there is the NDAA. Last I checked, Johnny Reb wasn’t marching on Washington or Gettysburg. That all ended slightly over a century before I was born. The NDAA extends a really bad policy of the government wiping its ass with the Fourth Amendment that started with the Patriot Act. There is no legitimate reason whatsoever for warrantless wiretaps – NONE – nor the suspension of habeas corpus. Yet the Obama Administration actually asked for this to be put into the NDAA.  I’ve got a problem with that.

“Ah, ha!” some of the few Republicans who haven’t stopped reading this to put pins in their Jim Winter voodoo dolls say, “there’s why you shouldn’t vote for him.”

Um, well…  Name me a candidate in the GOP slate who wouldn’t have signed that bill. Ron Paul? OK, name one with a serious shot at the nomination.

Yeah. That’s what I thought.

I’m not happy with this year’s election, but unless someone breaks into a hotel at the GOP convention, none of the bozos wanting to be the new president give me any compelling reason to change course.

If anything, they inspire me to push for reconciliation with Britain.

But only if we can have Eddie Izzard as our governor-general.

Northcoast Shakedown: Cleveland Rocks!

Posted by eviljwinter on January 10, 2012
Posted in: Ebooks. Tagged: . Leave a Comment

BERJAYAAs you can see by the cover of ebook version of Northcoast Shakedown, the book’s setting is Cleveland. In fact, since it’s original publication, I’ve been identified with the city. Despite almost three years of My Town Monday posts about my current home, Cincinnati, I still get asked about how things are in Cleveland.

Honestly? I don’t know. I moved out of the Greater Cleveland area in 1988 and arrived in Cincinnati in 1991. A few years ago when I was going through a divorce, I contemplated leaving Cincinnati and starting over. I’m sorry to say Cleveland was not on my list of possible new hometowns. No, I was looking at Chicago or San Francisco. (Then I met this cute blonde who gave me a very compelling reason to stay put: She said yes to my marriage proposal. Suddenly, Chicago wasn’t in the cards.)

So why Cleveland?

Well, let’s consider my current home. It’s a sleepy, conservative Ohio River town with more in common with Memphis and St. Louis than Cleveland or Columbus. It took me over a decade to really embrace my adopted home. During that decade, I still pined for the shores of Lake Erie. Cleveland has about as much in common with the city on the other end of I-71 as New York has with Los Angeles. They’re both American cities of similar size. And that’s it.

Cleveland has a patchwork ethnic mix more like those in Chicago or New York than Cincinnati and Columbus. The architecture is different. The music is different. Once upon a time, Cleveland was one of those cities where you needed a following in music if you ever hoped to break big in New York or LA. The city is rough, often and gleefully crude, and unabashedly earthy in its attitudes and language. It’s biggest rival is Pittsburgh, a rivalry that has forged a bond through economic hardship and common ethnic, religious, and political makeup. Besides, it’s two hours away on the Turnpike.

And Cleveland has never taken the worst blows anyone can deal it lying down. It’s river caught fire. It’s baseball team was a laughingstock for three decades. Someone kidnapped its football team, but the city forced the NFL to leave the records, the team name, and the franchise in place while they built a new home for the Browns. Hit hard with the housing collapse, Cleveland, like Detroit to the west, simply bulldozed the abandoned neighborhoods and pressed on with a decades-long plan to remake the lakefront.

Cleveland takes its share of abuse, much of it unfair, and yet it’s still there.

And while Cincinnati has a lot to offer and certainly enough character to support yet another crime series set here, telling stories in Cleveland is like stepping into a smokey blues bar and hearing Buddy Guy or the ghost of Stevie Ray Vaughan making that guitar cry.

Amazon | Nook

Caught In My Own Web

Posted by eviljwinter on January 9, 2012
Posted in: Technical Stuff. Tagged: . 2 comments

Well, I finished the new jamesrwinter.net. Don’t go looking for it. I never pointed the domain to it. Why?

Two reasons. One, it looks like crap. Oh, that’s fixable. Since I’m not trained in graphic arts, I would need to put a lot more time into the site’s design. Unfortunately, I was too busy trying to get the backend to work properly.  The second problem is more technical. I wanted to use ASP.Net to run the page. The trouble is running ASP.Net on GoDaddy is slooooow. How slow?

It’s a common complaint that ASP.Net pages with frequent round trips to the database can be slow to render. A robust server able to handle the traffic can prevent this.  However, a simple table or rss feed should not be much of a problem. The database I used was not that big, and the feeds – Twitter and WordPress – are generally rapid loads. But I’m hosting on GoDaddy, and all the hot commercials with Danica Patrick can’t cover up the fact GoDaddy’s performance is somewhat lacking at times, especially with ASP.Net sites.

So I’ve got an ugly site on a slow host. What does one do?

I backed up and looked at my whole web presence. Why redo the site at all? Virtually everything that’s on the web site is on this blog. All the books. All the short stories. Just rewrite the bio, add a contact page, and a new FAQ. Oh, and here’s a hint if you’re going to put a FAQ page: Turn the comments on so visitors can frequently ask questions.

Since we’re trying to play up the brand, I picked a new WordPress theme (and now you know why Edged in Blue is no longer edged in blue) that better plays to Northcoast Shakedown‘s cover. When I go to release Second Hand Goods or The Compleat Winter (which I keep threatening), I’ll change the theme accordingly.

Eventually, I’d like to build my own, even if it’s a WordPress-based site, designing the graphics myself. But rather than waste money on a poorly performing host and devoting more time than I have at present to the graphics, it just makes sense to consolidate everything here. When the time comes, I’ll go host shopping and take a lot more time into doing the graphics.

So welcome to the new jamesrwinter.net.  The address will point here by the end of this week. Until then, jamesrwinter.net will continue to point at the venerable old web site.

The Physics Of The Future By Michio Kaku

Posted by eviljwinter on January 6, 2012
Posted in: Books. Tagged: , . Leave a Comment

It’s 2011. Where are the flying cars? Someone promised me flying cars?

Well, theoretical physicist, science popularizer, and science fiction buff Michio Kaku knows where they are. And he tells you about it in The Physics of the Future. Kaku has appeared on the Science Channel with a series pondering such science fiction concepts as the Death Star and warp drive and found some very real-world possibilities for creating them. Kaku’s conclusions about the future of computing, energy, and even the human species itself are compelling.

Among the things he speculates on…

  • The Internet, even the computer, will soon disappear.  Chips are becoming so small and cheap, they’ll be in everything. The Internet, he suggests, will be delivered to glasses or contact lenses that let you look at anyone or anything and get whatever data you want about it/them. Handheld MRI boxes will scan your body and diagnose diseases like cancer long before it could be fatal. Imagine pancreatic cancer, almost always a death sentence when detected, being treated by a box of pills packed with nanites that destroy errant cells while you go about your business.
  • Kaku does not seem to be a fan of singularity, the point when machines overtake humans as the primary intelligence on Earth. He seems to believe that the nature of computers will forever hamstring artificial intelligence as machines simply aren’t geared for common sense and pattern recognition. He concedes it could be a possibility, but expresses doubts.
  • Which is not to say machines aren’t getting smarter. He postulates an artificial intelligence application that would function as your personal physician by 2100. Some machines may actually seem sentient and intelligent.
  • The age of oil is rapidly coming to a close, since we are running out. But fusion, for once, really is about 20 years out.  There are not just one but three different reactor designs, all likely to produce more energy than they use. By 2100, the first commercial reactors will be retired. The nice thing is that fusion reactors cannot meltdown, and what radioactive waste they produce is only toxic for about fifty years.
  • The goal for transportation engineers by mid-century will not be fuel efficiency or battery efficiency but getting rid of friction. Superconductors will replace asphalt, and cars will simply coast above the road using very little fuel or juice. The only friction will be the air.
  • Nanites will be everywhere, even in our bodies. Between nanotechnology and gene therapy, we may be able to stall aging indefinitely.
  • The biggest challenges will be dealing with leftover CO2 in the air, the transition from oil to non-petroleum-based energy, and producing food. Also, something will have to replace silicon (probably quantum computing) when Moore’s Law runs out of gas. (Get ready for another Great Recession about ten years after this one ends.)
  • Imagine having your entire genetic code on a thumb drive sequenced for about $100. Imagine growing replacement organs and limbs in a lab. Actually, simple organs like livers are already being grown. Hearts and limbs are probably twenty years off.
  • Technology always gets cheaper. The $500 laptop this post was written on computes runs circles around the pocket calculator you used in high school which is light years ahead of the room-sized behemoth that was ENIAC in 1946.
  • Programmable matter is already in the lab. Imagine downloading new furniture or programming a skyscraper.

Thursday Reviews: The Lady In The Lake, All The Young Warriors, Steve Jobs

Posted by eviljwinter on January 5, 2012
Posted in: Books, Ebooks. Leave a Comment

BERJAYABERJAYA

The Lady in the Lake

Raymond Chandler

Chandler’s fourth Phillip Marlowe novel  finds the master of the metaphor and the smartass one-liner once again crafting a novel from scratch. Previously, The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely had the benefit of pulling material from pre-existing Chandler short stories. The third book, The High Window, was a wholly original work, and somehow, feels hollow.

But Chandler is back in form in The Lady in the Lake. I suspect time spent in Hollywood writing screenplays might have helped. Marlowe is hired by Derace Kinglsey to find his missing wife, Crystal. Oh, he doesn’t want her back. He just wants to know why she absconded to Mexico for a quickie divorce that never happened. This leads our intrepid cracker of wise to Kingsley’s cabin in the mountains, where he and the caretaker finds the caretaker’s wife dead in the nearby lake. (Hence the title. Clever, eh?)

The caretaker, Chess, is arrested, but it doesn’t feel right. And somehow, it’s tied to Crystal’s disappearance and that of a mysterious woman named Mildred Haviland. Marlowe then travels to Bay City (a thinly disguised and rather run-down Santa Monica), where the cops seem to be more corrupt than Mrs. Kingsley and her shifty boyfriend, a gigolo named Lavery. Of course, Marlowe has to deal with the cops when Lavery is found dead, and Crystal’s clothes and gun are found at the scene.

The complicated plot and wartime-era SoCal setting make this one feel like a the story that took place between China Town and The Two Jakes. Los Angeles and its neighbors are in flux, and the war seems only to accelerate that change. The police are both corrupt and scared at the same time, and Hollywoods seedy side shows itself in the form of Dr. Almore, Lavery’s neighbor and junk dealer to the stars.

A bit hard to handle are the modern feel of the story juxtaposed with the somewhat sanitized dialogue. You can tell Chandler’s characters want to spew strings of obscenities that would make George Carlin blush, but can’t because of the societal taboos of when this was written. Just the same, you can see the seeds of Chinatown and James Ellroy in this one. This is Los Angeles, and it’s a very dirty place, the way only Chandler could write it.

BERJAYABERJAYA

All the Young Warriors

Anthony Neil Smith

We begin with the shooting of two small town cops in Minnesota. One of them is the fiancee of another cop named Bleeker, and she was carrying his baby. Bleeker’s out for revenge, since he figures his life is over now. In the process, he teams up with a former gang leader named Mustafa. Turns out his son, Adem, was in the car when the cops were shot. The shooter was Jibril, a gang banger wannabe whom Mustafa never respected. This might be another noir romp we’ve come to expect from Neil Smith, but then Adem and Jibril head to Somalia, a trip interrupted by that fatal traffic stop. Bleeker and Mustafa follow them, and we are plunged into a world alien to most readers, one where religious mania, unrelenting war, and abject poverty are the norm. When Adem is sent to be the spokesman for Somali pirates in their negotiations for ransomed ships.

But it’s in this environment that Smith tests our perceptions of that world. Islam is seen both as the radical banner of angry terrorists as well as a quiet, peaceful religion that bears no resemblance to what fear mongers of all stripes would have you believe.

But while Bleeker’s quest for revenge is his main focus through most of the book, it takes a backseat to Mustafa’s quest to save his son. And it is counterbalanced with Adem’s struggle to figure out if he is an American in the wrong place or a Somali fighting the good fight to save his country. Through it all, Jibril, who wants to be the big man, finally becomes one. Does it make him the hero he always wanted to be or just a bigger target.

BERJAYA

Steve Jobs

Walter Isaacson

After tackling Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, biographer Walter Isaacson turns his attention to a man who was alive up to six weeks before the book was published. And he not only had his subject’s cooperation, but that of his family, friends, coworkers, and even enemies. Steve Jobs insisted on that.

Steve Jobs was a complicated man. A counter-culture disciple of Bob Dylan, he abandoned the hacker ethos of the mid-1970′s to turn Steve Wozniak’s nifty little circuit board into a company that would revolutionize the computer industry. Steeped in electronics, he nonetheless attended a liberal arts college. Obsessed with hardware and his new Next operating system, he bought Pixar and turned it into a major animation studio, eventually supplanting Disney’s own animation division when the Mouse bought it out in the mid-2000′s. A devotee of Zen, he was prone to tantrums, black-and-white thinking, and rude behavior. Close to his biological sister, adopted parents, and son, he nonetheless abandoned, then assumed a tense relationship with his daughter Lisa (for whom the second Apple line of computers was named.) He respected, even admired, his rivals like Bill Gates and Larry Page, but held grudges against former partners and companies.

In short, Steve Jobs was a magnificent paradox, and without him, much of what we now take for granted about modern computer would not have happened. Jobs’ great gift was being a designer at heart who knew enough about engineering to somehow make the impossible happen. Obsessed with detail, he created an ecosystem that sprawls today from music to movies to the phone in your pocket and the machine on your desk. Open systems might have more success in the long run, but Apple’s approach usually meant Microsoft and Google would be following rather than leading. Usually, this was good. The Mac showed us what Windows would ultimately be, and the iPhone made Android possible. On the other hand, the technology highway is littered with the corpses of technology breakthroughs its makers were too shortsighted to make succeed. Xerox’s GUI-based operating system flopped where Macintosh exploded onto the market, followed closely by Windows. Sony’s music download service drove millions of MP3 pirates into the waiting arms of iTunes.

Jobs himself was not an easy man to like. You were either a hero or a bozo in his mind, sometimes in the same conversation. He held grudges. He pushed his people to the breaking point. But he was fascinating. And brilliant, a flawed genius. His gift was his ability to see where users would be rather than where they were. Remember the snickering that accompanied the original iPad? And yet it has competitors, like the Kindle Fire and Samsung’s Android-based tablets. So where are the naysayers who said the iPad was useless now? It’s not only indispensible, it has clones.

What made Jobs able to rise above his character faults was his passion for design. His personality is imprinted all over Apple’s product lines. He had a refreshingly different view of business for a CEO. At both Apple and Pixar, he insisted his job was to put out great products. Making money was secondary. It birthed the Macintosh. It allowed Pixar to literally take over Disney’s animation division. And it built Apple into a company whose culture and legacy will last at least a generation or two.

And for a man who worried when people exposed his flaws to the public, he told Isaacson to tell the whole story, including warts and all. He wouldn’t even read the book, at least not initially (or ever, since he died as the book was finished.) Isaacson does so, talking to rivals, sworn enemies, along with peers, family members, and partners. It’s a complete picture that changes from moment to moment.