NONFICTION:EAST MEETS WEST
American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation — How
Indian Spirituality Changed the West by Philip Goldberg (Harmony)
Long before the Fab Four embraced the East, there were the Fab Three — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman. Philip Goldberg’s “American veda” is an engaging survey of why, starting with these three venerable American thinkers, the flowers of Eastern practices have thrived in Western soil.
At Harvard Divinity School, Emerson had a shattering realization about Christianity. His discovery of Eastern texts “dispelled once and for all the dream about Christianity being the sole revelation — for here in India, there in China, were the same principles, the same grandeurs, the like depths.”
Goldberg shows us other people who came to the same conclusion. His chapters move gently like ocean swells, easily accessible, and he applies sharp brushstrokes to capture particular viewpoints or dilemmas. “Tibetan Buddhists compare gurus to fire,” he writes of some yogis, “stay too far away, and you don’t get warm; venture too close, and you can be burned.”
Goldberg traces the “vedization of America” using various figures — among them Mary Baker Eddy and a founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson — as stepping stones to the present. The popularity today of all things Eastern is a hopeful sign, he says, of a genuine “uptick in interreligious and interethnic harmony.”
— Nick Owchar, Los Angeles Times
NONFICTION:FORCES OF NATURE
Sex and the River Styx: Essays by Edward Hoagland (Chelsea Green)
“Quarry or reseed me,” writes Edward Hoagland, whom The Washington Post lauded as “the Thoreau of our time,” “but if life is, as Emerson suggested, a seethe of ecstasy, then time in its continuum has been the seat of joy and my citizenship lies more in the humus than the strata underfoot.”
In these glorious essays Hoagland tells how he worked for the circus when he was a college student at Harvard; he recounts his visit to Uganda to meet the family he sent money to for more than 20 years; he writes about the time his family first moved from the city to the country, in 1940, when he was 8; he writes about getting old in a tone that is humorous and confessional.
In his introduction, Howard Frank Mosher writes that Hoagland, even though his primary subject is the loss of nature, conveys the feeling (unlike so many environmentalists and naturalists) that “we are a species eminently worth saving.” Hoagland is a writer who has spent more time observing with gratitude than opining: “Life is moments,” he writes, “day by day, not a chronometer or a contractual commitment by God.”
— Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
NONFICTION:ESPIONAGE ENEMY NO. 1
Tiger Trap: America’s Secret Spy War With China by David Wise (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
On Dec. 16, 2005, federal Judge Florence Marie Cooper sentenced a Chinese-American woman to three years’ probation, 200 hours of community service and a $10,000 fine for lying to the FBI. “I love America” was Katrina Leung’s reply.
Leung’s reaction made sense. By all accounts, her case constituted the most sensational example ever of the penetration of the FBI by Chinese intelligence. All she got was a rap on the knuckles.
For decades during the Cold War, the most captivating spy-versus-spy battle was the one waged between Moscow and Washington. With the rise of China, a new player has entered the game. These days, it seems, not a month goes by without an intelligence case involving alleged Chinese spies stealing American industrial secrets, or reports that China tried to pay an American to join the CIA, or Chinese hackers (perhaps from the government) breaking into the Gmail accounts of U.S. officials and human rights activists. China is America’s espionage enemy No. 1.
But, as David Wise concludes in his new book, “Tiger Trap,” the federal agencies arrayed to protect the United States have handled the threat with astounding incompetence.
The author of best sellers on spies and counterspies, Wise is a master of page-turning nonfiction, and from that perspective “Tiger Trap” doesn’t disappoint. His book paints a sobering, sometimes pathetic picture of American law enforcement and counterintelligence forces that appear woefully incapable of coping with the challenge from China.
Wise concludes that over the past 30 years, China’s spies have learned an enormous amount about what he calls the most advanced weapon in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, the W88, a powerful warhead so small that several can be placed on one missile. Wise reports that details about the W88 significantly hastened the modernization of China’s own strategic forces. Chinese spies also have burrowed deep into the FBI’s counterintelligence operations and might have uncovered U.S. attempts to bug then-President Jiang Zemin’s private aircraft in 2001.
A half-dozen espionage cases lie at the heart of “Tiger Trap.” Wise turns his gaze most sharply on the investigation of Leung, a Chinese- American who rose to prominence in Southern California with the help of $1.7 million in payments from the FBI. Leung was run as a source for more than a decade by FBI Special Agent J.J. Smith, a famed counterintelligence officer in Los Angeles. First problem: She became his lover and the lover of another FBI agent, Bill Cleveland, who battled Chinese spies in San Francisco. Second problem: While collecting information about China for the Americans, Leung was also working for the Ministry of State Security in Beijing as a double agent.
Leung did provide some useful intelligence to the FBI. But according to Wise, she also pilfered classified information from Smith’s briefcase after trysts in his San Marino home and passed it to her spymasters in Beijing. The FBI got to the bottom of the Leung case in 2003 after sending in one of its best investigators. But the case fell apart in court when federal prosecutors engaged in what Cooper called “willful and deliberate misconduct.”
Wise has written an important book about the spy-versus-spy games that are guaranteed to capture the imagination of the next generation of espionage aficionados. One can only hope someday to hear the Chinese side of the tale.
— John Pomfret, The Washington Post
