Howard W. French, China's Second Continent **** 1/2

The titular second continent is Africa. More than a million Chinese have emigrated to Africa, the Chinese government has provided a vast amount of infrastructure for African countries, and Chinese businesses are prospering. The author traveled in southern and western Africa, interviewing Chinese immigrants and local Africans about their experiences.

French constructs his book as a mosaic. Rather than presenting a carefully structured argument, he describes his meetings with individuals almost in the manner of a travelogue and allows his conclusions to emerge from there. I found intriguing insights throughout, not just about the Chinese program in Africa but also globalization and national development more generally. African governments sure have their work cut out for them!

China needs natural resources to fuel its growth; it also needs new markets for its products and new horizons for its people. Africa is famous for its natural resources; it also has the fastest growing population and the highest amount of fallow arable land. China would say that they have a mutually beneficial relationship with African countries: They provide valuable infrastructure in exchange for resources, and gain a new market as a side benefit. But a growing number of Africans are unhappy: The Chinese hire other Chinese rather than local Africans, and the most of the profits are lost to corruption in the often short-lived governments.

Although the author spent time in China and speaks Chinese, China's Second Continent ultimately has an anti-Chinese tone. China is taking advantage of the inexperience and instability of many African governments to advance its own interests. On the other hand, plenty of Africans blame their governments' shortsightedness and corruption.

Max Barry, Lexicon ****

Lexicon is a fast-paced thriller whose science-fiction elements come from the science of linguistics. There is a group of people called poets who can identify which of 238 personality types you are and know the words to make you perfectly compliant to their will. 

The premise and plot of Lexicon are no less preposterous than those in a Dean Koontz novel, but Barry sells it for much longer.  No huge intuitive leaps that turn out to be right on target! (Longtime readers of my reviews know that Dean Koontz has many stylistic tics that drive me crazy.) Barry is especially good at writing action sequences: the long fight to capture Wil Parke is exciting and cinematic. He also makes his "scientific" ideas as plausible as possible.

I really enjoyed the first three quarters of Lexicon. I was less enamored of its end game, which introduced an extraneous super-villain when Wolfe herself would have been sufficient and more thematically fitting.

Robert Perisić, Our Man in Iraq ****

I bought this novel, part of "The Best of Croatian Literature" series, from the bookstore on the Stradun in Dubrovnik. The title and the helicopter silhouette on the cover led me to expect a glorified genre story, with a Croatian journalist tracking down his missing cousin in Iraq. Instead, I got something I liked better: a literary novel that explores modern Croatian society. The war in Iraq is a MacGuffin.

The narrator of Our Man in Iraq is Toni, the economics correspondent for a Zagreb newspaper. He and his actress girlfriend are considering buying a flat, which leads Toni to consider how he can grow into responsibility without succumbing to conventional stereotypes. His search for a suitable identity -- and his relationship to his "redneck" relatives -- is a metaphor for Croatia's post-communist situation.

I appreciated that Our Man in Iraq works as a personal story even if you ignore its larger concerns. Perisić writes perceptively about relationships and how people define their personal identities. I found insightful passages with some regularity.

It all ran by itself, without any particular plan. We enjoyed that experiment. We went on our first summer holiday together, then there were autumn walks in Venice, the Biennale, Red Hot Chili Peppers in Vienna, Nick Cave in Ljubljana, a second summer holiday, a third, Egypt, Istria, and so on. Mutual friends, parties, organizing things. Everything rolled along nicely as if nature were doing the thinking for us. And then we reached an invisible point.  At a particular moment, ... we started to wait -- waiting for things to keep happening all by themselves like before... (page 19) 

Most of the time the social commentary flows naturally from the story; for example, Toni's attitudes toward his rural background are revealed during a visit to his girlfriend's parents' home. Sometimes, though, Perisić makes his point more directly:

 Listen, Yugoslavia was a sum total of small nationalisms which united to fight the big ones. That's how we got rid of the Italians on the coast and the Germans on the continent. We couldn't have done that by ourselves. Once we'd done that, we got rid of Yugoslavia too... (page 152)

The story moves rather slowly until events speed up (and go a little over the top) in the last 100 pages. Our Man in Iraq won't satisfy action junkies, but I enjoyed it and appreciated it as a souvenir of our trip to Croatia.

Nancy Forbes and Basil Mahon, Faraday, Maxwell, and Electromagnetic Field ****

As the title clearly states, this book tells the story of the discovery of the electromagnetic field through the biography of the two men most responsible for it. As tradition has it, Michael Faraday was a brilliant researcher who discovered many of the shared properties of magnetism and electric currents, and James Clerk Maxwell formalized Faraday's insights into mathematical language, making them clear and persuasive to the scientific community. This conventional view has some truth to it, although it downplays how creative both men were as theoretical thinkers.

The authors are especially skilled at prose descriptions of theoretical insights and their consequences. For example, they manage to clearly explain Maxwell's dynamical theory with nary a mathematical formula, as well as convey its major impact on physics:

Some of nature's workings in the physical world not only do not need a mechanical model, but they cannot be explained in a mechanical way. For example, a current-carrying circuit "held" energy. This energy was real; it could be used in an electric motor to do mechanical work, but where was the energy? Not in the wire, but in the field -- distributed through the surrounding space. ... Maxwell was doing nothing less the changing our concept of reality. He was the first to recognize that the foundations of the physical world are imperceptible to our senses. All we know about them -- possibly all we can ever know -- are their mathematical relationships to things we can feel and touch. We may never understand what they are; we have to be content to describe them in an abstract way, giving them symbols and writing them in equations. (Chapter 13)

 The book also gives a good sense of how scientists in the nineteenth century worked, not to mention how general their scientific knowledge was.