100 books like Fail-Safe

As dark and depressing as this Cold War cautionary tale is, the author’s use of creeping ecological doom in the aftermath of a world-shattering war was profound to me. The story is told from several points of view by characters who have different motivations. I found their choices to be just as understandable as they were heartbreaking. This isn’t a “happily ever after” story. Even so, I found myself appreciating the whole story, from start to end.

This spot very nearly went to the great John le Carre, perhaps his brilliant The Little Drummer Girl.

Grady’s debut is not as complex or as dense as le Carre, but it holds a special place in my heart, partly because of its back story.

Grady was a young congressional staffer in my adopted hometown of Washington, DC when he dreamed up a covert CIA unit whose role is to monitor foreign intelligence operations by scouring books and magazines from around the world.

When the novel was adapted into the movie Three Days of the Condor, it was seen by KGB generals who—assuming it was based on truth—set up a similar unit of their own. Amazing but true.

Like most readers, I’m scared these days about the future of our democracy. As a reporter I’ve covered trouble spots; like Somalia – where no law existed - and Sudan, where I was in a crowd fleeing at the mere sight of an airplane, fearing bombs. One of my friends lost his wife in a Washington car bombing. Others escaped danger during a Chilean coup. Seven Days in May imagined an attempted coup in the US, and although the setting was decades ago, some forces at play are the same, since human motivation never changes. This book sobered up the nation back then by reminding readers what happens when some of us....any of us...think they know better than everyone else and believe force is the way to go. We could use that reminder now.

So good it was made into a movie. The movie however didn’t catch the suspense, and the investigation took far longer in the book.

Set in Stalinist Russia, the book is depressing, as was Commie Russia. The investigator, Leo Demidov’s friend has a child gone missing and a cursory investigation by the state goes nowhere. Leo Demidov, a Moscow investigator looks into it and is told to lay off—or else—because he makes the state look incompetent.

He and his family are exiled far away from Moscow and scorned by everyone. But he continues and discovers 44 children have been murdered along a railway line. Suspense and peril in this story combined with a vengeful Communist bureaucracy and its astounding ego make for a real thriller.

I visited the USSR in the late 70s and that bureaucracy is not to be challenged in any way or form.

Leo Szilard was one of the most interesting people of the 20th century. His first love was physics, and he is given credit for being the first to think about what would happen if someone could create a nuclear chain reaction. He worked closely with Fermi to make that chain reaction actually happen in Chicago in 1942, and was one of those who was able to see the great tragedy of the discovery, leading efforts in 1945 to try and prevent the use of the weapon against Japan. He was a colorful man, a bon vivant who loved to spend money on good clothes and fine food, and had the kind of mind that flitted from one idea to the next with the brilliance of a Monarch butterfly. His later years were devoted to the biological sciences. Lanouette/Silard have written the classic work on him. 

James Burke is a genius who had his own PBS series based on his book, Connections. Right from the get-go, he convinced me that one small malfunction can cripple our entire technologically-based system. This interdependence is typical of almost every aspect of life in the modern world.

Burke made me realize that we live surrounded by objects and systems that we take for granted, but they profoundly affect the way we behave, think, work, play and run our lives and those of our children. If you doubt his assertion, he says, look around you. How many machines could you either build yourself or repair if they stopped working? In my case, practically none.

When you start a car, press the button in an elevator, or buy food in a supermarket, you give no thought to the complex devices or systems that make the car move, the elevator rise, and… show more.

I love a good "what if" plot, and they don’t get much more "what if" than this one, which kicks off a great series.

The plot is mind-blowing, but it’s the gritty characters I love. I also loved the fact they don’t all make it through. There is no "plot armor" for the heroes in this one.

Tim Powers is my #1 role model. His secret history novels take a figure or incident from history that happens to be surrounded by unexplained weirdness, then explain all these strange, loose threads through the supernatural. His work scratches the itch for both history buffs and the (harmlessly) conspiracy-minded.

To call Three Days to Never a supernatural thriller would be reductionist. Powers casts a wide net when gathering story elements; Einstein’s fictional, time-traveling family is the centerpiece, but Mossad agents, a collective of magicians, and Charlie Chaplin’s legacy are all thrown into the mix. All are seeking the secret to time travel.

Powers writes free from the limitations of the genre. Breaking the boundaries imposed by marketing and showing the reader what’s possible when the imagination is unbound.

Connolly’s book traces recent historical shifts in artists’ cinema via a number of overlapping trends; multi-screen video projections in galleries, work that ‘references an earlier event through documentation, re-enactment or remaking’ and that which explores the relationship between cinema, screen architecture, and the museum or gallery space. The implications of these trends; the mobile as opposed to seated spectator or the making of work designed to run as continuous short loops, is considered via detailed discussion of works by a small number of key artists. Connolly, unusually and refreshingly, is not afraid to criticise, as in her discussion of Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s film Zidane. 

The author of this book was also a Crossroads participant and today is regarded as one of the foremost experts on the effects of ionizing radiation. His book is a collection of interviews with atomic veterans of tests in the Pacific and Nevada. I am grateful to Dr. Grahlfs for agreeing to write the Foreword to my Crossroads memoir.