8. Georges Simenon, The Window Over the Way

[There are a lot of spoilers in this review.]

Just when you think that this story cannot get any darker, it surprises you and gets even darker to the point that this Simenon book should be called un roman noirs instead of un roman durs.

The story is set in post-war Batum, a seaside oil town bordering Turkey in what is now Georgia, just as the communists were taking a strangle hold on power. Simenon does a masterful job of describing Batum as a labyrinth of unpaved roads bordered by unwashed and unremarkable houses that are in various states of disrepair. He describes the residents of Batum as the worst kind of informers telling on their friend to the KGB for a meager addition to their rations. Batum, in Simenon's eyes, is the end of the line kind of city where nobody voluntarily goes to live but for people who have no choice. Simenon paints such a dark and depressing picture of the town that it almost comes alive as a character in the book.

The four characters most involved in the story are Adil Bey, the Turkish Consul; John, a reporter for an American newspaper who ultimately arranges for Adil Bey's and Sonia's escape; Nejla, the Persian Consul's mistress, and for a time Adil Bey's lover; and Sonia Kolin, Adil Bey's secretary and lover.

The story begins with a cocktail party at the Italian Consul's home where Adil Bey, the protagonist, is introduced to the four of the five ex-patriots living in Batum: the Italian Consul and his wife and the Persian Consul and his lover. Adil Bey takes offense with some comments made by the Italian Consul and storms out of the party beginning a period of relative isolation from the other ex-pats. He goes back to his consulate which has been stripped of everything by his predecessor's secretary on his departure and functions as Adil Bey's apartment. You imagine him living in a dark and dusty set of rooms, the equivalent of a contemporary crack house.

Adil Bey is a Victorian style gentleman who is completely unfamiliar with washing his own clothes, putting sheets on the bed, fashioning curtains and buying food: the fundamentals of living. So, he begins this slovenly life of sleeping on the mattress, never changing his clothes, eating whatever food - rotten or not - out of cans, and rarely showering. Simenon repeatedly paints Adil Bey as an anachronism: a man with Victorian mores living in the second half of the twentieth century; a man who fought in Galipoli but doesn't seem to know how to cook his own food; or a man who seems so weak and manages to survive in Batum.

Adil Bey also starts becoming sicker and sicker over time. At first the sickness is not more than a minor inconvenience but then it turns into a bad cough, then into heavy sweating, then into insomnia and then into severe weight gain. This transformation layered on top of everything else really turns Adil Bey into a sad and sickly creature.

In the middle of his collapsing health, Adil Bey falls in love with his secretary, Sonia, and starts a cold almost sterile love affair with her. She comes to see him in the evenings when they make love and then she heads home very early in the morning before the city awakes. While this is going on Adil Bey's health continues to deteriorate until he starts showing symptoms of schizophrenia. He starts walking down the street talking to himself, wandering around the town and the port aimlessly and, most importantly, thinking that everyone is out to get him.

It turns out he is not wrong on the last point. During a fight with Sonia he grabs her purse, rummages through it and discovers that she has been slowly poisoning him with arsenic which is why he has been slowly falling apart. Sonia apologizes and concedes that the communist government had pressed her into doing this and that she truly loves him and he reciprocates the emotion. They make plans to leave town and to smuggle Sonia out of the country on a Belgian freighter that is leaving the next night. But the KGB finds out and kills Sonia and leaves Adil Bey to linger in his own personal hell.

7. Isaac Asimov, The Naked Sun

This is the second in the Elijah Baley science fiction mystery trilogy. In this book Baley is called on to travel to one of the outermost worlds colonized by humans to solve a series of murders and attempted murders. The story is interesting but not worth any specific commentary in and of itself because the story is rather overwhelmed by Asimov's thinly disguised metaphors which can easily be connected to some of the issues that people faced in mid-twentieth century America.

Asimov weaves two central themes throughout the book: a suspicion of technology and of more planned (less free) societies. Almost every interaction between the characters in the book is like a mini-battle pitting those who are accepting of technology against those who are not; or those who are accepting of a dictatorship against those who are not. Most books include some social commentary or over arching themes that readers need to understand but in this book the themes take a primary role over the story itself.

Asimov is clear that he prefers more freedom and more technology which is not a surprising outcome. But after reading the book I have come away thinking that Asimov is not such a brilliant writer, rather, he is a scientist with a literary bent and a great imagination.

6. Cold Steel by Tim Bouquet and Byron Ousey

This is the story of one of the nastier hostile take over battles in European corporate history when the Indian ex-pat owned Mittal Steel made a hostile bid for the Luxembourg based Arcelor Steel. The saga began in earnest after Guy Dolle, the President of Arcelor, received the following phone call from Lakshmi Mittal, the CEO of Mittal:

This is Lakshmi Mittal. As a matter of courtesy I am calling to tell you that tomorrow I will mount a public offer to your shareholders to take over your company.

Mittal Steel was established in the late 1970s when Lakshmi Mittal purchased an under appreciated steel mill in Indonesia and set about modernizing the facility and increasing its output. With that business prospering, Mittal assembled the largest steel producer in the world by purchasing steel mills throughout the world. He bought facilities in the US, the Caribbean, the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In just over 20 years he became one of the richest men in the world from basically nothing.

Arcelor, in contrast, was a hundred plus year old company which was the product of the merger of the largest French, Spanish and Luxembourg steel producers. It was run like many pseudo state run companies in continental Europe as a partnership between its unions, its management, its shareholders and various governments.

I think what makes this story interesting is the clash of cultures: the brash entrepreneurial culture of the Mittal group versus the staid bureaucratic culture of the Arcelor managers. From the start, the Arcelor managers played this battle incorrectly. In one of their first press conferences, and in one of the most stunning demonstrations of French racism, the head of Arcelor described the Mittal bid as follows:

Mittal's offer consists, if you will excuse the expression, of monkey money.

He then went on to describe how it would be wrong for Arcelor, such an icon of European industry, to be managed by Indians.

Six months later, after having thrown everything including the kitchen sink at Mittal's offer, the Arcelor board of directors relented and allowed the company to be acquired by Mittal Steel. The subsequent years have shown all of Arcelor's and the European's fears to be unfounded. The combined company is known as ArcelorMittal, it is based in Luxembourg and it employs tens of thousands more people in Europe than it did before the take over.

This was a great, fast story.

5. Second Foundation: Galactic Empire by Isaac Asimov*

The Second Foundation is the third novel in Asimov's Foundation Series which I find interesting because the stories are a merger of diplomacy/politics and science fiction. I have not read any of the other Foundation Series novels but picked this one up because it was included in the box of novels that Adam sent me last year.

As you can tell by the title the first Foundation has collapsed and an entity called the Mule has taken over the galactic government. He rules by manipulating people's brains and making them his unquestioning followers so it is by no means a benign leadership. The Mule hears rumors of the existence of a budding Second Foundation which is in the process of accumulating sufficient power to take over the Mule's leadership and sets about to try to find and then to destroy the Second Foundation.

As I write this quick summary I am surprised that I was not more engrossed by this book: it is certainly a cool premise and something that is right up my alley. Nevertheless, I find the story to be somewhat plodding and not as entertaining as I had built it up to be in my mind.

4. Master & Commander by Patrick O'Brian

This was a fantastic adventure story though all of the sailing jargon did get me a little confused and reaching for my dictionary more often than I would have liked. The book is well reviewed by my 50 books colleagues here and here.

3. Three Bedrooms in Manhattan by Georges Simenon

Finishing this book was a little bitter sweet for me because it means that I only have one more of Simenon's roman durs to read and then I will be done with all of them. They have all been awesome books and this one does not disappoint.

This is a very dark story of a prominent French stage actor whose wife left him for a 21 year old hunk. Finding it unbearable to live in Paris, he decides to move to America. He first tries to look for work in Hollywood but can't find anything at all that would be in keeping with his stature, so he decides to move to New York where he finds himself similarly out of luck. He starts life in New York living the high life but as he runs out of money he ends up in a dingy studio apartment around Washington Square. Slowly the loneliness of his situation starts to fill every crack of his life and he begins to devolve into a more pathetic creature every day. He wakes up in the middle of the night one day and decides to go to the diner for some food. He has reached such a stage where he doesn't even bother to dress, he just throws on a dressing gown and some slippers and walks out the door. At the diner he meets Kay, a thirty something rather unattractive (by his own admission) woman who is equally lonely and at an equally pathetic point in her life.

They begin a fast paced and high strung love affair and within days they are living together, calling his apartment 'our' place and behaving as couples with months or years of history would. Simenon writes from Francois' point of view and does an admirable job describing his desperation, his pathological jealousy and the physical damage that he does to Kay, his subconscious efforts to destroy his relationship and his final coming down to earth.

The story is a fast paced psychological love affair and Simenon writes it brilliantly always conveying the precipitous edge that Francois and Kay are walking as they conduct their relationship. A+.

2. The Chasm by Victor Canning

This book was published in 1947 and was one of Victor Canning's first books. I expected it to be more of a detective story but it turned out that it is more like a traditional piece of dramatic fiction. The book is set in Italy immediately after the end of WWII and is focused around an English soldier living in Italy called Burgess who is having a rough time dealing with the aftermath of the war. During the war he lost his three best friends and his fiance left him and married another man. Both of these events caused him some trauma to the point that he often halucinates and the thinks he hears his friends voices only to turn around and find that it is someone that he doesn't know. Finally his shrink tells him to leave the base in Bologna and go for a holiday in order to cure himself by doing some soul searching and trying to identify what is really bothering him. So, he heads off to Florence where he wanders around the city visiting all the sites that him and his friends had visited and doing all of the things that they had done together. This exercise is doing nothing for him other than exacerbating his condition.

While at a bar he meets up with an army acquaintance called Marsh who advises him to get out into the country and find some place where he can take in the mountain air and go for long walks to clear his head. Burgess listens and heads off into the countryside and stops at a town called Cappo and checks into the local hotel. On one of his walks he spots a young woman and a boy and decides to follow them. He catches up with them and starts talking to them and he is immediately captivated by the young woman's beauty. He goes to their village and being friendly Italians they invite him to stay with them.

While at this village he discovers that the lord of the village is in fact a Nazi soldier who is hiding out from the authorities. At this point the story diverges into three major themes: his love affair with Gemma who is engaged to a hot headed Italian, his attempts to out the Nazi soldier, and his continued efforts to deal with his hallucinations.

This is not as good a book as the other Canning novels that I have read. His writing is far too colorful and melodramatic for my liking and he makes a number of convenient logical leaps that are just not believable. For example, at one point he looks into the eyes of one of the villagers and realizes that the villager is allied with the Nazi soldier. It is an entertaining read but I wouldn't rush to put it on your bookshelves.

As an aside, the back cover says that the book will be one of Columbia Pictures' "biggest British productions." I don't think that it was ever made into a movie though.

1. The Predators' Ball by Connie Bruck

I had read this book when I was in college but I decided to pick it up because it explains a lot about today's economic situation. In the 1970s Michael Milken joined a fledgling second tier investment bank called Drexel Burnham where he began as a low level associate but quickly rose through the organization because he was very smart and because he created the concept of the levereged buyout or LBO which brought in a lot fees for the firm. His idea was that you could buy a company by borrowing a lot of money and using that borrowed money plus a little bit of your own cash to do the deal. He would do this by issuing junk bonds which are unrated bonds that carry a very high interest rate to compensate the lenders for the risk they are taking.

He began doing these deals at a modest pace to finance friendly take overs but then he hit on the idea of doing these kinds of bond issuances to finance hostile take overs and that's when his business really started moving. By the early 1980s he ran a huge junk bond business which had catapulted Drexel Burnham from relative obscurity to one of the stars of Wall Street. He had built such a franchise that in most years he did at least 75% of the junk bond issuances that were completed. To a large degree he was responsible for putting buyout funds like KKR, Blackstone and others into business.

The book paints him as an egocentric self dealing control freak. I find it difficult to trust these editorial type books on these kinds of matters but from what I remember I agree that he was at least a control freak. But then his and the Drexel Burnham empire both came crashing down when he was charged with insider trading, found guilty, had to pay a huge fine and go to jail for a few years. The book is a good story about excess financed by too much debt which is analogous to the causes of today's problems.

The Year in Review

Despite my best efforts I failed to make it to the 50 mark this year but I am pleased with my performance nonetheless. I know why I didn't make it, I got too ambitious. The pseudo-intellectual side of me raged out and decided that I should be interested in all sorts of high brow books with interesting titles and fascinating subjects. If I had stuck to my meat and potatoes - science fiction with a little bit of mystery thrown in - I would have been closer to the mark.

I want to recognize some of my fellow 50-bookers for their efforts: Olman's 50 for some of the great authors he brought to light this year (Attlee and Canning); Meezly for her terrific, well written and thoughtful reviews; and Mount Benson for continuing to giv'er. I would also like to thank Opinion be Damned and Redwing for taking the time to read my blog: increasing your regular readership by 67% (from three to five) is great, just ask any newspaper man.

Happy new year and here's to 2009.

43. Amar Bhide, The Venturesome Economy

This is the baddest of the bad business books. You know you are in trouble when an author (or his editor) decides that it is a good idea to have shaded boxed insets in the middle of the narrative or decides to divide the book into "Book 1" and "Book 2" like its some religious manuscript. This book is supposed to enlighten you about the nature of innovation, how it can be fostered and sustained in a business and how a business man can do things to use it as a competitive advantage. I am not enlightened

42. Adam Kirsch, Benjamin Disraeli

Disraeli is a fascinating guy because he was a long time prime minister in 19th century England but he was not an aristocrat, he was a novelist, he was under the burden of a great deal of debt and, most interestingly, he was Jewish. He was definitely the first Jewish prime minister of England and, as far as I can recall, England has not had a Jewish PM since. Disraeli was a conservative whose political career was marked by an epic political battle with Gladstone, his counterweight on the Liberal side of the house.

This was a short, interesting and well put together biography of Disraeli. Those of you who are interested in 19th century British history will find it interesting.

41. John Wyndahm, The Chrysalids*

I grabbed this off the shelf because of Meezly's terrific review. I don't have much else to add other than to say that it was great to re-read the book after so many years.

40. Ray Bradbury, R is for Rocket

This is a great collection of short stories which, I think, were put together for a young adult audience though some seem quite sophisticated. Some of the stories are just brilliant. The Fog Horn is about a lighthouse whose repetitive horn and light attract an ancient sea creature from the depths of the ocean. The sea creature gets himself to the lighthouse and begins slowly and carefully introducing himself to the lighthouse and its operators who, then, foolishly turn off the horn leaving the sea creature distraught and helpless. The Rocket is about a family who can barely make ends meet in a world where only rich people get to ride in rockets to and from Mars. The father runs a scrap heap and is one day offered the opportunity to purchase a full scale model rocket. He blows the family's entire savings and proceeds to refit the rocket with car engines and other bits and pieces. He then invites his kids over, buckles them in, turns on the car engines and manages to convince them that they are on a real rocket ship leaving them forever happy. Frost and Fire is a story about a group of rockets that crashed in a planet resembling Mercury. The heavy radiation on the planet speeds up the survivors metabolism to the point that it reduces their lifespans down to just eight days which means that life has to be lived in fast forward. The survivors live in hill side caves that protect them from the extreme daytime heat and nightime cold leaving them with only dusk and dawn to go outside to gather food, get into fights, wage war and make love. All of the rockets that crashed on the planet have been destroyed but one which crash landed at the crest of a hill and has been able to survive the elements. But it is just far enough away that no one has been able to make it to the ship before they die until Sim. Sim ingeniously finds a way to get to the ship and to save many of the people from the planet.

Ray Bradbury is an interesting writer who was always a little skeptical of the advancement of technology and the dawn of space travel. This collection of stories really highlights his skepticism.

35 to 39. Various Books I've Read in the Past Month

I have been delinquent in making timely posts over the past month or so: too much travel. The period began with the completion of H.G. Wells' The First Men in the Moon, a terrific piece of allegorical science fiction that is highly critical of colonial mores; I then moved on to Larry Niven's Ring World - which I must have read in high school but forgotten. I found this book to be a little too heavy on the tech/gadgets but otherwise an entertaining science fiction story; I then moved on to Philip Attlee's Canadian Bomber Contract which is well reviewed on Olman's Fifty; I then moved on to Alan Furst's The World at Night, a spy story in occupation France. Furst's books are so light and airy that you barely feel like you've read a book and despite his efforts he is not able to add the true grit and darkness that good spy stories deserve. He is now off my list of supported authors; finally, I read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. Gladwell is a man of big ideas and doesn't provide much in support of his big ideas. In this, his third book, he hypothesizes that people don't achieve success through just their hard work and dedication they are, more often than not, supported by particular circumstances that end up giving them an advantage over the next guy. His arguments and examples make sense but one cannot prove such a big hypothesis by anecdotes and scant references alone. Someone needs to tell him that he has ADD and if he really wants to present a compelling hypothesis then he should do the hard academic work required to back it up.

Passwords

In the past few weeks I have had a couple of people ask me or make comments about my blog. I would rather not give these people a window into my life, as a result I will soon switch this blog to a password protected site. If you'd like to continue to have access to the blog then leave a comment saying as much and include your email address. This will really help improve my readership!

34. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Children of Hurin

Tolkien wrote the manuscript for this book in 1910 and never finished it. His son, who calls himself the literary executor of his father's estate, completed the manuscript and made it fit for publication. To me it really didn't feel like it deserved to be a book which, in turn, made it feel like a rather distasteful cash grab. After subtracting the 29 page introduction, the dozen or so page glossary and the random full color pictures (I am not even counting the double spaced type) you get to a book that is no more than about 100 pages long. In my view that's just too short for a self standing novel.

Setting that aside, this is the story of Turin, his mother Morwen and her newly born daughter. Hurin, Morwen's husband, is alive but captured very early in the book. The story is set in the first age of Middle Earth. At the beginning of the book Hurin joins an alliance of other men and elves to fight against the evil Morgoth in the Battle of Unnumbered Tears. Hurin and his allies are slaughtered and Morgoth captures Hurin alive and takes him back to his castle. When Hurin does not give Morgoth the information that he is seeking he chains Hurin to a giant stone chair and curses him with the ability to see and hear what Morgoth hears.

Morgoth's henchmen take over different parts of the earth including Hurin's home which forces Turin, Hurin's son, to flee. His mother cannot join them as she is pregnant with her third child. Turin, who is about nine years old, flees to a hidden town of elves where he grows up never forgetting his mother and father. The balance of the story relates Turin's deeds as head of a lawless band, his attacks on Morgoth and his search for his mother.

The book was reasonably good but it is more like a short story than a novel. I felt a little ripped off by the Tolkien family which left a bad taste in my mouth.

33. Philip K. Dick, The Unteleported Man

This book was first published by Ace as a novella. PKD submitted a 32,000 word book, based on a serialized novel in a magazine, to Ace for review, the editors liked it but felt that it was too short so they asked PKD to expand it into a novel. PKD agreed to do so and a few months later came back with a manuscript that was some 25,000 words longer. On reading it, however, Ace concluded that PKD's additions were not good and they went ahead and published the original novella instead. Much later, Berkely published the book in its full and added an introduction that was highly critical of Ace for not publishing the full novel in the first place.

The book fits, I think, into the alternative history science fiction genre. Unlike The Man in the High Castle where the Germans actually win World War II, in this story the Germans lose the war but regain worldwide political power and eventually end up controlling both the United Nations and the one of the world's largest and most powerful corporations (there are only a few corporations left). This company, called THL, develops a telportation system which, they claim, is only capable of teleporting people to the destination but not back. Because the world is severely over populated and because someone has discovered a far off planet that is much like the earth, THL gets a concession to develop and colonize that planet which they call Whale's Mouth. In addition, the Germans running the UN don't really question THL since they are both run by Germans. THL sets up its teleportation machines in hundreds of outlets throughout the world and runs a captivating advertising campaign which shows off the wide open spaces and pastoral beauty fo Whale's Mouth. By the start of the book some forty million people have moved to Whale's Mouth.

The teleportation machine puts an inter-planetary shipping and travel company out of business. The stress of the bankruptcy ends up killing the founder of that company. His son, Rachmael ben Applebaum, takes over and begins the dissolution of the company. He is suspicious of THL and what they are doing in Whale's Mouth though and he holds on to his last inter-planetary ferry and plans on making the 18 year long journey over to Whale's Mouth to see what is actually going on there. He enlists the head of another large corporation, called LIES, Inc., to help him in this effort. LIES is a private spying and security firm which has grown to be so powerful that it is accepted by the authorities. Instead of joining ben Applebaum on his ship the head of LIES decides to send 2,000 of his agents across to Whale's Mouth through the THL telportation machines to start a coup instead. Days into his journey, after hearing about LIES' plans Appelbaum also abandons his plan and follows the agents across.

When they get there they are confronted by the horror of THL's actions. Instead of a beautiful spacious pastoral land Whale's Mouth is a barracks fenced in by high barbed wire trimmed fences. The forty million colonists are being trained as an army which will eventually invade earth. When the LIES agents arrive the THL army is one million strong. The story briefly covers the ass kicking that the LIES agents are receiving but then quickly focuses on ben Applebaum who, on arrival, is almost immediately engaged in combat by one of the members of the THL army. He loses that fight when he is hit by an LSD tipped dart. The next part of the book is the part that Ace found too stupid to publish.

For the next 50 plus pages PKD describes ben Applebaum's acid trip like only someone who has taken a lot of acid could do. The narrative is brilliantly written in such a twisting logic that someone who isn't high has a difficult time following along. I differ with Ace, while the added material is certainly a little incongruous it is also an imaginative description of an acid trip. Once the acid trip narrative ends the book returns to its original plot and the story unfolds much as it should.

I would highly recommend this book to my few readers as I know that they would find it just as interesting as I did.

32. Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama

The problem I have with Arthur C. Clarke's and, to a much lesser degree, Asimov's brands of science fiction is that they often paint such a clean image of the future: vibrant democracies, happy people, great technology etc. Don't get me wrong, their books are not all happiness but, in comparison to other science fiction works they describe a more successful future.

After a number of asteroids either hit the earth or come too close for comfort the residents of earth and the human residents of the other colonized planets in the solar system decide to deploy a high tech early warning system to keep track of all the nearby asteroids. This early warning system detects Rama (which is an arbitrary name based on much the same system as, for example, we have today for hurricanes) a previously uncatalogued asteroid that has just entered the solar system and is on a path to go past many of the planets and shoot around the sun and out of the solar system.

Intrigued by this newcomer, the authorities send a manned space craft to land on the asteroid and to study it in more detail. Upon landing on Rama the astronauts discover that it is not an asteroid at all, rather it is a cylindrical space ship that is about 50KM long and some 8KM wide and is spinning from end to end. They manage to get inside the cylinder and discover a marvelously complicated but uninhabited world which they set about to explore.

Clarke's strength as a writer has always been his imaginative, believable and detailed view on future technologies, this book is a great example of the execution of his strengths. He describes the landscape, technology, mystery and atmosphere in breathtaking and yet accessible detail. His weakness as a writer, in my view, is that he cannot marry the tech with an interesting story involving the human actors in the book. It's like watching a movie with awesome technology but with cheesy lines and acting. He leaves a number of fascinating story lines just hanging: the entire mission to Rama is governed by a sub-committee of the now inter-planetary UN which has all sorts of diplomatic intrigue associated with it but Clarke doesn't really deal with that at all; similarly at one point, the renegade colonists on Mercury, launch a missile directed at Rama which is disarmed by the astronauts sent to Rama but Clarke doesn't deal with how the people from Mercury react to this affront.

You should read this book for the tech but not the story line.

31. Victor Canning, A Forest of Eyes

This is the second Canning novel that I have read after being introduced to them by the great Olman. This book is excellent and very different than the first VC book that I read which was more like a posh Desmond Bagley book. This one is set in 1950s Yugoslavia soon after Tito has cemented his power and just as he is beginning to show that he is not prepared to blindly follow Stalin's lead. The book is filled with underhanded criticism of Tito, Stalin and communism to the point that at one point I thought that this must be a propaganda book.

It is difficult to review spy fiction because one gives away so much during the course of the review but I will say what I can. The book is set in Dubrovnik where Raikes and Hudson, two engineers working for a British firm, are taking a short holiday while they wait for the Yugoslav Minister of Interior to return from a trip to Russia and sign a contract that they had given his office. The two of them have two weeks on their hand so they head south as special guests of the Yugoslav government. Dubrovnik is a great setting for a spy story with its cliff side geography, historic buildings and winding alley ways.

Canning's book is very well written, rarely slow and a great piece of spy fiction. I urge you all to pick it up.

30. Mark Clifton and Frank Riley, They'd Rather Be Right

The world is in a down swing and heading towards its end. The government's stifling control of opinions has killed off all innovation and left the masses stupid and resentful of the 'brains,' and the intelligentsia tightly controlled by the government so that, unknown to them, they are unable to think of any original ideas. A telepath called Joe Carter starts changing all that. Through his telepathic skills and using his position as secretary to a military project being developed at a university, he lifts the shround of opinion control and helps a group of scientists develop Bossy: a female machine that makes people young again by removing the different psychological inhibitions and restrictions that have built up over time but only so long as the person's mind is receptive to change.

The government's discovery of Bossy makes Joe and its two leading scientists take flight to avoid capture and certain jail time. They first hide out in San Francisco's skid row where they rebuild Bossy and run one person through the system which transforms their 70 year old ugly landlord to an 18 year old beautiful, intelligent blonde. News of this transformation leaks out and a super rich benefactor who is too rich and powerful to be subject to the government's control takes Bossy, Joe and the scientists into his trust.

The remainder of the story is about the fight between all the different parts of the government for control of Bossy, how the group fights back and the ultimate fate of Bossy and society. This is a pretty superficial story with a few high points but not too many (it won the Hugo award in 1957 and it has been widely acclaimed as the worst book to win a Hugo!).