A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, by James Comey

in his memoir A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership (2018), James Comey presents himself as a man who throughout his life has tried to do the right thing.  He discusses mistakes he has made and his efforts to improve himself and his character.  He had a long, distinguished career in law enforcement both as an agent and a prosecutor prior to becoming Director of the FBI. He served under four presidents, from Clinton to Trump.  He does not gossip, for the most part, but we become aware that he liked some presidents more than others.  Although he was prone to agree more with President Bush politically, he found him prone to gruffness and capable of being distant.  Obama, whom he did not always agree with politically, he came to like and respect.  His attitudes towards Hillary Clinton are equivocal. And he seemed to have little respect for Donald Trump even before the 2016 election campaign began.

In the future, most people will remember Comey for his handling of the Clinton e-mail controversy and its impact on the 2016 presidential election. Many readers will look to his memoir in hopes of finding clarity on that matter.  Although there may be other reasons why Clinton lost, including a series of mistakes by her campaign, misogyny, probable Russian interference, baggage from her husband’s presidency, not to mention the archaic and outmoded Electoral College, many people blame Comey for her defeat.  In the summer of 2016 Comey announced that the FBI found in its investigation no reason to indict Clinton, but he also stated that she had handled the e-mails “carelessly.” Ten days prior to the election he held a press conference to reveal that the investigation had been reopened because of new evidence, and then three days before the election he announced that the investigation had turned up nothing new and was therefore closed again—this led many, including this writer, to suspect political shenanigans, to suspect that he was trying to throw the election. Since that time, in his resistance to Donald Trump, in his refusal to close the Mueller investigation or to pledge fealty to the new president, many have moderated their opinions of him.

The memoir doesn’t shed new light on the controversy. Comey admits to character flaws early in his memoir.  He recounts how early in his career he convinced friends that he had been a professional basketball player, and he admits to other mistakes.  All of these foibles became a basis for self-improvement.  Comey presents himself as someone always struggling to improve, to overcome personality quirks, and so on.

Comey’s explanation for his handling of revelations about the Clinton e-mail controversy is that he was attempting to protect the FBI’s public image, to preserve the public trust in the FBI.  He explains his concern that if he did not announce the resumption of the investigation he and the Bureau might later be accused of suppressing important information during the final days of an election.  This is reasonable enough on the face of it, but there were other concerns he might have considered, including the national welfare. Moreover, his announcements about the investigation violated FBI protocol. Comey says he believed Clinton would win the election, implying that if he had thought otherwise, he might have handled things differently.  And he says he often wonders whether he made a mistake.

I believe Comey did care about making the right decisions.  I think he has served the public trust in a basically honest way.  However, I also think he cares about his public image.  His insistence on duty, on uprightness, on protecting the FBI might on occasion have blinded him to the need for thinking more carefully, more deeply, about the most important of his decisions.

The Woman in the Woods, by John Connolly

In The Woman in the Woods (2018), John Connolly uses a technique I’ve encountered in other suspense novels.  He constructs an intricate plot with an array of characters and a central mystery.  As the novel develops, we begin to encounter chapters that appears to be asides, with nothing much to contribute except for one small but significant detail.  As an example, in one chapter, a group of teenage boys are hanging out and drinking on a cliff next to a quarry.  One of them is pushing boulders into the lake below the cliff.  One large boulder produces a huge splash which causes a sunken car to rise to the surface.  In its open trunk, the boys see the body of a woman.  Hers is the corpse which other characters in the novel have been looking for.  It’s not an especially important point in the novel’s plot—many people go missing—but this is just one box in the narrative assemblage to be clicked off. The teenage boys play no other role in the novel.

The prose style of this novel is dense and literary--it reminded me especially of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, whose serial killing murderer has much in common with the killer at the center of The Woman in the Woods.

Some of the characters bear faintly allegorical names.  A secondary character is Angel, and the missing woman in the woods is Karis (close to charitas?). The two main characters are clearly representative of good and evil.  One is described as partially divine, and the other is a Satan figure.  This novel was well constructed, too well constructed, and the fact that it is a crypto Christian/Lovecraftian allegory of good vs. evil eventually made it tiresome. There are “buried gods” and “old gods” and so on, along with a mysterious book with missing pages.  When the pages are recovered, the reassembled book will bring about apocalypse.  The villain has supernatural powers—he’s lived for centuries.  In a book where powers of logic and deduction would seem important, his presence alters the narrative landscape.  Since he can do things beyond the powers of any human being, he is a kind of narrative cheat.  He may not be human himself.  I’d describe the novel as a Cormac McCarthy/C. S. Lewis/Charles Williams mashup.

What is Real: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Theory, by Adam Becker

Among the weird facts about the history of quantum theory, according to Adam Becker in What is Real: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Theory (2018), is that Niels Bohr, one of the originators of quantum theory, argued that the quantum world didn’t exist, as far as the normal Newtonian world was concerned, and that it was therefore impossible to ask questions about it.  Bohr wrote and spoke in such an obscure way that articles are written that argue over what he meant.  The irony at the center of this book is that although quantum theory is the source of precise measurements and of science that has produced many of the technological marvels of contemporary life, many quantum scientists and theorists aren’t sure what it means and how it works.  Quantum physics, as a way of explaining that the world isn’t really what it seems, is itself not what it seems. Moreover, the conflicts in personality and ambition, the political tensions, that characterize other avenues of life also plague research in physics.  The work of ambitious and personable physicists tends to get more attention than that of loners who prefer to work quietly. This is one of several reasons Becker cites for the relative success of the Copenhagen interpretation championed by the popular and influential Bohr, despites its flaws.

Every book I read about quantum physics I begin with the hope that it will do a better job than the others of making quantum physics clear, or at least clearer.  The uncertainty principle, quantum action at a distance, atomic structures, the measurement paradox, Schrödinger’s cat, locality vs. non-locality, wave-particle duality—I want to understand these concepts.  Becker does a better job than most in explaining them with some clarity, but as usually happens at a certain point my eyes glaze over.  My own cognitive limitations may be the problem.  Or maybe the complexity of quantum physics is overwhelming for someone who reads casually in the field. I continue to hope for understanding.