Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Why Iraq and Not Saudi Arabia?

Bush insisted on invading Iraq, trumping up claims about its alleged WMD's, connection to al Qaeda, dictator...although…15 of the 19 terrorists of 9/11 were Saudis, rebellious against the tyrannical monarchy protected by the US.

“Kingdom of Saudi Arabia” means a lot of things to a lot of people. Literally it means that the Al-Saud family owns the country and its residents are their vassals. The Royal Saud family rules “Saudi Arabia” mostly by force.

Nevertheless its ministry of communications attempts to present the kingdom as a country of peace and harmony. If this were true, how could 15 of the 19 terrorists of the 9/11 attack come from the kingdom?

After World War I, at the Cairo Conference of 1921, the British rewarded Sherif Hussein, naming one of his sons, Faisal, king of Iraq, and another, Abdullah, ruler of modern-day Jordan—both countries, like most in the Middle East, were imperial inventions whose borders were sketched in the sand. The winners of WWI carved up the Ottoman Empire into the modern Middle Eastern countries we know today and they assigned rulers who seemed cooperative.

The British also backed Ibn Saud and his Wahhabi followers because he seemed most capable to pacify rival tribes in the Arabian Peninsula, especially since he had already regained control of Riyadh after a final power struggle against Al Rashid in 1902. Thus the Saud family gained royal power to rule what became the Saudi Arabia we know today.

In 1945, US President Franklin Roosevelt met with Ibn Saud to negotiate an important oil deal in which the US would back the Saud dynasty by providing military support in exchange for a reliable supply of crude. It seemed like a good deal at the time.

Shady Partners
To this day, the US continues a similar policy in the Middle East: support a ruler in order to maintain a dependable trading partner, regardless of how that leader rules his country—monarch, tyrant, dictator, or popular nice guy. Few, if any, beloved leaders have yet to arise in the oil rich land of the Levant. Thrust into Iraqi power mainly by the US in the early 1970’s, Saddam Hussein eventually turned his back on his Yankee supporters and nationalized the Western-owned Iraqi Petroleum Company. Well, you know what happened to him—the good’ol boy gone maverick finished at the end of a rope.

Only in the post-9/11 period do we begin to question this sordid history of propping up compliant governments to satisfy our needs for petroleum and its profits. Eventually we, Western oil consumers, will have to admit at least partial blame for the terrorism that now plagues us.

The imperial support we provide to dictators, tyrants, and kings contradicts our own ideals of free trade democracy. Now, as we miserably attempt to reclaim control of Iraq, we find that our own freewheeling democracy comes under question, what with our undeniable oil interests in the country we invaded for all the most ridiculous reasons.

As far as our oil supplying countries go, we only play lip service to democracy as a marketing ploy to justify our on-going neo-colonial holds on reliable oil traders. This has been our implicit policy since 1945.

When Roosevelt met with Ibn Saud, this “scratch my back I’ll scratch yours” policy made sense. Back then, the Levant was a tribal frontier and the United States a new born industrial powerhouse. Things changed in the half century since then.

The United States grew into a global empire. Its strongest power brokers became the international petroleum oligarchs we know today; these few companies enjoy the highest levels of profits in all of human history and are fully entrenched in the status quo of oil as our source of energy, albeit an obsolete technology considering Global Warming and the current Petroleum conflicts.

Thus the West became blindly addicted to fossil fuels and never bothered to develop alternative fuels over the decades. This poses a huge pressure on the oil suppliers of the Levant.

In many ways similar to Iran and Iraq, in Saudi Arabia, the Saud Royal family garnered enormous wealth over the decades while all but ignoring the development of the people in their tribal frontiers. This imbalance intensified resentment between the Royalty and the various tribes, the vassals of the kingdom.

Theocratic Tyrants
The Royal family owns the powerful army and Crown Prince Abdullah heads the elite National Guard, made up of young men drawn from the various ranks of the Bedu (Bedouin), tribes, and official Wahhabi establishment. The Wahhabists, the extremely conservative, fundamentalist Islamic sect, owns the moral and judicial power to control the people’s behavior, how they think, dress, eat, drink, and, well, every other detail.

To this day, the Al-Saud family rules in partnership with the direct descendants of Abdul Wahhab, known as the Al-Asheikh family.

“The Al-Saud princes hold all the key government posts. Members of the Al-Asheikh family hold the key positions in the religious establishment and are responsible for enforcing Islamic orthodoxy on the streets by intimidating people by the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice,” says John R. Bradley in his book Saudi Arabia Exposed.

People fear and revile this “religious police” for its Stasi style of wide reaching and nefarious attacks, its members drawn from lower classes who resent the freedoms and ease of the wealthy.

Things that us westerners consider a birthright such as dissent on the issues of religious belief, are out of the question and punishable by public beheading. For this reason, “chop-chop square” in Riyadh is often a busy place.

Like the Al-Rashid, several tribes, their cultures, and their religious variations struggle to survive under the US backed Saudi regime.

Restless Natives
Before the Ottoman Empire fell (WWI), several ancient tribes called the Arabian Peninsula (Saudi Arabia) their home. “But the Hijazis in the West, the Asiris in the south, and the Shiites in the east did all suffer massacres, witness their Islamic monuments destroyed, and have their various Islamic beliefs damned as apostacy by the new official ideology: Wahhabism,” says John R. Bradley in his book, Saudi Arabia Exposed.

Although all were eventually cowered into submission, many of these diverse people Ibn Saud finally ruled over were not originally Wahhabis. Indeed, many members of these tribes still resent and resist Wahhabism, while Al-Saud bought or promised or compelled the loyalty of others under threat of beheading. These tribes have always fiercely resisted the Wahhabi-Al-Saud tyranny which arose from the central region of Al-Najd.

Shiites make a majority in the Eastern Province on the oil rich Gulf. The Saudi regime has impoverished, often harshly oppressed, and at times massacred them (not unlike Saddam Hussein’s Kurd massacres using gas and helicopters supplied by the US).

The Hijaz is home of the House of Hashem, or the Hashemite tribe, descendants from the Prophet. They enjoyed considerable autonomy and a belief in Sufism, the mystical Islamic belief system based on the idea that love is projection of the essence of God to the universe. This greatly contrasts from the Wahhabi’s strict literalistic and legalistic approach to religion.

The Asir tribes, like the liberal Hijaz and the Shiites, have always been reluctant vassals to the Al-Saud Royalty. Like the many other tribes, the Asir have never fully adopted the Wahhabi doctrine. The Asirs carry out periodic rebellions and low-level struggles to keep their regional identity alive.

The Asirs view the Al-Saud family as outsiders imposing their rule, backed by the West. They call both hypocritical: the Al-Saud Royalty for preaching piety and purity while living in opulence and the West for espousing human rights and democracy while supporting a tyrannical regime that disrespects the rights and customs of others. The hypocrisy fuels hatred for the West and local alienation from Al-Najd, the region of Wahhabism.

The governor of the Asir region, Prince Khaled Al-Faisal, surprisingly admits to the crisis that the Wahhabi influence has created.

Who teaches children in orphanages and schools that Saudi Arabia is not their home, that their only home is Islam? That their future vocation is jihad?...Who convinced Saudi youth that the surest path to Heaven is to blow themselves up and take citizens, foreign residents and security officers with them? Who did this to us?
Quoted from John R. Bradley’s Saudi Arabia Exposed.

Why Terrorism?
Asir was where the 15 Saudi hijackers lived when the 9/11 attack took place. Several of the hijackers came from the same tribe and bonded there in the late 1990’s. They listened to the same radical Wahhabi sermons at the Seqeley mosque in the region’s capital. Shortly before they left Saudi Arabia for Afghan training camps, they pledged to join jihad.

At least 12 of the hijackers came from the impoverished, highly tribal parts of Hijaz and Asir. Like most young Saudis, well educated or not, but almost all unemployed, oppressed, and impoverished, they imbued the anit-West and anti-Saudi sentiment. Like them and other hard-line Islamic dissenters in the past, Osama bin Laden was always a harsh critic of the official Wahhabi religious establishment that joins forces with the Al-Saud Royalty.

The hijackers also shared bin Laden’s tribal roots. Like him, they resented the Saud Royal clan that ruled them while living a double standard and they hated the religious sheiks from the Al-Najd region who legitimatize Al-Saud while “issuing fatwas for money” as the dissident saying goes.

By attacking the US--supporters of Saud--these tribal hard-line Islamist Saudis targeted the Wahhabi-Al-Saud tyranny. The Saudi-U.S. alliance motivates the
otherwise powerless, disinherited tribe members to attack their source of disinheritance and resentment.

Since Al-Saud remains a reliable oil partner, unlike Saddam Hussein, need we wonder why the US invaded Iraq instead of the real source of the 9/11 attack?


Main Source for this article: John R. Bradley's Saudi Arabia Exposed.

Sunday, June 15, 2008

Father's Day

Today is more like Memorial Day. Father's Day calls my father to mind, but WWII was one of the most defining events in his life.

Just a farm boy from Nebraska, hardly 18 years old, he served in the Army's 89th Division and shipped out for the third wave of landings onto the shores of Normandy.

He saw a lot of action. Carrying a high quality German camera, he took a lot of pictures of the war. None of them pretty.

When he returned home, he had a lot of shrapnel embedded in his flesh. Many years later, when he'd started a family, contributing to the baby boom, he had to go to the VA hospital several times to take some of those pieces of metal out from under his skin as they began to resurface.

As I grew older, his experiences and stories of war fascinated me. And the shrapnel that took so many years to surface again now remain as a memory and a metaphor.

As my father advanced in age and then learned that his days were numbered, like the resurfacing shrapnel, he began to remember his combat experiences. That's when I learned a lot more. He talked about it more than ever.

Since then, I've written a novel mostly based on a character similar to my father, though, placed in our modern times and circumstances.

War is war no matter the time or the generation. Soldiers return home and try their damnedest to forget. Only the self-proclaimed gung-ho soldiers, the ones who dance around in flight suits for photo ops...only they are eager to talk of war. Eventually, combat experience comes back, haunting the soul. I remember how my father often woke up from nightmares. All his short life, he suffered from narcolepsy caused by combat.

Mojave Winds is a novel, its main character, Kris Klug, is a young man returning home, looking for job and faces calamity while readapting to the civilian world.

Mojave Winds, though, is partly a memoir about my father, despite the time that's lapsed. It's in honor to him.

Saturday, June 14, 2008

Culture of Deception

“My husband and I’ve thought about this next election. We realized that McCain is more than seventy years old. It’s his last chance. The other candidates are younger and have many years ahead of them. So, we’ve decided to vote for McCain.”

While driving to work, I heard a caller say this on Air Talk, the Larry Mantle radio talk show, KPCC.

Think about it. One of the best reasons to vote for McSame, right?

If this represents the way a large part of Americans reason or just gut check the issues, then the very foundation of our democracy shakes on sandy grounds. Does this murky thinking reflect the quality of our public educational system?

A crisp sunny day awakes us with a blue sky here in Southern California. The miracle of humanity begins to scurry, we hop into our cars and off to work. Busy people, we want to make the money that buys the things that we enjoy with our families. The paycheck routine seldom allows time to contemplate the big picture, or any picture at all for that matter.

The sunshine drives shards of brightness through the cracks in the curtains and roof top windows. We awake to the light, though, the more we ignore the darkness, the more we allow it to thrive. Soon darkness can take over the sky and the light fades such that we seldom ever awaken, if not only in our dreams.

The Matrix

We enter into a fabricated world, a virtual reality, like that depicted in the movie The Matrix. It’s a place we inhabit but our eyes are covered, the brain perceives images and an entire life in a society, a culture, a world, but it’s all merely a video feed plugged into the nerves at the base of our skull. We become so incapable of discerning what is real that we lose all sense of it. Our critical thinking dwindles. We drift into an existence without awareness.

The Secret Service code named Bush’s press secretary, Scott McClellan, as the Matrix, referring to the movie by the same title. McClellan acted as the main video feed into the mainstream news channels, the one who fed the lies at the president’s requests. Bush often referred to his ol’ pal Karl Rove as “The Architect,” referring to the character in the Matrix movie as the master mind that created the enchanting delusions which people believed as reality. Karl Rove worded most of the spin that McClellan presented to the media.

Rove, the Architect, and McClellan, the Matrix…they fabricated a whole world around Bush, albeit one of intentional deceit. From Bush all the way through his entire administration, a constant marketing campaign of propaganda fed deception to the public about life and death issues, including healthcare, war, and the economy. Matrix, Architect…code words. People in organized crime like the Mafia use them to cover illegal activity.

Dispelling the Deception with a Vengeance

Once a fervent spokesman among Bush idolaters, Scott McClellan now peddles his book entitled, “What Happened.” It claims to illuminate how Bush’s public image as beer drinking, ranch hand was mere chimera. By now though, to most of us, it’s redundant to talk how the real Bush lives in his own loser’s bubble.

McClellan’s testimony as an eye witness offers one more of the volumes and volumes of solid evidence in the public courtroom. Will the justice system function as it should? Will its wheels turn and begin impeachment proceedings? The eye witness testimonies of the Bush Administration’s criminal conduct now bust the seams of the bookstores and libraries. Does the US justice system do anything?

Without the light, the colors of flowers would pale and turn their smell sour. The leaves of grass would rot. Without the light of day, truth itself becomes unrecognizable, if not entirely lost.

Can The Working Class Get Tough?

Democracy depends on the working class. We are the majority vote. Like the leaves of grass, we have to keep our feet planted on the ground and respect our
common sense, as Thomas Paine once called it. If we fail in the basics of life, we lose our footing, nothing else supports us.

Growing up on a small, remote Oregon farm, my mother could size up a sleazy politician by mere glance. Economics did not allow her to finish high school, yet, she was smart enough to tell you if the town’s Evangelical or Southern Baptist preacher was nothing but a flimflam. Her generation lived by a hard-bitten skepticism that pierced through the darkness of deception and into the light of truth.

What happened? What generation picked up the torch after that generation of America’s working class, the ones who fought in World War II and knew how disastrous war meant for everyone involved?

Was it too much TV for the baby boomers? Did the baby boomers overdose on the Pollyanna Disney characters? Hopefully the Bush years have taught the “baby boomers” and the “gen-Xers” about the consequences of political indifference. Too bad we Americans have to always learn by experience and mistakes rather than by reading a history book. The tide has turned though.

Even legions of hardcore Bush devotees have turned their backs on the con artist. Among the growing list of fall guys and disgruntled sycophants, we find high level officials, including Colin Powell, Paul O’Neil, George Tenet, Douglas Feith and so on and so on.

Like some of these authors, McClellan became a fall guy. From Bush’s Texas days, he was in it for the money and the glory. As may be the case for many baby boomers, money took a priority over any civic duty to a higher good. Only after the chips fell against him, did he rediscover his civil duty to unveil the lie. Although years late in divulging Bush’s already well documented intentional sham, McClellan has made a noble gesture by adding to the mountainous public testimony.

Even the top Israeli political officials and U.S. defense contractors, the strongest of Bush supporters, the most fervent instigators of the war and investors in Bush, have turned their backs on the now unpopular mess. When the war was popular, many prominent people were behind it. Defense contractors are still enjoying the huge profits from Bush’s propaganda.

Today, though, only those in blind darkness would support this total disaster of duplicity.

And that’s exactly where McCain and his followers are right now.

Citizen McCain Embraces Bush’s Chimera

The son of a celebrated four-star admiral, John Sidney McCain III started his Navy career as a pilot. After being shot down during a bombing mission and taken prisoner, he returned home. Thanks to a famous father, McCain enjoys many gratuities. Thanks to his father’s status, US News & World Report printed a 13 page spread, describing his ordeal as a POW.

Shortly thereafter he attained captain’s rank. His POW ordeal, more than anything else, gave him the credibility to launch his political career. He then took over his father’s old job as liaison to Congress, enabling him to hob-knob with many elected officials.

“I attribute it more to John turning forty and wanting to be twenty-five again than I do to anything else,” said Carol, McCain’s first wife, mother of his first three of seven children, when asked about the grounds for their divorce.

So, when Hagee, whose initial claim to fame derived from his right-wing family values, endorsed McCain recently, it was just another spin on reality for the sake of votes among the dreadfully gullible fundamentalist holy rollers. Any association with the wacky Hagee buys votes for McCain from the flocks of sheep that follow the zany preacher.

Shortly after his divorce, a travesty of Hagee’s view of family values, McCain found new love with a daughter of wealth, Cindy Hensley. His marriage with Cindy afforded him more gratuities, including the connections and cash needed to catapult him to a Senator seat for Arizona.

When McCain and Cindy needed to move quickly from Phoenix to Tucson, her cash made the move easy to buy a new house. McCain had to establish residence in Tucson to take the Senator slot from retiring John Rhodes. His rivals called him a carpetbagger and opportunist.

Rebutting his critics, McCain told a little story about how much he had to move around his whole life as a Navy serviceman and cited Hanoi as the city where he’d lived the longest in any one place. The symbolic reference to Hanoi recalled his claim to heroism. McCain, like the Architect, had learned how to spin a political narrative more powerful than the truth.

As a legislator, he’s not particularly effective. The McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act took torturous paths to enact. And despite this law he helped to establish, McCain’s campaign has taken huge amounts of contributions from lobbyists who expect payback in political favors.

Though again, as part of his image building, McCain participated in campaign finance reform mainly to restore his reputation after the Keating Five incident in which he, among four other senators, took huge campaign contributions.

His media acumen has proven his greatest, perhaps his only, survival skill. He has been smooth in spinning a response to suit his political needs for the moment. In 2006, Chris Matthews (MSNBC) said, “The press loves McCain. We’re his base.”

Although as McCain advances in age, his media instincts falter. He’s made many gaffs during his current campaign. Unbeknownst to him, someone cam corded him while singing about bombing Iran in some morbid sense of humor, undignified for a senator, much less a presidential candidate.

Like Bush, McCain stitched his political career in mythologies. Just as Karl Rove architected an artificial reality for G. W. Bush, he now constructs that sham magic for McCain’s campaign.

In 2004, former counterterrorism adviser, Richard Clarke published Against All Enemies a blistering testimony of his career in the White House under President Bush. On CNN Clarke said, “they’re saying some of the exact same things about McClellan they said about me.” Bush’s propaganda machine routinely smears any dissent or criticism.

Now that Bush is raising campaign funds for McCain, the new presidential candidate mimics Bush’s policies, making it possible for Bush to serve a third term at least vicariously.

I knew an American working class that made decisions from a tough, bitter, and skeptical gut. A carpenter could see the snake oil salesman in an Evangelical Preacher like Hagee. A plumber could smell the slimy stench of a rich kid charlatan like G.W. Bush from great distances. Now it’s time that all America’s working class wakes up and finds the light. We are the majority vote.

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Book Expo America -- Market of Free Thought

Los Angeles, CA—Most publishing professionals consider Book Expo of America the industry’s compass in trends and innovative thinking. This last weekend, the spirits of Magic Johnson, Ted Turner, Thomas Friedman, Michael Moore, and others drifted through the convention center’s halls, as the Zeitgeist of our times flashed glimpses of its elusive light.

Agents, writers, and editors roam through the aisles and rows of new books. As the publishing industry's annual showcase, it’s one of the world’s largest flea-markets of books and thought trends. The event focuses on business to business relations, not intended for general public.

Coolest of all people I met at the event was by far James Rollins, my favorite writer buddy. He told me about how he wrote the novel entitled “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” based on the latest movie.

As a journalist I meandered around hoping to shake hands with the Zeitgeist, peer into its eyes, and listen as it whispered secrets to me. Things didn’t turn out quite like that though.

Not following any plan, I first stumbled onto the guys at the Bowker booth. They told me that books sales have dropped, whereas in Europe, people buy more than twice the number of books compared to the USA.

Here in the USA, we might complain about the disappearing small corner bookstore and the rise of the corporate sellers. Don’t gripe too loud. You take a trip down to South America, you’ll discover that there’s a brisk pirated book industry where few respect copyright laws. So you can buy a DVD or a book for pocket change on the street, though selection is extremely limited. As a consequence you’ll find hardly a bookstore in Lima or Bogota. Stores can’t pay their expenses if the market goes underground.

That may explain partly why some countries remain in the third world. In South America, the main source of culture and ideas remains the Catholic Church, keeping a lid on truth and freedom with a dogma that includes “subdue the earth and multiply.” The old religions want us to ignore the dire issue of over-population and their lack of science in education, or secular education at all. The healthier the market for ideas and free expression, the stronger, more innovative goes the culture. Book Expo America thrives on new ideas.

A theme of innovation cropped up in Thomas Friedman’s hour long pitch for his new book, “Hot, Flat, and Crowded.” Friedman demands a Green revolution in the USA. He warns us about the exponential population growth rate and its ecological impact on our planet. Nothing in his speech was new or revolutionary. I can remember reading about all these issues in high school from books like “Future Shock” by Alvin Toffler.

What’s new about Friedman’s passionate voice in the wilderness is that it now echoes through the otherwise empty channels of mainstream media. Despite the Bush Administration’s attempts to completely squelch ecology, Al Gore brought it back front and center. We can applaud Friedman for hopping on this band wagon. Though, in many ways, I sense that Friedman has sipped too much of the right-wing Cool Aid.

In his speech, Friedman warned us against the USA’s dependence on foreign oil and its despot barons. Among such petroleum tyrants, Friedman only mentioned Chavez and Iran. He didn’t mention a whole host of monopolistic practices among oil corporations, not a word about the American automobile industry’s complete resistance to new technology. His approach to revolution would make Mickey Mouse look aggressive.

Friedman’s lack of depth and of full disclosure begs the question if he’s siding with the Neoconservatives in their love affair with dictators like the Saudi royalty. I suppose he has to muffle his tone in order to sell more books. But to make the Green revolution happen, we’ll need radical and immediate shake-up of the corrupt energy, defense, and transportation industries. His version of Revolution lacks leadership and any real critical view for change to occur. Without sharp teeth, at least in innovative, creative, critical thinking, his so-called revolution will gain the momentum of frozen yoghurt. I left Friedman’s speech wondering if he’s also joined in the search for WMD’s in Iraq…and now in Syria and Iran.

As a self-proclaimed trend-spotter, Book Expo of America’s choice of Thomas Friedman was a let-down, like casting Mayberry’s Barney Fife in the role of Rambo. The survival of the planet is at stake, hey, let’s call on Donald Duck.

Speaking of third world dictatorships, China, one of the world's fastest-growing populaters and polluters, was the subject of a five-hour seminar. About 750 officials from China and other Asian countries attended, the highest ever at BookExpo.

Virtually every major publisher, from Amazon, with its Kindle ebook, to Random House, announced environmental plans, mostly through the increased use of recycled paper and fiber from forests certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, an international environmental organization.

Alas, Book Expo management has yet to walk their talk. The event and the program guides added up to more than 10 million pages, none on recycled paper.

Aside from saving the planet, increasing income remained at the top of publishers’ priority list. "I expect the usual jockeying for possession of `The Next Big Book,' since there are no clear candidates," says Steve Ross, publisher of the Collins division of HarperCollins.

I wanted to blurt out and tell him about my own new novel, “Mojave Winds,” as the obvious choice, but I succeeded in containing myself.

Celebrities always seem to hype up book sales by virtue of their profile. Alec Baldwin, promoted his new book on parenthood. Other speakers this weekend included media mogul Ted Turner, whose new book, entitled “Call Me Ted,” resonates as if he’ll have a beer with us in some gesture of American democracy and egalitarianism. He wants everyone to think of him as “Captain Planet,” a clever marketing position, considering how his boob-tube programs like CNN cower down to commercial sponsors when reporting tainted truth.

Strolling around aimlessly, I also met Federal Public Defender Steven Wax, author of “Kafka Comes to America.” I’ve had time to read only the first chapter. It’s enough to see that Wax’s office works harder than any lawyers to exposing the truth about prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. Wax delivers a harrowing story of the erosion of civil liberties after the September 11 terrorist attacks in a powerful account that reads like a thriller.

Steven Wax and I talked briefly about how so many Americans seem to remain apathetic even during a war waged on the whim of a rich kid who wants to prove he’s a better Texan than his father. Wax offered no answer to the enigma and offered less to say about how most of America’s popular fiction is based on escapism. Is it the publishing industry that nurtures a culture of lethargy? Or does the droopiness of the American mind demand what it deserves? In all fairness, I suppose my questions were a little loaded.

Novelist Michael Connelly hosted a fabulous cocktail party. I was honored to shake his hand. He explained how he found inspiration for his stories and characters, not so much from books but from the lively conversations with criminal lawyers and LAPD detectives. His soon to be released crime mystery entitled “The Brass Verdict” delivers a smooth read. His story telling skills inspire many novelists to raise the bar.