California Books

If you're looking for something to take to the beach, look no further. Talk about a quick read: I started it between a wedding and its reception on Saturday and finished it Sunday evening, despite having the reception, post-reception drinks, and a brunch the day after that turned into a five-hour affair.

The fifth Munch Mancini novel begins with Munch's old friend Ellen Summers getting out of prison the day after her mother and stepfather are killed in a rather gruesome fashion. Ellen has an explanation of why someone would have been after her mother, but the explanation has too many holes in it to completely make sense. Combine this with Ellen's real father coming back into the picture, a crazy woman stalking Munch, a new romantic interest (on the police force, no less), and you've got yourself a novel.

Quick, witty, and absorbing, No Man Standing is pretty much the perfect beach novel; easy, fun, and with short enough chapters that you know, when you finish one, it's time to expose a different side to the sun. ***

Ellen Summers was Mancini's best gal-pal in the rough old days, and is just released from her latest stint in the California Institution for Women, a penal facility. Summers is being sought by vicious killers who want returned a very large sum of counterfeit Franklins that she found and hid before her most recent imprisonment. The first bodies in a growing pile are those of Ellen's Mom and stepfather. Meanwhile, Munch is being harassed by the jealous ex of a poor choice of lovers, and she doesn't need the heavy baggage that Ellen has brought to her and Asia's doorstep.

By design or not, assigning Ellen a major role in this fifth book of the Munch Mancini series was true inspiration by author Barbara Seranella. Summers is at least a pale reflection of Seranella's protagonist before she became a contributing member of society. For those steady readers of the series, who perhaps thought that Munch was becoming too middle-class, or for those being introduced to Munch for the first time, Ellen is a much-needed reminder of Mancini's former low-life edginess. That aspect, plus the ending plot twist of NO MAN STANDING, extends my interest in the series as a whole, the storylines of which will need to be unpredictable to keep me returning for more. While the last chapter gives a too obvious hint to the evolution of Mancini's love life in the next book, I trust the author will surprise us.

The back flap of NO MAN STANDING reveals that Barbara Seranella ran away at fourteen from the showcase upper middle-class enclave of Pacific Palisades, CA, joined a San Francisco hippie commune, rode with outlaw bikers, and became an auto mechanic. Since I also spent several idyllic childhood years in Pacific Palisades before my uneventful and unrebellious teens, I wish we could sit and compare notes to determine where I went wrong.

So begins this paradigm-bending book, an elegant theory of social evolution, as well as a brilliant prescription for modern peacemakers. Schmookler not only accounts for the origins of the ancient cycle of human violence, he provides a path from domination, competition, and unilateral decision-making to partnership, cooperation, and multilateralism. As Schmookler guides the reader through possible answers to the parable, it becomes clear that, when faced with violence, whether one chooses to fight back, surrender, or run away, each "solution" tends to spread the power dynamics of violence through the system. Even the most peaceful culture, when forced to defend itself, must shift to that degree of militarism deemed necessary for survival.

The liberating message for peacemakers is that violence is neither a hard-wired aspect of human nature nor God the Father's indelible curse on humankind; rather, violence arose as a regrettable solution to human conflicts and has since spread from person to person and culture and culture like a social virus, or meme. By focusing on what Schmookler calls "the problem of power in social evolution," we can chart a new course through personal and political conflicts and find lasting, nonviolent answers to the parable's dilemma. A vital book in the peacemaker's library.

This is tough reading, in part because the publisher's choice of paper and font are not the best. As one who has previously recommended such books as Lionel Tiger's "The Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System", Norman Cousins "The Pathology of Power", and many other books on the pathologies of treating man as a "good", of scientific objectivity as "value neutral" and therefore bad, of secrecy as counter-productive to "precautionary principle" decision-making, I immediately recognized this book as an integrative work, possibly supplanting all those other books by bringing the various arguments together in one place.

This is indeed a brilliant product by a towering intellect, and it has the bibliography and index that one would expect from a world-class endeavor. I recommend it together with Philip Alott's "The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State", Stewart Brand's "Clock of the Long Now", and John Lewis Gaddis "The Landscape of History".

The author's bottom line: not only must we come to grips with how power is managed in every nation and organization, but also we must manage at the *global* level if we are to succeed in optimizing fulfillment at the *individual* level.

Sincerely
Kelvin Otis