A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan
By James Fergusson
Published by Bantam, 2008

The coalition soldiers in Afghanistan appear to be tethered goats in history’s grinding maw. My review for The Nation, published on March 22.

There’s nothing in “A Million Bullets” that astute newspaper readers are missing, but no newspaper is going to lay out the whole sorry banquet like James Fergusson has, and that’s why his book needs to be ingested in its entirety.

Getting the information piecemeal, often still spinning, is no way to assess a war, and certainly not some ethereal “war on terror”.

There’s no spin in this carefully composed account of the British effort in the US-led campaign up to early last year. The arguments and counter-arguments are all given a fair shake, even if Fergusson concludes by recommending immediate negotiation with the Taleban — something America is likely to allow only over many more dead bodies.

America and its allies — down to just Britain, Canada and the Netherlands — went there to get al-Qaeda, right? So why are their soldiers and airmen dying fighting the Taleban? These are two entirely different entities, a fact few people realise but one that Fergusson makes clear.

Despite the picture painted of them in the West, the Taleban have demonstrated their malleability in matters of faith, morals and warfare. If al-Qaeda once trained its fighters in Afghanistan, they’re long gone, into Pakistan. And al-Qaeda trained its flyers on American soil, it must be remembered.

In the meantime, Fergusson seems to accept the prescription of many British officers: more boots, fewer battleships. Assuming the damage already done to relations isn’t irreversible, forget the poppy crops for now and get more men in there to fix the place up again.

Get back to the original hearts-and-minds ambition that was bled away when Afghans had a sudden, violent reaction to seeing the awesome machinery of war thunder across the sky once more. They went through this with the Russians: rocket-propelled grenades against heavy tank armour.

They went through this three times with the British: muskets against machine guns. What’s going on in southern Helmand province is, to many, history’s fourth Anglo-Afghan war. There’s more!

You can always count on Wall Street for wild and crazy fun, and in London, the City is just as madcap.

The Crunch: The Scandal of Northern Rock and the Escalating Credit Crisis
By Alex Brummer
Published by Random House Business Books, 2008

When the economic landslide began, British bank Northern Rock was among the biggest boulders, yet not a lesson was learned. My review for The Nation, published on March 8.

The economy’s broken back could easily make people forget about the comparative twisted ankle of 2007’s Northern Rock debacle in Britain. But less than a month ago the state-owned bank — stabbed multiple times for wrecking a century of solid business practice and left for dead in its own blazing mansion — stumbled out of the flames with a leering smile on its face.

With government approval and £14 billion it somehow found in its pocket, Northern Rock was back in the business of helping ordinary Brits buy their first house, the reaper’s grin on its face mocking Gordon Brown’s demands for a return to “prudent banking”.

Northern Rock had been among Europe’s biggest lenders, flogging mortgages of up to 125 per cent with the sucking-wound morality of a slave auctioneer. When flesh-eating disease inevitably set in, the government forced it to slow down, for God’s sake, and do something about its £27-billion debt to the taxpayer.

The prime minister also insisted that no banker associated with a loss would receive any salary bonuses. Northern Rock, having saddled honest working men with a £3.8-million-per-day debt, promptly promised 500 of its executives tens of millions of pounds in pay-offs deferred until next year.

And yet the horror show is allowed to continue, with loans on offer at 90 per cent, breathing fresh life into Alex Brummer’s “The Crunch” just when the book was being buried in a global avalanche of fiscal terrorism.

In this instructive guide to who killed the economy, Brummer paints a portrait of the finance industry in a blood-soaked butcher’s apron. No longer able to unload prime beef, it began grinding up yesterday’s maggoty SIV (structured investment vehicle) sub-prime cuts into sausages marbled with fatty debts.

It then swept up the bits that had fallen on the floor to make a bilious thin stew of CDOs — collateral debt obligations. All of these goodies were packaged out to scabrous street vendors and sold for a song that soon enough, sure enough, became a funeral dirge.

Where was the health inspector while all this was going on? Having given the butcher a licence to feed people this fiscal compost of toxins, he was dining elsewhere on filet mignon. Real filet mignon.

It’s no wonder the world is now retching. There’s more!

Is It Me or Is Everything Shit? Volumes 1 & 2
By Steve Lowe and Alan McArthur
Published by Sphere, 2008

From Britain, a list of all the crap in the world today — you can really only laugh, can’t you? My review for Daily Xpress.

Falling well short of hilarious but never tedious, “Is It Me or Is Everything Shit?” is a UK-derived encyclopaedia of the moronic products, people and politics that slow the strut of modern life to an idiot’s hapless meander. It runs from Ads for credit cards to Z-list celebrities saving the planet.

The unself-conscious “shit” in the title is a signal that the book is written in Ladspeak, the well-irrigated dialect of British pubs. Far more brazen words openly copulate between the covers, cheered on by cheeky yobs full of malt and mindless of manners.

There are 356 pages — no introductions, no index, no illustrations and certainly no apologies — and almost as many entries. By my count, there are about a dozen laugh-out-loud bits.

That’s not a particularly good return on your money, but this is, after all, toilet reading, so all that’s expected is mildly amusing distraction. It’s funny enough, at any rate, to get the book just under the authors’ own shit radar, though I doubt they’d be so kind if someone else had written it. Doubtless there would be an entry on knock-off humour books that aren’t all that humorous.

The biggest drawback is the generous references to British celebrities and television shows that we’ve never heard of in Thailand. These gags are lost in incomprehension, but they’re amply compensated for by the wealth of things we know all too well.

To name just a few: bottled water, romantic comedies starring Matthew McConaughey, the rich, the volume of TV ads, foot spas, food courts, insanely expensive T-shirts, private members’ clubs, “Change Yourself Today” promotions and, for all you Daily Xpress readers, “X, the letter at the start of a word where it isn’t”.

The authors have a go at foreign billionaires who own British football clubs too, but unfortunately focus on Abramovich, not Thaksin.

They suggest new retail items for Yoko “It’s What John Would Have Wanted” Ono Lennon, including “The Dream is Over” alarm clocks and greeting cards for Mother’s Day that say “MOTHA DON’T GOOOOOOOOO!!” and for fathers in hospital with the text “DADDY COME HOME!” There’s more!

Photos from Bangkok promoter Bec-Tero

I have now seen Rod Stewart live in concert twice. The first time was in Toronto with the Faces in October 1975. The second time was this week, in Bangkok, on March 4, 2009. Thirty-four years. We’re both still doing alright.

Here’s my review of the latest show, published in much-abbreviated form in the incredibly shrinking Daily Xpress.

Trailing history and superlatives behind him, Rock’n'Roll Hall-of-Famer Rod Stewart gave a sold-out Impact Arena a snoot-full of both Rockin’ Rod and Karaoke Rod on Wednesday night, and the crowd would have loved to hear a whole lot more.

A couple of months ago the man who’s sold a quarter of a billion records joined the “When I’m 64″ club, but he showed little sag as he piled on the hits and served up a few surprises for Bangkok, including yielding the stage to his 21-year-old daughter Ruby for a couple of numbers.

In the end, though, Stewart left without a final goodbye, leaving the audience and his band to finish off the last choruses of “Sailing”. It seemed an abrupt ending to a thoroughly enjoyable but oddly uneven show.

Things got off to a magnificent start with Rod at his charming best on “Some Guys Have All the Luck”, “It’s a Heartache” and “You Wear It Well”.

He turned up the heat with Sam Cooke’s “Having a Party” and then sang “Rhythm of My Heart”, which ended in a stunning set piece with his three back-up singers taking cues from him one by one to unleash some serious vocal stretches.

Julie Delgado, Natasha Pearce and Esterlee Nicholson are the ladies he’s kiddingly called “the Lap Tops”, a pun on lap dancers and the Four Tops, but musically they carried a heavy load, muscling through Tina Turner’s “Proud Mary” on their own later and, in this number, building expectations as high as they were going to get.

Then technology stepped in to wreck things. The giant central screen at the back of the stage, which had been adding much to the fun with a spoof Hollywood teaser and Motown video clips, went berserk. Half the imagery was obliterated in a pixel firestorm that ruined all of Stewart’s “Downtown Train” (with the help of an ill-advised double-drum solo).

The technicians struggled to douse the electronic fireworks as the band carried on with Cat Stevens’ “The First Cut is the Deepest” and a lacklustre “Reason to Believe”, but the screen continued to pulsate like an immense, menacing robot refusing to be ignored.

They finally just pulled the plug on it in time for Ruby Stewart, Rod’s daughter with former long-time girlfriend Kelly Emberg, to give the old man a rest and perform Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man” and “Rescue Me”, the soul hit by Fontella Bass.

Ruby’s a fine singer and drew cheers from the audience, but her participation only added to the concert’s gradual unhinging.

Interestingly, Ruby’s four-year-old step-brother Alastair wasn’t far away. Rod has brought along on this tour his wife Penny Lancaster-Stewart and their son, Rod’s seventh child.

Their dad came back onstage, gave his first of two assurances that the screen disaster wasn’t his fault, sang his stomping version of “Have You Ever Seen The Rain?”, a tune that was plaintive when John Fogerty wrote it, and then took a break.

He soon got things back on track, though, with “Forever Young”, “Twisting the Night Away” and especially a lovely rendition of “You’re in My Heart”. A massive crowd response greeted the Van Morrison classic “Have I Told You Lately”, and the evening headed deep into karaoke territory.

It was absolutely amazing how many people in the arena were ready and able to provide the vocals for “I Don’t Want to Talk About It”. Stewart twice silenced the band so the fans could pretend they were him. It was quite moving, and a lot of fun. There’s more!

Destination: Asia – Coming to Thailand & Asian Adventures
By Carleton Cole
Published by Bangkok Books, 2008

From frenetic preparation to enlightened observation, an American shares the story of how he turned Siamese. My review for The Nation, published on January 23.

The title of this debut book from former Nation subeditor Carleton Cole might lead shoppers to think it’s a travel guide, but despite its visits to many Eastern landmarks, this is very much one man’s memoir.

Why someone as young as Cole wants to write a memoir is a puzzle, even with as much to share as he has. Its real value as a “guide” will be in helping other young Westerners who are thinking about transplanting their roots in oriental soil.

The travel accounts are a bit madcap – impressionist glimpses of Brunei, Tibet, China, Laos, Cambodia and of course Thailand, plus a sprint through India and Japan’s most beckoning destinations.

The reports are all positive and the main focus on faith, with temple visits aplenty. Cole was raised a Christian Scientist, and its gentle tolerance is the bright light in his personal character as well as his writing. It certainly helps explain why he’s “an atypically quiet American“, as is noted on the book’s cover (a truthful blurb, this one, as his friends and colleagues can attest).

But the kid from Columbus, Maryland, was a Thai and a Buddhist waiting to be born. He saw a star in the East early on and, unable to dissolve into the great American melting pot, began stashing aside income for a planned year’s sojourn teaching in Thailand.

A puddle he was mopping up on the floor of a supermarket somewhere in the chilly US Midwest formed itself into Thailand’s outline. He became a Siam junkie, getting his fixes at museums and libraries and waiting tables at a Thai restaurant in St Louis called the King & I. His dad, wary of Bangkok’s fleshy reputation, recommended 50,000 condoms in a suitcase pocket, but his son wasn’t migrating for sex on the sly.

Cole came, saw, conquered and decided to stay forever. He jumped into journalism and only this past autumn left The Nation when the economy slashed the newspaper’s staff. Cut loose, he landed a sweet job on a travel website … and wrote this book. There’s more!