A few nights ago I finished the new best-seller Matterhorn, a gritty, wrenching novel about the life of American soldiers serving in Vietnam, written by a highly decorated soldier, Karl Marlantes, who took 30 years to complete it. Matterhorn was originally 1,600 pages, and his editors cut it down to a less terrifying 600 pages. I bought it after reading James Fallows’ recommendation.

Anyone who still believes it’s sweet and glorious to die for one’s country should read Matterhorn, but so should everyone else. There cannot be a more graphic and beautifully written novel about war, and I don’t think there’s any doubt that most of it is based on actual events.

With no preparation or warning, the reader is thrown right into the vile, putrid world of jungle warfare, defined by the pus-dripping sores of jungle rot and immersion foot, and the constant battle with leeches that drop from the trees and silently suck the soldiers’ blood. Marlantes wastes no time; by page eight we are hurled into one of those horrific scenarios that we know we will never forget as much as we may want to: a leech gets inside a soldier’s urethra, and if it’s not removed his bladder will burst, killing him. Low clouds and rain make it impossible to send a medevac. How the poor inexperienced medic ultimately deals with this makes for literally the most harrowing reading I’ve ever endured. You simply have to put the book down, and sometimes you want to hurl it away.

The brutality of hand-to-hand combat, the racial tension between the black and white soldiers (which results in murder), the incompetent officers who needlessly send boys without food to die fighting for nothing except “body count,” scenes of heroism and betrayal and sheer misery as soldiers literally rot in the rain forest – Matterhorn makes you feel it, and it makes you shake with rage. There is no mention of politics or objectives beyond the battle at hand. It is all about the mission, to secure the mountain they’ve named Matterhorn and clear out North Vietnamese soldiers from the surrounding jungle, a fruitless, meaningless effort with no real strategy behind it. The book’s most repellent figure, Major Blakely, sends men off to die without food and knowing he’s screwed up the layout of their machine guns. He can’t be bothered. “The marines under him would make up for mistakes like that.” He only cares about the reports he prepares. With the most restrained writing, Marlantes makes you hate this man so much you want to see him tortured and killed.

They’d fight well with the imperfect machine-gun layout. The casualties would be slightly higher, with fewer enemy dead, but the statistics of perfection never show up in any reporting system. A victory is reported with the casualties it takes to secure that victory, not the casualties it would have taken if the machine gun had been better placed. There was nothing sinister in this. Blakely himself would not be aware that he’d positioned the machine gun poorly. He’d feel bad about his casualties for a while. But reflecting on why or what wasn’t something Blakely did. Right now the problem before him was to engage the enemy and get the body count as high as possible. He wanted to do a good job as any decent person would, and now he’d finally figured out a way to to it. He might actually get to use the entire battalion at a time, an invaluable experience for a career officer.

Marlantes goes back and forth, juxtaposing the brute horrors of jungle warfare with monsters like Blakely sitting in their office and blithely sending men to their doom. And just when you’re thinking no human being could actually be this cruel, this venal, they go ahead and do even worse things. The soldiers become ghosts, living in a strange altered state of consciousness, knowing they are being sent out to die for literally nothing. Another officer, always drunk, sips Jack Daniels in comfort and orders the men to keep pushing, blissfully unaware that a tiger is biting one the boy’s heads off, while others are losing their legs from trip mines. To the officer, they are red pins on a map. They will die for the officers’ pride.

The kids filed quietly to the edge of the strip to wait for the helicopters. Other Marines stopped to watch them, wanting to say an encouraging word yet not daring to break into their private world — a world no longer shared with ordinary people. Some of them were experiencing the last hour of that brief mystery called life.

“Where’s the gold?” a young soldier plaintively asks the book’s hero, Lt. Mellas, in one of the book’s most poignant moments. What are we doing this for? Is there oil somewhere? A prize? There was no answer.

It’s heartbreaking to think a large number of people still believe the Rambo argument, that if we just had more guts and more commitment we could have “won” in Vietnam. Won what? The greatest exercise in futility the US ever embarked on, a bright shining lie and a total and unmitigated catastrophe. Matterhorn makes it raw, makes you understand the hubris and incompetency that made it all possible, and makes you want to scream, to cry, to throw the book down in hopeless frustration.

There’s a lot more to this book. It’s not light summer fare, and it’s not always easy. Marlantes introduces one character after another after another, and I had to keep flipping back to remember who was who. And he uses a lot of military jargon and alphabet soup (necessitating a glossary at the end). But you know within a few pages you’re about to embark on a terrible journey, bloody and disturbing and stomach-turning, but one you have to take if you want to truly know what our soldiers endured in Vietnam and why they came back the way they did.

Unforgettable is a cliche we throw around too much. Some things really are unforgettable, and Matterhorn is one of them. Please read it.

Gady Epstein on China’s decision yesterday to ban Foursquare nationwide after it was used to arrange gatherings at Tiananmen Square:

The blocking of Foursquare, while perhaps temporary, is yet another reminder that the Communist Party of China is serious about controlling history, as I wrote about last year at this time, and is just as serious about controlling the dangers of Web 2.0. Chinese social networking services are in self-censorship mode today — in the case of the portal Sina, even removing emoticons of candles and flowers from its microblog. To some extent the party’s strategy has been successful: Many in China, especially younger generations, have little clue what happened 21 years ago on June 4. Of those that do remember, some unknown percentage — perhaps a quite high percentage — have chosen not to care too deeply, a sort of willed forgetting in service of today’s prosperity that author Chan Koon Chung broaches in his Chinese novel “The Fat Years.”

….Those who choose to remember, meanwhile, continue to do so today — in various ways on the Chinese Internet, quite brazenly on Foursquare, Twitter and Facebook for those who use a VPN or proxy service to get around the Great Firewall, and many in their own quiet ways offline. Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou’s issued a statement today, translated here, asking that Beijing “sincerely confront the major human rights incident of June Fourth.” Hong Kong holds its annual march and candlelight vigil tonight. Up to 50,000 people there are expected to show that they choose not to forget.

All of those who insist the Chinese people don’t care about this anymore leave out this key point: today’s apathy and indifference toward the incident is government-induced. Epstein in the above article calls it “willed forgetting.” I left the following comment on this topic over at Elliott Ng’s excellent post today:

The only point I disagree with is that it’s been forgotten due to “the busyness of life.” In neighboring Hong Kong there are still sizable demonstrations, and the world still remembers the day vividly. Just look at twitter last night. It is only where the incident has been filtered out of the search engines and banned from any discussion in the media that it is forgotten. The Nanjing Massacre is not forgotten, and those remembering it are just as busy as those forgetting the TSM. Out of sight, out of mind. Gady is spot on – this is willed forgetfulness, and the one doing the willing is the government. That is the high price that comes with a one-party authoritarian state; Big Brother controls the brainwaves and can convince people that ignorance is strength and freedom is slavery.

[Also via Elliott, whose post offers an array of excellent links, I found these superb photos from 1989 over at Slate. Highly recommended.]

I got quite annoyed at myself several days ago when I put up a post on Tibet and gave a finger-wagging lecture about how whenever China censors and cracks down on basic liberties it tells the world it is still a weak country, insecure and in the grip of a seemingly unending inferiority complex. I got so annoyed at my own self-righteousness I deleted it. But I look at this story and I think, maybe it’s not too harsh or self-righteous. It may come across that way, especially when Westerners say it, but it still needs to be said.

As China embarks on an expensive and ambitious campaign to build up its soft power, it should look right here, at this sort of behavior. Soft power is all about hearts and minds. The US sacrificed much of its own soft power under Bush, and you’d think China would learn from that. Bullying and suppressing aren’t good strategies for winning global admiration.

Update: CDT has some great articles, videos and photos on its site, which today is bathed in black. You must go see those videos (like this one). No wonder the whole incident has been hermetically sealed and locked away.

Go to this page and check out the PDF file. This is not a summary of all those who were killed and wounded, just a sliver. The report was released in Chinese last year and the English translation was made available today. From the summary:

Compiled from available information, including the Tiananmen Mothers’ database, as well as in-person interviews, the report tells the stories of 195 people who were killed in the June Fourth crackdown, and provides information on 57 people who were wounded or disabled, and more than 800 individuals who have been imprisoned or detained in Reeducation-Through-Labor institutions for offenses related to the crackdown in more than a dozen provinces, including the seven people still in prison today….

“This report is an invaluable resource for those who want to understand the on-going human costs of the June Fourth crackdown, and an important tool for promoting official accountability,” said Sharon Hom, Executive Director of HRIC.

Those killed were men, women and children from all walks of life, including students, peasants, truck drivers, performers, engineers, peddlers and even a party secretary and deputy to the Beijing People’s Congress. They were from major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, and as far away as Liaoning Province. The report provides their personal details: names, ages, home locations, occupations, circumstances surrounding their deaths, family backgrounds, and information on surviving family members.

The youngest victim was Lu Peng, a 9-year-old third grade student (#34) who was shot in the chest by martial law troops around midnight, June 3-4, and died immediately. The oldest was Zhang Fuyuan, a 66-year-old retired hospital worker and Communist Party member (#166) who was working as a guard in a construction site of the Design Institute of the Ministry of Metallurgical Industry. On the evening of June 3, Zhang was among a group of residents near Changanjie who were chased and fired upon by martial law troops as they ran into a hutong.

Other victims include Zhang Jian, 17-year-old high school student (#181) who was shot in the heart by soldiers on his way to see his uncle and aunt on June 4 and was dead on arrival at the Peking Union Medical college Hospital; and Dai Wei, a 20-year-old cook in the Beijing Roast Duck Restaurant (#42) who was shot in the back on his way to work on the evening of June 3 and died in the early morning of June 4 in the Post and Communications Hospital.

In the report, Jiang tells of families of the dead who never received any compensation or even official accounts of how their loved ones died. These families have never even been allowed to openly mourn their deaths.

As for the living, the report provides the names of the more than 800 prisoners identified, and more detailed information on many of them, such as lengths and types of sentences and locations of imprisonment, offenses of which they were convicted, and age, occupation, home location and other personal details. The report also tells the story of many who have been released from prison but have not been able to find work, and continue to suffer economically, politically and psychologically.

Human Rights in China urges the Chinese authorities to respond to the appeal in this report for an official re-examination of the events and to the Tiananmen Mothers’ call for investigation, compensation, accountability, and dialogue.

To my friends who find this dull, repetitious and water under the bridge, please move on. For me, this remains an open wound, and as long as the CCP keeps stonewalling, the much beloved phrase “Reform and Opening Up” will ring at least partially hollow. Those who keep demanding more contrition from the Japanese for their crimes against humanity should demand the same from their own rulers. I’m not saying the TSM was anywhere near the scale of the Nanjing Massacre, but murder is murder.

Update: Amnesty International’s blog tells us what’s going on in Hong Kong today:

Commemorative activities organized by the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China (The Alliance) were brought to an abrupt halt by police on May 29th and 30th.

The organizers had followed procedures for regulating public assemblies, but the police claimed additional ‘entertainment’ licenses were required, confiscated exhibits including two statues of the Goddess of Democracy and arrested 15 people.

Amnesty released a public statement commemorating today’s anniversary, in which we condemned the Chinese authorities’ efforts to cover up the massacre and bring those responsible into investigation. Furthermore, we continue to urge the Chinese government to stop suppressing citizens who exercise their fundamental rights to freedom of expression.

Three cheers for One Country, Two Systems.

Via CDT, AP photographer Jeff Widener’s photo of two amateur photographers taking shots of the “goddess of democracy.”

Later in the week Widner would take the most famous photo to ever come out of China.

I have to admit, I want to move back to China. It’s always in my heart, and sometimes I feel like dropping everything and heading back. But no matter how much I love China, I will never forget what the government there is capable of, the good and the bad. The government can bulldoze over the old Gulou hutong (and do check that link), they can scrub uncomfortable references from the Internet, but they cannot delete what happened that day, and no story of modern China is complete without including it. Never forget.

I do hope everyone who points approvingly to Anticnn and insists the US media are hopelessly biased against China gets to listen to this superb podcast over at Popup Chinese. It touches on many media-related issues, but the first few minutes are devoted to the bias issue.

These are really smart China hands talking, and they all agree that the notion among many Chinese (especially the fenqing) of purposeful media bias against China is seriously inflated.They generally agree there is some bias against China, but it occurs mainly over in the US editorial offices where the headlines and photo captions are written, and is not symptomatic of the foreign correspondents living in China.

They also acknowledge there is bias for the Dalai Lama, but not because the editors are anti-China, It’s because there is a strong, irrational bias in America towards Buddhists, just as there is often a strong media bias in favor of Israel, and an even stronger media bias against Arabs and Muslims. Thus, as they say in the podcast, the Tibetan monks get far more sympathy and attention than the Uighurs. But what the fenqing need to get is that this is generally not anti-China bias, but a bias in which Buddhists are gentle, devout souls who are all about peace and love. Editors in the US may also view China as the oppressors and the Tibetans as the oppressed. But this doesn’t mean they are anti-China.

What those pressing this issue furthermore need to get is that everyone feels they are a victim of media bias. The Republicans, the Dems, the left and the right – we all have complaints with media bias. We all feel we are misrepresented. Every company feels that way, too. China just needs to join the club; everyone perceives bias against them. The difference is that most don’t allow themselves to get so manipulated and worked up about it so they think they’re the only ones. Inaccuracy in media is simply a fact of life.

The podcast goes on to explain why this is especially so today, with US newsrooms being drastically shrunk in size and fewer editors doing much more work. Everyone suffers, not just China. And I know (I really do) that you can find this or that example of media bias against China. Yes, it does happen. But usually it happens in the copy room, and often it’s simply a mistake. There may be bias behind these mistakes; that’s probably what led to some Western media falsely describing weapons used in the Tibet protests of 2008 as belonging to the Chinese, when in fact they were being used by the Tibetan demonstrators. This wasn’t an act of intentional bias against China, though. It was a matter of jumping to conclusions based upon a bias that sees the Tibetans as gentle and sweet.

Much of the current media coverage, as discussed in the podcast, is surprisingly pro-China. There is a powerful new meme going through the media, particularly the financial press, about how China proves how effective an authoritarian government can be, and pointing to it as a possible model for the future. (As part of this argument the pundits point to the hopeless political mess in the US; does that make them “anti-US”?) Most economic stories on China are positive, although a lot of critics jumped on the property bubble band wagon, as well as Jim Chano’s predictions of a China collapse. But they also jump on similar stories in regard to Europe, and the US.

This is pack journalism, a bad thing, but certainly something that is in no way exclusive to coverage of China. The media, in a huge pack, went after Obama last week for not getting emotional enough over the Louisiana offshore oil rig catastrophe. Does this mean the media is biased against Obama? Say that to any wingnut and they’ll laugh in your face; in their eyes the media are hopelessly in love with Obama. The truth is they are just being the media – short-sighted, rushed, fact-starved, on impossible deadlines and fighting to get the best headline in the face of shrinking readership. They do it to Obama, they did it to Bush, they do it to Europe and they do it to China.

The notion that there is a monolithic prejudice among the US media against China is a falsehood and a fabrication. What you’re seeing is the standard prejudice and screw-ups that pervade all journalism, unfortunately. Many see the media fawning over China, others see it as needlessly and unfairly critical. Both are right. Because it is not monolithic, and the distribution of prejudice and poor reporting is spread out evenly to everyone and every nation.

This post comparing the daily lives of Chinese and American teens caught my eye and brought back a lot of memories. (It’s already a couple of weeks old; I just saw the link via Danwei.) American teens dream of “writing their own Aeneid,” and their teen years “are an endless drama: fights with parents over curfew, acne, not making the football team or cheerleading squad, break-ups, depression, anorexia, Waiting for Godot, anxiety, the prom.” Very different from their Chinese counterparts:

Boys and girls are not permitted to be near one meter of each other on school grounds, there’s a regulation haircut and school uniform, and there’s no mobile phone service and Internet access. All the students dress, look, act and think the same, and an administrator’s greatest pride is to see his 1000 students do calisthenics in synch on the soccer field. Walls and gates limit the movement of students, security cameras and the eyes of teachers track students, and if it were possible administrators would implant a signalling device on each student. If all this is still not enough to depress and stress out the Chinese teenager, then the head teacher and/or parent will now and then remind him that he’s worthless and useless.

The result of all this unreasonable and unnecessary repression is that Chinese students are remarkably polite and well-behaved. But at the end of their schooling they won’t be able to write their own Aeneid, (though maybe the more literary among them can write The Tale of Peter Rabbit). They will matriculate at a top university, but they will lack sympathy and empathy, which will hinder them from developing and managing personal and professional relationships; they won’t understand trust and tolerance, only power and fear. They may rise to a top management position, but lacking in self-understanding and self-reflection they’ll curse and criticize their subordinates, making the workplace a cold stagnant repressive regime.

Having skipped the tumultuous teenage years, Chinese are forever doomed to live as teenagers all their lives. Whereas Americans may be stubborn, moody, quick to anger, insecure, impetuous, condescending, extreme, and paranoid in their teenage years, Chinese may suffer from these psychological issues all their lives. The psychologists who wrote Reviving Ophelia, Raising Cain, and Real Boys may not be happy with how American families and schools are distorting the emotional development of children, but if they came to China they’d faint in horror and despair.

Based on my own experience, I’d have to say the writer is onto something. I worked with so many Chinese colleagues in China, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taibei, and it was interesting to see the differences and similarities in terms of maturity and ability to deal with issues and decision making. Not surprisingly, the Hong Kong and Taiwanese workers were generally better at problem solving and controlling their emotions, having grown up in a more developed, relatively free-thinking environment. They still had “face” issues, and sometimes things that I saw as trivial could set off tears, which I also saw frequently in Beijing. The Singaporean workers, at least in my office, could have been from New York or Paris. Especially stark was the difference between the average mainland Chinese worker and their colleagues who grew up in Vancouver or spent years studying abroad. It was as if they came from different planets. What a difference in personality and temperament, when the teen years are spent doing more than memorization.

Obviously, with so many students and so much poverty and such a deeply entrenched system this isn’t changing anytime soon. Like most other issues in China, it seems to be getting better, but very, very slowly. And just to make sure I’m clear (for the trolls): I have many friends who went through the Chinese educational system and never left the mainland. And they are the salt of the earth. Critical thinking, however, can be an issue for some of them. Some of them completely overcame these issues, and exposure to other cultures seemed to have been a big help.

These photos cracked me up and brought back a stream of anecdotes from Peter Hessler’s new book re. the oddities of driving in China.

China has some of the world’s most gracious people, some of the most sublime scenery, much of the world’s greatest art, etc. It also seems to have some of the worst drivers, for whatever reasons. Maybe it’s just a matter of giving too many cars to too many people who aren’t quite ready to be put behind the wheel.

And if it’s any consolation, friends of mine who have lived in India tell me it’s even worse over there.

First of all, if you aren’t following the Sinica podcasts on Popup Chinese, you are missing some excellent commentary on current issues in China. This one is from two days ago, and it complements this post. It is 100 percent must-hear.

A key contributor to the podcast, Gady Epstein of Forbes, now has an article on a topic that comes up a lot in that podcast, namely the staying power of the CCP and how it has maintained an iron grip on all aspects of life in China that it deems necessary to maintain control. Like the podcast, you simply have to read it.

The piece is based on the soon-to-be-released book The Party by Richard McGregor, which I’ve already pre-ordered. Judging from what Epstein writes, this is one scary book.

“The Party is like God,” a professor from People’s University in Beijing tells McGregor. “He is everywhere. You just can’t see him.”

The Party is not simply an account of how the party succeeds in ruling through its mechanisms of autocracy. The party’s Achilles’ heel–its lack of any independent check on its power–undermines at every turn its efforts to police corruption, vet its members, reform its bureaucracy and respond to crises.

The maneuvering required to conduct a high-level corruption investigation sounds like it is out of a mafia movie. Taking down a Politburo member, former Shanghai Party Secretary Chen Liangyu, required a side deal to keep hands off of the family of former General Secretary Jiang Zemin, whose consent for the takedown was required because he was the reigning kingpin of the Shanghai faction, despite the fact that he no longer held any official leadership posts.

The party’s apparatus of control dominated every stage of decision-making in the disastrous Sanlu milk powder scandal, from covering up melamine contamination that poisoned thousands of babies to censoring media coverage that could have saved lives to blocking legal action that could have given families some measure of justice and deterred future corporate misbehavior. At every stage where some check or balance might exist in a democratic system, the one-party system failed its people.

Well, I suppose it’s not like we didn’t know the party controls the media and everything else it wants to control, and that the big SOEs are simply part of the state apparatus. But reading this, you really have to wonder how real those signs of hope we all like to point to – the increased freedom to criticize the Party, the Glasnost approach we sometimes see in the Global Times and other media, the ability of public opinion to shake the party into action as it did after Sun Zhigang’s murder or in the case of the waitress who stabbed a menacing official – you have to wonder if these aren’t just escape valves that the party cynically uses to create a sense of democracy, a sham. Because no matter how touchy-feely China seems at times, if you really get in the way of the party in a manner it feels could undermine it, you will be crushed like a gnat.

It’s easy to forget that when we see the stories about Han Han standing up to the CCP (this was an especially delightful example and I urge you to check it out, I was laughing out loud). And it’s easy to forget that no matter how earnest those wonderful cadres we know are (and so many of them really are wonderful), their earnest attempts to bring about change can only go so far. As we all know, there are limits. For all the new freedoms and rising GDP, China remains a quasi-police state. Not a Nazi Germany or North Korea-style police state, which rule by sheer terror and fear, but a less visible system of control that’s no less insidious, should you end up in its bad graces. Like the children who drank the San Lu milk, who could easily have been saved if squelching the news hadn’t been in the party’s interest.

I’m ready for the usual comments, “Yes, but it’s just as bad or worse in the US.” And although some comparisons can be drawn between the party in China and the power brokers who rule in the US, the comparison doesn’t work; ours can be brought to heel, they can go to jail, they can be dragged in front of congressional committees. They can’t be party to the poisoning of babies and then block media coverage, ensuring that yet more babies die. They can try, as some drug companies have tried to keep secret their research showing their drugs had lethal side effects. But they’ll usually be exposed and punished, if not as severely as deserved.

As Epstein says at the close of his article, most Chinese are content not to look behind the curtain and ask questions – “times are too good.” But no good times last forever, and after the ball it will be fascinating to see how the party maintains the harmony and relative stability it so cherishes today. Will it work when springtime becomes the winter of discontent?

Rock Paper Tiger, an up-to-the-minute, kaleidoscopic romp through contemporary China with some side-stops in US-occupied Iraq, is the first novel of Lisa Brackman, better known here as the commenter “Other Lisa.” She’s also one of my best friends, and I’d been waiting to get my hands on this book for at least half a year. It will officially launch next week, but it’s already for sale here, and you should go right now and order your copy. No matter how good a friend Lisa is, I wouldn’t tell you to do that unless I loved the book. (Loved is an understatement.)

Lisa has done the impossible: created a taut, breathless thriller that along the way takes the reader on a whirlwind tour through China, the big cities, the smaller cities, the places tourists go and the country’s underbelly. She manages to weave into the narrative an endless stream of details about life in China, what living there actually feels like, such vibrant images you can touch and taste them. In effect, it’s a kind of primer on life in modern-day China, yet it never feels like we’re being lectured or taught. Each image and each description is tightly connected to the story.

Rock Paper Tiger’s plot is complex, with as many twists and turns and borderline cliff-hanger chapter endings as a Dan Brown mystery – only Lisa, unlike Brown, is a great writer.

The hero Ellie Cooper, an Iraq war veteran now living in Beijing, doesn’t know what she’s getting into when she says “Nice to meet you” to a guest at her artist friend’s apartment, Hashim, a Uighur. Hashim is in the book for all of 15 seconds, but it’s this chance and rather meaningless encounter that soon has Ellie running as fast as she can, despite a leg wound she suffered in Iraq, as she’s pursued by American mercenaries and Chinese PSB agents. And others. We never know who to trust or what’s motivating them, and we never know where Ellie’s roller-coaster chase will take us next.

Interspersed with (and related to) the chase are Ellie’s flashbacks to several years back when she served in Iraq. One fateful day she stumbled into a secret prison that bears an uncanny resemblance to Abu Ghraib, but due to a mega-dose of fear and confusion she says nothing, despite her horror and her knowledge something really bad is going on. Does this make her a party to the crime? That’s a question Ellie has to live with.

Another twist: a good portion of the story takes place online, within a video game Ellie must play in order to communicate with friends who – she hopes – can help her figure out what’s going on. The descriptions of this virtual world and the challenges she meets there, like being attacked by a nine-headed bird are among the most imaginative in the book.

Every scene is jammed with imagery, but never to the point of being cluttered. If you’ve never been to China you may think Lisa is exaggerating. If anything, her descriptions are often understated, and hilarious. Here’s Ellie, trying to hide from her pursuers after she arrives in Chengdu:

I catch a cab outside the train station, take note of the giant statue of Mao with his arm outstretched like he’s directing traffic – or maybe he’s just trying to greet the patrons of the shopping malls and the Starbucks down the street.

I get to the backpackers’ joint, wedged between a hotpot restaurant and a camping-supply store on a narrow lane.

“No baggage?” asks the…clerk? Manager? You can’t call somebody a “concierge” when he’s sitting behind a scarred desk in a beige room containing a bulletin board leprous with notices about treks to Tibet and Jiuzhaigou and dubious job offers to teach English, a pressboard bookcase overflowing with paperbacks, and a pile of backpacks heaped in one corner.

Lisa similarly brings to life aspects of China that many of us take for granted: train travel (hard seats, soft sleepers and hard sleepers), Internet bars, dumpling houses, VPNs, Beijing art colonies, the lifestyle of the nouveau riche, the seedy karaoke bar of a backwater village, the sulfurous air of a coal mining city, the pollution (just about everywhere), the way Chinese people always ask your age and whether you’re married…. For everything she observes (and that’s a lot of things) she comes up with an image, often startling. How can she come up with so many images, and how can they all be this satisfying? Some new buildings in Beijing, for example, are “glassy high-rises with green Chinese-style roofs perched on top, like somebody put party hats on the heads of awkward giants.”

What impressed me the most is that Lisa does the same with the flashbacks to Iraq – the imagery is just as detailed and precise. She’s been to China many times, but never to Iraq. People who served in Iraq will have a hard time believing Lisa didn’t.

Imagery and style and the thrill are one thing. But those are practically ancillary to what’s at the heart of the story and that is Ellie Cooper’s humanity and essential goodness. She’s been to hell and back (in Iraq), only to be betrayed by her husband in China, and she’s in constant pain – her popping percocets becomes a kind of punctuation of her various circumstances. You have no choice but to admire her.

The book leaves several loose ends loose. The fate of some key characters remains unresolved, and we’re also left wondering whether certain characters are heroes or villains. But that’s okay; the ambiguousness keeps you wondering when the book is over, and maybe that’s partly why you can’t get these people out of your head.

I admit, I had trouble reading the first few chapters of Rock Paper Tiger. The main issue was that I know Lisa, and since the book is written in the first person I kept hearing Lisa’s actual voice doing the narration. Ellie Cooper often speaks in sentence fragments, and she constantly appends the phrase, “I guess” to just about any thought she has. That little voice in my head kept saying, “But Lisa doesn’t talk like this!” Then, after about four chapters Lisa disappeared, Ellie took over, and I succumbed.

I always try to find something to criticize in a book I rave about in order to show “balance.” But I can’t criticize much here. Sometimes I wondered whether readers who know nothing about China might not find some of the images confusing, like a reference to someone wearing a “Cui Jian t-shirt,” and they might get thrown when they see the word “fuwuyuan” (which soon gets defined by context). And maybe a part of me wanted all of the mysteries explained. Maybe, but not much. (The final episode of Lost last night was far more frustrating in this regard.)

But those aren’t even criticisms. Rock Paper Tiger totally rocks in every way. It is so intense and trippy, so full of exotic images and astonishing characters who aren’t what you first believe, I kept thinking, “This is perfect material for a movie.” I hope all of you get to read it, but I hope more than anything that some producer somewhere hears about this thriller on steroids and puts it on the screen where it ultimately belongs.

And this is her first novel. I can’t imagine anyone reading it and not thirsting for the next one.

Every Man Dies Alone is a rare book, one that to my knowledge has no precedent. It is a novel, based on an actual Gestapo file, that takes the reader into the daily life of everyday people living in Hitler’s Germany. What is unprecedented is that it was written by someone who lived through the nightmare and wrote his book almost immediately afterward, soon after which he died of a morphine overdose.

The book is also rare because it has languished, virtually unknown outside of Germany for more than half a century, which is completely inexplicable. This is a great and powerful book and one of the most penetrating and disturbing examinations of life in a totalitarian society, written before the historians and anthropologists wrote the books that have shaped so many of our impressions of the Third Reich.

Not that those impressions we have are inaccurate. But many of the histories were written years, even generations after the fact. This book was obviously incubating as the horror was living itself out, and emerged, more than 500 pages, only months after the last shots were fired in May 1945. Most of the first-hand accounts we’re familiar with came from the victims of Nazism, like the Diary of Ann Frank or the many Shoah stories. This book comes from a much different perspective, from the eyes of German citizens. (And I know, the Germans were victims of Nazism also, but they were also its enabler, whether they meant to be or not.)

There are probably too many fictional embellishments to the plot to categorize this as historical fiction, but it does what good historical fiction is supposed to: it takes you right there, so you feel the terror of the housewife being interrogated by an odious Gestapo official, you hear her prison door clank shut, leaving her in darkness, and you experience for yourself the confusion, rage and frustration of parents who are told their son has been killed in a war they don’t understand.

For more than two years, starting in 1941, a working-class husband and wife in Berlin actually decided to defy Hitler and do what they could to raise the consciousness of their countrymen, to tell them Hitler was a monster who invaded Russia with no provocation and was killing wholesale the flower of Germany’s youth. Their effort seems ridiculous: they would hand-write postcards with anti-Hitler messages and calls for worker sabotage, and drop them on the windowsills and in the stairwells of hundreds of buildings, hoping they would be read, passed around, and hopefully help turn people against Nazism. And that was all. But they had to do something, and by doing this small thing they placed themselves on a moral plane above the perpetrators and collaborators. They were heroes, fully aware they would eventually die for their crime.

Their effort was a total failure. Of the hundreds of postcards they dropped off, all but a tiny fraction were immediately handed over to the Gestapo. People wanted no part of the hopeless campaign. One day the couple slipped up and were caught by the Gestapo, tried and beheaded.

Fallada’s book offers a fictionalized account of this couple that includes a wide cast of unforgettable characters, nearly all of them repulsive. Take whatever your impression is of life under the Nazis, make it a hundred times worse, and you have Fallada’s world. And the book begins in 1940, when the Nazis were at their peak of power, having just swallowed continental Europe whole and appearing invincible. But even then, the German people were living in a stage of constant fear, and fear is what permeates every page of the book. A world of informers, extortionists, corrupt officials, a browbeaten population terrified into believing it must report everything to the Gestapo, lest they come under suspicion as an accomplice.

Nearly every scene is drowned in treachery, and often in blood. Totally innocent people are swept up, tortured and put to death over the most casual passing reference by the postcard-writing wife. And the Gestapo always wins. Torture, extortion and the threat of the concentration camps always get people to talk.

Every Man Dies Alone is a mystery novel, a breathless thriller about a two-year chase. It follows the Gestapo step by step as they pursue their prey, recording in painstaking detail the destruction and fear they leave in their wake. But I saw it most of all as a window into the lives of the “ordinary people” of Germany. Many of them hated Hitler and hated the atmosphere of terror. And yet they played along, and even gave the cards to the Gestapo. We are reminded that many Germans despised Hitler, especially after Stalingrad, but by the time war was declared in 1939 it was too late, they had handed Hitler total power, and now all they could do was survive as best they could. And yes, many, many others followed him blindly, believing in him until the very end.

The postcard couple are at the core of the book, but surrounding them is a constellation of supporting characters – low lives, Hitler Youth, a Jew in hiding, a compassionate judge who sees exactly what’s happening to Germany, a postal worker who learns her beloved son is smashing the skulls of Jewish babies in Russia, die-hard radicalized Nazis, and others who begin to have their doubts….

Each of these characters is interesting, each leaves a strong impression. But I have to say, several are one-dimensional, and Fallada spends way too much time going into their individual stories. (This is particularly true in the case of Enno Kluge, a compulsive gambler and con man who somehow gets involved, mistakenly, in the investigation; he ends up shot in the head and thrown in a river. Intriguing, but Fallada definitely gives us too much information.)

Also, the book is a little too long. It dragged for about 100 pages in the middle, but then took on ferocious speed as the Gestapo zeros in. The style isn’t rich or florid; it is simple and straightforward. But I hung on every word, and found myself reading late into the night.

Primo Levi called this, “The greatest book ever written about the German resistance to the Nazis.” I won’t disagree, though there’s so little to compare it to – there was hardly any organized German resistance to speak of until Stauffenberg’s ill-fated plot in 1944. It especially makes you wonder, to what extent were the ordinary German people responsible for the blight of Hitler, a question that has mystified me since I can first remember learning who Hitler was.

I lived in Germany as a college student, my former history professor served in the Waffen SS, I’ve spoken with countless students whose parents participated in Hitler rallies and I’ve read a fearful number of books about German history. I always am left with the same question, how much did the “ordinary Germans” know and to what extent can they be held accountable? Fallada helped me better understand all the forces pressing against the ordinary German seeking to survive in a time when death and betrayal were a possibility with each knock on the door. I will never know the actual answer, will never have a perfect understanding of this impossible question. But Every Man Dies Alone gave me a new perspective, and showed me what the Nazi terror meant for the simple factory worker, the mail deliverer, the lowlife pimp and gambler, the retired judge who knew what justice meant. I don’t think you can fully understand life in Nazi Germany if you don’t read this book.

As a quick note: I discovered this book quite fortuitously, when I was led to this article. This was the description that moved me to order it:

What was it like? I would ask myself, the years I lived in Berlin. What was it like in the leafy Grunewald neighborhood to watch your Jewish neighbors — lawyers, businessmen, dentists — trooping head bowed to the nearby train station for transport eastward to extinction?

With what measure of fear, denial, calculation, conscience and contempt did neighbors who had proved their Aryan stock to Hitler’s butchers make their accommodations with this Jewish exodus? How good did the schnapps taste and how effectively did it wash down the shame?

Now I know. Thanks to Hans Fallada’s extraordinary “Every Man Dies Alone,” just published in the United States more than 60 years after it first appeared in Germany, I know. What Irène Némirovsky’s “Suite Française” did for wartime France after six decades in obscurity, Fallada does for wartime Berlin. Like all great art, it transports, in this instance to a world where, “The Third Reich kept springing surprises on its antagonists: It was vile beyond all vileness.”

Fallada, born Rudolf Ditzen, wrote his novel in less than a month right after the war and just before his death in 1947 at the age of 53. The Nazi hell he evokes is not so much recalled as rendered, whole and alive. The prose is sinuous and gritty, like the city he describes. Dialogue often veers toward sadistic folly with a barbaric logic that takes the breath away.

Yes, it definitely takes the breath away. I’m grateful to the writer for steering me to this book I’d never heard of. Few novels can hold you and move you like this one.