Book reviews: Nothing But A Circus and First With The News

3 / 5 stars
Nothing But A Circus

THIS autobiographical account of a globetrotting American consultant’s sometimes hair-raising efforts to drum up business in a range of the world’s troublespots makes you fear for his bottom line.

Book jacketsPH

Nothing But A Circus: Misadventures Among The Powerful by Daniel Levin Allen Lane, £20 

Two weeks after Daniel Levin flew to Moscow for preliminary negotiations over a “financial development project” with the number two at Russia’s central bank, the unfortunate bureaucrat is shot dead by two gunmen in what appears to be a contract killing.

En route to Gambia for an ultimately futile visit to the country’s then head of state, Levin is arrested in Senegal on trumped-up charges and forced to pay a $400 bribe to secure his onward passage in a single-engined propeller plane with netting instead of doors. Lured to Sheikh Mohammed Al Maktoum’s Dubai by an oily Mr Fixit, who promises a meeting with his old friend “Mo”, he spends days in pointless meetings before concluding his contact is a confidence trickster with opaque motives. But Levin clearly did make money.

How do we know this? Because at one point he describes how his long-serving office manager defrauded him of hundreds of thousands of dollars, a loss that he appears to take in his stride. Levin trained as a lawyer before reinventing himself as an expert on economic development and political reform and it is in this role that he met all these colourful characters. The denizens of national and international organisations prove to be no more impressive.

After a meeting with time-served dullards at the United Nations he is sent an email with 38 people copied in and hears no more. At USAID, the American equivalent of our Department for International Development (DfId), he is told that corporations will be helped with door-opening abroad in return for contributions to its aid initiatives and, controversially, political donations. For all its revelations and anecdotal entertainment, however, Levin’s book has two fundamental issues. Almost all names appear to have been changed to protect the guilty. While this is understandable given Britain’s draconian libel laws it does mean that there is an element of so-whattery about the events described.

Who is the member of the Russian Duma who very publicly took on Putin before performing a spectacular ideological U-turn and who had clearly been working with the Kremlin the whole time to create the illusion that opposition was tolerated? Who is the Washington insider described as “one of the most senior people on the vicepresident’s staff” who mixes up the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation) with the PLA (China’s People’s Liberation Army) during a meeting in DC?

And who is the power-crazed chairman of a Chinese state enterprise who failed to spot that a bottle of Château Pétrus 1982 was very obviously corked? Levin’s refusal to reveal the true identities of his rogues’ gallery of mountebanks, narcissists and creeps means his war stories do not have the impact they otherwise would.

The other problem is that the work contains vast tracts of direct speech that are presented as verbatim transcripts of the conversations that took place between Levin and his associates when clearly they are mere approximations.

Levin would not be human if he did not make sure he came off pretty well in these exchanges and I’m sure he is an extremely well educated and erudite man. But his surefootedness on everything from the internal workings of myriad regimes to the terms of Pascal’s Wager does make you wonder. That said, his book is a fascinating insight into a world that most of us are not privileged enough to penetrate.

DOMINIC MIDGLEY

Books [PH]

Headlines from scary front lines

First With The News by Michael Evans (Rowanvale Books, £16.99)

Michael Evans’ career as a journalist has spanned more than 40 years and taken him all over the world. That includes plenty of places that most people in their right minds would never go near.

During the 1990s he hardly seemed to leave Bosnia, reporting on the brutal civil war. He has spent plenty of time in Iraq and Afghanistan. His memoir contains plenty of talk of dangerous missions and derring-do, whether his own or that of his colleagues out in the field. War reporting is after all a close-knit vocation. Throughout the book, Evans focuses on the stories he was sent to cover rather than indulging in self-aggrandising anecdotes about his own fearlessness.

The range of characters featured in Evans’ book help to make it such an enjoyable read. As a correspondent based at the Pentagon he attended the Guantanamo Bay trial of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Evans describes the strange feeling of seeing a man responsible for the murder of 2,976 people sauntering into a courtroom and demanding to wear a camouflage jacket throughout proceedings. The ability to make and nurture contacts is often the difference between a decent journalist and a great one.

He is a man who would happily hobnob with generals at gala dinners, split open a ration pack while bedding down with British troops out in the field and help locals under threat of sniper fire to transport bags of flour on a rickety wheelbarrow.

He also has perspective which means this isn’t just an entertaining book but a worthwhile one containing the context, statistics and insight needed to understand his role as a reporter and the larger story of the various conflicts. Evans’ career in covering wars and defence matters lasted from the Falklands War – he was the Daily Express man on Whitehall at the time – through to covering the US-led war on terror as a correspondent based at the Pentagon.

He has observed the various conflicts at differing levels of intimacy and, although one must always be wary of drawing grand conclusions from one person’s experience, his memoir charts a time of rapid change in the way wars are conducted as conflicts between governments have given way to Western military powers’ attempts to subdue terror groups. He provides a picture of the modern battlefield by observing peacekeeping missions, the guerilla tactics of the Taliban and the effects of improvised explosive devices on injured soldiers.

It is often the fault of journalists’ memoirs that they appeal to fellow scribes but leave readers outside the media bubble feeling cold. While Evans recalls plenty of newsroom dramas, provides an insider’s account of meeting top officials and spent his fair share of time reporting from inside offices rather than war zones, he manages to avoid this common trap.

The result is a book that is informative, entertaining and a fine record of what it was like to have a front row seat during the transformative conflicts of the last half-century.

HARRY HODGES

VERDICT: 4/5

Books [PH]

Each year The Reading Agency charity launches Quick Reads books. These quality adult books by high-profile authors are short, easy to read and are available at the bargain price of £1.

They are also more accessible to people who don’t have much time to read or who have lost confidence in their reading skills. This year’s six Quick Reads books are... Looking For Captain Poldark by Rowan Coleman (Ebury) A road trip novel about four people united by their shared love of Poldark.

A Very Distant Shore by Jenny Colgan (Little Brown) This romantic novel is set on a remote Scottish island where a Syrian refugee goes to work as a doctor. The Other Side Of You by Amanda Craig (Little Brown) A London-set reimagining of the Beauty And The Beast fairy tale. 

Feel the Fear And Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers (Ebury) An adaptation of the late Susan Jeffers’ landmark self-help title and its bestselling follow-up.

One False Move by Dreda Say Mitchell (Hodder) A gritty novel set on the Devil’s Estate in London. Dead Simple Edited by Harry Bingham (Orion) A collection of original short stories from some of the UK’s best crime writers including Mark Billingham, Clare Mackintosh, Jane Casey, Angela Marsons, Antonia Hodgson, CL Taylor and James Oswald.

“Quick Reads are a fantastic way to get people reading who have never found, or who have lost, their confidence as readers,” says author Amanda Craig. 

“A lot of people never find the key that gives you this confidence but it is there for every single person and once you find it you are never bored or lonely again. “When you can really read it’s like developing a superpower. Your imagination takes you anywhere. This is why I was so delighted to contribute to the Quick Reads programme.”

We have 15 sets of this year’s Quick Reads to give away to our readers. To be in with a chance of winning please call 0905 789 3497(80ppm)* or text DXQREADS followed by your email address, name and address to 83310 (£2)**.

Or to enter via post send your name, address, phone number, email address, age and gender in a sealed envelope to Quick Reads Competition, PO BOX 12581, Sutton Coldfield B73 9BX. One entry per letter. This competition closes at midnight on February 10, 2017 and three working days later for postal entries.
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