If Harold Kushner had been a literary critic instead of a rabbi, he might have asked, “Why do bad books happen to good writers?” And if Leo Tolstoy had also been a critic, he might have answered, “All good books are alike, while every bad book goes bad in its own way.”

These bloody thoughts are occasioned by Henning Mankel and Jim Crace, novelists of proven quality who have recently produced very bad books, indeed. Of course, Tolstoy’s resonant but simplistic bifurcation is no more true of books than it is of families. So let us begin by considering what the new novels by Crace and Mankel have in common.

Each author attempts something new. Mankel, Sweden’s most famous living crime novelist, tries to cram a Micheneresque indictment of colonialism, with much globetrotting and historical backstory, into the narrow confines of a police procedural. Crace, an award-winning Britsh litterateur, assays a thriller with faint sci-fi overtones.

Mankel’s strengths include an engaging narrative voice, and he uses it to great effect in the early sections of The Man From Beijing, where we’re shown a wolf gnawing on the murdered body of an elderly man (from the wolf’s point of view!). Soon it’s revealed the victim is only one of 19 people butchered in a remote Swedish hamlet, all pensioners except for a 12-year-old boy.

It’s a splendid set-up, baroque and lurid, and Mankell keeps it grounded by his keen eye for dour Swedish character and social detail, and his way with pungent and credible characters. Indeed, in Vivi Sundberg, a stout, no-nonsense provincial detective in her mid-’50s, he has created a fascinating protagonist – who, alas, he promptly abandons.

Instead of burrowing ever deeper into this remote corner of Scandanavia, with Sundberg as our guide, Mankell supplants her with the much less interesting Birgitta Roslin, an urban judge on medical leave who takes an intrusive interest in the case even though it lies far out of her jurisdiction and despite being warned off by local and national authorities.

Worse, Mankell opens the narrative up like a Russian nesting doll. Soon he’s in 19^th- century China, with the story of three peasant brothers. Then it’s the American West, where a sadistic Swedish project manager abuses the Chinese laborers helping build the intercontinental railway – then back to China, with a band of Swedish missionaries. And there are fequent forays to modern Beijing, not to mention Africa, where the Chinese seek to secure energy and mineral reserves.

As long as Mankell remains in Sweden, his story has the ring of deep authenticity. But while his narrative verve never deserts him, he has little feel for the American West, and his presentation of Chinese characters is hackneyed to the point of racial stereotype. One villain wields a sword, like a medieval warrior, while another seeks to assassinate an enemy with ground glass hidden in food – something I haven’t seen since I read Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu novels at the age of 12.

Moreover, Mankell’s plot hinges again and again on unlikely coincidence, with the climax decided by the abrupt intervention of characters hardly hinted at before that moment. Key characters take drastic action with little coherent motivation, as when a villain murders his most loyal and effective henchman for no apparent reason. I could go on. Almost everything that happens outside Sweden is caricature.

***

A Man Booker finalist and three-time Whitbread Award-winner, Jim Crace certainly knows how to write a muscular and compelling sentence, as well as how to move a narrative forward in admirably subtle ways. But none of that saves All That Follows.

Indeed, prose quality aside, not one thing about this low-wattage thriller is authentic. Set in 2020, its hero is Leonard Lessing, a successful jazz sax player nearing his 50^th birthday. Full of self-regard, but maddeningly irresolute and timid, he’s unhappily married to a demanding woman who’s fretting about the disappearance of her estranged daughter.

On a newscast, Lessing recognizes the leader of a terrorist band who has taken hostages somewhere in suburban Britain. It’s Maxie Lermontov, an American anarchist he knew as a young man, a former romantic rival. For no good reason, Lessing visits the scene of the hostage crisis, standing behind police barricades, befriending the teenage daughter of Lermontov and his old love interest and generally behaving like a dull fictional character in an irrational search for psychological motivation.

Lessing is the single most irritating aspect of All That Follows, but by no means the only one. His approach to the teenaged girl is supposed to be ill-considered and wreckless, but it’s actually creepy, with Lessing no less despicable for not acting on his dirty-old-man impulses. When the action goes back in time, to 2007 and Austin, Texas, the narrative enters a bogus fugue. Crace is as awkward and unconvincing in Bush’s America as Mankell is in modern Beijing.

Crace’s decision to cast All That Follows as a near-future thriller is profoundly misguided. Really, I’m heartily sick of serious novelists playing with genre tropes as though they can be picked up and put down at will. On the contrary, sci-fi, fantasy and crime fiction require total commitment, just as serious literature does.

Not for one instant does Crace make us believe that by 2020 we’ll have solved the energy crisis, while his 2007 radical political operatives are actually cut-and-pasted from the Vietnam War era. All That Follows would be far more convincing if it were set in the present day, with Lessing’s youthful Texas sojourn taking place around 1967.

But even then, the novel would still have this limp dishrag of a main character. His arbitrary heroics in the final act would remain ludicrous, and the happy ending, with none of his stupid and selfish actions reaping the consequences they deserve, would still be risible.

The Man From Beijing, by Henning Mankell. Translated from the Swedish by Laurie Thompson. Knopf. $29.95. 366 pp.

All That Follows, by Jim Crace. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. $25.95. 223 pp.

Wilbert Rideau was 19 when he impulsively decided to rob a bank in Lake Charles, La., so he could flee to a new life on the West Coast. The botched 1961 robbery ended with Rideau taking three hostages. In the ensuing chaos he fatally shot and stabbed a female bank teller.

Rideau was black and the victim was white, and a seething mob nearly lynched him. He was quickly convicted of murder and sentenced to death.

In the Place of Justice is Rideau’s meticulous account of his 44 years behind bars, during which he became a model prisoner and won national awards for his work as editor of a prison magazine.

Rideau describes the brutal reality of rape, gangs and violence inside Louisiana’s Angola penitentiary, regarded for years as the most violent prison in America. Between 1972 and 1975, some 67 inmates were fatally stabbed and another 350 suffered knife wounds.

The author documents the racism that pervaded Louisiana’s justice system. In the parish where he was convicted, every black person accused of killing a white person between 1889 and 1976 was sent to death row. Whites who murdered whites during the same period were sentenced to death less than 25 percent of the time. Rideau was convicted in three successive trials by all-white juries, but each conviction was overturned on appeal.

At a fourth trial in 2005 a mixed-race jury found Rideau guilty of manslaughter instead of premeditated murder, and because he had already served more than the 21-year maximum for manslaughter, he was set free.

When Rideau entered prison, he was an angry young man with little formal education, but he began to read books, which “helped me survive the maddening monotony and boredom of the cell.”

He started to write and founded a newsletter for black inmates. Angola’s warden invited Rideau to become editor of the Angolite, a bimonthly prison magazine.

Over the course of two decades, Rideau turned the magazine into a publication that won national honors for its investigative reports about prison conditions. He wrote a piece titled The Horror Show documenting how inmates were burned and perhaps tortured by a faulty electric chair used for executions at Angola. Another exposé documented the plight of inmates who were blind, paralyzed or otherwise severely disabled and yet were routinely denied pardons. The article led to the release of about 20 men.

He became a correspondent for National Public Radio and flew to Washington, D.C., to address a convention of newspaper editors.

Rideau won the trust of inmates and officials alike. He was given wide freedom inside and outside the penitentiary, and became the beneficiary of enlightened prison leadership, which allowed him to publish critical articles without censorship, a unique arrangement in an American prison.

And yet his repeated bids for freedom failed. Year after year successive governors rejected commutation, even as scores of other murderers were freed. Rideau believes it had more to do with politics than anything else. Governors feared the public’s ire if they released a convict involved in a high-profile, black-on-white crime in a community with a virulent racist history.

Rideau comes across as truthful, remorseful, and straightforward. “I had been defined as criminal,” he writes, “but I knew I wasn’t an evil or monstrous person, despite my crime.”

In the Place of Justice is remarkably even-handed and generous. Rideau said he never could have accomplished what he did without the help of many guards and prison officials. Guards loaned him books, and officials granted him wide latitude to pursue stories without interference.

After his release, the author married Linda LaBranche, who had befriended him and fought for his release. Now in his late 60s, Rideau soaks up the little joys of daily life, such as being “mesmerized by the aerial artistry” of hummingbirds in his back yard.

“Having so long dwelled in a hellish place,” he writes, “I recognize paradise when I see it.”

Bill Williams is a freelance writer in West Hartford, Conn., and a former editorial writer for The Hartford Courant. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance, by Wilbert Rideau; Knopf; 366 pp.; $26.95

After the Bible, the Tao Te Ching is the second most translated text in the world, and certainly it is the most famous and influential book of ancient Chinese wisdom in the West. Why, then, with dozens of versions already available, would we need a new one – especially by a translator who made his name in classical Japanese samurai literature?

“My friends all ask that same question,” says William Scott Wilson, the renowned translator of Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, The Unfettered Mind: Writings of the Zen Master to the Sword Master, and The Book of the Five Rings, among other medieval samurai classics.

One reason, says Wilson, who grew up in Fort Lauderdale and now lives in Miami, is the deep connection between the Tao and Zen Buddhism, which, in turn exerts a strong influence on the Japanese martial arts tradition. In a way, he says, all his samurai translations have led him back in time toward the Tao Te Ching.

“Going on to the ‘Tao’ is like going to the source of sources,” Wilson says. “I always wanted to do this, but didn’t think anyone would pay me to do it. It’s one of the three great Chinese books: The Tao, the I Ching and the Analects of Confucius.”

Born in 1944, Wilson was a political science major at Dartmouth in 1966 when a friend invited him on a three-month kayak trip along the coast of Japan. "That trip was an eye-opener," says Wilson. "I didn't know what was there for me, but I knew it was something."

Wilson earned a bachelor’s in Japanese literature and language at the Monterey Institute of Foreign Studies in Monterey, Calif. He studied Edo period philosophy at the Aichi Prefectural University in Nagoya, Japan. He translated his first book, Hagakure, an 18^th-century martial arts classic, to fulfill an academic requirement – with no thought it might be published.

But since being published by Kodansha in 1979, Hagakure has never been out of print. While he’s had to supplement his income with other jobs, Wilson has steadily built up a body of classical samurai translations. “I've made sacrifices to do what I love," Wilson says. "You do what you can to keep doing this. I've been fortunate in recent years, when Kodansha issued new editions of all my books. They look really nice."

Wilson’s big break came in 1999, when indie film director Jim Jarmusch made the Zen thriller Ghost Dog, starring Forest Whitaker as a mob hit man who reads Hagakure and lives by its warrior code. After the movie came out, sales for Hagakure went "way up and remained up for years," Wilson says.

Gradually Wilson’s interest expanded beyond samurai literature to related fields – first to Nō drama (The Flowering Spirit: Classic Teachings on the Art of Nō; 2006), then to ancient Chinese maxims (The 36 Secret Strategies of the Martial Arts, ancient sayings collected by Hiroshi Moriya; 2008) and ancient Chinese philosophy (The Unencumbered Sprit, by Hung Ying-ming, published earlier this year.)

Because classical Japanese writing is derived from Chinese, Wilson had to study both languages, and therefore is qualified to translate each. “I picked Chinese as my second language for my master’s,” he says. “I wanted to learn to read Chinese. It’s just a beautiful, wonderful language.”

Wilson is one of those rare people who seem born with a gift for languages. In high school he taught himself Spanish in six weeks “for fun.” To illustrate a point about the Chinese concept of “te” and how it’s related to the English word “virtue,” he recites a few lines from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales – in what sounds like flawless Middle English.

What really distinguishes Wilson’s translation of the Tao is his attempt to push it 300 years deeper into antiquity. Written about 500 B.C., supposedly by the legendary sage Lao Tzu, the Tao exists only in the “new” text of 200 B.C. Wilson wondered what he might get if he recast the text into the archaic characters in use at the time the original was written.

“I said, ‘Let’s go back to the source,’ ” Wilson says. “I had books with ancient characters and etymology. Maybe I could find new meaning, or at least nuance, if I can translate it as it might appear to its first readers.”

Much of Wilson’s version is similar to existing translations, but he does find nuance, if not altogether new meaning, in the archaic characters. For example, one of the key principles of the Tao is to “act without acting, to go on intuition rather than rationality,” Wilson says. “If we think we have it, we don’t.”

One version of that thought, which repeats throughout the Tao, is to act without relying on anything. Through the use of archaic characters, Wilson realized the word usually translated as “act” is closely related to the word for “fabricate,” which allows for a fine adjustment in connotation.

“I used the word ‘fabricate’ instead of ‘act’ in the theatrical sense,” Wilson says. “That was the revelation: It doesn’t just mean mindless acting. It means act without making something up. Whoever put this book together felt strongly about this idea. It’s one of the lodestones of the ‘Tao.’ ”

Wilson’s translations of classical Japanese – and now Chinese – literature have proven so distinguished they have been translated themselves into 18 languages, including Magyar, Lithuanian, and, in some cases, modern Chinese — which, ironically, Wilson cannot read.

“Modern Chinese has been simplified down so much I won’t even look at it,” Wilson says. “It’s lost all its charm. The Communists ordered it made so simplified they wiped out 2,000 years of Chinese literature. All it’s good for is Communist propaganda.”

Still, Wilson is grateful for every translation. Take the Magyar edition of Hagakure, which earned him, in total, a check for $66: “If I hadn’t been so broke, I would have framed the check and hung it on my wall.”

Chauncey Mabe is the former books editor of the Sun-Sentinel. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Visit him on Facebook.

The spectacle of Americans choking with rage at Tea Parties, or tossing around racist epithets at Sarah Palin rallies, has our European friends worried.

Recently, French journalist Jean-Sebastien Stehli, writing in Le Figaro, bemoaned the “climate of violence” in American politics, which he identifies as white fear and resentment at the rise of a black president.

Nativist fury is nothing new, however, and the Republic has survived worse. As Nell Irvin Painter shows in her book The History of White People, periodic spasms of white rage and violence are American as apple pie. Consider the Know Nothing Party, active in the 1840s and ‘50s.

Alarmed by Irish immigration, nativists took to burning Catholic churches. A mob 600 strong rioted for three days in Philadelphia in 1844, burning two churches and a number of Irish houses, killing 13 and wounding 15. “Such mob violence made riot the signature Know-Nothing activity,” writes Painter.

Again, in 1891, long after the Know Nothings faded away, a New Orleans mob lynched 11 Italians. What did the Irish of the 1840s and the Italians of the 1890s have in common? At the time neither was included in the “white race.” Nor were Jews, Slavs or anyone else who couldn’t claim Anglo-Saxon descent — no matter how pale their skin.

While the Tea Partiers might find it a shock, everyone else has known for some time that “race” is a social construct, not a biological fact. Stephen Jay Gould forcefully argues the point in the interest of intellectual equality in his 1981 book, The Mismeasure of Man, while Noel Ignatiev approaches the same notion from a different angle in How the Irish Became White (1995).

The Human Genome Project settled the issue resoundingly in 2000, with the discovery that human beings around the globe, regardless of skin color or other superficial characteristics, share 99.99 percent of the same genetic code. Race, declared geneticist J. Craig Venter, is a “social concept, not a scientific one.”

But if race is an idea, not a fact, then how did the myth of “whiteness” -- and its mischief-making cousin, “white supremacy” -- come into existence? Painter follows the story from antiquity to the present, uncovering fascinating, shocking and sometimes dispiriting surprises.

To Greeks and Romans, “people’s skin color did not have any useful meaning. What mattered was where they lived.” Race had not yet been invented. Another surprise: Most slaves from classical times through the medieval period until the discovery of the New World were not black, but white. Indeed, the word “slave” derives from “Slav,” because of the thriving trade in captives from Eastern Europe. Ironically, white superiority began with the idea that female slaves from this region were the most beautiful in the world.

An Enlightenment-era German scientist, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, romanticizing the beauty of white people in the region, labeled them “Caucasian,” a term that almost immediately came to connote the white race. The term quickly evolved —an ideal of captive effeminate beauty would not do for the masculine aspirations of Germany, Britain or the United States.

Soon enough, Caucasian superiority came to be identified with Teutonic or Aryan purity, Viking robustness, Anglo-Saxon virility. Although Painter does not underscore the point, the white supremacy advocated by Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Roosevelt and others sounds uncomfortably close to Nazi propaganda. A few small accidents of history might have been enough to unite Britain and America in common cause with Hitler.

Painter touches on some of the material Gould examines at greater detail -- skull measurements, intended to prove white brains are bigger than anyone else’s. But she is more interested in social and intellectual developments than science. It almost beggars belief that not so long ago Europe was thought to contain three races -- Nordic (best), Alpine (tolerable) and Mediterranean (which included the Irish and was not remotely considered “white”).

Although Painter is not a gifted writer, she is always clear and in command of her complicated material. She ranges widely, which necessarily means shallowly, and she never talks down to her intended audience, the general reader. She shows whiteness as refracted through eugenics (which resulted in the sterilization of thousands of inferior whites), as well as class and labor conflict. She tells the stories of scientists such as Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, pioneers in the rejection of “racial science.”

In the end, Painter sounds a cautiously optimistic note. “Race talk” has not disappeared, she writes, “but ideally we would realize that human beings’ short history relates us all to one another. To speak in racial terms, incessant human migration has made us all multiracial.”

And yet in the United States the “fundamental black/white binary endures, driven by an age-old social yearning to characterize the poor as permanently other and inherently inferior.” By tracing how the fiction of race came into existence, Painter’s book may help to inoculate us against such virulent ideas.

There is no “other.” There is only us.

Chauncey Mabe is former books editor of the Sun-Sentinel. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

The History of White People. Nell Irvin Painter. Norton. $27.95. 496 pp.

Few people have done more to promote the spread of Buddhism in the West than Thich Nhat Hanh, the monk from Vietnam who lives in France and conducts well-attended retreats around the world.

Nhat Hanh has written more than 100 books, most of them revolving around the theme of living mindfully in the moment. Now he has joined with co-author Lilian Cheung, a lecturer at the Harvard School of Public Health, to apply that wisdom to diet and nutrition.

Although Savor does not break new ground, it may prove useful by showing people who struggle with weight gain how the principles of mindfulness can help.

Weight-loss programs, diet books and diet foods are a multi-billion-dollar industry. The authors offer a concise overview of the factors that influence consumption, noting that people are “surrounded by societal forces that drive us to eat more and move less.” The result is weight gain, obesity, and myriad health and emotional problems.

Food companies spend more on advertising than any other industry segment except cars. This bombardment has created a “culture of constant snacking, drinking and eating,” with the result that the percentage of Americans who are overweight or obese is steadily growing.

Savor explains how a core Buddhist teaching known as the Four Noble Truths applies to eating.

The first truth holds that life involves suffering. In this case, being overweight or obese increases the risk of cancer, diabetes, heart disease and premature death. The second truth is that craving, such as a craving for the pleasure found in food and drink, causes suffering. The third truth is that we can address suffering, in this instance by believing we can change negative habits. And the fourth truth lists steps to end suffering, such as setting realistic goals, finding a supportive network of friends, and eating mindfully.

Savor encourages readers to eat slowly to appreciate the gift of nutritious food. The authors suggest trying it with an apple, enjoying each bite, “immersing yourself in the experience 100 percent.”

“We are propelled,” the book says, “by the fast pace of high-tech living – high-speed Internet, e-mails, instant messages and cell phones – and the expectation that we are always on call, always ready to respond instantly to any message we get.”

Nhat Hanh and Cheung recommend a vegetarian or vegan diet, suggesting that readers reduce, if not eliminate, their consumption of meat, fish, chicken and dairy products, including eggs, milk and cheese. They note the staggering environmental toll of meat production, including the release of methane tied to global warming, the destruction of rain forests to expand grain production for farm animals, and the pollution of water and air from animal waste.

Vegetarians and vegans, the book says, tend to be healthier and weigh less than those who consume animal products high in unhealthy fat.

Much of the text covers familiar ground. The authors recommend that people consume more fruits and vegetables, and cover at least half their plates with fruits or vegetables at each meal.

They stress the importance of regular exercise, calling it “about as close to a magic potion as you can get.” Not surprisingly, they note the negative impact of television, tying it to lack of exercise and obesity. Children spend more time watching TV and playing on computers than they do in school.

Unfortunately, the book includes a disturbing Buddhist parable about a young couple crossing the desert with their 3-year-old son. When they run out of food, they decide to eat their son to survive. The story is figuratively supposed to illustrate the suffering caused by mindless consumption. The authors concede that the story “may sound unimaginable, cruel and totally unacceptable.” Then why include such an offensive tale, which adds nothing to the book and likely will repel many readers?

Other than that, Savor is a helpful guide for anyone who cares about diet and weight, with many tips about using mindfulness to stick to a healthy diet.

Bill Williams is a freelance writer in West Hartford, Conn., and a former editorial writer for The Hartford Courant. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

Savor: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life, by Thich Nhat Hanh and Lilian Cheung; HarperOne; 292 pp.; $25.99.