Hour of the Rat by Lisa Brackmann

Hour of the Rat, Lisa Brackmann.  New York:  Soho Press, Inc., 2013.  e-book, 313 pps.

In this second book of a series, Lisa Brackmann continues the story of Ellie McEnroe.  She is still living in Beijing.  Her mother is visiting.  Mom is a Christian who attends a church back home.  While visiting her daughter, Mom falls for Ellie's creepy neighbor hard.  Ellie is not happy with her mother's propensity for all things of a Christian nature.  She is extremely unhappy with her mother's choice of lousy men.

Her war buddy Doug a.k.a. Dog, Turner calls and wants to know where his brother is.  The brother Jason is missing in China somewhere.  Not taking his bipolar meds.

Ellie gets a visit by the Domestic Security Department.  They are not happy that her artist friend Zhang Jianli is still underground somewhere.  She is not happy to have been dragged off to some stark business hotel to have tea and a talk with these two guys.

The computer game is in Hour of the Rat also but it does not figure as prominently.  There is travel too, and action.  And a dog.

Monsanto is in this novel.  Or a company with a Chinese name that sounds very much like it operates in the same way that Monsanto wants to.  Sell seeds to farmers that will not die when farmers use the company pesticides and herbicides [but all other plants and weeds will].  The genetic engineering of the seeds is part of tweaking the proper response to the company pesticides and herbicides.  Prohibit farmers and gardeners from harvesting the vegetables for seeds.  If you want them, you have to buy the seeds or seedlings all over again next year.  Big profits for the company.  Business is business.  In the novel, just as in real life, the company is a villain.  GMOs are bad, m'kay?

sapphoqreviews says:  Lisa Brackmann has proven herself to be a great writer of intricacies with this third novel.  I like her books.  Her characters come off as real.  The sense of place in Hour of the Rat catapulted me into destinations I'd never been to [yet?].  Thoroughly enjoyable.  If you aren't reading Lisa Brackmann's thrillers, you really ought to be.  Highly recommended. 

Rock Paper Tiger by Lisa Brackmann

Rock Paper Tiger, Lisa Brackmann.  New York:  Soho Press, Inc., 2010.  e-book, 274 pps.

The first in a series, Lisa Brackmann introduces Ellie McEnroe, divorcee and Iraqi war vet who is living in Beijing.  She has a Chinese name-- Yili-- and a passel of Chinese artsy friends.  The ex-husband Trey Cooper is no prize.  He went native in a big way.  End of marriage.

Ellie also has memories.  These are the sort of memories of the war in a hot and sandy hellpit and some of the things that some of the American service people did to some of their prisoners.  Not nice things.  The sort of memories that give one a bout with P.T.S.D. which used to be called combat fatigue many years ago.  Ellie had gotten a Purple Heart.  Even that medal could not take away the pain.

Lucy Wu is a big time art dealer who keeps attempting to contact Ellie.  An artist friend of Ellie has been forced underground and has given her permission to show and/or sell some of his paintings.  These are not ordinary times.  The ordinary things do not happen.  There is a game involved, a sort of virtual world.  The characters talk to each other and Ellie is helped out when she herself has to go on the run.

sapphoq reviews says:  The virtual world in Rock Paper Tiger is not driven by materialism or capitalism.  It is instead driven by art.  Lisa Brackmann's first book was excellent and so I immediately read the other two books [also reviewed here].  I hope she keeps on writing and publishing.  Highly recommended.

Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism by Robert Jay Lifton

Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of 'brainwashing' in China.  Chapel Hill NC:  University of North Carolina Press, 2012 and 1989.  ebook, 525 pps.

In the preface to Thought Reform, Robert Jay Lifton notes that he now views his seminal work as "...more an exploration of what might be the most dangerous direction of the twentieth-century mind-- the quest for absolute or 'totalistic' belief systems."  He lays out a simple definition of groups which take over the lives of their followers [popularly known as "cults"].  
     There is an inspired text or group of writings which are pedaled as the sole and only truth for everyone whether they accept it or not. The leader or head of the group exploits the resources [which may include sexual, physical, intellectual, emotional, social, financial resources] of the followers. 
     There is an active discouragement against consulting outside sources along with psychological measures designed to stop independent thinking.  Confession as used by the group induces a split between the old ways of being and the lifestyle deigned optimal by the group.  Methods may employ separation of the followers from their loved ones and friends who don't subscribe to the group, imprisonment or isolation from general society, and prescribed activities.
     There is finally a military or military-like fierce mandate to crush the perceived or actual enemies of the ideology which may or may not involve nuclear warfare.  There may be talk of taking over a government or a people or a planet.  The more political groups may have actual plans in place.  The more religious groups may look to a leader to set a nuclear cataclysm into motion in order to achieve something like an apocalypse.

In the fifties and sixties, Communist China actively campaigned for the people to be educated into Chinese Communism.  This started with the students.  Universities had required trainings which then escalated into longer periods of isolation for the students and the faculty members.  There was at first a bonding of the groups within their living facilities.  Then deep confessions were required with a heavy emphasis on denouncement of the old ways-- which included giving the axe to filial duties and other things central to the Chinese family-- and indeed a denouncement of one's own family.  The confessions were not automatically accepted.  The students and faculty spent long days re-writing them until they reflected exactly perceived wrongful thinking which had created individualism among the People.  Those who were able to escape afterwards did so.  Some were forced to remain in now Communist China.  Some converted to Chinese Communism and wanted to stay on.

But there were also prisons.  Westerners were imprisoned along with Chinese nationals.  The treatment at the prisons was harsh.  Again there was a living group-- now the inhabitants of a prison cell-- and confessions.  The older prisoners would try to cue the newer ones into how to confess.  A few resisted mightily at first, but since the punishment for this resistance was physical and severe any sort of protest tended to die away.  Thus Christian missionaries, Roman Catholic priests, and other Westerners were forced into compromising positions.  There was sleep deprivation too-- at times for several days on end-- with the other prisoners taking turns at night to ensure that the target prisoner remained awake.

Lifton's study began in 1955 and 1956 in Hong Kong with newly released Westerners and Chinese.  Lifton was able to follow-up long-term with many of the original ex-prisoners.  Thought Reform is a record of what he found.

sapphoq reviews says:  I found Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism to be an excellent and scholarly read.  Lifton combines historical events with personal accounts of some people who lived through them and searching opinions.  Although a few critics are quick to pronounce that Lifton was against his book being used as a study in the "new religions" [read: religious and also quasi-religious groups which coerce their followers into a party line and employ various techniques of stopping independent thinking], Lifton himself indicates in his preface his acceptance of the wider implications of Thought Reform.  Highly recommended.