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Oakland Post

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By Terri Schlichenmeyer, The Bookworm Sez

Author: Eriq La Salle, Copyright: c.2026, Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press, SRP: $18.99, Page Count: 304 pages

Finally, after so much work, you’ve left your past behind.

That’s what you tell yourself: what’s done is done and you can’t undo history. It’s over. You try not to think about last month, last year, a decade back because what does it matter? As in the new novel, “Laws of Solomon” by Eriq La Salle, remembering is too full of pain.

The monsters that came to him early in his sleep were the easy ones. It was the later demons that stole Solomon Nangobi’s sleep, the spirits of all the people he killed when he was a child soldier in Uganda, and when he was a fixer in New York as an adult. Their ghosts called to him with urgent voices, though he left that life behind long ago.

Now, his days were filled working the soil in gardens near Malibu, and he loved the quiet life.

Still, he kept his guns.

And he was glad: when Solomon recognized two Zeta gunmen stalking a well-dressed man, woman, and child through the gardens, he couldn’t walk away. He stopped the gangsters with bullets, but not before the adults and their bodyguards were dead. The child, an 8-year-old boy named Gaby, was safe, but Gaby couldn’t tell Solomon what was going on.

What became quickly certain, however, was that Solomon was now Gaby’s guardian, and the Zeta crime boss wanted them dead, too.

When he was the same age as Gaby, Solomon saw unspeakable things, the murder of his parents, the destruction of his homeland, and the atrocities that Uganda dictator Idi Amin’s soldiers committed. He learned to kill, he observed, and he was hardened, understanding as a small boy that revenge was often necessary and needed, and that blood would shed at those times.

But Gaby was pure, an innocent, a child.

Solomon reached out to his contacts to try to get the boy to safety, but being a contact of a marked man was likewise a dangerous thing: the monsters outside were worse than the ones inside him.

Two words for you: ‘Whoo weee.’ That’s what you’re going to say when you close the back cover of “Laws of Solomon,” knowing that you’ve just been taken on a wild up-and-down, around-and-round ride.

La Salle makes it impossible not to like Solomon, an African man who has, over time, lost nearly everything dear to him and who has no faith in much of anything. Readers get that part of the story eventually, and there’s historical authenticity in some of it, but we never really get to know Solomon, which makes the book feel dark and dangerous. Along the way, we meet and get to know his helpers, which buoys Solomon’s chase to find safety for the boy, and your heart won’t stop pounding.

Keep in mind that this is a thriller partially set in 1970s Uganda, so expect lots of violence but don’t expect a lot of people to live. If you’re up for that, find “Laws of Solomon.” You won’t be able to leave it behind.

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By Emil Amok Guillermo

I was quiet about 9/11 until this week, when terrorism got an upgrade.

Artificial intelligence.

I have taken 9/11 seriously every year. Twenty-five years later, I was all “feeled out.”

I’ve gone to Ground Zero. I’ve written about the dead, the survivors, the first responders and those who survived that day only to become sick years later.

But this isn’t another column about where we were.

It’s about what America became.

For me, September 11, 2001, marks the beginning of a New America. Not the diverse, multicultural America I hoped was emerging.

This is the America that fear built.

I was 3,000 miles away in the Bay Area watching CNBC.

Then the planes hit.

The markets shut down.

And something else opened.

Fear.

At first, fear brought us together. We had a common enemy and, briefly, rediscovered a common good.

But fear is a terrible foundation for democracy.

The person we feared was initially the terrorist.

Then the Muslim.

Then the Arab.

Then the Sikh mistaken for an Arab.

Then the immigrant. The undocumented. The person at the border.

The category continues to expand.

Maybe that’s the real 25-year story of 9/11.

We went from finding common ground to looking for flaws that prove somebody doesn’t belong.

The terrorists didn’t invent American racism, xenophobia or political paranoia. We shouldn’t give 19 hijackers that much credit.

But after 9/11, America built an enormous security structure around fear.

Surveillance expanded. Wars followed. Congress created the Department of Homeland Security. TSA transformed airports. Immigration enforcement was reorganized and ICE was created.

Temporary emergency became permanent infrastructure.

Recently, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit his job and warned that people building advanced AI genuinely believe it could kill humanity by the end of this decade.

He walked away two months before his Anthropic equity vested.

That’s credibility.

President Trump has taken a different view. On Sept. 14 he called fears of AI destroying humanity a “HOAX” and declared, “WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS!” He said the only guardrail AI needs is a “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT.”

We have built the threat.

We finance it. We feed it our words, photographs, voices, art and knowledge. We invite it into our homes and carry it in our pockets.

Americans are confronting something genuinely frightening.

AI could eliminate or transform jobs. And its increasingly powerful systems raise questions even some of their creators say they cannot fully answer.

So, the question what do we do with fear without surrendering our common humanity.

That requires real leadership and oversight from Congress, if not the president.

Trump insists Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon. But on AI, his emphasis is winning the race, especially against China.

That’s the trap.

Fear of China becomes the argument for going full speed ahead.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, we have another chance to get fear right.

Be smart enough to know what to be afraid of.

And make sure we stay in control of the tech.

We’ve got to be smarter than the machines.

About the Author

Emil Amok Guillermo is an award-winning journalist, commentator and comic monologist. He hosts a micro-talk show on YouTube. See him at Comedy Day at Robin Williams Meadow in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, on Sept. 20, around 2:45 p.m. Free.

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