Category: Book Report

On July 24, sometime commenter A. Rothman friended me on Facebook, prompting me to comment “Brian J. Noggle got friended by a Minneapolis concealed carry instructor. Noggle feels compelled to read a Joel Rosenberg book now.” This book is the one that sprang into my hand. Which means it took me several months to read it. Wow.

The conceit is this: Magic exists, and Mordred defeated Arthur. Hundreds of years later, the British crown is in a power struggle with the Dar al Islam and another empire whose provenance I’ve forgotten. Priest warriors for the crown carry swords imbued with the souls of either saints (white swords) or very evil men (red swords). Apparently, the swords were made in ancient times and are the magic that has created them has been forgotten or driven from history. But in the Eastern Mediterranean, where the three empires clash, a new red sword has been found. Two active members of the holy order, the paladins of the title, bring a former member of the order, their former mentor, out of retirement to investigate. Their former mentor recruits and deputizes a local fisherman–fisherboy really–to their order and gives him the sword, which has been infused with the soul of a baby (but somehow, this becomes a red sword). The young paladin and the mentor depart to investigate on their own, leading the other paladins, including a conflicted paladin bearing a red sword carrying the soul of Genghis Khan, to follow them.

So it’s a very rich book, and it clock in at 450+ pages, so there’s plenty of room to spread the wealth and depth. We have well-rounded Marines and side adventures in taking a pirate ship. We have a little battle with darklings, the nature of which is unclear (and whose presence is remarkable, according to the characters, but is not resolved). We have an aging Navy man in port duty intriguing within the Navy and with the enemies of the crown. We have hints and some details about the past, why the mentor left the order, some history regarding the other members of the order, and, as I said, a lot of depth.

Which is then lost on the plot.

The story of the new live red sword runs through it, but the ulimate resolution takes place suddenly by comparison. I won’t spoil it for you because the book might be worth reading on its own–I’m a bit ambivalent because of the ultimate weakness of the plot or at least how the main plot is resolved–but the climax comes out of left field with some unheard of people working on their own plot unrelated to the things investigated, off and on, by the paladins for 350 pages. Then there’s a scene with the king at the end, a sort of Star Wars award ceremony, except R2 D2 doesn’t come back to life (although his return might have been foreshadowed).

There’s only one more book in this series, so I don’t know what Rosenberg had planned. Maybe a series of seven or eight which would have made more use of the deep background. I haven’t read the early books in the Guardians of the Flame series, so I don’t know if that’s how he did it with that series. Or maybe these books didn’t sell well enough to continue.

Jeez, it took me since July to read this, and it’s not even one of the big books I’m sorta reading.

Books mentioned in this review:

Of all the picture books I’ve been browsing lately, this book has a distinction: I actually started looking through this book last football season, and it remained on the side table, often-dusted, until I finished it this season.

This book, as its title might indicate, is a retrospective of Rembrandt’s work and a pretty detailed biography of the man. Too much text, almost, to read and keep one’s place while watching the intermittent plays of a football game. I learned a bit about Rembrandt’s rise and fall and the meaning of chiaroscuro. That might be the only thing I retain long term, but it’s enough.

Related story: I’ve had two copies of Rembrandt’s Man in a Gold Helmet in my life. The first I bought when I was in college with a freshmanly minted credit card. The Alumni Memorial Union had a print sale in it, and I wanted copies of Wyeth’s Christina’s World and Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Since it was three for $15 or $6 each, I picked a third. The third was Man in a Gold Helmet.

Sometime later, I divested myself of those prints, but I found a framed one inexpensive at a garage sale or an estate sale back when I was hitting them all the time. I bought it, and I hung it in Casinoport, and I hung it in Old Trees, and I hung it at Nogglestead. But when I was talking to my beautiful wife about the painting, I couldn’t remember where we’d hung it. The living room is rife with Renoir, the bedroom has a Monet (I’ve discovered recently it’s a Monet) and a couple of Hargroves, but I drew a blank on the Rembrandt. I didn’t know if we’d stored it or if we’d donated it, but I’ll be darned if I remembered it or could find it.

Until my wife and I were sitting in a chair together, a chair I don’t normally sit in, and I saw it: it is in the small hallway between our offices, a hallway that we rarely light. I pass by it several times a day, but I’d lost it there until such time as I was sitting somewhere I normally don’t and looked into that hallway.

So I still have it, and now that I have reviewed this book, I can definitively and with more authority say that it’s my favorite of Rembrandt’s work. Probably partly because of the history I have with it, but also probably because the affinity I have for it thematically and stylistically I would have had with it even if I’d seen it in the book for the first time.

So the book’s worth checking out. Rembrandt was a very interesting painter, and he lived a very interesting life.

Books mentioned in this review:

I’ll be honest: this book appealed to me for a specific reason. As you remember, I only bought the book because I saw it and Rosemary’s Baby together at a book fair.

I wanted it to read it now, of all times, because my children have both gone off to school full time, and as I work at building up some contract work, I’m cleaning the house pretty regularly and meticulously. As a matter of fact, I’m cleaning things and places people don’t see, and I’m sort of taking a weird pride in it. On one occasion, I’ve wondered if I’ve turned into a Stepford wife. Since I have the book, I could investigate.

Spoiler alerts follow Continue reading “Book Report: The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin (1972)” →

I have bought a large number of guides to Missouri flora and fauna like this book so I can be more definitive when my children ask me about plants and animals they see on our long nature hikes. I don’t know when we’re going to take these long nature hikes–I’m not much of an outdoor hiker, although I am a bit of an urban walker when living in urban domiciles–but I’ll be prepared, I hope, if I just thumb through enough of these.

This small product of the Missouri Department of Conservation gives a high-level primer on birding, including identifying the distinguishing features of birds and tips to help with identification, but this is not an identification book or a field guide. Most of the book is given over to charts identifying the frequency of birds’ appearances in Missouri by month and habitat so you’ll know what to look for in the field and in the field guides.

A quick browse and, as I mentioned, a very early primer for anyone who wants to get into birding.

Heaven help me, I know how birdwatchers refer to themselves. I might as well get The Big Year on Blu-Ray.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is the source for the 1953 film.

In it, a Philadelphia cop, not the smartest guy on the squad, but the straightest and the most methodical, is called to investigate the apparent suicide of a police clerk. Ranking cops want it to be a suicide, but Bannion, the cop, thinks there might be more to it and is reluctant to give it up. Eventually, he stirs up a mob hit that kills Bannion’s wife instead, and Bannion goes all in, giving up his career as a police detective to find and punish those corrupt city officials who make it all possible.

This is a good bit of noir. It’s third person, so it lacks the immediacy of the stuff that makes the latter half of the 20th century narration, but it makes up for it in spades. Because I bought it in a detective book club edition, I expected less than I got. Recommended.

Books mentioned in this review:

As I might have mentioned, it’s football season again, so it’s time to look at books with pictures of cars in them amid the cartoon books and art books. Last year, it was Triumph Sports Cars by Graham Robson. This year, I’ve read Triumph Sports Cars by the same author. While that book was a hardback, this is a short gallery book (32 pages) given over to photographs, mostly, with a brief history of the models.

It’s more of a primer than the other book, probably sharing some copy and photos. The Shire Album series is a collection of pictorial guides to old British things, with other books in the series covering Playing Cards and Tarots, Cricketing Bygones, Agricultural Hand Tools, and the like. So it’s geared to the collector. What’s odd or ironic is that the books themselves, judging from the price on the Internet, are collectibles themselves, which means there might be room for a Shire Album entitled Shire Albums. Or maybe not.

Someday, I’m going to have to write a detective series where the investigator drives a TR7 or something to make sure that I put these books to use and can write off the five bucks or whatever I’ve dedicated to the innumerable books.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is a collection of black and white photographs, along with a couple of poems, by the author, a former architect who brought his design eye to photography. He prefers, as do many photographers, the wild, bridges, and old buildings. He also is a fan of a certain photographic techinique–longer exposure times or development times–that washes water splashing into a white miasma. I remember when my photographer for the St. Louis Artesian used a similar technique for the first cover with her photograph “Shattered Water”. Wow, I was the editor of a literary magazine such a long time ago that its Internet presence is slim? That was almost twenty years ago.

At any rate, the photographs are what you would expect. None leapt out at me. I’m not a real critic, so don’t take my dismissal as definitive. I’m that way with most of the contents of museums and books of work by serious artists, too.

Books mentioned in this review:

I swapped a copy of my novel for these books, since I know the author from the old BBS days, when he dominated the local CG64 boards as White Knight. Or maybe that was me.

Regardless, these books collect the first two years (already?) of his Web comic Frik’in Hell. The motif centers upon a medieval warrior who finds himself out of war-work and takes up as the counter man in a fast food inn. He doesn’t take it too well, and beheads customers in between visits to a support group, attacks of ninjas, and a quest by another character to create ketchup.

Strangely, given that I’m an IT professional, but Web comics don’t tend to draw me in. I see the occasional Penny Arcade and XCD-something (see? I can’t even remember the name of it). I did read another book made from an online Web comic (RPG World). But it’s not my thing. Old Heathcliff? My thing. Maybe even Marmaduke.

But if you’re hipper than me, check his comic out at frikinhell.com.

This book is a little tourist guide to the All Saints Church in Wing, Buckinghamshire, England. I certainly didn’t visit it, and I’m not sure what I would have paid for it, but I doubt it was fifty cents. The booklet is only 20 pages of text and photos, after all.

But this book like so many of the tourist-centric, very localized books I’ve read about locations in Europe (see Orvieto and Bruges from last football season, for example). Each is focused on a single city or location with the attendant pile of photographs and maps. More importantly, and more startlingly to someone who has lived in a city-within-a-city where its lustrous history extends back about a hundred years or now a region whose densely worded histories extend back a couple of hundred years, the history of Europe extends back millenia. In more narrative-driven history books, you tend to lose a little bit of a sense of wonder in the sweeping epochs and the rises and falls of civilizations and monarchies.

But All Saints Wing church extends back to when manor owners tended to take care of the churches on their manors. The church was probably built in the tenth century, as its first mention appears in the will of the manor owner in 966, and its architecture reaches back to the Anglo-Saxon period before the Norman Conquest. The guidebook points out what features survive and how the church was modified in the centuries, including during Henry VIII’s break with the Catholic church and the English Revolution. The various defilements of the historical character of the church are now part of the historical character of the church.

And in the present day, or at least in 2003, All Saints Church was not a historical venue maintained by a foundation or the British equivalent (with the additional U that is so characteristic of the Queen’s English is fouundation).

It is a church. With people attending services there and children’s programs. Just like your church, which is probably about a millennium younger than it.

You want to know what Noggle does when he’s desperate to make his annual reading quota, and he’s nowhere near finishing the three different 1400+ page books he’s spending a lot of time on this year? He reads a children’s book.

This is a children’s book circa 2000 that introduces children to the very high-level concepts of computers. What a computer is, how computers were in the 1940s, what a component is, what a peripheral is, what kinds of computers there are, what software is, and so on. Kind of like if you just read the titles of that old Time-Life Books series.

Twelve years later, I guess it’s hard to justify keeping this in a library, since most kids these days are born with an iPhone in their hands, and libraries themselves have whole rooms dedicated to functioning computers rather than books, so children can get hands on experience without the need for a book about them. Still, this book is a book targeted to libraries; I cannot imagine many people picking this up and giving it as a gift, even to children who don’t already have a computer (which brings to mind how I used to pore through the Radio Shack ads in 1980, looking at the pictures of the Tandys for sale, and now I have piles of computers with lots of blinking lights and whirring fans beneath a monitor bigger than my television playing Whiz Kids, and all I want to do is get away from them these days).

It’s a book for libraries, and the local library has discarded it.

Is it worth a read? If you pick it up at the local library book sale with an eye to mockery (although I’m not as wry about it as I would have hoped on that particular bag day), if you need to pad out your reading list, if you’ve got the book, and if you’ve got a football game to watch in between large print definition of mouse and keyboard (it’s the part that looks like a typewriter, which isn’t something someone born in 1994 is going to be familiar with).

On the other hand, this book just might be a good starter book not for children, but for seniors getting in touch with their first computer. It’s short, it’s basic, and it’s larger than normal print. Hmmm. I think Roberta could have used this book.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is a collection of 90 pages of 2-3 quips per page filling out the set-up You can tell you’re a Midwesterner when….. They’re almost akin to Jeff Foxworthy’s redneck series, but a little less absolutely funny. They skew a little northern Midwest than Missouri, and they’re about small town living more than big city quips. A couple of them ring true, with a deeper understanding and statement of small town America than others.

An amusing, short read that I browsed while watching the preseason football game. I’d better stock up on these sorts of things and coloring books, since this in only the 55th book I’ve read this year and will have to make tracks if I want to get close to 100.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is a 1970s-era business book designed to help you understand the cut-throat world of business where everyone you do business with is out to get you, and how you can adopt a strong posture to defend yourself against these tactics and intimidate them into honoring their commitments. Ringer was a business real-estate salesman in the era where the Dirty Harry movies were contemporary commentaries and the apartment buildings he sold were bedecked in shag carpeting, avocado appliances, and bead curtains.

That said, it’s a worthwhile book once you re-orient the book’s focus to a more realistic worldview (where not all businesspeople are sharks). It has valuable lessons in attitude focus and sustenance (Theory of Sustenance of a Positive Attitude through the Assumption of a Negative Result) and a number of good lessons in professional image presentation and management. So you can still find something in the book worth remembering almost 30 years later. As a matter of fact, Ringer refocused and rereleased the book this century as To Be or Not To Be Intimidated.

It’s a quick enough read, engaging in prose and laden with a couple of life lessons and the philosophy interspersed with real-life stories of deals that Ringer closed and how they proved his pudding.

Additionally, he invokes Ayn Rand in the first sentence. Turns out, he’s still alive and an active advocate of laissez-faire capitalism with a very nice looking Web site and everything.

I’m glad to have read it, and I’m a bit amazed to find out how collectible this mass market paperback is.

(Oh, yeah, and I did a parallel review for IT industry folks over at QA Hates You if you’re so inclined.)

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is definitely not one of the stronger entries in the series (contrast with Red Hammer Down, Point Blank, and Gulag War). Actually, I think I liked Gulag War the best and have been hopeful that these books would recapture some of its pulp glory, but for the most part, after it they’ve all been hackish.

This one, too, suffers from more problems than good parts. The books spends a good portion of the first half with the set-up, which is before the title characters appear. Apparently, there are some elements of the Bolivian armed forces double-crossing US anti-drug military forces and Bolivian military members in the field; the Swedish prime minister is assassinated; there’s a coup in Bolivia where a crooked general with the backing of a Swedish chemist who can make artificial cocaine throws out a democratic reformer. Then we have a chapter of the Washington contact for the SOBs being pulled away from a glorious dinner to tend to the problem. Then we have a long chapter of the team members on their own after their recent most adventure getting restless and awaiting the call from Barrabas. Then, some sixty percent of the way through the book, they get to Bolivia, split up into teams, and then we get some jump cuts between the teams, even the team that is essentially sitting around and doing nothing, and more not much exciting happens, until we reach a simplistic climax that is a bit deus ex maquina. Most of the team doesn’t get a lot of action, but they get a lot of pages.

Again, the book does have the feel of an eighties action film baked right into it, but it’s more akin to a straight-to-VHS action film than something that would star Chuck Norris.

Books mentioned in this review:

I had hoped that this book would be akin to Dear Customer: You Are A Loser so I could get double duty out of it and to post a blog entry on QAHY about it (such as this, which apparently actually sold a copy of the title to my benefit).

Oh, but no.

Instead, this book is a collection of short anecdotes about bad business ideas throughout history (this just in: Tulip futures in Holland hundreds of years ago–what up with that?) and out-of-context quotes from luminaries and businessmen (hey, it’s 2001: let’s throw something in from Bill Gates! Hah! I didn’t get it, and neither will most people who weren’t at the Microsoft convention!). Worse, in a lot of cases, the anecdotes seem anti-capitalist (Martha Stewart got hers for insider trading on the ImClone thing! Neener neener neener! Although in truth she was convicted for conspiracy and obstruction of justice). I mean, what sort of magazine is Business 2.0 to revel in that?

Oh, a failed magazine. Right.

(Full disclosure: I was a subscriber there at the end, when they killed it and sent me Fortune magazine to fill the subscription instead.)

At any rate, it’s a brief read for an idea book, but not something worth spending a lot of review time on, and not something I enjoyed all that much, really.

Books mentioned in this review:

When I wrote about my visit to Smallin Civil War Cave last month, I mentioned this book, which is a book about Ozark caves that the Smallin Civil War Cave’s proprietor wrote about caves in the Ozarks. He wrote this book before he bought and ran the cave.

The book is more of a memoir than any sort of actual field guide, since it doesn’t talk much about actual caves per se. It talks about the author’s experiences in amateur spelunking as well as some experience of being a cave guide (from which I drew much of my glibness about cave guides from the book). As a personal memoir, it interested me than a more stilted book would. Bright recounts stories about chasing goats and discovering caves, finding abandoned home sights in caves (and the attendant story therein), and a host of other folklore and geology filtered through his experience and explorations. The book also contains a large section of pictures from the author’s collection. As such, it clocks in at 128 pages, which makes it a very easy, quick, and pleasant read.

Books mentioned in this review:

I’ll be honest: I was not in a real hurry to pick up the Zombie Parker titles, including this book, a Spenser novel written by Ace Atkins. However, a piece about it and its author in Mystery Scene magazine changed my mind. So I started watching for it in the library. As you might know, I found it. And I was pleased.

Atkins does his best to capture old Spenser novels from the pre 1990-something era, where the books had some depth and lyricism to them. The plot: Spenser is hired (for a box of doughnuts) by a fourteen-year-old girl from South Boston who wants Spenser to investigate the murder of her mother four years before. He looks into the murder, which the police have already solved, and finds that the man in prison probably did not do it. But once he gets that notion, finding out who did puts Spenser and the girl in jeopardy from scary individuals in the crime syndicates and whatnot.

As I said, it’s a good throwback to the old style Spenser novels, before Parker stacked them up with nothing but dialog. Atkins adds depth and, get this, new allusions. He throws in references to previous books and characters, but also peppers the book with quotes and references to other material. I dunno, maybe Parker stopped reading, or maybe he thought his readers were more interested in references to the Spenser mythos (and now that there are two authors in the field, it has achieved mythos), but I find the new allusions satisfying and fresh.

Sadly, though, Atkins does go to the established baddie well much like Parker would have done (Gerry Broz plays an important role in the plot), but it’s not the sort of book where Spenser knows the answers but has to work out a solution. Instead, he, Hawk, and the girl spend a lot of the book trying to figure out what’s going on, and that makes the story move along well and keeps one going.

It didn’t take me just a night to read like they did in the old days–the old days are gone, as are the short Parker entries in the series–but I did read it in only two nights. I’m looking forward to the next entries in the series more than I have in some time, although I’ll probably go with library copies. But if Atkins–or other designated heirs–keeps this up, I might take to buying them again.

Books mentioned in this review: