Category: Book Report

Unlike the first biography of Gainsborough I read, this books pages are all separated, so I got a better sense of Gainsborough, the man, and his rise amid the world of British painters, his preference for painting landscapes and common folk instead of the portraits that paid his bills and kept his family in the good life, eventually. So I have more respect and understanding for the artist this time around.

Unfortunately, the reproductions of his work herein are all in black and white, so it creates a bit of a chasm between the vivid descriptions of the paintings and the images themselves.

I posted the review of the first book a week and a couple days before my mother died. Oh, the new normalcy into which we’d found ourselves with her sickness and her daily treatments, but where I still had time to sit in my reading spot in my home in Old Trees and read every night. Now, some years later, a new new normalcy, maybe even a couple normalcies beyond that one. I mention this in a book report about a single volume just to emphasize that a book and its reading experience can resonate in one’s memory. Can a Kindle representation do that for you? Given how much I remember about reading things online on the computer, I’d have to think not.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is a collection of photographs from the Reagan administration and grouped around events or topics in his presidency like the inaugurations, the attack on Libya, the firing of the PATCO air traffic controllers, Iran-Contra, and so on. Each section/chapter runs 2-4 pages and has a couple paragraphs from each event or period.

It’s a nice trip back to the 1980s. I was but a boy then, of course, so my growing awareness of the political world was rising quickly. I don’t remember many of the things from his first administration, but by the second, I’m familiar with the themes and the events. The photos show Reagan, of course, but they are also photos of the period, with the fashion, blocky glasses, big hair, and whatnot.

I have to say, aside from the weird stuff in the urban areas, the 1980s fashions that trickled down to Missouri weren’t hideous enough to scar us, unlike the things that Boomers did to themselves. I mean, plaid pants? Really?

I inherited this book from my aunt Dale, I deduce, because it was sent out to her beau in 1994 and has a letter from some Republican fundraising organization or another in it and a certificate of authenticity that says this is a numbered copy of the deluxe edition that was limited to 125,000. I’m pretty sure that that must have been the whole initial press run of this book.

The book is worth a browse for the nostalgia and for its mood lifting potential: 8 years of Reagan lifted the national mood quite a bit and ushered in several decades of positive growth and national mood. These times we’re in, they too will pass, and the end result might be a better world instead of Mad Maxville.

Books mentioned in this review:

Well, if you cracked open this book and expected to see a bunch of Flemish women in revealing clothing patterned upon the traditional garb of the region, you would be disappointed as I was. The “beauties” of the title are, in fact, the old buildings, art work, and religious artifacts in this Belgian town that dates back to the early Middle Ages.

The photos are beautiful and the things in the beautiful photos are beautiful, but the most interesting things in the book are the captions, which tell of the city’s history as it was a commercial center and its position under the various dukes and kings that had dominion over what later became Belgium. The poor country gets short shrift in European history, and sometimes these low-level focused photo books are great gateways to knowledge about overlooked regions.

So I liked the book.

Books mentioned in this review:

The title pretty much says it all: it’s a collection of easy crafts you can do with your children or your children should be able to do themselves, assuming they’re old enough to handle glue and scissors without inventing any new hair styles or gluing scissors to the light fixtures. That is to say, if you have boys, when they’re old enough to think crafts are for girls, but girls and girl things are icky.

Sixteen projects range from light woodworking in making a keyhanger to simple painting things and glued felt. The project materials don’t look to be too expensive and could probably be assembled from scraps if you’re a crafty person. However, if you’re a crafty person, you have ideas and craft books you can use to think up your own crafts for kids.

I guess the market is people who want to come up with something to do to occupy their little girls for an hour at a time. Not exactly me. But, hey, the Packers won the game during which I browsed this book.

Books mentioned in this review:

It’s hard to know what I expected when I picked this book up; probably a collection of poems in a chapbook sort of thing. It definitely carries that vibe, as Armbruster talks about Christianity, humility, and taking care of your fellow man in poems and bullet-pointed type musings.

However, the book has an essay on creativity, wherein the truly creative person thinks far ahead of others. The creative person sees the problem, sees that he is the one to solve it, sees the solution, and only then fills in the blanks to make that solution possible. 1, 2, 5, 3, 5, Armbruster calls it. In a recent piece, James Lileks describes Steve Jobs in those terms, although he doesn’t mention that he got it from Armbruster. He probably didn’t, but two pieces I’ve read ran in parallel.

The book itself came with two local papers’ obituaries for Armbruster from the middle 1990s clipped and tucked into them. I’ve noticed that’s a trend: putting authors’ obits in the authors’ books. I wonder where that started and why so many people do it.

At any rate, this book is worth a quick read. It’s an hour or so of realtime sports or a magazine-browse length of dedicated time, and the essay on creativity is worthwhile if you don’t get much out of the rest.

Books mentioned in this review:

I remember reading another book in this series, and I was surprised that I bought two. I’d have been more surprised if I had bought the second after I read Missouri Bandits, Bushwhackers, Outlaws, Crooks, Devils, Ghosts, & Desperadoes earlier this year. But I bought them both at the same time.

It’s more of the same: a couple things native to Missouri, many more things that were not native to Missouri but were instead made relevant by appending phrases like “folks in Missouri” to them, wingdings in words, and all that business.

Maybe I’m in a slightly more charitable mood in October than I was in January, since I will say these books might not be a complete waste of about an hour of a baseball game’s in between pitches time. I did find at least worth investigating for a written piece. But I won’t cite this book as a source, as you cannot take anything in it as truth.

Books mentioned in this review:

You remember when I bought this book four years ago? Me, either, but I remember I bought of books about the little British automobile at the time. I thought it might be a good little picture book to flip through while watching sports.

Well, I was sort of wrong.

This is not a mere picture book with lots of loving plates depicting the automobile. This is a very detailed history of the automobile and its evolution over the decades of its history written by a high-level employee of Triumph. The book pretty much enumerates the stock parts on every Triumph built based upon serial number. It will tell you that the Triumphs up to his serial number had this engine, and then to this number they had that suspension, and all the way up from the original TRs to the TR7. To be frank, I’m not a gearhead, so most of the information just rolled over me.

I say the author was a high-level employee because he has a low view of the labor that built the automobile. No, strike that: he had a low view of the organized labor that stopped the production of his beloved TRs at various plants at various points. He calls them suicidal and bloody minded at one point. Also, he has no truck with the United States government and its safety and emissions controls that start shackling the automobile’s performance in the 1960s. This guy is a Tea Partier, between the Tea Parties and drinking tea.

So what did I take away from this book? Well, I have a favorite TR body (the TR6, which was built in the 1960s and looks a little like the American pony cars of the era), and I have some insight into the importance of rally cars and those races to automobile dealers and manufacturers in Britain in the early 20th century. Also, I have a pile of research, so sometime, somewhere, a character in a book might drive a TR.

So it’s a worthwhile read if you’re into British cars or if you’re just out-of-control in your reading habits.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is the second of the two in the Three Aces omnibus edition I’m reading (remember, gentle reader, I have begun to break out the individual novels within omnibus editions for individual review, but when I’m done, this will still only count as a single volume for my annual book count).

At any rate, the plot: A businessman from the midwest comes to New York, seeking his son whom he drove off after the businessman thought the son had embezzled some money. Now that the real culprit has been identified, years later, the father wants to reconcile. Well, the mother wants to see the boy again. However, the police cannot find the son, so either he’s long gone or he’s changed his name. Wolfe guesses that the son will still retain his initials, so he has Goodwin place an ad in the paper that says, “P.H., we know you didn’t do it.” Strangely, that is the name of a recently convicted murderer who couldn’t be the guy, could he?

Of course he is. He’s taking the fall for killing his twue wuv’s husband, mostly because he thinks she’s done it. She thinks he’s done it. Since someone has begun to follow Goodwin, Wolfe suspects that the real culprit might still be out there. So he cogitates and Goodwin and the other bit players start running down leads. Other deaths during the investigation confirm Wolfe’s suspicion, so the book progresses until Wolfe unmasks the real killer in a sitdown in his (Wolfe’s) office.

It’s a good book for the genre. Those olden days mysteries, especially the good ones like this one, keep it moving, don’t get too detailed, and come in under 200 pages. Remember those days? Modern authors don’t, but I guess if you’re going to drop $30 on a hardback, the authors want to give you 140,000 words to make it worth your money. I think ebooks will change that for the better, make reading less of a daunting undertaking. Or so I hope.

Books mentioned in this review:

Yes, I do realize that I’m a book behind on Steyn’s works. I run a little late on political books, since I can only take a couple of them annually. I read enough blogs to get my fix of this sort of material daily, and when you’re reading it daily, the book form seems to be a bit tiresome.

I actually picked this book as the first selection in a shared reading experience a friend of mine in Minnesota suggested. Sort of like a book club, but just the two of us, and over the phone. We were talking about demographics one day, and I remembered I own this book, so I recommended it. He borrowed a copy from the library, and when I called him again, he fumed a bit about it and said he couldn’t read it because… well, because Steyn is that way. Also, my Canadian friend in Minnesota is quite probably not that way, which is to say obnoxiously conservative.

So I read it with an eye toward what it would mean to my friend, who is not a conservative. The thrust of Steyn’s argument lies in three facets: 1) Demography is destiny, 2) Sclerotic, secular, non-reproductive societies have their roots in their cradle-to-grave welfare systems, and 3) A certain worldwide demographic wants to destroy the West and make the world submit to its religion, and its birthrate exceeds that of the West. If you’re reading this blog, you’re familiar with it. In Steyn’s thesis, Western Europe and possibly all of Europe will be overrun by Islamic citizens in the near term, which will destroy those countries as they’ve been known, and of all the West, only America will maintain its civilization since it is barely replenishing its citizenry through things done routinely in seventies science fiction in extraplanetary zoos by human captives on display.

Steyn weaves the three main thrusts of his arguments together instead of building them syllogistically to the conclusion, and he puts barbs into the text. Between those two things, it’s really not going to convince my friend and maybe not many who are yet unconvinced. However, I think the target audience of the book is those who are already convinced and want affirmation or restatement of their beliefs, hopefully so they can go forth thoughtfully and convince others.

Five years after the book, I’m not as gloomy as Steyn was (and is now, given the title of his latest book–After America for those of you who might not know). The sweep of history is broad and long, and its predictors are more often wrong than not. However, the book does crystallize, or should, that our Western traditions and heritage are better than all the others that have been tried and do require some conscious defense thereof. If you merely enjoy liberty without recognizing its sources, someone will quickly take it from you.

Books mentioned in this review:

Is it super? Well, it’s over 4,850 entries spread over 506 pages, mostly on popular culture with heavy emphasis on films, so it’s big.

Is it trivia? Well, some of it is. A lot of it, though, depends upon phone numbers, house numbers, and license plate numbers of sets in films, sometimes the sort of thing you only glimpsed once. These researchers were thurough, and probably only working from videocassettes or laser discs when they compiled the book.

Is it incredible? Here’s the entry for KITT:

Michael Knight’s (David Hasselhoff) special black Pontiac Trans-Am in the TV series “Knight Rider.” KITT, which stands for Knight Institute Two Thousand, is voiced by William Danielson.

Incredible, as in you cannot believe any of it. Quick, what’s wrong with that entry?

Since it’s from 1984, all of the sports records have been broken since then except for Ivory Crockett’s 100-yard-dash record, which this book fails to mention. What it does rely on, though, is a very, very good knowledge of the author’s or the researchers’ favorite films, which explains why so many entries deal with Time Bandits or Somewhere in Time.

At any rate, it’s something that I kinda flipped through as I was winding down for bed or during sporting events over the course of months. I don’t know how much of it I’ll retain for Trivia Nights (the one item I’ve worked hard to retain is the name of the only singer to chart a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner”.) It also reminded me of how many interesting old movies I’ve not yet seen, and it assured me that Kate Mulgrew had done something else besides "Alien Lover" (which I have seen in its entirety) before Star Trek:Voyager.

Is it worth reading? If you’re a trivia masochist like I am.

Books mentioned in this review:

Oh, a churchpeoplewhohomeschooldunit.

Well, it’s not as bad as all that, but you do kind of start keeping score about how many bad guys would be likely to vote Republican, don’t you? In this particular novel, the bad guys are a bunch of people in a free-lovin’ (and “free-lovin'” includes children) religious group out in the hinterlands. Some kid, a gay football star held back from college ball by an injury, kills a farmer at a grain elevator, which in turn leads to a deputy who’s in the free-lovin’ church killing him, who leads to someone killing the deputy to silence him. Virgil Flowers comes to southwest Minnesota to investigate and to romance the lady sheriff in town.

As with Sandford novels, the action jumps between the good guys and the bad guys, so you know whodunit and why very early in the book, and the real puzzle is how the cops will prove it and deal with the political fallout. Frankly, it’s a bit of a narrative cop-out, no pun intended, but it does keep the plot moving along (and the writing of the novel, I’m sure). This book hits a bang-bang climax, but that’s not the climax. Instead, like the book Painted Ladies, we end up with a later ‘climax’ where it comes down to a dysfunctional family resolution wherein the protagonist is present, but really is only a witness to something happening, which is also dissatisfying.

So it’s a disappointing book overall, but it’s paced well. So you might not mind the disappointing elements if you don’t think about them too much or if your taste varies from mine.

Books mentioned in this review:

Well, now I’ve done gone and finished the series. Since I just took Painted Ladies back to the library, I picked up the last book in the Spenser series. Well, the last Parker wrote. Whether his estate keeps it going or not, this is the end of the series for me.

This book borrows a bit from Early Autumn, as Spenser takes on an apprentice to teach him how to be a man. It also borrows some from Stardust, High Profile, and the other show business plots in that it deals with a movie star (not a television star, not a radio talker, so completely different!), a large movie star, who might have killed a girl during some sexual games (fortunately, most modern audiences won’t know Parker is recycling Fatty Arbuckle). Complications ensue when Spenser not only gets fired for insubordination, but continues to discover that the mob owns this particular movie star as a money laundering device.

It’s recycled, and longtime fans and history buffs will know where it comes from, but it’s still not among the worst of the books involved. Again, Parker doesn’t summon the posse to help him, relying on his new apprentice, a native American. It’s not like Gerry Broz or the zombie version of April Kyle appear. The chapters follow the recently common chapter of action followed by chapter of talking to Susan trope, but at least though she’s a therapist, she’s his girl. So it’s probably worth a read.

Also, given that it’s written in the OE and not the DYB (Dark Years of Bush), there are no gratuitous jibes at Republicans or Bush in this book. It gives me heart that there’s a block of time in which modern detective fiction is written that does not slap at half the country to prove the detective or narrator is a sophisticated thinker.

You know, maybe I will try one of the new guy’s Spenser books. I might like them better than some of Parker’s postings. But I need to get out of the habit of getting books from the library. I have enough books to read now. And as for my Parker collection, as some of you know, I have one of the best Parker collections in Missouri if not the country. I’ve gotten out of the habit of buying the books whether new or used, but I’ll probably fill out the collection from used book fairs and stores as time goes on and through Ebay (for the hardback of Mortal Stakes, the only one from the early ones I lack in hardback). I used to have images of my collection on Geocities, but that’s gone now, obviously. If you’re interested (or, more to the point, if you don’t explicitly stop me), I’ll get those up sometime.

Books mentioned in this review:

This Rex Stout / Nero Wolfe mystery starts out with a quick twist: Archie is hired by a businessman to follow him to a certain address, but the businessman does not show as scheduled. Instead, police are surrounding the address, as the businessman has been found dead in a construction site across the street. However, the corpse in the hole is not the man who talked to Goodwin. There are more twists in this book in the first thirty pages than you see in many books over the course of 300.

The book cannot sustain the twisting over the long haul, though; we discover that the real businessman, who is the dead businessman, had a love nest at the address where a variety of women came to call. One of them might have had a hand in the murder, and Wolfe and Goodwin investigate. It’s stretched a bit to novel length and relies a little bit on deus ex machina of Wolfe cogitating and using detectives other than the first person narrating Goodwin to set up the big finish, but it’s not a bad novel.

It is a little strange, though, that this book came out in 1960, nine years after The Book of the Crime, but Manhattan feels vastly different between them. In this book, it’s relatively modern, and but barring the lack of smart phones and computers, might be modern day. As a reader, I’m fortunate enough to remember those times, so I can relate to fiction written before 1998.

And as a side note, this novel appears in a three-book-omnibus edition of Wolfe stories. Because I’ve just about given up on hitting 100 books this year.

(See also this previous Rex Stout review, The Father Hunt.)

Books mentioned in this review:

I had a certain sadness reading this book, the first Spenser novel published after Robert B. Parker’s death. The copyright notice even attributes the copyright to the Estate of Robert B. Parker. Even though I’ve been a bit rough on him in book reports for the better part of a decade now, his early works still meant a lot to me.

An art expert and college professor engages Spenser to guard him while he conducts a ransom-for-old-painting swap. A precise bomb kills the art expert after the swap, while Spenser is still on the job, so Spenser tries to track down the art thieves. In the course of events, he finds himself as the target while investigating an elite ring of mercenaries and art thieves who might be seeking to right art confiscations from World War II.

This book eschews some of the pitfalls of the later books. When he’s the target, Spenser has the chance to summon the rainbow posse of multicultural tough guys from around the country, but he does not. The book mixes in a large number of allusions to classical literature, but it still hits the regular Spenser catch phrases (“Tough, but oh so gentle” and “Pretty to think so” and whatnot). Additionally, the plot is a little forced, particularly the resolution, which takes a ring of the aforementioned international mercenaries out for Spenser and turns in a resolution based on a bad mommy and daddy domestic situation. A couple of the plot elements and set pieces within the book might also have been lifted pretty much wholely from the early works.

So it’s not too bad, but not without its flaws. Knowing that Parker won’t pen any more of them, good or bad, still saddens me, and I’m not sure how I feel about the series continuing without him.

Books mentioned in this review:

It’s strange; I’ve borrowed a number of the later parts to this series from the library, and this is an ex-library volume that I own, so I kinda felt like I had to be extra careful with it when I read it. Even though, as an ex-library copy, it’s obvious that other people have not been as scrupulous as I. I passed this book a number of times on my shelves, each time a little surprised that I owned one of Sandford’s books that I had yet to read. Finally, the time was right, and I happened to spot it sometime other than I was 300 pages into a 600 page science fiction or high fantasy epic.

It’s an early volume from the series; number four, I think. Davenport has not yet become the political fixer cop he does later, although he does get a glimpse of that lifestyle as he travels to New York to try to hunt a serial killer whom he’d already captured in Minneapolis but who escaped custody. The killer is strung out on drugs and–wait for it–does gruesome things. Seriously. Although he just dumps the bodies and does not pose them ritually, which differentiates him from some of Sandford’s other villains.

As Davenport purportedly is supposed to draw press attention from the actual cops hunting the serial killer, he’s also commissioned as an outsider by a secret intelligence project to find a group of vigilante cops who might be vigilanteing. So there’s another thread here with lots of intrigue.

It’s an okay book, but Sandford does a very, very naughty thing: he withholds a very pertinent bit of information so he can spring it on us as a surprise. The bad guy is crossdressing to get his victims. So we get him all out and about and whatnot, and this pertinent bit is not revealed until an interview with a jailhouse neighbor transvestite reveals that the villain learned how to do it right from him. Then, suddenly, we get passages of the villain dolling himself up and mentions that he’s walking in heels, and so on. I mean, he’s hiding out as live-in help for an elderly woman by wearing drag at all hours, and this is not mentioned until two-thirds of the way through the book. Oh, for Pete’s sake.

Books mentioned in this review:

I missed a book in the series, as the last Executioner book I read was #20, New Orleans Knockout. However, when one misses a book in the series, it’s not like missing an episode in the serial. Although I might miss a couple references to prior characters, it doesn’t completely hang upon what happened then.

This book sends Mack Bolan to Hawaii, where he encounters some recurring characters and they get together to bust up not just a mob plot, but a plot from a Red Chinese general, possibly rogue, who is using a secret volcano lair for ill. Strangely, though, the hit on the lair doesn’t play out like a secret agent novel would; instead, it’s a pretty straightforward assault, and a bit anti-climactic as a climax for the novel. So it’s not one of the better ones in the series, or I wasn’t in a proper appreciative mood.

That said, the novel is noteworthy for the number of times it refers to a karate wraparound or a terrycloth karate wraparound. Kung fu movies were emerging in the culture, but I guess the word gi had not made it across the pacific just yet.

Books mentioned in this review:

Given that the local school district has removed this book from its school library and curriculum and seeing as I’ve defended the school board’s right to do so and have taken issue with use of the word “ban” to describe the school board’s actions (see this and here). Since I already owned the book, it seemed a topical time to read it. And…. meh.

It’s a novel about a writer writing about his experiences in Dresden during the firebombing in World War II. That’s the frame story: a writer has produced this book and has dealt with his compatriot who was also there. Then, there’s the text of the novel, where a survivor of Dresden has come unstuck in time and goes back and forth between the past and the present and who was kidnapped by aliens and kept in a zoo for a number of years on their planet, where he copulated with a porn actress. This novel-inside-the-novel was a successful optometrist until he started expressing his belief in the extraterrestrials, who can see things in the fourth dimension and to whom all moments are equally present or some such, through newspaper letters to the editor and appearances on late-night radio. So maybe he’s going crazy instead of it being a science fiction book. Also, the writer of the novel inserts himself into the novel by pointing himself out when the narrator of the novel-inside-the-novel meets him.

So I can see why this was popular on campuses: it’s a messed up novel that has the play-within-the-play thing going on, an anti-war message at the time of an unpopular war, and enough oblique things open to interpretation to make smooth sledding for students or tenure-track scholars who need to publish. That’s not to say it’s unentertaining and a lightweight read. It is. But I’m unsold on its presence on any list of serious literature. No doubt I did not enjoy it as its previous owner, Mr. J. Tobacco.

Books mentioned in this review:

I got this book relatively recently and dived into it as I thought it would be a quick, episodic read. Well, it was quicker than I thought; of the book’s 190 page heft, only 165 of it are the book itself; the rest are footnotes, index, and whatnot.

The book expands upon an essay, and it shows. Separated into chapters covering conservativism’s rise in talk radio, the blogosphere, new publishers, and on college campuses, the book reads like a series of blog entries where footnotes replace hyperlinks. It’s audience is not the readers of blogs, per se, as most of the information within it is well known to people who have followed blogs for years. Instead, it’s geared to those who read books and newspapers.

In 2011, it’s an interesting time capsule. Its semi-triumphalist tone is kind of amusing given the events of the 2006 and 2008 elections which proved that conservative values were not as widely ascendent as they seemed. Also, the book provides a time capsule of the blogosphere in 2004-2005. Remember when Andrew Sullivan and Charles Johnson were conservative stalwarts? Good times, good times. Also, the book refers to a blog called “2blowhards” which I don’t think I’d heard of, but the author must have read it plenty. The book shows how much changes and how much has remained the same.

I dunno. It’s an okay book, I suppose. A bit stretched to fit book size and, as I said, a bit dated and a bit redundant if you read blogs.

Books mentioned in this review: