Category: Book Report

This book finds Mack Bolan, the Executioner, winging into Texas to take on the Mafia there. In this particular book, Mack rescues a hostage, buys an old fighter jet to hit important men with mob connections in three cities in rapid succession, and destroys what might be an attempt to create a new petro-state out of the former Republic of Texas. The books are very similar in the series, but each has its own plot and twists, so they definitely keep fresh. Also, they’re books on can tear through to make quota.

Books mentioned in this review:

This year, I decided to bone up on my geek bona fides and read some geek lore that I’d previously skipped. Although my beautiful wife read the trilogy ten years ago when the films came out (I said TEN YEARS AGO, granpa!), I didn’t. I also missed out in my youth in the middle eighties to read these in the formative years where they’d have had the most impact and I’d be a slavish fanboy. As it is, I am not.

You know the plot, surely, so I won’t bore you with going into it. Instead, I’d like to point out the book that The Fellowship of the Ring (yes, I know, Tolkien himself called it the Company more than the Fellowship, blah blah blah. I did catch that) most reminded me of was Kim by Rudyard Kipling. They both feature very lush descriptions of exotic locations populated with strange (to us) people, and both feature someone who is elevated to play a big role in The Great Game/The War of the Ring. Both feature Roads which cut through the wilderness. I don’t know if any serious scholar has seen it and written a dissertation on it, but you could definitely put a deep comparison through the works.

That said, Lord of the Rings might be a touch too lush for optimum enjoyment. Its very populous cast of characters makes it hard to relate to a single person within it as the reader’s proxy. The best you can do is Sam Gamgee. Even Frodo is a cipher, really. And you need that proxy when running through dozens of pages of elaborate history/description/meeting of the minds to get to the next brief bit of action–although by the beginning of The Two Towers, we get to more action, but by splitting the Fellowship into two or three parts and giving us complete books without Sam, it can still be a slog to read.

Also, note I did not read the appendices which account for something like 200 pages of the final book. Seriously, more of the lush background and description with none of the action and, ultimately, none of the relevance to the story at hand? Maybe, as I say, this would have been more relevant had I grown up a decade earlier or read these books in my younger, more time to kill days.

That being said, I do have the rest of the Tolkien canon, and I will get to it eventually, but not right away. This stuff is rich and deep and dense–more so than Kipling himself–and I need to tear through some books to make sure I make quota this year.

So it’s worth reading if you fancy yourself a geek, and it is a 20th century classic that will probably be studied and relevant in the future when so much is not. But steel yourself. This is not a comic book nor a 20th century American thriller.

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I read this book before I read The Well-Stocked Bookcase, and I liked the genre enough so that I decided to read the latter, too, in addition to checking another book of the type from the library (returned unread, as the completion of this book and then the aforementioned The Well-Stocked Bookcase sort of put me off of them for a while).

This book stems from a newspaper column for the Baltimore Sun, where he read and wrote book reviews on classic literature. The early part of the book deals with actual dyed-in-the-wool classics, and as I read his book reviews on them, it really made me want to go on to read the books themselves. Then, the chapters wander into more contemporary nonfiction and into lesser books by noted authors, and suddenly it veered into that “my stamp on classics” territory.

Still, a good read, and you’ve probably recognize the titles of most. I won’t enumerate them here to clutter up your skimming. Suffice to say, I have most of the classics he mentioned and don’t remember any of the non-classics he talks about.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book marks Pendleton’s return to the series after the one-off Sicilian Slaughter by Jim Peterson. By comparison, it’s a better book. Also, it’s clear that the book was planned to be number 16 in the series, as it mentions 15 different campaigns and begins the same way as 16, with Bolan wounded and needing attention. Instead of going to a bad doctor in Manhattan, though, he’s taken in by a brother and sister on a New Jersey farm. Actually, since Bolan was unwounded at the end of Peterson’s book, they had to graft a wounding into the first chapter. But it’s pretty clear what happened in the real world. Also, the back has a bio and photo of Pendleton to show he does exist and does not (yet) represent a stable of writers.

Bolan has to recuperate in hiding while the mob searches the countryside for him. He does, but his benefacting farmers are captured by the mob, so Bolan has to conduct a rescue instead of just hitting and gitting.

Contrasting a bad Bolan book with a Pendleton Bolan book really puts the latter into stark relief. The books often begin with epitaphs from famous poets and philosophers followed with a Bolan quote to spin it; the books also feature cast-off allusions to classical literature that one finds in a lot of WWII veteran-aged pulp writers that you don’t really see in modern popular fiction. Telling.

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This book follows Panic in Philly, which I read way back in 2007. That book report contains the immortal lines:

Of all the series I’ve sampled this year, this is the least likely for a return visit; that’s not to say that it’s bad pulp, but it’s the worst of the pulp I’ve read this year.

Something changed by the time 2010 rolled around and I read Missouri Deathwatch and Arizona Ambush. Maybe I got better acquainted with pulp. But I changed my mind about the Executioner series.

But about this book: This book was not written by Don Pendleton; I read somewhere it was about a licensing dispute or something. So this take on Mack Bolan is more straightforward brutal than Pendleton’s philosphical (at times) hero. A couple of the set pieces involve Bolan killing people that I don’t think Pendleton’s Bolan would have, and in theatrical fashion with bad “numbers” (Bolan’s calculation of the odds, a recurring trope).

At any rate, wounded Bolan goes to NYC to get healed up after the Philadelphia adventure (and has to kill the doctor who helps him). He then decides to go to Italy to take out a training ground for mafia soldiers. He blows stuff up and whatnot. The end.

An relatively unsatisfying outing, but I guess Pendleton was refreshed after his brief hiatus, as the next novel (which I’m currently working on) is better.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book updates an earlier edition of the book, wherein the editors of the Book of the Month Club got together to decide what a well-stocked bookcase should include and then included a couple paragraphs of why they think so. The subtitle limits the conceit to 72 Enduring novels by Americans published between 1926 and 1998. The analysis of each book is much shorter than in Vintage Reading, as they more likely reflect the blurbs in the BOMC newsletter than actual news reviews.

So what do they think should be on your bookshelves? (I have italicized those I know I own and have bolded those I have already read.)

Title	Author	Year
Accidental Tourist	Anne Tyler	1985
Alias Grace	Margaret Atwood	1996
All the King’s Men	Robert Warren	1946
Angle of Repose	Wallace Stegner	1971
Appointment in Samarra	John O’Hara	1934
The Assistant	Bernard Malamud	1957
Bastard Out Of Carolina	Dorothy Allison	1992
Because It Is Bitter, And Because It Is My Heart	Joyce Carol Oates	1990
The Bell Jar	Sylvia Plath	1963
Beloved	Toni Morrison	1987
The Bonfire of the Vanities	Tom Wolfe	1987
Burr	Gore Vidal	1973
Catch-22	Joseph Heller	1961
The Catcher in the Rye	J.D. Salinger	1951
Cold Mountain	Charles Frazier	1997
The Counterlife	Philip Roth	1987
The Day of the Locust	Nathaniel West	1939
Death Comes For The Archbishop	Willa Cather	1927
Delta Wedding	Eudora Welty	1946
Edwin Mulhouse	Steven Milhauser	1972
A Fan’s Notes	Frederick Exley	1968
A Farewell to Arms	Ernest Hemingway	1929
A Flag for Sunrise	Robert Stone	1981
From Here to Eternity	James Jones	1951
Geek Love	Katherine Dunn	1988
Gone with the Wind	Margaret Mitchell	1936
The Grapes of Wrath	James Steinbeck	1939
Guard of Honor	James Gould Cozzens	1948
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter	Carson McCullers	1940
Heaven’s My Destination	Thornton Wilder	1935
Invisible Man	Ralph Ellison	1952
The Joy Luck Club	Amy Tan	1989
The Last Hurrah	Edwin O’Connor	1956
The Late George Apley	John P. Marquand	1937
Libra	Don DeLillo	1988
Lie Down in Darkness	William Styron	1952
Light in August	William Faulkner	1932
Little Big Man	Thomas Berger	1964
Lolita	Vladimir Nabakov	1958
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne	Brian Moore	1956
Look Homeward, Angel	Thomas Wolfe	1929
The Magic Christian	Terry Southern	1960
The Maltese Falcon	Dashiell Hammett	1930
The Man with the Golden Arm	Nelson Algren	1949
The Mountain Lion	Jean Stafford	1947
The Moviegoer	Walker Percy	1961
The Naked and the Dead	Norman Mailer	1948
Nickel Mountain	John Gardner	1973
Other Voices, Other Rooms	Truman Capote	1948
The Postman Always Rings Twice	James M. Cain	1934
Rabbit, Run	John Updike	1960
Ragtime	E.L. Doctorow	1975
The Recognitions	William Gaddis	1955
Seize the Day	Saul Bellow	1956
The Sheltering Sky	Paul Bowles	1949
Slaughterhouse Five	Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.	1969
Song of Solomon	Toni Morrison	1977
The Sound and the Fury	William Faulkner	1929
Studs Lonigan	James T. Farrell	1932, 1934, 1935
The Sun Also Rises	Ernest Hemingway	1926
Tales of the City	Armistead Maupin	1978-1989
Tender is the Night	F. Scott Fitzgerald	1934
Them	Joyce Carol Oates	1969
To Kill A Mockingbird	Harper Lee	1960
The Transit of Venus	Shirley Hazzard	1980
The Trees/The Fields/The Town	Conrad Richter	1940, 1946, 1950
U.S.A.	John Dos Passos	1930, 1933, 1936
The Wall	John Hersey	1950
The Wapshot Chronicle	John Cheever	1957
What Makes Sammy Run?	Budd Schulberg	1941
That Which Springeth Green	J.F. Powers	1988
The World According to Garp	John Irving	1978

Apparently, my bookshelves are not well-stocked. I must find another book fair, stat! Although it would not surprise me if I did not own more of these titles hidden among my to read shelves and forgotten.

The only one on the list I read but do not own is Catch-22, which I read the summer before my freshman year of college when the big Swedish mechanic next door taunted me for not having read much literary literature and planning to be an English major. He recommended it. Thanks, Mark!

The thing about this sort of popularity contest is that the list tends to be stacked toward more recent books. Or, in this case, books recent to a decade ago. You end up with a lot more “Who?” responses the later you get; I think the “classics” portion of this list really stops about 1960, and anything after it is very suspect. I mean, two books by Joyce Carol Oates? Really?

At any rate, it’s a quick read and hopefully has brushed me up a little about contemporary serious literature, but I’m not sure I’m going to remember anything new except that Carson McCullers is the author of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

Books mentioned in this review:

This is the first book of trivia-stuff or fact-review things I picked up for my upcoming June adventure, and I chose wisely. If I was looking for a quick read, this juvenile book is it. I should start checking publishers so I don’t get snookered by Scholastic.

It’s a quick bit of paragraphs with history vignettes / trivium in it, but it’s not without some trepidation. Any time you run into something in a book that you know is not true, particularly in a trivia book, you have to wonder if any of it is true. In this particular book, the author explains that the origin of the term “jeep” is that soldiers named it after the Popeye cartoon character. Well, that’s one theory of many.

Regardless, if anything in here stuck in my head, hopefully it’s the right questions.

Books mentioned in this review:

This is the 14th book in the series. Mack Bolan is summoned to San Diego by some former associates who worry about Bolan’s mentor from Vietnam, who seems to have become embroiled in some sort of mob scheme. Although Bolan does not consider San Diego a major target, he decides to investigate. When he tries to visit the general, Bolan finds the man dead of an apparent suicide and his papers in the fireplace. Bolan decides to investigate and clear his former boss’s name as much as possible. During the course of his investigations, he uncovers a ring involving stolen military-grade equipment.

It’s not one of the strongest in the series, and it contains a little more speechifying than the norm, but a quick and enjoyable read nevertheless.

Books mentioned in this review:

This is the 13th book in the series, and it follows closely the events from Boston Blitz. Bolan goes to Washington D.C. to break the Mafia’s growing control over the levers of power. He meets a woman used to bait powerful men into compromising positions who might be an ally or who might be an enemy and discovers that the powerful man behind the Mafia’s efforts–the elusive Lupo–knows the woman better than she knows.

Also, explosions and guns. Bang! Bang!

Books mentioned in this review:

Here’s another bulleted list of trivia items, ungrouped. This one, though, is targeted for adults. And in case you’re wondering, this book’s known untruth is the assertion that the Great Wall of China might be the only man-made thing visible from space. As you and I know, 35 years after this book was published and some decade and a half after the rise of the Internet and Snopes.com, uh, no.

So I don’t know if any of this will help me at all, if I retained any of it, but I did find something of interest in this book. As it was written in 1975, it includes trivia about cigarettes, and they are not demonized. Additionally, there’s a lot of trivia about tea in this book, so the knowledge of the author speaks to the things the author likes, perhaps. I can almost picture what he looked like in 1975, swilling tea and smoking on a cigarette. Hippie.

Books mentioned in this review:

You’re saying, “What, Noggle, you’re reading cartoon books now and counting them in your annual total?” If you’ve paid attention, I’ve done this for a number of years. I’ve read these two books in the last two days as a brief respite from the 500+ page books I’m still working on, so deal with it. Or skip the report if you weren’t already.

At any rate, as I worked through these books, my wife mentioned that Dilbert was funnier than Garfield. Well, I guess it depends on what your life is. If you work at a white collar job, you probably get the jokes in Dilbert. If you have a cat, you can relate to Garfield. If you don’t live the lifestyle, then you’re not going to relate to the humor. I think both of them are amusing, and I don’t think myself any less sophisticated for it.

The Adams book is from the middle 1990s, but its humor remains topical enough to not be dated. It’s the same with the Garfield book, although its timing is my senior year of high school, so I get the extra little bit of nostalgia and have read this morning the Garfield cartoon that ran on my 18th birthday. I don’t know if I’ll get nostalgia kicks out of anything after 1995, so Scott Adams will never do that.

Well, there you have it: about as in-depth of a review of fourteen and twenty-one year old cartoon books as you might expect.

Books mentioned in this review:

I began to read this book a long time ago. I remember reading this book to my son when he got a rare excursion into the basement in our home in Old Trees. That’s before he was our eldest son, and our non-eldest son is turning three next month. So it’s been a long time since I first put a bookmark in this book.

As you might recollect, my main methodology of reading poetry these last few years has been to read it aloud while my son(s) played. Sometimes he (they) actually ask(s) for more poems. But I read this aloud to my boy before he got to that point. And then I hit the poem letters, which sometimes run for several pages. That’s too much to try to jam into a session where one is reading aloud to a child and interjecting to keep the child from flossing with the poorly insulated electrical cord.

So I thought I’d read the epistles to myself. Then I hit the poem “Of the Progress of the Soul”. Which is 16 pages. Which is a long slog. Especially if you’re trying to pay attention and read the poem out loud, which is what I do: I cannot read poetry without reading it aloud to see how it sounds and how the rhythm of the words, line breaks, and punctuations make it sound. You know what 500+ lines of a single poem take? An hour or so scattered in places where I waited to pick children up from school over the course of several days. What will they think of the Noggle boys’ Daddy, who has to move his lips when he reads? I don’t know, but suffice to say the number of birthday party invitations has declined.

Oh, wait, a comment on the poetry? It’s “Meh.” I mean, Donne’s poems are about love, sometimes, and spirtual all of the time. If you’re going to read him, read him in an anthology. There are few poets I can take in large doses–I mean, it took me four years to read this volume and coming on twenty to read the complete works of Emily Dickinson (as of 20 years ago; I think they’ve been revised upwards since). He has a couple of quotable lines here and there, but if the poems are going to stretch into more than a dozen pages–there’d better be bloodshed in them, not just the flattery of a perfect soul who died two years prior.

So get it if your class requires it, I suppose–I think that’s the purpose of this cheap volume. Or if you have patience. But be prepared.

Books mentioned in this review:

Earlier this year, I read Battlestar Galactica in hardback, so why not run through the paperback sequel in short order? So I did.

This does continue the season of reading repeats, as I also read this book in high school. This book covers the two-part “Gun on Ice Planet Zero” episode, where Apollo and Starbuck lead a team of convict mountaineers to an ice planet to disable a giant Cylon laser. I mean, what’s not in it for a fourteen-year-old to love? Giant lasers, a mismash of World War II film plots (although a fourteen-year-old in 1986 might not recognize this), and a young child who stows away and gets into danger that I can relate to? Well, all except the last: no matter how much the writers insist young people need that character, we never did.

It’s a good adaptation, which means it adds some depth to the events depicted on the screen and does not generally detract from the charaters and the established mythos (or at least what I imagined was the mythos). So it’s worth a read and maybe, 20 years later, a re-read. And it makes me want to watch the original series again, which I haven’t done in five years or so.

Books mentioned in this review:

Repeat month here at Nogglestead continues. I first read this book in middle school or high school, so it’s been a while since I’ve read it, but this is a repeat, albeit not a recent, unintentional repeat like Thunderball.

This was the first in his Benjamin Smoke series of books. The Smoke books didn’t go far; he would later go with another series character, Matthew Hope, and that would take off. Yes, I do have some of the Matt Hope books on my to-read shelves, and they will be reruns, too. But McBain was a writer who carried his quality on for more than 50 years, so I’m happy to reread many of them in a span of decades myself.

The schtick here is that Ben Smoke, a retired police lieutenant, does some freelance investigating because he wants to find a case he cannot solve. Most cases, he points out, are easily solved with dilligent police work and fall into the same ruts of criminal activity. Ergo, when he finds strange cases that might be impossible to solve, he gets involved and wants to be unable to solve it. Ultimately, though, he finds he can.

In this case (the first book, but not the first he has worked on; the book alludes to other capers preceding the printing), Smoke helps out a funeral director whose funeral home is broken into and a body stolen. Smoke investigates, even after the corpse is found abandoned in a vacant lot, because he uncovers the fact that many funeral homes in the area have been broken into without a loss of property except the one embalmed body. He works sort of with the police, many of whom remember him from his days on the force, but he gets shut out so they can don’t jeopardize the prosecution. In another funeral home burglary, a technician is killed, so the ante is upped to murder. Smoke beats the police to most of the witnesses and relevant people to question and, of course, solves the case.

It’s a quick read, a decent outing by McBain. I did pick up an additional thing this read that I would not have in my earlier run through it: Smoke hits a crow with his car and brings it into his home to nurse it back to health, which gives Smoke the opportunity to gripe several times about how he hates the Hitchcock film The Birds. Evan Hunter (Ed McBain) wrote that screenplay. It’s a bit of an injoke I would not have gotten in the middle 1980s.

Books mentioned in this review:

Well, it would appear that I have read this book in paperback form in 2006. I didn’t mean to re-read it, but I did sometime pick up a hardback copy of it, and so I have.

I think the things I said then apply, but I’d like to add that reading it in close proximity to American pulp fiction of only a decade later shows a stark contrast in the British versus the American thriller styles. This book is very slow to develop to action, and the set pieces are interspersed with character building and scenery. I’d expect that’s why they translate better to film than some American thrillers; a lot of the thickness of the book translates into the shots and the varied action bits from the book get included more directly, whereas a slam-bang American thriller has to be cut down to size.

At any rate, to summarize the plot: James Bond becomes a health food fanatic, briefly, and meets an enemy agent at a spa. The enemy agent tries to kill him, but Bond survives and gets some revenge on the fellow. SPECTRE has a plot to steal two nuclear weapons and does. Bond is sent to the Caribbean on what he thinks is a wild goose chase, but he finds the SPECTRE agents responsible and, with the help of Felix Leiter, thwarts the plan.

A good interlude. The film follows the book pretty well, as I mentioned; however, I’m not sure how the beginning section really adds to the book other than to fluff it up, as the enemy agent from the spa is only tangentally associated with the main plot. I think Fleming is a little guilty of padding here.

Books mentioned in this review:

Well, this is the next Executioner book. In the previous book, Mack Bolan receives word that his kid brother and his love-of-his-life are missing in Massachussetts, so Bolan goes to the East Coast to find them. He starts knocking off low end mob shops and leaves a survivor with a message: someone knows why Mack is back, and unless they want him to go really ballistic, they’d better make him happy. There is some mob dealing and wheeling, and Mack blows a lot of bad guys and their cars and/or homes up.

Note to self: I’m not going to be able to read 45 more of these contiguously; they are light snacks, for all their virtues as soul-searching, morality-affirming pulp fiction. I need something with a little more depth, or at least a little more variety, than a steady diet of these.

Which pretty much rules out an actual subscription to them. I’m not sure I could handle three of these a month, every month.

Books mentioned in this review:

I hope you like The Executioner series. As you might know from previous entries, I do. So my wife bought me 47 of them for my birthday, which means I’m probably going to read a lot of pulp paperbacks this year and next.

This is the 11th entry in the series. The long-running characters are getting established, and the history which will be referred to in the future happens now. The plot? Uh, Mack Bolan goes to San Francisco, meets an attractive woman who may be an ally or an enemy, shoots up some mafioso, and searches his soul.

That being said, that’s one aspect of the early Pendleton entries in the Mack Bolan series: Mack Bolan has a certain depth, in that he questions what he’s doing, his mortality, and his morality a bit. The books often start out with a juxtaposition of an epigraph from a known (at that time) poet and an epigram from one of Mack Bolan’s war journals. So they do try to include a little depth beyond just the gun porn and explosions. That really elevates pulp in my estimation.

A good, quick read that thematically embraces good versus evil, somewhat reflectively.

Books mentioned in this review:

This is a 3-In-One Volume, as the dustjacket indicates, which means I might have screwed myself as far as the absolute metrics are concerned. This is the 21st book I’ve read this year, but if I’d read individual novels and whatnot, I’d be on 24. But such is life. When I read The Green Mile, someday, I’m going to take advantage of just that.

Meanwhile, this is the first book of G. McDonald’s that I have read in seven years (the last, apparently, was Skylar in Yankeeland). I read a lot of McDonald when I was in high school, back when I read a lot. These books were much fresher then, about ten or fifteen years old. Like me. But he was one of the big three Mc/MacDonalds (Ross and John D. being the others). But Gregory was the lesser of the three in output and ultimate popularity.

The books are the first three in the Fletch series. The first was made into the Chevy Chase film, albeit with some elements altered to make it more cinematic. Strangely, I like the film a little better, as it ties some things up better. In it, an investigative reporter for a newspaper goes undercover on a beach to find out the source of its drug traffic. As he does that, millionaire Alan Stanwyk hires Fletch, in his drifter disguise, to kill Stanwyk, who claims to have a fast-moving cancer. Fletch investigates both lines and solves them, but the two plotlines are parallel and only slightly converge at the end in an unsatisfying demideus ex machina. The movie ties it up better.

In Confess, Fletch, Fletch visits Boston from his recent residence in Italy. He’s seeking some paintings stolen from his fiance’s father. The father has disappeared. The father’s third wife follows Fletch to find out where her paintings are. And someone is murdered in the apartment Fletch borrowed for his stay on the night he arrives. Inspector Flynn, another McDonald character, gives Fletch enough lead to investigate the murder as well as the stolen paintings, and Fletch resolves both. These plotlines resolve a little better.

Fletch’s Fortune finds Fletch blackmailed by the CIA to bug the rooms of journalists at a national convention where the primary target, a newspaper magnate, is murdered. Fletch investigates and solves the crime.

It’s an interesting throwback, the investigative reporter. Remember when they were relevant, briefly, in the 1970s and early 1980s? Remarkable.

A good read; I tore through it, relatively. I have at least one more McDonald on my shelves–a Flynn novel–and need to revisit McDonald’s other works as well. If that’s not enough to get you to consider it, nothing is.

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This is a particularly timely book, as I am now staring at 40 myself and am getting started on my 2/3 life crisis as we speak. I’ve read Barry for 20 years, ever since that Dave Barry Borrowed Book Staining Incident of 1989. So I know how the next 20 years of Dave Barry’s life are going to turn out. Strangely, I also know how both of Dave Barry’s parents died by the time he was 40, too. That’s all very meta, of course, unrelated to the text, but lately I’m really sticking on when a book was written, where I was at the time, and where I and the author might have gone since. But you’re not here for that. Well, if you’re reading the review and did not get here from a Hong Kong Google search for Dave Barry Turns 40 book report, you might be here for that.

At any rate, this book talks about getting older back in an era when 40 was older. Now that the Boomers have come along, though, they destroyed the concepts of “older” even as Dave Barry makes fun of them here. You’ve got your bits on relationships and marriage, your parents and kids, and your body’s changes.

Dave Barry’s humor is topical, and (I haven’t read his recent work–when did the blogs all stop linking to him?) the pieces talk generically about politicians without (too much) asserting that one side is better than the other. That’s a nice respite. Although given the halcyon era we’re dealing with–B.C.–maybe I’ll discover his work changes in the 21st century. I hope not.

Recommended, of course.

Books mentioned in this review: