Category: Book Report

If you’re a long-time reader, you know I like Bill Cosby (see Cosbyology, Love and Marriage, and Time Flies). This book came out in the middle 1980s, so it includes some of the bits from the Bill Cosby: Himself film, but it also has a number of other essays and anecdotes about raising his children (and about being raised as a child).

One thing I still don’t get is the inclusion of the Forward and Afterward by Dr. Alvin Poussaint. Maybe Dr. Cosby hopes to make a meta statement about the themes within his book, add a dash of seriousness about them, through this device, but frankly, I found Dr. Poussaint’s advice to be trite. But maybe that’s not targeted to me.

One of the better in his line of books (I say having read Cosbyology most recently, so I’m working from that constraint).

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is five books ahead of Tennessee Smash and advances the overarching story quite a bit. Mack Bolan is going to lead a government team, the story goes, so he’s driving east and slaughtering a bunch of mafiosos on the way over the course of the week. This is the sixth book in that week. Bolan infiltrates a hard site in Baltimore, impersonates an independent Mafia hitman (the Ace of Spades gambit again), and finds a murdered capo whom none in his family mourn.

Bolan susses out the story, interdicts a forty million dollar shipment of gold, and returns to the hardsite to shoot a bunch of people with Italian names.

It’s a quick read, pretty good for pulp (as have been some of the others I’ve read in the series), and worth some change at a book fair.

Books mentioned in this review:

I bought this book sometime at a book fair, alone, without its two companions. Will I pick up the others? I suppose if I find them at a book fair. Why do I do that sort of thing (see also the report on Star Trek: Dark Victory, where I pick up the second book in a trilogy by itself)? Because they’re something wrong with me.

This book begins the story about the rise of Khan from “Space Seed” and The Wrath of Khan in the last century and at least one trilogy in this new one. It’s told with a wrapper story of the original Enterprise crew going to a colony of genetic engineered folk who want to join the Federation to avoid a Klingon threat. Within that story, Kirk reviews the rise of Khan from his birth ca 1970 to somewhere near his 20th birthday (1989) where he’s putting together his group to take over the world, or at least to get launched into space.

Meanwhile, although we know that Khan will rise, we’re treated to the story of Gary Seven (!) and his team breaking up a genetic engineering ring in India and doing other things to stave off humanity’s self-extinction. However, at the root of it, this is a book about Gary Seven. I’m old school enough to know who Gary Seven is without hitting a wiki. The bulk of the novel centers on a minor character from the original series and weaves in actual historic and Star Trek historic events.

All that geek love can only make up so much for a novel whose pacing is just a bit off. The narrative didn’t really pull me along, so it’s not a series I’m particularly compelled to continue. If I find them for a buck a throw, maybe I’ll pick the others up. But I’m not ordering them from Amazon or anything.

Special Noggle Fun Fact: I noted to my wife when we watched Star Wars this week that I’ve read a pile of Star Trek books, but I’m not sure I’ve read any Star Wars books except for the Star Wars Storybook when I was like eight.

Books mentioned in this review:

As Tam predicted when I bought the book two and a half years ago, I enjoyed this collection of roadside attractions, cut-rate museums, and silly tourist traps you find on the edges of US and state highways.

It’s interesting to read about the obsessions people of previous generations have had, with things from nuts to, well, other things and how they tried to cash in on car-mad America in the middle of the 20th century. Sadly, the things were dying when the book was written almost 20 years ago. You know most of the colorful characters depicted within and their creations are dead now, gone but for this book and memories sandwiched between the sense of boredom on long trips.

My total, by the way? I’ve been to one, the old Noah’s Ark restaurant in St. Charles. Interesting tidbits about it: I was there when I was in middle school since it was where the Republican Pachyderm meetings were held, and the parking lot where I met my wife in person for the first time is right across Fifth Street from where it stood. She remembers it was still there when we met, but a new interchange for Interstate 70 spelled its doom in the early part of the 21st century.

Books mentioned in this review:

This is a Virgil Flowers book, so it differs from the Davenport series as it’s more focused on a single guy out there trying to solve a mystery. In this particular case, it’s an advertising agency woman visiting a resort in the northern part of Minnesota who gets shot in the face while canoeing. The resort is women-only, kind of as a retreat from men, and draws a lot of lesbians. And some of them interact with the locals, including a lesbian folk singer with a menacing father and mentally different brother. As a result, Flowers plods along for 200 or so pages as Sandford lays it out and then starts to solving it in the next couple hundred pages.

The later Sandford books seem to take on this sort of pattern. Complications for 200 pages, starting to make progress for 150 pages, then resolution. As it’s a Flowers book, it also features a wide collection of band t-shirts that Flowers wears and sexual escapades or, in this book, tension.

And it’s not a Sandford book without the occasional clangs of wrongness. This book has two that stick with me: one where a couple bring in a small gadget and explain it’s an intercom that alerts them if their baby awakens. That’s called a baby monitor perhaps everywhere but Minneapolis. Secondly, when the sinister father talks about his daughter getting caught up in musical dreams, he refers to CMTV. Whereas it is Country Music Television, the tag and call signs are CMT. Maybe Sandford wants to show he’s out of touch. Given Sandford’s history of these sorts of boners, though, he should probably keep from that sort of subtlety.

It’s a pretty good book, a bit long, and it doesn’t drop in too many things from the killer’s perspective, although he does rely on it once. It’s a laziness in writing as are hitting the common series tropes. He’s not devolved too much here.

Oh, and he’s also laid off the Republicans for the most part, maybe because the book was written in that golden period between the election and the effects of the administration. He can’t lay off of Fox News entirely, though, but it’s easily bypassed since it doesn’t crop up every thirty pages like in Wicked Prey.

Books mentioned in this review:

I wish I could have read this book more closely, but a previous owner had removed pages, probably pages whose reverse included pretty pictures the previous owner wanted for crafts or display. As such, I would read along into the life of Degas, for example, and suddenly would find myself in the middle of the life of Renoir. So I gave up reading too closely and focused on the paintings. Well, the paintings that the previous owner of the book did not think were worth tearing out.

As with any survey, it can give a broad overview or help broaden your perspective. Reviewing this book, I learned that I need to review the work of Mary Cassattm more closely, as I like it. However, I don’t like Paul Cézanne as much.

But that’s what these kinds of survey books are for. Also, they fill the time between plays with something cultural on a Sunday afternoon.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is a pretty detailed biography of Degas, one of the founders and/or inspirations for the Impressionist movement in France, and a number of full color reproductions of his work. He, like Remington among my recent art reading, did not live a life of penury. Instead, he was pretty comfortably comported with a banker father (who proved to be less successful than thought). Degas travelled abroad and studied art and achieved enough success that he could exhibit with the Impressionists at no real risk to himself. Apparently, showing with that riff raff instead of at the Salon was quite a statement.

At any rate, Degas’s work with the human form falls into my wheelhouse of Impressionist appreciation. As you might recollect, I prefer Impressionism to include human figures instead of just landscape. Degas also worked with sculpture and wrote sonnets, so what’s not to like about the guy?

Books mentioned in this review:

I think I’m reaching a scientific breakthrough on these books. I liked the first, where Odd Thomas interacted with a lot of people. I didn’t like the second, where Odd was on his own thinking to himself as much. I liked third, where Odd interacts with lots of people, more than I liked the second. Now this one, the fourth, and Odd spends a lot of time wandering in the fog on his own being a bit of an action hero, and…. Well, if you were taking a standardized quiz, you would best fill in the circle for “He didn’t like it much.”

In this book, Odd Thomas is on a seashore town trying to prevent an apocalyptic vision from occurring. It somehow involves a cryptic mother-to-be who seems wiser than her years and seems to know a lot about Odd Thomas. And it involves Odd wandering around in the thick fog of the seaside town trying to dodge corrupt cops and to prevent the aforementioned apocalypse.

And he does, of course, almost as a matter of course. He seems to be in no real jeopardy as the story progresses, even as a woman mystically drawn to people in trouble appears out of the fog to give Odd a gun so he can be an action hero for a bit. Then the book ends as Odd and the cryptic mother-to-be head to parts unknown as he’s pledged to defend her with his life. Because he does. Never mind, I don’t get it either.

I snuck a look at the Wikipedia entry for the series, and I see Koontz plans a couple more books and has a graphic novel or two in the series already as well as a Web series going on. Ah, I see. That would explain a bit of it, then. The plotting and depth of the book sort of match what you would get in a graphic novel, but with more Odd Thomas interior monologue to fill it out. Not quite up to snuff. And this book ends kind of in the middle of a larger story, unlike the others, which detracts from it. I didn’t want to read a comic book without pictures.

I hope the other books in the series pick it back up.

Books mentioned in this review:

 

 
 

Well, there it is. A novel about QA. Well, no, strike that, it’s a literary novel set in software development in the 1980s where a software defect is the MacGuffin and one of the main characters is a software tester.

Not by choice, oh, no. You can tell you’re reading a LITERARY book because the main character is clear to state that she has a doctorate in linguistics and only ends up working as a software tester when her academic career peters out. This is how you direct a book to an audience that does not work in the field the book covers, by saying ATTENTION! This character is the fish out of water and will explain to you the things you need to know because this character is just like you (in the field of academics or whoever reads Literary novels) except they work somewhere exotic (software development in the 1980s).

The book, as I mentioned, takes place at a database developer in 1984. They’re building a database from the ground up, including a GUI front end written from scratch that uses a mouse and everything. The main character, aforementioned, finds a defect that crashes the system, but is hard to replicate and appears to happen randomly, but usually in big demos. The book bounces back and forth between a first person double-effect narrator (since the story is told from present day ca. 2000ish after the dot.com bubble bursts, spurred when the narrator sees the one of the old screens still in use) and a limited omniscient narrator peering into the point of view of the developer to whom the defect is assigned.

The defect itself is a MacGuffin since the book deals mostly with the break-up of the tester’s and the developer’s personal relationship and the breakdown of the developer as he doesn’t think he’s a good developer and struggles to find this bug. That’s pretty much it. Enough technospeak and actual code and UNIX commands thrown into the mix, kind of like you’d find Hindi interspersed through a Kipling work to add authenticity. The tester finds self-actualization or empowerment by learning to code. The developer abruptly hangs himself, and even that did not cheer me. Uh, retroactive spoiler alert.

I didn’t care for it much, either for the plot nor the technical aptitude. The main characters are pathetic; I didn’t like either of them. The secondary characters are very, very stock and cardboard. The other testers are, essentially, the boss who is tough and fair minded and the other one whose dialogue mostly consists of her character tic of saying, “Meep.” The developers are mostly interchangeable except for their specialties, told to us of course. And I don’t know what the point of the frame story is, frankly. To show us the pathetic main character becomes rich but remains pathetic? Or to allow someone to feasibly set a book in 1984 when it’s written in 2002?

The best QA fiction is definitely genre fiction, mainly a thriller. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been written.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book includes a representative sampling of Frederic Remington’s drawings, paintings, and bronzes along with text that tells of his youth, his desire to be an artist at an early age, and his stints as Western artist for major magazines back East. I saw “Back East” as though Remington did his work from the frontier. He didn’t. He visited the West numerous times, including Mexico, and captured the spirit of the Fin de 19th siècle West in drawings and photos that he took home to NY to work on.

He found a lot of success as an artist, living from his art’s ample proceeds and able to experiment with a sort of Impressionism and enjoying some critical success at it. I’m always inspired when an artist has success in his lifetime.

Also, the book has lots of pretty pictures. One can flip through them and their explanatory text while watching football.

Watching football and looking at pictures of horses helps me recharge my Man Points after a hard day of découpage. At least, I hope it does.

Books mentioned in this review:

This is the second Dick Tracy book report on this site; the first was a collection of the actual comics (The Dick Tracy Casebook in 2005–good Lord, has it been five years?).

This is a collection of original short stories including Dick Tracy written by a number of popular authors of 1990, or at least people Max Collins knew. It was released to ride the success of Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy film (which also starred Madonna–good Lord, has it been twenty years?). As such, it’s a mixed bag. Most of the stories are tolerable, but one of the volume is darn near unreadable as it goes into very heavily cinematic action and the writer can’t capture it well in the text.

Sometimes I get the urge to read short fiction as my primary fiction book because I think how easily I can put it down when it’s time for bed. That’s a double-edged wrist radio (sorry, I should have issued a spoiled metaphor alert). It makes it too easy to put down sometimes, and this book is a good example of that.

I suppose the book is more worthwhile if you’re a big Dick Tracy fan, but what person under the age of fifty is. I mean, really.

On a personal note, someone ran a contest tied into the movie where you could win a yellow trenchcoat and fedora like Dick Tracy. I entered the contest, and that’s when I started thinking of myself in a trenchcoat and hat. A couple years later, I got my first trenchcoat for Christmas and then my first fedora from Donge’s on Third Street in Milwaukee. Twenty years later, I still affect that look.

Books mentioned in this review:

 

You cannot find this book on the Internet, mostly because it’s a 40-or-more-year-old (although I think it’s a later printing, but it’s still undated) comb-bound publication of the Naborhood Link News, a small free newspaper in south St. Louis County at the time. It’s a little better than photocopied typewritten article proofs, but the content is fascinating.

I lived in Lemay for a couple years in the middle 1990s, when the Naborhood Link News still existed (it ceased publication in 1996). This precedes my interest in reading up on the history of the region where I live, so I overlooked this book at that time. But Lemay has a far greater history than Webster Groves, word. Currently, the Lemay area is kinda defined as a portion of the unincorporated area in South St. Louis County where they tried to make Southpointe (with an E, like the car dealership whose owner led the charge) and that the small, 900-resident Bella Villa, best known as the eight-square-block speed trap on Bayless Avenue, helpfully offered to annex about the same time. However, historically, the Lemay area used to include Affton, Lakeshire, St. George, and a bunch of other municipalities that later made their own little town halls to…well, I suppose, impose a subdivision’s will on neighboring subdivisions.

The book tells anecdotes about Jefferson Barracks, how the villages that came to comprise Lemay were founded, the origins of Lemay Ferry Road and Telegraph Road (this last used to be called “El Camino Real” because it was built when the area was under Spanish control, which preceded French control, which preceded the Louisiana Purchase). A restaurant my wife and reviewed for our wedding rehearsal dinner dates from the 18th century; Lafayette purportedly stayed there once. Lemay was once considered for capital of the United States (story here).

And so on. Of course, the stories are all told informally with a lot of basis in recollections of the locals and some recourse to Missouri history periodicals. However, it’s best not to take them as the gospel truth. Still, good starting points for historical research or, at the very least, good legends to pass on.

I didn’t live in Lemay for that long, although my mother, the former owner of the book, lived there for much of her life, so I drove down some of the streets mentioned in the book (often accompanied by parentheses and “Now called Orient Avenue” or “Now called Ripa Avenue”). I sort of wish I was still in St. Louis so I could go look to see if many of these locations remain after the sixty years between the book’s publication and now.

As I mentioned, I inherited this book from my mother, who might have inherited it from her sister or mother. I wonder if my mother read it. I wish I could ask her and talk about it with her. One of the things I used to do on Sunday mornings was to have breakfast and coffee with her and regale her with stories and histories from books I read. This would be extra poignant as it is a book about her town.

Books mentioned in this review:

I’ve been a fan of Vargas’s work since the Great Playboy Caper (someday, I’ll have to re-relate that story since I cannot find it on the blog here). Vargas (and his s-less alter ego Varga) did pinup and nude art for Esquire and later Playboy. They were always playful and attractive, so when I saw this book at Barnes and Noble, marked down, I knew it was the proper way to spend a Christmas gift card so long as I didn’t mention it in the thank you note by name.

The book chronicles the eras in Vargas life and selective art from each period from the collection of Vargas’s nephew. There’s plenty of text to tell the sad story of Vargas, from his start doing promo portraits of Zeigfield girls, to his rise when discovered by Esquire, to the final contract at that magazine that rooked him into indentured servitude, his break with Esquire, the lawsuit over the contract and its aftermath, and then his return to publication with Playboy.

He had a rough life, fiscally for sure, but he produced some great work. I cannot help but compare his life with that of Frederic Remington, whose art book I expect to complete during the Packers game next Sunday. Remington lived a generation before Vargas, and his work came from a life that was pretty cush and unfraught with drama. It puts lie to the hypothesis that great art must come from rotten lives. Sometimes art comes in spite of surroundings. Which is what I tell myself since I live a pretty cush life, which contrasts with my most productive writing period.

Although, to be honest, the Great Playboy Caper brought me more fiscal reward than my creative writing has.

So this book is worth a look if you’re not too embarrassed to buy it or be caught reading it. Because the other Republicans might ostracize one who knows who Vargas is or has an event in one’s life called The Great Playboy Caper.

Books mentioned in this review:

This is a little souvenir book you could pick up if you were stationed in Detroit (what will they call tourists in 2014 Detroit? The National Guard). Me, I bought it since I’m a silly sucker for picture books of Detroit (see also the review for the full-sized coffee table book Detroit).

I cannot tell from the photos really when the book was published, but they still talk about the Silverdome. Part of the book is given over to the University of Michigan campus and other nearby other cities, so the authors had some trouble coming up with enough nice in Detroit to fill up this slender volume.

I have to wonder what sort of drinking problem the copywriters for this sort of thing have. I don’t intimate that they’re probably drinking on the job to write this glowing prose when Detroit was a punchline at least as far back as 1977. A real professional can make anything sound shiny and to say that Detroit is ever-ascendant while working, but when they go home and think about what they’re reduced to writing day in, day out instead of writing the sweeping novels they’d envisioned in college, I bet they tipple till they topple. Maybe I shouldn’t mock so much professional writers who get paychecks while I’m here on the blog plan with its fifty dollars a decade salary.

I’m looking through these books nowadays with an eye for patterns and images I could burn on wood. Unfortunately, all of these are so Detroit-specific, focusing on its famous buildings, that the photos are not generic enough. I could burn one of the halls at Michigan or the Renaissance Center, but only someone from Detroit might recognize it. Instead, all I get to do is make fun of the book and Detroit. Which makes it worthwhile anyway.

This is the first in what has become a 20 year series of novels. In it, Lucas Davenport hunts down a serial killer who varies his methods and his targets to confound the police but cannot help leaving notes with the rules to which he adheres in killing. The series starts right out with the tropes that become tropes as the series progresses, including as much time spent handling the media as detecting and with the soap opera loves of Lucas. I guess Sandford had a series in mind all along. After all, he did start right out with a psuedonym for it.

The books all have a very contemporary feel to them: Davenport uses all the latest technology and whatnot, and if you read the latest books, you recognize they’re current day. So it startled me a bit to read a book from the great before, where Davenport and everyone exchange notebook notes to synchronize them every morning, people need to use pay phones, and Davenport makes wall charts with paper notes. You don’t think a thing of it when Perry Mason books or Ed McBain’s detectives type up reports because most of their books came from that great Before, but when you read someone who has crossed that gap and you read his latest works first, the transition can be remarkable. Reparagraphable, even.

As with many of the Davenport series, the end seems unsatisfying and a bit contrived. Davenport sets the killer up and vigilantes him, but Davenport remembers to execute his carefully crafted execution in a state of emergency, when he’s flown in his Porsche from one twin city to the next while a crime is in progress. It’s very pat and very novelesque, as though Sandford plotted the ending before getting the book to that point, and even though it didn’t seem to fit congruously, he was going to use it anyway.

Strangely enough, as he says on his Web site, the original ending was even worse.

A decent book. Still available in paperback. I actually borrowed this from the library because I’ve run short of things to read around here (meaning that the number has dropped under 3000). I’ll look to find this if I can at a book fair to flesh out my collection.

Books mentioned in this review: