Category: Book Report

This book is a collection of interrelated short stories set in a dystopian near future. This future has a rigged societal structure based on employment, with the unemployed sent to live in underground barracks sort of like modern housing projects, but with fewer prospects. Also, corporations run the world.

In this thread, a young boy becomes the smartest man in the world and hears the voice of God in intergalactic static before euthanizing his caretakers; a woman boxer becomes heavyweight champion; a man meets the reclusive head of a megacorporation and beats him at tennis; a private investigator finds that his new lover is the assassin killing his clients’ comrades; a designer gets a promotion that he never dreamed of; whitey creates a virus to kill black people, and a team of black people mutate it so it kills white people.

The stories are stronger in the beginning, when they’re only tangentally connected in that they’re set in the same world. They’re independent and self-contained, so they are stronger. Once the characters start coming together, it weakens. By the time we get to the end, the final culmination of the book seems forced and not satisfying because it seems like Mosley is trying to tie it up neatly.

Given the ending of the book, you might think Mosley’s politics are all leftist and whatnot. Frankly, since the book is dedicated to Danny Glover, I expected at least one full-mouth kiss of a Latin American dictator somewhere. But Mosley’s a bit weaselly. His characters espouse some odd positions, such as the aforementioned man who meets the reclusive leader of the corporation who turns down a job offer where he could make a difference for the human race, provide well for his family, and become something, but chooses instead to remain a radical chasing down conspiracies that keep the black man down or such as the ultimate elimination of the blue-eyed devil in the end. However, throughout, Mosley sprinkles in self-determining heroes, asides praising private property, and the book ends with the white man gone and brutal tribalism rising from the survivors. Mosley’s stories and his themes are more complex than that. They keep me guessing and engaged on a thematic level.

A pretty good book. Starts strong, ends kinda weakly. He’s no John D. MacDonald, but who is?

Books mentioned in this review:

Don’t tell Roy Blount, Jr., this, but I think I remember that he was some sort of humorist. In the middle 1980s. Maybe earlier than that. Since he’s still playing with Dave Barry in the Rock Bottom Remainders and since I checked to see he still has new books coming out, I think Roy Blount, Jr., is still alive.

Although I read some of his work a long time ago whose varied titles I don’t recollect and whose publication titles I don’t remember, this is the first volume of his collected works, circa my sixth grade year, that I have read. It wasn’t bad.

Blount’s works are more essayical than zany Dave Barry’s works, so they’re not slapstick, but they are amusing. Somewhere between Barry and P.J. O’Rourke amusing. However, Blount’s works are more left-leaning in nature, as every educated person from 1980-2000 aspired to. The politics, though, and zingers speaking truth against the conservatives, do not dominate the book. Its humor for the most part speaks to universals which never whisper to Bill Maher or Senator Franken (although the words “Senator Franken” whisper them).

Blount’s framework for the book is not as amusing as the work he collects. Apparently, he’s tasked to write for a women’s magazine to speak to women about what men don’t say to women. So throughout his collected essays, we have italicized bits about men talking about women. Sadly, this schtick detracts from the collected Blount essays within the book, some of which are sort of related to the relationship of men and women.

An amusing read, lighter than Marcus Aurelius, but probably not world-changing. Which puts it on par with Marcus Aurelius.

Books mentioned in this review:

I’ve got the Google ads up, loudly, and in a stunning turn of events, they all seem to involve books.

This book collects a large number of Marcus Aurelius’ thoughts about life as a Stoic. Marcus Aurelius, for those of you who don’t know, was Roman Emperor in the middle portion of the Empire. He might sound a little familiar because Joaquin Phoenix killed him in Gladiator.

The book reads like a set of Stoic tweets or fortune cookies. There is no flow to them, really, aside from a couple that seem to follow stream of consciousness style. When my children removed my bookmark from the book, I was quite in a spot, since you really cannot remember where you were based on context, because many of the things are repetitive and restate the same things only slightly differently. So this book took me a while to slog through.

I’m not a fan of Aurelius’ Stoicism; it is a philosophy of emperors and slaves (Aurelius’ mentor, Epicetus, was a slave, and I have his collection to get through sometime but not soon). It urges you to bear up under your life, as its course is determined outside of you, and to do right and live according to the tenets of Stoicism, which seems to include noticing that you’re not in control of your life and it really doesn’t mean much anyway since you will be forgotten.

As this is a Classics Club edition, it also includes other material, including:

• Several chapters of a novel entitled Marius the Epicurean which imagines and presents a fictional but descriptive portrait of Aurelius in his times (and a Christian ceremony at the time).
• Two satires by Lucian that make fun of Stoicism.
• A couple of pieces by Justin, including a dialog discussing his conversion to Christianity and an apology for Christianity (not an “I’m Sorry” kind of apology, but more an explanation of it) written with Aurelius in mind. These bits are very interesting in their own right (and rite) in that they very seriously compare the mysteries of Jesus Christ with various elements and deities in the Roman pantheon, saying these guys you worship did this, why is it so seditious that we believe Christ did this.

Overall, the most I derive out of this book is that I can say I read it. The philosophy within did not inspire me to something more, nor did it add anything to my credos. The pieces by Justin were interesting and helped provide me with some insight into early Christianity. The whole of it helped fill some historical gaps in my knowledge, I suppose, but I prefer Cicero to Marcus Aurelius when it comes to talking about Stoicism. This sort of Stoicism offers me no comfort since I prefer to believe in Free Will.

Books mentioned in this review:

This is not a book about the action figure. Unfortunately.

It’s a 1979 dark novel about power politics and national and bloc-level conflict. However, in this future, although people are still flying Trans World Airlines, the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact are part of a larger bloc called the Food Bloc which squares off against oil-producing countries (including Great Britain) and the populous countries (such as China and Pakistan). When astronomers discover a habitable planet with three sentient species on it, the three blocs send expeditions and the international tensions continue to rise until a shooting war breaks out on Earth and on the planet Jem.

The book spends about eighty percent of the book introducing a number of characters of the different blocs and the different species, then about fifteen percent of the book killing those characters pretty offhandedly, and then ends with a small epilogue from some six generations later when the survivors on Jem have evolved into a new civilization that incorporates the species from the planet and a whole lot of proto-Gaiaist loving of Mother Jem.

A pretty grim book, and unsatisfying. I think I’ll have to cleanse my science-fiction reading palate with some rocket-jockeying Heinlein.

Books mentioned in this review:

It’s been five years since I read the next volume in the series (The Darwin Awards 3, wherein the numbering went Arabic instead of Roman. You know, what I said about that book also applies to this book, really. It’s a digest of Web site postings. The essays that introduce each chapter still annoyed me.

But five years later, I’m less amused by the anecdotes of creative deaths. Maybe I’m getting older, maybe I’m moping through the first holiday season without my mother, but I’m just not as into the concept as I had been five years ago or when I first sat in my TALXware training session in 1998 and read the site after finishing up an easy exercise in writing an IVR script.

But, to say something nice about it, it’s as good as any other in the series as I’ve read. There’s some faint praise for it.

Books mentioned in this review:

Well, I’ve read another book of cartoons to make my annual total more impressive. Also, it’s a handy book to read when you’re watching a football game, as you can read a cartoon or two between plays. So that explains why I spent some time on a fifty year old book of cartoons designated for the sophisticate reading a magazine founded by Ben Franklin. Back in the 50s, it was more a general interest magazine; now, it’s a medical-themed magazine angled for the oldsters who still subscribe to it. And to me, since I subscribe to it.

For the most part, the cartoons are more clever than what you get from Heathcliff or Family Circus, but they don’t have to work in a cat or a series character and they don’t have the crutch of hitting common series tropes. On the other hand, the merchandising money is far less. So it’s a slightly better read than a book in those series, but it’s also less likely to connect you nostalgically with things you read when you were younger.

Unless, I guess, you’re about 30 years older than I am and your parents subscribed to this magazine.

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Yes, I did read another book of 1960s and 1970s cartoons to make my annual quota of 100 books. Well, what would you do?

I guess some Family Circus cartoons are amusing. I certainly empathize with them now that I have Jeffy and PJ of my own. But they do seem to be relics of a bygone era of straight nuclear family cartoons. Although the pages of this paperback are yellowed with age, in my mind’s eye they were all printed on green paper as part of the Milwaukee Journal‘s Green Sheet.

I guess it’s worth your time if you’re a fan of these sorts of books, as I seem to be, or you need to make quota, which I often need to do. A good, quick, mindless short evening’s reading.

Books mentioned in this review:

Consider this book to be the antidote to the little elementary school books about 1980s television stars that I’ve read before (TV Superstars ’82, TV Superstars ’83, TV Close-ups). In it, the author recounts suicides, crimes, breakdowns, scandals, and all sorts of shenanigans that take place in Hollywood to television stars.

Oddly enough, the book covers some of the same stars as the books mentioned above, including Freddie Prinze, John Schneider, Tom Wopat, and Gary Burghoff.

So it’s a bit of a quick tabloid read that’s only relevant if you were alive and sentient prior to the publication date. You might learn something or learn some stories you weren’t familiar with before, such as the Jack Paar/Johnny Carson spat and who Ernie Kovacs was. However, you probably won’t come out of it like Tobey Maguire’s character from Wonder Boys. Mostly because James Leer dealt with movie stars.

Books mentioned in this review:

This might be one of MacDonald’s darkest pieces. Set in Las Vegas, it focuses on a hotel manager who tries not to get involved in the mob doings on with the hotel or the casino. He falls for a singer who’s been with the hotel for a long time (a couple of years), and he dreams of taking her away when he makes enough to buy himself a hotel of his own in Florida. She, however, is blackmailed by the casino owners into spending nights with high rollers who win to encourage them to stay in Vegas and lose their winnings, so she suspects it’s a pipe dream.

But when her father dies–the person to whom her seductions would have been outed as the threat of the blackmail–the singer decides to break free. The mob has other ideas. And then it’s up to the hotel manager and the millionaire oil man who befriended the singer to exact revenge.

It’s dark, and it’s cynical, and then the ending comes very quickly. For that reason alone I was a little disappointed. But I still think MacDonald can write anything.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is a set of reminiscences about growing up in the bend of the Gasconade River in rural Missouri in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The author is the son of a small farmer in the region who attends the local one room elementary school at the time and occasionally takes in a film in a nearby town. Strangely, the stories seem more from the time of The Great Brain series (Utah 1898) than a more modern era. When you compare the films of the era, often set in urban areas and New York in particular with the life of a rural person (no heat, no electricity, and some people still travelling by wagon), you get a stunning juxtaposition and a reminder of just how much change some people saw in the 20th Century.

The book isn’t too long, but the narrative is a little disjointed, as each chapter is a discrete piece that relates stories or circumstances in the Bend in the year the author talks about. But it makes for some slow reading as each piece doesn’t lead to the next.

Still, I enjoyed the book and learned a lot from it. Mostly, I learned how little a city boy like me knows of rural skills, such as hunting, butchering, growing, and gathering. It makes me what sort of city boy skills I have taking their place in my palette of experience. Running a backwater blog for over half a decade might be it.

Books mentioned in this review:

This is a shorter of MacDonald’s works, it seems, and it combines two of his themes: business and crime.

In it, the oldest brother of a family runs a business empire built on a Florida highway at an interchange. Businesses include a truck stop, a hotel, a motel, a couple restaurants, and a strip mall. His father, who bought all the land, has retired and lives on a hill overlooking his family work. The whole clan, including the numbers-mad but indecisive brother, the alert sister, and the playboy youngest son, work in the group. The book touches on the affairs and marriages of the characters and culminates in a robbery that goes awry.

A good bit of reading, combining a slice of life vignette with the planning, commission, and aftermath of the crime.

And the ending is mostly upbeat, too, which is better than The Only Girl in the Game.

Books mentioned in this review:

This John D. MacDonald paperback original, written over 50 years ago, centers on a man working for a construction company whose boss commits suicide with a harpoon gun. The protagonist’s harpoon gun. And it doesn’t look like suicide after all. Circumstances and the individual plots of the individual people have hemmed him in as the suspect, though. But when the woman friend who the protagonist discovers too late he loves is found in a canal, the police have to turn him loose. For vengeance.

I hoped for a bit of bloodshed at the end, but there’s no burst of gun violence. It wouldn’t suit the characters, of course. MacDonald created another interesting little town with its own people, problems, and story. I like MacDonald. A lot. I was recently saddened to realize I will eventually have read all of his books.

Books mentioned in this review:

I’m reviewing these books out of order; I read this book when I went through a recent sci-fi set including Solaris and Lovelock. So apparently it was not only a sci-fi set, but also a single word title sci-fi set.

This book centers on the return of a human rescued in space by the Haklh’hi. The young man was raised from infancy by the herd-like aliens. As they return him, they behave a little suspiciously, sending him into a civilization that has slipped after global warming and nuclear wars to determine how warlike the survivors remain. Unfortunately, the aliens have only prepared the boy by showing him old television shows, so the reconnaissance fails. And the Haklh’hi plans are not as benign as they’ve let on.

An interesting read, something to keep you puzzling what the final twist will be. At which time, you will say, “But of course.”

Books mentioned in this review:

This is a very early thriller from a very young (from the book jacket photo) Cornwell. Probably precedes his success with historical novels, but this very book could be a historical novel of sorts since it deals with a veteran of the Falkland Islands War.

A disabled veteran, winner of the Victoria Cross, finds that his boat–the one thing he missed most–has been beached during his absence and stripped of gear. The probably culprit: a roughneck employed by the television personality who purchased the veteran’s father’s home. The guy is drawn into the television man’s circle when the television man wants to produce a documentary about the veteran’s heroism. The whole thing turns complicated when agents of the television man’s former father-in-law look for revenge against the television guy for the accidental death of his wife in a yacht race. The television guy is going to race again and eventually the veteran gets involved.

It’s a convoluted plot with a meandering pace. The book includes a lot of nautical detail, which sort of gummed it up since I was not that interested in it much. Perhaps the historical novels have similar pacing issues except that I’m interested in the details.

It’s clear to see why Cornwell ended up in the genre where he did. Historical novels suit him better than straight ahead thrillers.

Books mentioned in this review:

As an anonymous commentor said when I reviewed Ben Bova’s book of the same name, the novel Millennium by John Varley, based on the short story “Air Raid” by the same, is better than the film Millennium, based on the short story “Air Raid” by John Varley. You know, he’s right, but it’s a strange odyssey from the short story to each. According to Wikipedia:

We had the first meeting on Millennium in 1979. I ended up writing it six times. There were four different directors, and each time a new director came in I went over the whole thing with him and rewrote it. Each new director had his own ideas, and sometimes you’d gain something from that, but each time something’s always lost in the process, so that by the time it went in front of the cameras, a lot of the vision was lost.

Ergo, the timeline is as follows: In 1977, Varley writes the short story. In 1979, he begins on a screenplay. In 1983, the novel comes out. In 1989, a movie based on a revised screenplay comes out. Based on the special effects, I would have guessed that the movie was closer to the novel than the X-Files’ television debut. But there you go.

An air crash investigator finds some anomalies with the crash. A time traveller from the future leads a team to recover people scheduled to die in air crashes and replace them with semi-living bodies to repopulate the species or something. Their goals intersect and create a paradox. The book interweaves their point of view, whereas the movie retreads the timeline a bit to turn the story from the investigator’s tale to the woman’s testimony.

The book has more depth and detail, as indicated, with the futurists from further in the future and not knowing the source even of the time traveling apparatus that lets them go back. Additionally, the characters are fleshed out, the robot is not a poor C3P0 clone, and there are real questions of free will and manipulation of time. Plus, the woman is harder and more crazy. However, it ends with in a fashion similar to Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama series, where the Deus ex Machina is not a Machina at all.

An enjoyable read, and it made me watch the film again. You know, I haven’t told you how I came to view the film. In 1996 or so, I had a membership at Blockbuster and was wont to go rent a film or two to pass an idle evening (before I got addicted to reading as heavily as I do now). So I was browsing, and I thought the film’s box and teaser were interesting enough to warrant watching. I was disappointed with the film. Then, in 2007 or so, I was browsing Euclid Records in Webster Groves and found the DVD, and I thought, “Hmm, that looks interesting.” It was only when I started watching it that I realized I’d seen it a decade earlier. Now, with the viewing after reading the book, I’m up to 3. That’s probably more times than Cheryl Ladd and Kris Kristopherson have seen it combined.

Sick, I know.

Books mentioned in this review:

Well, after reading Scipio Africanus: Greater than Napoleon, of course I picked up this book, a novel about Scipio’s adversary which I’d picked up a while back.

The book is an interesting combination of first person narrative with historical fact in that the battles are in the right order makes a pretty compelling read. We get bits from Hannibal’s childhood as the son of Hamilcar Barca and his growth into the leader of the Carthaginian army in Europe. It talks a bit about his disdain for politics and whatnot and intimates at the hard drilling between battles and the preparations that the general had to make.

Unfortunately, the book stalls a bit after the Battle of Cannae; we don’t get much about what Hannibal did in the 15 years he spend in Italy after the battle. The Battle of Zama seems an afterthought. Then the book ends with Hannibal’s death in exile.

The author made this the first of a trilogy; I would have figured out how to do it, but I guess the second are from Scipio’s point of view and the third is simply titled Carthage. The author lets us know how well researched the book is by including quotes in the original Greek throughout. So I’m sure he’s researched it quite a bit, but one cannot take the events in any novel as true. I won’t cite it in a paper.

Pretty good read if you’re into the history of the period and want something more narrative than scholarly.

Books mentioned in this review:

I liked this book. It involved a lot of aspects of home buying, moving, and whatnot with which I’ve recently been reacquainted. Also, it’s old school Dave Barry, written when he was young, married to his first wife, and before he became a brand. You know how you can tell? Is his name above the title or below it? There you go. As Amazon shows below, this book was later rebadged with his name above the title (Dave Barry’s Homes and Other Black Holes).

Additionally, behold how I make a brief cameo in the book:

Hard to argue with that.

Books mentioned in this review:

I enjoyed Yakov Smirnoff’s humor back in the old days (those 1980s again) when his America vs. the USSR and incredulous immigrant schtick brought a unique perspective to being an American. This book recreates a bunch of those moments, and since I can remember what that was like, I can still laugh with it. Since I’m seeing the USA of today turn into that USSR of his humor, it’s not humor without sadness.

I know Mr. Smirnoff has continued to work the comedy thing, so I have to wonder how much I’ll enjoy the contemporary Yakov. Since I’m in Springfield, where Professor Smirnoff teaches at MSU and near where he has a theater at Branson, I’ll find out, certainly. I might even run into him on the street someday.

So consider this review a preliminary suck-up.

Books mentioned in this review: