Category: Book Report

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.

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This isn’t the book for the Kris Kristofferson film of the same name or for the Lance Henrikson television show of the same name. Instead, it’s a book written in 1996 about the state of the world and a close call for a nuclear war between the United States and the USSR except for a lunar rebellion that takes control of the warring sides’ incomplete ABM satellite networks.

It’s a pretty good read, and a strange extrapolation about the turn of the century from 1976. Space travel has really gone well, with waystation space platforms and lunar colonies in place for over a decade by the book’s setting. However, no great push to correct software written about the time of the book. Also, the Soviet Union remains a strong force in the world and the UN is a force for good.

A good science fiction book if you can put yourself into the now alternate-universe where it takes place.

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When I read the selected works of Cicero earlier this year, Cicero kept telling me about the Roman age of heroes and of Scipio. So when my beautiful wife and I were killing some time in Patten Books a couple months back, I found this volume for $6. That alone should tell you how far gone I am into my current Roman history sort of phase (for me, 4 books in a couple of months is a pretty determined phase). SIX DOLLARS I spent on this book. And enjoyed it.

So if you’re like me and don’t really know who Scipio was, he’s the guy who beat Hannibal. In Carthage.

Now, if you remember your trivia, Hannibal took elephants over the Alps. Of course, since you remember the Roman empire and not the Carthaginian empire, you probably think it went badly for Hannibal. Not so. He trashed the Romans and then moved into Italy and maintained an army near Rome for 15 years. He might have stayed for another 15 or worked toward actually attacking Rome if it hadn’t been for that meddling kid, Scipio.

Scipio, like Hannibal, was the son of a commander who died in Spain. After some bravery and heroics, he got himself named commander of the Roman forces in Spain and then managed to throw the Romans out of Spain, cross into Africa, and march on Carthage. It was at this point Carthage withdrew Hannibal from Italy and the two met in the Battle of Zama. Wherein Scipio beat the master strategist and earned the title Africanus.

Without Scipio, the author argues, there would have been no later Roman republic and Roman empire. However, he’s forgotten in popular memory now because he didn’t bring bears across the Strait of Gibraltar or some other novelty.

With a subtitle like “Greater than Napoleon” (added to the new edition), you can tell that the author writes approvingly of the subject. Personally, I approve of that narrative type. I’d rather read some swashbuckling account of the person under study than a well-footnoted smug bit where you get as much of the professor’s disdain as anything else.

So the book is a good read and a very good bit of military history, back in an age where men were men, usually from the age of 13 to their deaths at 30.

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I read this book pretty soon after Missouri Deathwatch, so it posed stark relief. The professional wordsmith who cranked out this entry kept it pretty fresh and quick moving.

In this book, Nick Carter goes against AXE itself when a Soviet spymaster comes to town and shoots Nick. In the hospital, another attempt is made on Nick after his boss visits. Why does AXE want the Killmaster dead? Nick delves into it, discovering that the Soviet is part of a plot to infiltrate American nuclear facilities as part of a nuclear arms treaty mission. And more. With the help of a sexy reporter, Nick goes against the cops, against AXE, and against the President’s orders to discover the truth and save America. Even if he has to commit treason to do it.

It’s quality paperback pulp from the 1980s with only a couple of repeated stock descriptions of Carter’s arsenal. This series is worth revisiting when I get around to it and after I hit the Friends of the Christian County book fair again. That place is lousy with the pulp.

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At first, I thought this book was going to be a mash-up between a pulp paperback thriller and a romance novel. The cover looks violent. The back mentions the title character was trained in a mercenary camp. The first chapter features her infiltrating rebel-held territory for the second night to make a deal with a rebel leader and ends up in a mixed martial arts fight with a couple of mercenaries.

But then it turns completely on that and becomes a bit more of a romance novel. The character changes into a photojournalist at the mercy of her feminine nature and under the protection of the males in the book, even going so far as striking out on her own a couple times to ill effect and the merciful rescue of the handsome mercenary she’s trying to resist.

Also, it ends abruptly.

Maybe it’s a good romance adventure or something, but that genre ain’t my bag, baby, and I was disappointed. In my defense, I picked up the book because Shank (which sounds like the pseudonym on a pulp thriller, so understand one of the reasons I bought a romance novel) lives in the area. The book is a little amateur, or maybe that’s just because I’m not familiar with romance, but on the plus side, it’s not hack work like some of the pulp series books I’ve read recently. Keeping the main character tough as she’s pitched would have made for a better book, but perhaps not one fitting the genre.

Now I better read some Ray Chandler or Andrew Sugar to rinse.

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After a couple years of watching the game religiously, I think I have enough insight into how it works to talk football. Okay, I don’t have enough insight into the muscle memory mechanics of it to instruct how to block or how to turn the hips to fool a cornerback, but enough to talk it. As such, this book is really just a little refresher course on it except for the biographies of great past football players at the end. Red Grange, Jim Brown, et al.. This sort of thing makes the book for me because all the hype for the modern players and all the tipping of the hat to these guys, it’s good to learn what they did to make them household names fifty years ago.

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My goodness, if you’ve ever wanted to read a book composed of 88% bullet points, look no further. I’d hoped this book would be a thoughtful exploration of things Americans believe, but this is no Jan Harold Brunvand book. The authors have modeled it upon a book by H.L. Mencken from the 1920s. It lists, sorted by chapter, a variety of things they say Americans believe ca. 1983. A few of the credos have parenthetical notes to pooh pooh the rubes who believe it, but most are just bullet points of statements such as “That it does not bother a lobster to be boiled alive.”

The end of the book has an actual chapter of paragraphs talking about modern fables, i.e., urban legends. It even includes outlines of a couple of them (not in actual outlines, you know, but I could see why you would expect it with this book). Then there’s an extensive index to the bullets.

It’s a quick read and a good nightstand book with easy places to break off, but seriously, in the 21st century, you get more from Snopes.com and its thousands of pop-under ads.

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This book follows the story of the sons of a tribal chief in prehistoric England. The oldest brother is banished; the lame brother hides in the old temples and gets visions. The protagonist middle brother falls in love and gets his tribal scars of manhood. The oldest brother returns and slays the father, assuming tribal leadership and selling the middle brother as a slave. The middle brother’s girl is used and then runs off to a rivalling tribe to become the sorceress there. The lame brother gets painfully healed and grows in stature as a religious visionary whose goal is to reunite the Sun and the Moon, banishing winter. To that end, he leads the middle brother into a series of plots and programs to build the great temple–Stonehenge.

It’s a long convoluted tale, and the reader does not really get a sense of where they’re all going. I found the book close to Warriors of the Way, but without actual divine intervention. Cornwell spends a lot of time going into a lot of detail with the sacrifices, which I could have done without. Also, since it’s clear that Cornwell is making it all up, it lacks the historical detail interest that I take from the Sharpe series.

Ultimately, I was disappointed.

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This book was sold by Doubleday Science Fiction, but really it’s a mystery set at a science fiction convention. The book is thus very reminiscient of Murder at the ABA.

In it, a professor who has written some science fiction becomes embroiled in a series of murders that seem to revolve around a rare science fiction pulp magazine.

Not a bad read, ultimately. It’s an old science fiction book, though, in its pacing and printing. Do you know what I mean?

Books mentioned in this review:

Murdercon

Another Star Trek book “by” William Shatner (see also Star Trek: The Return). This one is the middle of a trilogy, so I’m in a world of challenge already. I’ve missed much of the set-up and back story, and brother, that book must have taken plenty. Not only do we have nods to all of the Star Trek series to that time (even Voyager), but the book deals with the universe from the “Mirror, Mirror” episode of the original series, so there are doubles of some of the characters in play.

In the book, Kirk chases his alter-ego, the emperor from the dark universe. Then Kirk’s new bride, a Klingon-Romulan hybrid(!), is endangered. Then they go off in space.

Come on, does the plot really matter? We’re here to see an episode with familiar characters, and we get it. We also get a little of space origins philosophy and a bit of nature/nurture stuff with the alternate universe musings, but it doesn’t detract from the story too much. At least no one is writing papers on it and holding conferences about it instead of, I don’t know, leading with his phaser.

Okay book, but you should really be careful about plucking a book from the middle of a trilogy. I should be, but probably won’t take care in the future, either.

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Now this is premium 80s pulp fiction. The bad guys are obvious, and everyone aside from a few academics and maybe Teddy Kennedy agreed the Soviets were the bad guys. In this book, the mercenary band Soldiers of Barrabas (SOBs, you see) go into Siberia to rescue a dissident scientist.

The book deals with the way which the team gets into Russia–through a phony computer deal that lands them in a tank factory. They steal a plane and fly to Siberia, engaging in a fight for their lives as they try to find on emaciated political prisoner from a haystack.

It moves quickly, lights on some of the characters, and jumps between scenes to create adequate suspense. The author isn’t afraid to sacrifice series characters to make a point that there are bullets flying and this is war-ish.

Good stuff. I look forward to others in the series. I see they’re going for $30 each on Amazon, but I know somewhere where I can get them for a quarter (nyah, nyah!).

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As you might recollect, this book was made into two films. One was made in the Eastern bloc the year I was born; the other starred George Clooney and was made in 2002. I haven’t seen either, but I remember it was a big deal because it represented something of the pinnacle of Eastern European science fiction.

The result is a mixture of Event Horizon, The Forge of God, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. All it lacks is aliens bare of anything but a bowler.

To recap: a scientist rockets out to a scientific station orbiting the planet Solaris, which has an ocean which might be a sentient thing inscrutible to humans. The scientist finds out that his mentor has committed suicide, and that his two fellow residents of the space station fear phantasms apparently spawned by the ocean below. Soon, his ex-girlfriend who committed suicide begins to appear to him.

Gimlet said, “i liked lem’s idea that alien intelligence is probably incomprehensible to us, and vice versa.” I tell you what, kids, it’s not just the alien intelligence that is incomprehensible to me. The actions of the people on the station don’t rise above the level of “healthy cyphers” either. Instead of huddling together, one locks himself in the lab with whatever phantasm the ocean spawned for him, the second drinks himself blind and pops up sometimes to counsel the protagonist, and the protagonist goes to the library and researches 80 years of scholarship regarding the planet while musing about his relationship with his ex. Who is there, partly, recreated from his memories by the ocean below.

Instead of trying to communicate through the avatars, the scientists try to dispose of them (we’re told) and go mad. We’re not told what they’re supposed to represent, what the others’ phantasms are, or anything like that. No, the scientists, when they come together, theorize and then make up experiments. Then, the book sort of ends when the protagonist’s phantasm gets some degree of self-awareness and ‘kills’ itself.

Frankly, it’s not the sort of book that I prefer to read, and I only got out of it the ability to say I’ve read it and that I’ve grappled with the author’s point. I had more trouble grappling with the author’s writing, though. You cannot blame the substance on the translator.

So if you’re a Serious Student of Eastern European or Science Fiction Literature, it’s probably for you. Otherwise, stick to the Star Trek novels.

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I found this book at my first book fair in the Springfield area. The Friends of the Christian County Library book sale was laden with series pulp like The Executioner, so how could I not grab one entitled Missouri Deathwatch and set in St. Louis.

Sort of. Aside from the title and the character mentioning that the action takes place in St. Louis, there’s no real sense of place. Descriptions of locations are stock. It could have been Philadelphia Deathwatch for all intents and purposes. On the other hand, it’s better than getting details wrong so that you get a sense of misplace (see Blood on the Arch).

This book is somewhere in the 80s in the Mack Bolan series, and with any series like this run through a set of different authors pounding out a wordcount for a paycheck. This book falls toward the bottom of the range. The author pads it out with musings about Mack Bolan’s purpose for the war on the Mob and repeating the arms he carries and whatnot. So it’s not the best in the series, and it’s not bad for what it is: a short pulp novel with some action and some explosions.

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I read this book after my experience with The Ruins, and I was pleased to remember how good fiction should roll. This is my first Orson Scott Card book (although it’s a collaboration), so I didn’t know what to expect. But it’s a well-paced science fiction bit. The main character is a mute enhanced monkey who acts as a “witness” for an important scientist as she and her family join a one-way expedition to the stars on an extremely large vessel called The Ark.

The monkey becomes sentient, starts breaking his bonds and conditioning, and outwits most of the people in the book. Additionally, the family breaks down under the strains of the preliminary steps to space travel. And then the book sort of ends without any real resolution or major plot arc settlement, as this is the first of a trilogy. Still, the book was fresh enough and paced well enough that I did not mind.

I might have to pick up the others in the series to see what happens next; however, the book ended without a cliffhanger or anything, so I’m not driven.

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This book puts Scott Smith into some mighty fine company. Along with the complete works of Algernon Blackwood, I put this book down with no intention of finishing it.

It is a slow mving, chapterless tale of some American students who go into the interior of Mexico and encounter something horrible. It’s a horror book, blurbed by Stephen King for crying out loud. I meandered through almost a hundred pages of it, not pulled by the plot and not liking the characters much. I turned to find out how many pages the book was, and I caught a sentence beginning the last section of the book: The Greeks arrived three days later. And I knew then how the book ended, with all the characters dead.

So I read the Wikipedia entry for the book to see if I would have liked it. And you know what? It didn’t get better from where I left off reading the book. The conceit behind the book doesn’t lend itself to much scrutiny, ultimately: a strange vine takes over people. It’s only at this one place, the ruins of the title. The local natives have salted a ring around a hilltop to keep the vine there, and they prevent anyone who crosses the threshold from leaving and carrying the eldritch vine with them.

Come on, that’s a conceit for a screenplay, which no doubt is what Smith had in mind. But if the freaking vine kills everyone who comes there, how come people keep saying they’re going there? How do the natives know to keep the vine at bay? I doubt the book answers anything; the plot on Wikipedia seems to be nothing but getting young, attractive Americans up to the Ruins to kill them.

I wasted a couple nights slogging through the first hundred pages. I’m glad I didn’t waste many more finishing the book.

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This is the second book in the Tarzan series. Given its origins in pulp fiction, one must forgive some of the circumstances that come around for no other purpose than to spin a good yarn.

Tarzan leaves the United States after leaving Jane to his cousin, who has assumed Tarzan’s birthright. Then, he enlists in the French secret service. Stop snickering. Then he goes to Africa on a mission, meets some of the desert nomads, is almost killed, and then catches a ship that also holds Jane’s best friend. Tarzan is pitched overboard by bad guys, but he survives by swimming to Africa and then has some adventures becoming the king of a tribe and going to a lost city of gold. Meanwhile, Jane meets her friend, who tells her Tarzan has died. They start cruising up the west coast of Africa and are shipwrecked near where Tarzan’s cabin from the original book lies. Then Tarzan comes back, finds his cousin has died, rescues Jane from some bad men, and they are married.

Man, if I were Jane, I would never get on a boat again. I wonder what will happen in the next book, too. These pulp adventures are a guilty pleasure.

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This is a collection from one of those poetry contests that makes everyone a winner and then puts all the winners into a book and then sells the winners copies of the book for $50. Full disclosure: I appeared in one of these books in 1984, and my sainted mother bought a copy. I probably even still have the copy of the Henderson Highlighter that reprinted the poem. But I digress. As for book quality, this isn’t the phone directory of the olden days like my poem appeared in, with 15 poems to a page of newsprint. This is actually like a real book of poems, with one or two per page.

Unfortunately, the poems aren’t that much better than I could have written in the sixth grade. I’m sorry, that’s not true; some of them are on more sophisticated subject matter, but that doesn’t mean that many of them are any good.

On the one hand, it really is awful that I subjected my children to hearing these as I read them aloud. On the other, it’s good to run through a bunch of these poems, especially after one has gotten a little bored with Ogden Nash, to recognize, again, what good poetry is.

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This book is the novel that launched two films. The paperback I have is not a true tie-in since it doesn’t have the stars of the original on it, but it does mention that it will soon be a major motion picture.

The book hinges on four guys who take a subway train hostage. It’s gritty seventies suspense, and seems somewhat dated because these days we expect more dastardly plots than the lives and deaths of sixteen hostages. The book bounces between scenes and characters and occasional flarings of violence.

Frankly, I don’t see how you make it into a movie featuring Mattheau or Washington, since the dispatch cop isn’t a featured player, but there you go.

Good piece of writing. I enjoyed it, but it does seem dated.

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So far, I’ve kept my word. I didn’t buy this book, I checked it out from the library. It’s not that bad of a bit, really, compared to some of Parker’s other recent entries. In it, Hitch and Cole rescue April Kyle Susan Silverman Allie from a whorehouse and they move to Brimstone, a town on the upswing. There, a revivalist preacher works to shut down the saloons. Hitch and Cole work as marshals and set up shop and home with Allie and the daughter of a farmer. The unholy alliance between the preacher and the biggest saloon owner breaks down violently, and Spenser and Hawk Everett and Virgil call winner. Then they decide to leave Brimstone and return to Appaloosa to settle down.

I think I got the major things, but I left out a sidebar about an Indian with a vendetta against the saloon owner. But Parker could have, too.

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I think David Barry wanted to write A Christmas Story for our generation. The book is short (117 pages, which is just right for a movie script). It’s a sweet little story that’s not full of quite the absurdity of his normal work or his full novels, and it’s cut into a short number of scenes. It tells the story of a dog’s death on Christmas Eve against the backdrop–or maybe it’s the foreground–of the children’s participation in the Christmas pageant.

Now, the text itself is not 117 pages. As a matter of fact, almost fifty percent of the book is old pictures and illustrations designed to visually evoke the scenes, although they are not direct illustrations of the scenes. It’s Lileksian.

It’s a plenty short piece and an easy read, so it’s worth its time.

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