Category: Books

This book is Jean Kerr’s follow-up to Please Don’t Eat The Daisies–thirteen years later.

The book is a slightly less eclectic mix, with most of the essays dealing with managing a household. By this time, her five children are spaced out in ages so that she’s had milk in sippy cups for years. That resonated with me, although I only have two children, raising the second one seems a bit like a repeat at times. Haven’t we covered this already?

Kerr makes allusions, again, to Kipling, which I can appreciate having read Kipling recently. Remind me sometime to write a piece about the loss of allusion in modern writing, replaced with political sucker punches which serve a similar role for a different subset of the reading public.

Recommended. I’m just sad that there are so few Jean Kerr titles available. Looks like a couple more collections and a couple of plays. Not that I see any of them in the seedy book fairs I hang out in. I’ll have to go to Amazon to get them if I get that hankering.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book will probably be the last of the Sandford novels I read for a while. I’m tired of them. To recap, the progression kind of followed that of Robert B. Parker’s later work: I bought them new until I couldn’t take the thematic material stretching between the books, then I got them from the library not too long after their release, and then I got to getting them from the library sometime, maybe.

My disillusionment comes from these factors:

• The political overtones. These are cops and Republicans books. Let’s recap some of them: In Wicked Prey, the bad guys were conservatives; in Bad Blood, the bad guys are religious; in Shock Wave, the bad guy is an Iraq War I veteran who thinks the president is a clown. You can sort of get away with that since we’re not invoking a President by name (at least not until someone belittles George H.W. Bush), but there are needless exchanges and airing of political opinions through this book where the political opinion is a marker for the character. You know, I don’t have to read books that belittle political opponents or tut-tut reasoned-out philosophical stances. I have enough crime fiction from the middle part of the 20th century, where this crap didn’t happen, to satisfy my reading needs for some time, thanks.
   
• The weaknesses of the Davenport novels are working their way in. So much of the Davenport novels is all about managing the bureaucracy and spinning the press to take pressure off or to manipulate the media during the investigation. The Virgil Flowers books have featured a lone detective in the hinterlands of Minnesota doing some detecting, but this book has an uptick in the bureaucratic crap. Also, the fixation with the tightness of women’s asses.
   
  Come to think of it, managing bureaucracy, spinning a narrative, and objectifying women tend to be hallmarks of modern liberal Democratic thought, aren’t they?
   
• The reliance on series tropes. You know what? Flowers dresses casually. He wears rock band t-shirts. I get it. I’ve read the other books. Even if I hadn’t, I might have gotten it the first time it’s mentioned in the book. But on and on, Sandford has to throw shout-outs to bands he likes by plastering them on his main character. I get it. At least he’s only called “that fuckin’ Flowers” a couple of times in the book. I’m awfully tired of that.

But what does my disillusionment matter? I’m not the target audience. I’m not even going to be the audience going forward. Mr. Sandford, you can kill the series characters according to your whim now. Won’t bother me a bit.

The plot? Oh, someone’s trying to keep a Walmart-clone out of a small town. Of course, the right-thinkers in the book agree with the sentiment. Only mad bombers are mad and bombing. And the mad bombers aren’t ELF or ALF or, you know, actual terrorist organizations who commit violent acts when the environment is involved (in this case, the development might cause runoff damage to a local river). Oh, but no. It’s the aforementioned veteran committing the crime out of monetary greed.

Jeez, there are Robert Crais novels I haven’t even read yet. I think I’ll bother with those when I have a hankering for a modern bit of detective fiction.

Books mentioned in this review:

This is a picture book about North and South Dakota. There’s an introductory chapter about how awesome the Dakotas and the Dakotans are, a bit about how awesome their history is, and how awesome some of the famous historical people who lived in or visited Dakota are.

Then the photos, which show mostly landscapes more varied than one expects from the upper prairie, but the Dakotas have the Badlands, too. The landscapes are quite impressive, and I wouldn’t mind visiting the Dakotas at some time to see them, and Mount Rushmore, in person. One thing, though, about the photos: Given that they date from the late 1970s, whenever people appear in the majestic landscapes, it’s all brown cords and sideburns. Well, not that bad, but the timelessness of the natural surroundings are juxtaposed with a single moment in fashion time.

The last chapter frets that the book might succeed in drawing too much attention to the Dakotas, and the increased tourism and industry might make the Dakotas less Dakotan. Thirty years later, with the petroleum boom going on, I’d guess certain elements of Dakotans and natural environments partisans would lament that progress and human achievement are occurring, exactly as prophecied here.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book collects the works of Gil Elvgren, commercial and calendar artist from the late 1930s through the 1970s. He did a large number of advertising calendar illustrations, the kind that the calendar company would put your company’s logo on and your company could send it out to automotive shops or whomever your client served. The industry still exists in some fashion, as I’ve gotten a promotional calendar from the local Chinese restaurant, but I don’t think they do pinups any more.

And he made a good living at it, too. He bought himself a nice house in the Chicago suburbs and built himself a studio in it and then moved down to Florida in the 1960s. He became successful right out of the gate and was so in demand that he had to turn away work. His basic contract was something like 24 paintings a year for the calendar company at good money, and then commercial illustrations on the side of that. He was a prolific painter, and one of the paintings in the book he did in a mere two hours.

The works are remarkably consistent in subject matter. Well, they are pin-ups from the middle part of the 20th century, which means they’re young women in playful poses. In many cases, some action has caused the young lady’s skirt or dress to come up, exposing the top of her stockings and a bit of thigh. Strangely enough, although it was risqué for the time, women in the 21st century wear more revealing clothing daily, but without the aplomb.

The women in Elvgren’s work also share certain traits that mark them as Elvgren Girls, and the traits are put into stark relief when the authors of this book put photos of the models used for the paintings beside the actual paintings. Many times the model’s face doesn’t match the painting, which has that Elvgren Girl look to it. There’s enough variation in the hair color and expression that, if you’re not looking for it, you won’t see the commonality, but if it’s drawn to your attention, you’ll see it. It was probably a trademark.

The authors of the text compare his work fittingly to that of Alberto Vargas. Vargas’s work looks more watercolorish, with lighter colors and more focus merely on the woman. Elvgren’s paintings are more complete, catching a moment in time within a setting. The authors are partisans who denigrate Vargas, but the artists are different and should be not compared completely directly.

That said, I enjoy the Vargas, but the Elvgren stuff has more depth, and Elvgren’s working for the calendar companies and advertising firms strikes me as more entrepreneural than Vargas’s work for the magazines.

A pretty cool book. Multilingual, too: The introductory chapters about why a monograph about Elvgren’s work was necessary and about Elvgren’s life are replicated after the art work in German and French, so this book could be marketed internationally.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is a short British painting project book that shows some quick things you can do to get started painting with oil paints. I believe it’s distributed by an art supply company. I remember back counting these out of boxes when I was a shipping receiving clerk at an art supply store. I read the book because I read anything, not because I’m taking up painting.

The book presents five paintings to try from a variety of painting types. There are a couple landscapes, an interior painting, and a still life. There are also samples for sketches made before drawing and basic information about equipment that you use and whatnot, which is typical for a hobby book like this.

The individual projects include five steps and then five pictures to illustrate the step, but for some reason, the book was laid out so that the steps are together and the pictures are together, but on different, often non-facing pages, so if you want to see the result of each step after you read the text, you’re going to do a lot of page flipping.

The artist’s style is somewhere between impressionism and realism, with blocky shape outlines. He works from the back to the front, which I guess is standard. It’s been a long time since I took an art class, but I watch a lot of Bob Ross’s The Joy of Painting, which I prefer and is much closer to inspiring me than this book is. I wonder how The Joy of Painting translated to print, as there are undoubtedly many books in the line.

Come to think of it, when I was in high school, The Joy of Painting did inspire me to try some painting using cheap watercolors from the department store and the cut-out tops of fresh doughnut boxes as canvases. It wasn’t half bad. It was more bad than that. Which is why I continued on my path to becoming a not half bad writer on the Internet.

At any rate, the book is a short primer on the art, so it shouldn’t be a major investment like a $30, 200 page hardback craft book would be. Especially if you buy it at a book fair bag day like I undoubtedly did.

Books mentioned in this review:

I’ve probably read this book before, but it’s been twenty years since I ran through most of the old, pre-90s 87th Precinct series. They’re getting kind of hard to come by, the old ones, although you can generally find the 21st century hardbacks at book fairs. I found this one somewhere in a 1981 paperback.

The book only has one central mystery, unlike the later volumes. A model is murdered in her apartment while her five-year-old daughter in an adjoining bedroom reassures her dolly that everything will be all right. There’s some pre-existing friction on the squad, and the lieutenant is going to transfer Kling, but Carella speaks up for him and partners with him on the case. Carella goes missing and a body turns up in a fiery wreck in his automobile, and Kling gets suspended but continues to pursue the case. They find the model has a secret, and only when the detectives from the 87th can figure that out can they find the killer and rescue Carella.

It’s a hard-hitting plot, maybe, for the 1960s, but in the 21st century, it’s as deep as the episode of a television crime drama. Then again, one of the joys of the mass market paperback is that they really were fast moving, singular sorts of plots with good prose attached. Well, sometimes with good prose. McBain’s, though, is some of the best.

Books mentioned in this review:

I know what you’re thinking: He’s really following up a book of jokes with a book of cartoons? No, even better: this book is actually a subset of Snoopy cartoons from a larger volume, Snoopy Come Home. So it’s like a Readers Digest Condensed Book of cartoons.

These Peanuts cartoons come from the late 1950s and 1960s and center on Snoopy, of course. They deal with his love for dinner and his relationships with Charlie and whatnot. No Red Baron at this time, and Woodstock does not look fully formed within the cartoons themselves (although he looks like we know him on the cover).

The Peanuts cartoons are timeless if you’re of a certain age who grew up with new ones in the paper and television specials frequently. But I can’t think what a younger crowd would think of them.

Worth it for a certain nostalgic value and some amusement, but no real laugh out loud things.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is a little pulp bit from the era of the early Don Pendleton “The Executioner” series. It’s not published by Gold Eagle or Pinnacle, though: it’s some off-brand called Modern Promotions/Unibook.

And it’s a pleasant surprise.

The main character of the book is a former NYPD detective now serving as a deputy in a small town in Maine after leaving New York in disgrace for having taken some money from some non-Mafia bookmakers. When the chief of police is in a coma and the main character acts as chief, a known mobster moves into town. The incapacitated chief of police, a good man by all accounts, looks to have taken some money. The chief’s wife, a sexpot, has designs on everyone in town, including the main character. As Maine becomes an open territory for mob homesteading, with the New York outfit hoping to beat the Montreal outfit to the new rackets, can one tarnished hero keep the mob out of his town at least?

A short pulp read, pretty dark and noir, but it moves well and keeps you rooting for the main character even as he admits some mistakes, pays for them in his own ways, and tries to do somewhat right.

Recommended.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is the second book published by Xerox that I know I’ve read. It’s not the first photocopied book I’ve read; that would be Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community, which I pirated from the Marquette Memorial Library back before the Internet made it available for $10. What was I talking about before admitting I’m a book pirate? Oh, yes.

Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Xerox had a publishing arm that pumped out at least books for young adults. I read The Day The World Went Away some years ago when I bought the book during my Ebaying days. Spoiler alert: It was the hippies.

This book, Moontoons Jokes & Riddles, is a collection of jokes about landing on the moon and aliens and whatnot. This must have been rushed out pretty quickly after the moon landing to capitalize on it. Sadly, the schoolchildren who were of the age to read this book when it was fresh–me included–might have thought space exploration would continue apace. How wrong they would have been.

The book includes a number of cartoons and gags that kids find funny. I only laughed at one thing, but I forget what it was. A couple of things predicted the modern sensibilities better than the then-future of space travel: there’s a cartoon where moon creatures complain about air pollution from the lander’s retrorockets, and there’s a cartoon where a moon dweller tells astronauts he hopes they don’t treat them like the American Indian. These were jokes in 1970, but a way of life for some people in 2012.

I’ll have to try some of these jokes on my children. I suspect they, as the target audience, will enjoy them more than I do, even if they don’t tend to include the words “bananahead” or “diaper.” At least, not until my children retell them.

Books mentioned in this review:

I read this book early in my college career, when I was cutting classes to hang out and read in the Marquette University Memorial Library. I read Existentialism and Human Emotions (which I reread in 2006), and I was looking for some other Existentialism to sink my teeth into. So I did a library catalog search (on a computer, even then, not on little cards), and I found the Camus. I checked out The Stranger and the book right next to it, The Outsider. When I finished The Stranger and cracked open the other, it was quite deja vu, although it did not make me physically nauseated. The Outsider was a British translation of The Stranger.

So, where was I? Oh, yes. Rereading this bit about Meursault not doing much, killing an Arab, and then getting tried for it.

Well, it’s a bleak little piece, and I don’t find Meursault a particularly unsympathetic character, the pivotal point comes when he, after his suspicious “friend” is in a fight with the Arab, returns to the place where the Arab lingers and, dazzled by the sun and his headache, shoots the man.

He’s like a Forrest Gumpian feather floating along on life, and then an Arab is shot, and he starts thinking deeply, well, Existentialism-deep on things? Bleh. I could have followed along some other path with the man who just lives in the moment without thinking or reacting coming to some other realization, but to have it hinge on a single, unforeshadowed violent act just doesn’t work for me.

I don’t remember what exactly I thought of this book twenty years ago, but as I age, it’s becoming clear to me that French Existentialism is a philosophy for college students and Frenchmen. It relies too much on subjective interpretation of reality to speak to someone older than 24. Or at least me.

Books mentioned in this review:

I’m pretty sure I’ve read this book before, but not since I’ve been blogging. I haven’t watched the film too recently, either, so although I was basically familiar with elements of the film and the plot, the exact order of them and many of the details I’d forgotten, so it was more akin to reading anew a book by an author I’ve read a lot of.

This book, written during the Eisenhower administration, finds Bond coming out of convalescence from the things that happened to him in From Russia, With Love. M is not sure that Bond is the agent he once was (sort of like in the film Die Another Day). So M sends Bond to Jamaica to look into the disappearance of the station agent there and his secretary. While the powers-that-be think he’s run off with the woman, Bond looks a little more closely and discovers it’s more related to the secretive island sanctuary of a mysterious Chinese figure, Doctor No. Then hijinks happen and Bond gets quite mauled but wins the day and the girl.

The girl who has the big broken nose, unlike Ursula Andress.

The book departs from my memory of the film, of course, but they’re both independent media, so they’re both enjoyable in their own way. Now that I’ve read the book again, I have the urge to watch the film. Kind of like watching the film The Living Daylights prompted me to pick this book up.

More Bond novel reviews:

• Thunderball (2006)
• Thunderball (2011)
• From Russia, With Love
• The Man with the Golden Gun
• Goldfinger

Books mentioned in this review:

I did not care for this book.

It’s a short but of small, blog-sized pieces about different historical topics. Some are round-ups of topics, like the history of toilet paper and codpieces. Some are more focused, such as the chapter on who would win in an arm-wrestling contest between Atilla the Hun and Ghengis Khan or which of Henry VIII’s wives was most bedable.

It’s a bit snarky, and I’ve determined that if you’re not in on the snark, you’re not going to enjoy it. The author looks down on a lot of his subject matter (“Where the Conquistadors Stupid Or What?” and “Could Christopher Columbus Navigate His Way out of a Paper Bag?” and so on).

I guess the title should have given the game away, but do I listen? No.

Skip this one and read a real history book instead.

Books mentioned in this review:

Given the recent Tom Hanks was near someone in blackface scandal, it seemed the very time to read this little one-act skit that I picked up somewhere.

It’s a short, 25 minute skit from 1901 for a minstrel show, wherein I guess a white guy would put on black face and make humor from the mannerisms of colored folk. This piece features five characters: An older father who is hard of hearing; an eldest daughter who has caught a man to marry, a wealthy man; a middle daughter who is a romantic and sees the match through that prism; the youngest daughter, who has a sharp tongue; and the “wealthy” man who has just come into an inheritance of $44.75 and some shoes and who is being henpecked into the marriage by the eldest daughter.

The piece is written heavily in Negro dialect, or at least that which the author would call Negro dialect. It’s harder to read even than some of Kipling’s argot, which might be why I found a bookmark halfway through its fifteen pages. It’s not very funny, either, but I’m a hundred years past the target audience. I can see some of the gags, though, the more clever ones that don’t rely on the basic comedy elements of the father mishearing the courtier or the continual repeating of the fortune that the young man has inherited.

Meh. It comes from a whole series, which proves that before radio, television, the movies, and the Internet, people would watch anything.

This book is one of MacDonald’s situational books. He takes a group of disparate, sometimes desperate, characters and puts them in a stressful situation where they interact. You see this in Murder in the Wind, and you see this in Condominium.

In this book, though, instead of a terrible storm, we have a delayed Mexican ferry.

A middle-aged man with an impulse mistress he picked up and bedded for an expensive three weeks in Mexico City heads back, guiltily, to his life. An expat American who works on his expat father’s Mexican farm waits to go buy farm equipment. A married couple whose husband is a mama’s boy and whose wife is a former model wanting a good married life wait with his mother (who flew down to join them on their Mexican honeymoon), and the mother takes ill in the heat. An American kills a jealous matador who found the American and the matador’s girl in flagrante delicto after the matador shoots the girl with a harpoon while aiming for the American, and the American finds his flight delayed. An aging comedian and the two statuesque members of his act return from a gig in Mexico and are on their way to New York, but not for the reason the comedian thinks.

They find themselves stymied by a modern ferry that’s been put into a shallow river because a Mexican official crossed there once, a while ago. The draught of the boat is too deep, and it requires Mexican laborers to dig a channel for it before it can carry its two cars across. During the hours-long delay this produces, the waiting travellers interact, reach life-altering reconsiderations and decisions, and engage in some questionable activity.

It’s the sort of thing MacDonald does and does well. Even though the book’s ending leaves the storylines unresolved (although you think they’ll resolve badly, or maybe just less happy than you’d hope for the protagonists who emerge), I enjoyed it. There’s a frame story, wherein a Mexican laborer goes to work at the beginning and at the very end returns home very weary but well-enough heeled from the overtime (he has fifty pesos, half a month’s pay for a day’s work). At the very end of the novel, he and his wife are happy with what they have, which contrasts with the busy, machinating Americans who have a lot of plots but little joy.

Recommended. Have I gone a whole year without reading a MacDonald book? (Yes. My mistake.)

Books mentioned in this review:

I picked up this book because some article regarding the release of Acts of Valor mentioned that Marcinko started SEAL Team Six. I remember buying this book and one of its fictional follow-ups at a book fair, so into it I went.

The book covers Marcinko’s career from his early postings in the Navy to joining the Underwater Demolition Teams (UDT) (the Frogmen), his joining the SEALs before Vietnam and serving in Vietnam as a SEAL through his middle management career and the eventual founding of SEAL Team Six and then Red Cell, an internal infiltration testing squad.

The book is self-aggrandizing, probably, as Marcinko settles scores from prison, where he was sent for a rather tepid charge of conspiracy to defraud the government. He tells readers exactly what he thinks about some officers and how he warned them about the Iranian Desert One debacle, the embassy vulnerability in Beirut, and the invasion of Grenada. The very end might be a semi-fictional lead into the fictional books in the Red Cell series (which continue to this day, so he’s having some success with them). So one has to take the history here with a grain of salt.

But it’s a pretty good read as a grunt’s view of Vietnam and the military. The first portion of the book deals with incidents and missions in Vietnam and Cambodia and paces as well as any fiction. The middle of the book deals, as I mentioned, with him working up the chain of command, so the reading drags. Towards the end, though, he trains with his troops and they perform missions, so it picks up again.

I enjoyed the book a bunch and will probably incorporate at least one of his repeated sayings (“Doom on you”) into my own argot. But the language is salty, the main character is a bit of a scoundrel, and it might offend the tender sensibilities of some of my readers. Ha! Just kidding. If you’re reading this, you have no sensibility.

Books mentioned in this review:

Did I really say I would read this book soon? The Internet doesn’t forget.

I read the first volume of this two-volume set in April 2010. The first volume collects four of Kipling’s novels. This volume has three parts: 314 pages of short stories (27 in all); 98 pages of Something of Myself; an autobiographical sketch; and 89 pages of poems (58 in total).

The first collection of short stories is what really bogged me down. Kipling wrote in so many locations, in so many styles, in so many argots that changing between short stories in rapid succession was a real challenge. In one, you might be a pair of American wealthy people looking to move to England and having to deal with the culture shock of owning an English manor where the population thinks in terms of generations instead of months or seasons. Or you might be a regiment private dealing with life on the Indian frontier. Or you might be a mongoose. The styles and idioms differ vastly between each, and you at about the time you’re really dialed in on the accent, the story is done and you’re onto the next. I put the book aside for a long period of time in the midst of the short stories to read other things with more unified metaphors. The collection includes the well-known stories “The Man Who Would Be King”, “Wee Willie Winkie”, and “Riki-Tiki-Tavi” (which will be the name of my next cat, werd, and I hope it’s as good as hunting snakes and lizards as our current aged-and-declining champion Galt).

The autobiography is very enjoyable. Kipling talks about his early days as a newspaperman in India, which in turn led to his success as a writer in England by the time he was in his 20s. He name-drops constantly–his best friend was M. Rider Haggard, the author of the Allan Quatermain tales. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle taught him golf. He talks about Robert Louis Stevenson, whom he just missed in New Zealand on one of Kipling’s round-the-world tours. He talks about the other literary luminaries in the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th and their relationship to him. He knew Cecil Rhodes, who once gave him a lion cub to raise. And so on.

The anecdotes are amusing, and the things Kipling considers are interesting in their own regard. Kipling and his wife lived for a time in Vermont, in the United States, in a couple of domiciles. One, called Naulakha, was a large estate. When rambling about, the couple meet a woman who asked if they were they were the owners of the house on the hillside in the distance (they were). Kipling admitted they were, and she told them how comforting it was to see the lights of another house in the darkness (Kipling, from that moment on, kept the lights on in the rooms facing her and the curtains open). I know the feeling now that I live out in the country–the house behind us has been empty for almost a year, and I can’t wait for the new purchasers to move in so I can see lights in it again).

Kipling was a product of many cultures from his youth in India. When the Kiplings decamped for England, their first home wasn’t right, Kipling felt, because of the Feng Shui. In the 19th century he was talking about Feng Shui. He uses the term Allah for the supreme being throughout. It’s fascinating stuff throughout.

The poems are fun to read, and the set includes the well-known “White Man’s Burden” (about the United States’ dominion over the Philipines following the Spanish-American War), “The Gods of Copybook Headings”, “If”, “Gunga Din”, “Tommy”, “Dane Geld”, and more.

Kipling gets a rap for being an imperialist running dog or whatever, but really, he’s not so simply classified. He recognizes the variety in other cultures, but he recognizes that the Western culture of the British Empire brings a certain amount of Law (see the review of Puck of Pook’s Hill from the previous volume for that progression). He also recognizes the plight of the soldier in the maintenance of the Empire, as seen throughout his poems like “Tommy” and his short stories. So although he’s not as propogandist as portrayed by unnamed and, possibly made up by this reviewer, critics, he does think that certain laws of human nature apply to all civilizations and cultures and that Western culture has done the best good for individuals and maybe mankind of the cultures that have come so far.

Kipling is great stuff, better at defending Western culture than your Hardys or your Dickenses. I wish he were more widely taught.

Now, I must send out a search party for the book’s dust jacket. I tend to take them off while I read the books so I don’t damage them (Aren’t the dust jackets there to protect the books? Shut up, he explained), and there’s no telling where it’s gotten to in the two years it’s been floating around my office during various cleanings and rearrangings of ephemera. Although I can tell you where it is not: 1) on the desktop and 2) in the spot where the other dust jackets are for books I’m currently “reading.”

While I do that, go over to Tam’s place and enjoy some Kipling sung (which sounds like a Korean dish, but isn’t.)

Books mentioned in this review: