Book Report: The Gingerbread Lady by Neil Simon (1971)

Sometimes, when I’m at a loss about what to read next, I kick the can down the road a bit by selecting a play. Modern plays are pretty easy reads; semi-modern plays (like Ibsen) are heavier fare, but they buy me a couple days before I have to pick another book; but classics (like Shakespeare or Jonson) can take as long as a short book. So when I was at a loss and didn’t want to simply pick up another paperback, I picked up this Neil Simon play. I’ve read a bunch by him in the past (I Ought To Be In Pictures in 2006; Biloxi Blues, Chapter Two, and Broadway Bound in 2007; Lost in Yonkers in 2008; and Laughter on the 23rd Floor in 2009). So I expected a lightweight comedy.

This book is not a lightweight comedy; it’s more heavy dramatic fare. It centers around a recovering alcoholic returning from rehab to her New York apartment, where her remaining friends are an aging actor who’s starting to know he’s not going to make it and an aging woman holding onto her youth and beauty as much as she can. When the gingerbread lady’s seventeen-year-old daughter returns, she has hopes for making as best of a life that she can sober and, she suspects, somewhat boring. When her friends’ problems all erupt at a birthday party, she backslides and has to deal with the aftermath.

It all takes place in a single set–the woman’s apartment–and deals with a milieu and a set of characters I can only imagine through fiction. It doesn’t end with any resolution, nor with any weddings or corpses. It’s a very 1970s kind of thing, probably taking on a slightly taboo subject seriously and pointing out the ongoing nature of life. Not bad, per se, but not compelling. A quick read, though, as it’s only a play, and it doesn’t dismiss the affection I feel for Neil Simon’s plays, however little I actually relate to them.

Books mentioned in this review:


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Book Report: Unsolved Murders & Mysteries edited by John Canning (1990)

This is another British collection of mysteries and true crime pieces. I’ve read this sort of thing before, but I’m too lazy to look in my archives to prove it to you. They’re exceptional idea books for coming up with essays for history magazines, and I have three items on my whiteboard from it.

Published in 1990, it contains a couple of things I remember from my youth: The dingo baby and KAL 007. I asked my wife about them, and she didn’t remember these news items from when we were 10. But I did. Strange, that.

The book includes the normal Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden, Rudolph Hess, and the Lindbergh kidnapping, but some other lesser-known stories, including the disappearance of an Australian Prime Minister who might have been a Chinese agent, the explosion of a British ship in Bombay during World War II, and whatnot.

The stories seem pretty straightforward, but the story about Korean Airlines Flight 007, shot down by the Russians, gives 100% credibility to the Russian account, and the book is pretty harsh on the American warmongers when the Maine blows up in Havana. Still, not too bad, just enough to arouse my skepticism.

But this kind of book is a starting point for research, not the definitive account.

Books mentioned in this review:

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Book Report: The Brookline Shoot-Out: America’s Bloodiest Peace Officer Massacre by Shirley Walker Garton as told to Bradley Allen Garton (1996)

Now, this is an interesting book. It details the Young Brothers’ Massacre/Brookline Shootout that took place right down the road from where I live in the year 1932. A couple local ne’er-do-wells were wanted for shooting the marshal over in Republic (which is where our Walmart and Walgreens are). Word got around to law enforcement that they returned to their mother’s house for the holidays, and when a couple of their sisters show up in Springfield trying to sell a car with Texas plates, the sheriff of Greene County, nine other law enforcement officers, and a civilian observer rode out to the Young farmhouse. As they tried to get into the building, occupants opened fire. By the time the firing stopped, six of the officers were dead. The Young brothers escaped, only to be captured in Texas shortly thereafter.

This book is interesting because it is written by the daughter of an undercover deputy of Greene County who was not at the massacre itself but who served as part of the large group that secured the scene immediately afterward, and it’s “told to” her son. The author and the son remember her father, Roy Walker, talking about it some, and the author gives some of her family history that prompted her to write the book and then talks about the people in the shootout. She relies heavily on a contemporary source, The Young Brothers Massacre by John R. Woodside, for the actual account of the event itself, but she supplements this account with various interviews with people who remembered the event almost sixty years before (most of the interviews are from the mid to late 1980s).

She also throws in a number of photostats of newspapers, original photos, and some poetry. It’s an eclectic blend, part historical account and part story of the investigation. It’s pretty engaging, although it might help that the book is pretty short and she’s not carrying on so for 300 pages.

I’d recommend it.

As I mentioned, this did take place just down the road from me. Some accounts say the house still stands, but it’s at the outside edge of Springfield now, so it might not last for long. Strange, though, that I’ve moved from historical Old Trees to this little house and I’m suddenly abutted on all sides by history.

Books mentioned in this review:

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Book Report: The River of Used To Be by Jim Hamilton (1994)

This is a collection of columns written by the editor of the Buffalo Reflex, a paper up in Dallas County. As such, it’s not a true memoir; instead, it’s a bit bland, driven by deadlines and the easy columns at some points.

There are some gems in it, such as his tale about cold weather camping or a couple of his imaginative tall tales regarding Christmas. Unfortunately, the really good things stand out so much from the common seasonal musings or the progress-is-destroying-what-I-remember templates.

The most poignant thing about the book is outside the text: it’s dedicated to his daughter who died her freshman year of college. The same as my freshman year of college. There’s a column about his daughters, there’s a column about her going to school, and then a column about moving out of his house where they all lived. I think it’s more striking because the book alludes to it and because she was born just two months before I was.

If you’re deeply into Ozarkania, it might be worth a browse.

Books mentioned in this review:

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Book Report: The Executioner: Code of Honor by “Don Pendleton” (2009)

This is a 2009 (!) entry in the Executioner series. I’ve skipped quite a few since I’ve gotten away from the original Don Pendleton ones, hey? I’m actually surprised to see they’re still writing them.

In this outing, Mack Bolan joins up with a band of assassins called the Black Cross to destroy them from within. Apparently, they’ve been commissioned to take out some government types who are looking into a defense project gone bad. Good on the author of this book: he or she managed to make the ultimate bad guy a member of the government. How modern.

It’s kind of strange the time-warping going on: the first guy killed by the Black Cross is a retiree of the government and a veteran of the Gulf War. Granted, Gulf War veterans aren’t getting that old yet, but you have to remember Mack Bolan is a Vietnam veteran. One of the Black Cross is a sixty-something martial arts expert, and the book says she’s three times Bolan’s age. Uh.

Yeah. So the book again isn’t one of Pendletons. It’s not one of the worst in the series, either, from what I have seen in my limited reading. However, everyone uses a different exotic gun, which the author gives in appropriate names and numbers, but there seems to be a basic misunderstanding about them. The word clip appears throughout instead of magazine, although the correct word crops up from time to time. Other times, the book talks about big guns chambered in .223. Uh. Right.

Additionally, the characters in the book, experts all, do some strange tactical things. One throws a knife from a distance and pins a good guy to the asphalt through his thigh, while under fire, and then she decides to use the grenades. Or when Mack Bolan is fighting his grandmother (who, if he is a Vietnam veteran, is actually closer to his age than 3x), he’s wearing a gun in a holster but doesn’t want to waste the couple of precious seconds it would take to get it out. Until, of course, the martial arts expert knocks him around for a while and then it’s time to take the risk of drawing the firearm.

If you can get around those sorts of suspensions of gaffes, as I could in this book because its pacing is brisk enough, you can enjoy this book for what it is: an adult comic book in prose. Why, the back pages even still have a form you can fill out to subscribe and get 6 new novels of this caliber (.223) every two months. Man, strangely, I was tempted. At one point in my youth, being in Gold Eagle’s stable of writers and cranking out one or two books like this every month would have been a dream job for me.

The worst thing about the book: In the end pages, again, a teaser for another book in another Gold Eagle line, Rogue Angel: The Spirit Banner:

The archeological find of the century… or a con?
When a long-sought-after map to Genghis Khan’s tomb is located, not everyone is convinced it’s authentic–archeologist Annja Creed among them. Despite her skepticism, Annja suddenly finds herself pulled along an increasingly complex trail of clues, each more remote than the last. Soon it appears that the only tomb Annja may find is her own!

Dammit! Last year when I was reading the magazine article and book on Genghis Khan, I wanted to write a book about the search for Genghis Khan’s missing spirit banner.

Those cursed fellows at Gold Eagle are like an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters with an infinite number of history books. Any quick thriller plot you can think of, they have published already.

At any rate, this was the last of the Executioner novels on my to-read shelves. Until I got my birthday present, which my four-year-old called “Gun Books” after returning from birthday present shopping with Mommy: 47 Executioner paperbacks from early in the series. I hope you like the reviews as much as I like the books, because the future will hold many more of them. Also, I don’t need six new ones every two months now.

Books mentioned in this review:

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Book Report: Goldfinger by Ian Fleming (1959)

It’s been a while since I’ve seen the film, but compared with reading the book, I have to remember the movie as being paced better. Maybe it wasn’t; it was, after all, a movie of the sixties.

James Bond comes into contact with Auric Goldfinger, a wealthy Brit with a lust for gold, in America, where he foils a little card game con Goldfinger ran. In Britain, Bond is tasked with finding out what Goldfinger is up to. Actually, the Bank of England suspects he’s draining the country of its gold reserve, but they can’t prove it. Bond plays a round of golf with Goldfinger and then follows him to Switzerland, gets kidnapped, and added to the plot to rob Fort Knox.

The movie’s plot differs significantly, particularly in the last plot point (the Fort Knox operation) and in pacing. The first third of the book deals with the American trip, the second with the golf game (I’ve only shot 9 holes of golf in my life, and the details of the golf game in this book go on that long–Fleming was into golf, and he shared his knowledge), and the third with the assault on Fort Knox and the denoument after that fails.

Sadly, I think the movie is better.

Also, something struck me when they were talking about Oddjob, and it wasn’t a deadly bowler: that esoteric martial art that made him so exotic and so lethal? Karate. In 1959, it made killing machines. In 2011, I’m taking my four-year-old to karate classes.

Books mentioned in this review:

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Book Report: The Virginian by Owen Wister (1902, 1988)

This book has been credited as being the first Western. Wister wrote it about a bygone era: it’s set 30 years before its publication in 1902, and Wister based it on people he’d known on the plains at the time. Frankly, it’s a series of connected vignettes that chronicle events in Wyoming centered on a young man from Virginia, the protagonist, as he becomes a foreman on a ranch and woos the local schoolmarm. The narrator starts out as a greenhorn under the protection of the Virginian, but on his frequent visits to the region over the course of the years the novel encompasses, he becomes accomplished in his own right in hunting and fishing anyway.

At any rate, the Virginian has to deal with the men on the farm and in the area, including a long-running enmity with a fellow named Trampas who goes from ne’er-do-well to cattle rustler. Eventually, there will be a climactic shootout, of course, but when you remember that this is the first Western novel, you can hopefully appreciate it as not being a cliche.

The language, a sort of self-conscious educated Eastern dialect of the later 19th century applied quite a bit to the landscape of the plains and the eastern Rockies, at times flows nicely over you and at other times distracts the 21st century reader a bit from the story. All in all, though, I liked the book. With this firm grounding, I’m ready, sometime, for the other popular Westerns (Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour). Or maybe some Willa Cather. I own some of them in the self-conscious Readers Digest editions, too.

Books mentioned in this review:

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Book Report: Great Sonnets edited by Paul Negri (1994)

This is a Dover thrift edition that collects a pile of sonnets that had fallen into the public domain. It collects them from a large number of authors, chiefly British and American, and includes a lot of favorites from Shakespeare, Millay, Whittier, Tennyson, Poe, Swinburne, and so on. It’s like a good sampler album of music. You find some you know and like, you find some you don’t think much of, but you also find a couple you like a whole lot and plan to look up more from the author.

This is the latest in the volumes of poetry that I’ve read aloud to my children as they’ve played so they can hear some cool words, and the older boy at four is starting to understand some of the narratives. This means it’s back to Ogden Nash since sonnets sometimes tend toward the That’s what Mommies and Daddies do.

At any rate, a good book. Worth the couple pennies it would cost you.

Books mentioned in this review:

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Book Report: Goodbye, Nanny Grey by Susannah Stacey (1987)

So I sat down to read an English village mystery from the Thatcher era. I think it’s because of brain chemistry changes that occurred when I drank a lot of honeyed tea for a cold. When I was a kid in high school, I read a lot of these since my high school library had all of the Agatha Christie books and my grandmother had quite a collection of such which my mother inherited too early. But every once and again, I get the urge for one of these books, and so I pick up the occasional title.

This book is kind of a whodunit slash British police meanderal (which, at 160 pages, does not give it a lot of room to wander). Nanny Gray is a village oldster and, well, Nanny to a lot of the local families who lived in a cottage given to her by one of her titled charges shortly before he died. He also redid his will to make her the sole heiress, leaving out the remainder of his family. She’s also served the local Arab family, whose wife might have let slip her secret assignation with her husband’s cousin. And since she’s crotchety, she also might have offended the local miscreants. So when she’s found dead in the woods, it could be an accident, or it could be… MURDER!

Well, of course it’s murder. So the investigating officer Bone has to walk about and talk to the various people over large quantities of tea and scones and deal with his own problems (a damaged daughter and his own grieving for his lost wife and son, victims of a car accident). Eventually, he gets his man, sort of, and the story comes out. But at the end, one’s not sure that his efforts helped at all.

Maybe there’s a British lesson in there. Maybe this reflects Britain of the 1980s or how the British mystery authors of the 1980s wished it still were. One thing’s certain: this period has passed in British history, and the Thatcher era might as well be the Thomas Hardy era.

Books mentioned in this review:

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Book Report: Fresh Lies by James Lileks (1994)

Wow. This is a portrait of the Lileks as a young man.

I’ve read his Web site, The Bleat and whatnot, for eight years or so. I’ve bought several of his books from the middle of the last decade new. And I’m expecting one of these days to pay into his BleatPlus system. Eventually.

But finding one of these old Lileks books at a book fair is almost as hard as finding a Philip K. Dick book. And that’s because They don’t want you to read either. This one I nabbed at the Friends of the Springfield Library book fair last fall. On bag day. Which might be proof that They wanted me to read it….

At any rate, this book was written in the early part of the 1990s. Lileks has left his life in the Midwest to find his fortune as a Washington, D.C., based columnist for the Newhouse News syndicate. He was still doing that until sometime in this century, so we have some carry over there between then and later then. His wife is still in law school when he goes to D.C. and lives as a bachelor for a bit. The pieces in the book are about what you’d expect. Not a lot of political stuff, but a dabbling of world-weary kinds of wry asides now and then about the Gulf War and George H.W. Bush.

But he talks a about his smoking habit and about some youthful drug use. He remarks about what it would be like to have a kid, and a longtime student of Lileksia cannot help but enjoy the book on a different level from someone without the same daily exposure. It’s the same guy who writes the Bleat, but instead of fifty-something, he’s a punk kid.

It’s a good enough book on its own. You would have to have lived through the era awarely to get some of it, so kids won’t be looking for this on their flashread devices. But we in our thirties and up can enjoy it.

Books mentioned in this review:

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Book Report: Buried Treasures of the Ozarks by W.C. Jameson (1990)

Now this book is what I’d hoped for out of this book (although, to be honest, I read this book before I browsed the other one watching football).

This book collects stories, legends, and perhaps a bit of history regarding old mines, hidden caches, and buried dollars throughout the Ozarks. Grouped by state (Arkansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma), the stories within this book run the gamut from old Spanish mines from the days of De Soto’s explorations to late 19th century outlaw money hidden hereabouts.

The Missouri section of this book talks about the nearby region, including a snippet that talks about an old mine hidden near the creek running southwest out of Missouri. That could be Wilson Creek, which is not that far off. So I have those neat things to think about, and I have ideas for not only articles, but also about fiction. So this book was quick and enjoyable to read and it might earn back its $4.50 price tag at Redeemed Music and Books.

It was written by a professor of geography and is part of a series of similar books. I might look for the others.

Books mentioned in this review:

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Book Report: The Turquoise Lament by John D. MacDonald (1973)

I must have read this book, as I assume that I’ve read all the Travis McGee series, but it hasn’t been recently, so I picked it up as a palate cleanser after the last Robert B. Parker effort. Within this book, McGee reunites with a former acquaintance he had known when she was a teenager. Now she’s a well-to-do heiress to a comfortable living from her treasure-hunter father, and she’s sailing around the world with her new husband. She thinks her husband is trying to kill her, so McGee flies out to Hawaii. He decides she’s just unnerved and not in love with her husband and that, hey, she’s all grown up now and they’re perfect together. So she’s going to sell the boat the newlyweds have been sailing on and live with McGee.

So McGee returns to Florida, but other events lead him to wonder. An intermediary tries to get an expedition going based on the lost research of the treasure-hunting father, which leads to the realization that maybe the husband is trying to kill her. Or make her think she’s going mad.

Also, it leads to a lot of soul-searching, reminiscing, and good old fashioned screw-them-in-power ruminating from McGee. The book is talkier than action-laden. I don’t remember if that’s the general McGee schtick, but it’s not badly done.

I recommend McGee and MacDonald, or vice versa, of course. I am re-reading the book, after all.

Books mentioned in this review:

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Book Report: Split Image by Robert B. Parker (2010)

I know, you’re thinking to yourself, “Are there only 30 pages of dialog between a major character in the Parkerverse speaking with his/her therapist in this book, or are there 40? Well, to tell you the truth, in all the excitement, I lost track myself. So the question is, does it matter, punk? Well, does it?”

It’s ostensibly a Jesse Stone book, but there’s a Sunny Randall thread going through it that includes a separate, unrelated case, so you get two bits of the Parkerverse in it. Additionally, Sunny is still seeing Dr. Silverman, so it has a touch of all three series. Maybe more, since I haven’t bothered with the Young Adult novels.

Okay, strip out the bad parts of Parkerania, and you’ve got a decent story. Jesse Stone investigates the deaths of a small gangster disciple (not theG.D.s, Packer fans). He discovers(?) two gangsters living side-by-side in Paradise in twin houses, and get this, they’re married to twin sisters. When one of the gangsters is killed, Stone has to find out who amongst the gangster world is doing this. Strangely enough, it’s….

Well, it’s a quick night’s read and it’s not a bad book once you strip the Parkerverse from it. Good news, though, Parkerversians: In this book, a male figure realizes he drove his wife to infidelity!. Jeez, Louise, I swear, I suffered through an English degree and attempting to do some biographical scat studies to explain books that have been studied for centuries. But Parker’s books really haven’t had much difference thematically since the middle to late 1980s. Make of that what you will.

Recommend it? Eh, it won’t do you major psychological damage, but it’s not as good as Parker’s books ca 1980 nor anything a whole host of authors, such as John D. MacDonald, wrote.

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Book Report: Battlestar Galactica by Glen A. Larson and Robert Thurston (1978)

I first read this book in high school. Back then, the television program had only been off the air for about 10 years, and cable had not advanced to the point where the program aired anywhere. As with the Star Trek books, this book and other novelizations were the only reusable relic you had unless you could score some grainy videocassettes taped from the television and recopied. But this book held me out in those years between watching the program on TV as a boy with my father and the whole family together in our apartment in Berryland. There were so few things that we all did together. And watching Battlestar Galactica was one of them. A decade after reading the book, the series aired on SciFi, and I taped my own copies to review the series. A couple years later, they were available on DVD. And then SciFi remade it with modern hectoring lessons baked right in.

So this book is not only a book, but it’s an artifact with pointers to many discrete memories in my youth.

At any rate, it’s not a bad casting of the first three episodes of the television program, although when they flesh out the details, they make some stuff up that seems in odds with the actual edited television episodes. The biggest issue I have is that they made the Cylons into a lizardoid race in armor; however, I seem to recall Apollo telling Boxey in one episode that the Cylons were just the machine remnants of the actual Cylon race, which always gave the premise an extra twist for me. But I guess that was not Larson’s original intent and it carries through here.

Of course, Larson didn’t mean for it to be an anti-technology, anti-American parable, either, as the reboot came to be. Which is one of the reasons I’m an originalist. The other, of course, is the memories bound into the series.

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Book Report: This Is It, Michael Shayne by Brett Halliday (1950)

This is a sixty-year-old book holds up pretty well. Frankly, if you remember the days before the Internet and before cell phones, you’ll only find one jarring dated note in the book: an evening postal delivery? Come on!

Mike Shayne, the red-haired and rangy Miami detective, is called to the hotel room of an investigative syndicate reporter who fears for her life. When he gets there, she’s murdered–and has half of a torn $500 bill in her hand. Since she’d already sent the other half as a retainer, Mike Shayne takes it upon himself to find out who killed her. Was it her ex-husband? The crime boss whose gambling halls she was shuttering? Or someone else.

If you’re like me, you know it’s someone else and you know who way early. But the final plot twist didn’t twist exactly like I expected. And it’s good late pulp crime fiction. This is a Red Badge Mystery, which means there’s another set out there I could accidentally start to collect.

(Previous Mike Shayne reports: Murder Spins the Wheel and The Careless Corpse.)

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It’s Not A Book List

TJIC linked to a Web site that would identify the New York Times Best Sellers on the day you were born.

Of course, it’s not just a book list; it’s a book challenge. How many of the books that were best sellers when you were born have you read?

The list from my birth date (books I’ve read in italics):

Fiction

  1. THE WINDS OF WAR Herman Wouk
  2. WHEELS Alex Hailey
  3. THE DAY OF THE JACKAL Frederick Forsyth
  4. THE EXORCIST William Peter Blatty
  5. RABBIT REDUX John Updike
  6. THE BETSY Harold Robbins
  7. MESSAGE FROM MALAGA Helen MacInnes
  8. OUR GANG Philip Roth
  9. NEMESIS Agatha Christie
  10. THE NAIVE AND SENTIMENTAL LOVER John Le Carré

Non-Fiction

  1. ELEANOR AND FRANKLIN Joseph P. Lash
  2. TRACY AND HEPBURN Garson Kanin
  3. BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE Dee Brown
  4. THE DEFENSE NEVER RESTS F. Lee Bailey
  5. THE GAME OF THE FOXES Ladislas Farago
  6. JENNIE VOLUME TWO, Ralph G. Martin
  7. HONOR THY FATHER Gay Talese
  8. THE LAST WHOLE EARTH CATALOG Portola Institute
  9. BRIAN PICCOLO: A SHORT SEASON Jeannie Morris
  10. BEYOND FREEDOM AND DIGNITY B. F. Skinner

Strangely enough, I read the same percentage (10%) of TJIC’s list, and they’re different books. Also, I have not identified the books I already own but have not yet read because, frankly, there are so many that I can never be sure.

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Book Report: A Political Bestiary by Eugene J. McCarthy and James J. Kilpatrick (1978)

This book was written in 1978, back when one could try to write a general political humor book without vitriol toward either side. So it’s amusing in spots, imagining Washington buzzwords as actual animals illustrated by Jeff McNelly of “Shoe” fame.

More than its actual humor content, though, the book provides a sort of insight as a time capsule into 1970s political thought. At the base, not much has changed except that perhaps the underlying tenets of liberal thought have been seriously challenged, leading to the aforementioned vitriol.

The more the differences change, though, the more they remain the same.

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Book Report: Missouri Bandits, Bushwhackers, Outlaws, Crooks, Devils, Ghosts, & Desperadoes by Carole Marsh (1990)

With a title like this, I’d hoped for a collection of thought-provoking and perhaps article-launching anecdotes. Instead, I got a young adult book self-published in a very rudimentary style circa 1990. How rudimentary? The pages are only printed on one side, the dust jacket is a stock dust jacket with the title pasted on, possibly from work-at-home-in-your-spare-time people, and the pages were designed with DOS-based, if that, desktop publishing not far above the old Print Shop software. And the author liked to make things fun by putting wingdings in words. I kid you not.

Revel in that glory.

And for all that, the pieces in the book aren’t that specific to Missouri. There are some things about Ma Barker and whatnot, but then they get into President Lincoln’s ghost in the White House, word finds with synonyms for Thief, jokes, and urban legends set elsewhere in the Midwest. All the better for the recycling of the material.

Hey, apparently Carole Marsh made a go of this judging by the sheer number of titles associate with her. Good for her. However, I cannot recommend anything from this book.

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Quotation from Popular Literature ca. 1904

Owen Wister, The Virginian:

There can be no doubt of this: All America is divided into two classes,–the quality and the equality.

The latter will always recognize the former when mistaken for it. Both will be with us until our women bear nothing but hangs.

It was through the Declaration of Independence that we Americans acknowledged the ETERNAL INEQUALITY of man. For by it we abolished a cut-and-dried aristocracy. We had seen little mere artificially held up in high places, and great men artificially held down in low places, and our own justice-loving hearts abhorred this violence to human nature. Therefore, we decreed that every man should thenceforth have equal liberty to find his own level. By this very decree we aknowledged and gave freedom to true aristocracy, saying, “Let the best man win, whoever he is.” Let the best man win! That is America’s word. That is true democracy. And true democracy and true aristocracy are one and the same thing. If anybody cannot see this, so much the worse for his eyesight.

Of course, that was popular literature when America was on the ascent.

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2010: The Year In Reading

Well, I made it to 100 books this year, helped immensely by a collection of art books and craft books.

Here’s the list:

A Beader’s Reference Jane Davis
Hunting Down Amanda Andrew Klavan
A Heinlein Trio Robert Heinlein
Designing Jewelry with Glass Beads Stephanie Sersich
Adam-12: The Runaway Chris Stratton
Adam-12: Dead on Arrival Chris Stratton
Blood for a Dirty Dollar Joe Millard
Wilson’s Creek William Garrett Piston & Richard W. Hatcher III
Make Necklaces Jo Moody
Jumpers Tom Stoppard
The Frankenstein Factory Edward D. Hoch
Assignment Golden Girl Edward S. Aarons
Street Fighter Todd Strasser
The Crime Encyclopedia Marie J. MacNee
Kipling: A Selection of His Stories and Poems Volume 1 edited by John Beecroft
Skin Tight Carl Hiaasen
Captains Courageous Rudyard Kipling
Play It Again Sam Stephen Humphrey Bogart
The Magic of Scrub Holler Lanny Gibson
100 People Who Are Screwing Up America Bernard Goldberg
Arizona Ambush Don Pendleton
The Joy of Junk Cheryl Fall
Winnowing Out Our Souls Jane Hoogestraat
The Illustrated Man Ray Bradbury
Tennessee Smash Don Pendleton
Trash to Treasure 8 Leisure Arts, Inc.
The Art of Woodburning Betty Auth
Clemmie John D. MacDonald
Two Hour Crafts Landauer Books
Viets Guide to Sex,Travel, & Anything Else That Will Sell This Book Elaine Viets
Brother Odd Dean Koontz
Craftivity edited by Tsia Carson
Trash to Treasure 2 Leisure Arts, Inc.
Another Antigone A.R. Gurney, Jr.
Tabletop Fountains Dawn Cusick
Historic Midwest Houses John Drury
Up For Grabs/Top of the Heap Erle Stanley Gardner
Step-by-Step Pyrography Bob Neill
Creative Tabletop Fountains Marthe Le Van
Junk Beautiful Outdoor Edition Sue Whitney with Kimberly Melamed
Murder, She Wrote: Dying to Retire Jessica Fletcher with Donald Bain
100 Crafts Under $10 Better Homes and Gardens
Wicked Prey John Sandford
The Salvage Sisters’ Guide to Finding Style in the Street and Inspiration in the Attic Kathleen Hackett and Mary Ann Young
Great Presidential Wit Bob Dole
City Clifford B. Simak
Rules of Prey John Sandford
Cosbyology Bill Cosby
Getting Even with the Answering Machine John Carfi and Cliff Carle
Currier and Ives’ America edited by Colin Simkin
Detroit Perrin Souvenir Company
Alberto Vargas: Works from the Max Vargas Collection Reid Stewart Austin
Dick Tracy: The Secret Files Edited by Max Allan Collins and Martin H. Greenberg
Kilobyte Couture Brittany Forks
Creative Juice Cathie Filian and Steve Piacenza
It Happened In Lemay William F. Alden
The Bug Ellen Ullman
Frederic Remington Peter Hassrick
Odd Hours Dean Koontz
Degas Phoebe Pool
The Impressionists Denis Thomas
Rough Country John Sandford
Napkin Decoupage Deborah Morbin and Tracy Boomer
The New Roadside America Mike Wilkins, Ken Smith, and Doug Kirby
Star Trek: The Eugenics Wars Volume I Greg Cox
Everything Crafts Easy Projects edited by Courtney Nolan
Three-dimensional Decoupage Hilda Stokes
Friday’s Feast Don Pendleton
Fatherhood Bill Cosby
You Look Nice Today Stanley Bing
Trash to Treasure 6 Leisure Arts
Borrowed Ideas and Famous Firsts: St. Louis Architecture Marilynne Bradley and Ahme Quist
Hand Shadows To Be Thrown On The Wall Henry Bursill
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World Jack Weatherford
Satan’s Sabbath Don Pendleton
Rustic Reminders of the Past Leo Hamblet
Motherhood, the Second Oldest Profession Erma Bombeck
Double Crossfire Don Pendleton
A History of the Rural Schools of Greene County, MO David L. Burton
The Libyan Contract Don Smith
Second Opinions of Hippocrates’ Oaf James T. Brown, MD
Copp for Hire Don Pendleton
Paul Harvey’s For What It’s Worth edited by Paul Harvey, Jr.
Copp on Fire Don Pendleton
Missouri Trivia Ernie Couch
Fantastic Four The Universal Guide
Color Treasury of Firearms Crescent Books
Growing Up in the Ozarks John E. Hult
The Past Through Tomorrow Robert Heinlein
Mary Ellen’s Best of Helpful Hints Mary Ellen
Cambodia Clash Mack Bolan

I didn’t read too much of real consequence this year; just a couple of Rudyard Kipling books. Also, in my defense in the run up to 100, one of the Kipling books was a collection with multiple books in it, and one of the Heinlein books I read this year was a collection of three shorter novels. Still, I count the number of books read.

I also didn’t add in my own novel, which I’ve read once through in manuscript form and a half way in bound galley form. Watch for that next year, werd.

If you’re interested in learning what I thought about each book on the list, check out the Book Reports category and keep scrolling.

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