Category: Books

I read Paul Harvey’s The Rest of the Story, lord, has it been five years ago already? No wonder I’m feeling old. I was going to go on a bit about how you can hear Paul Harvey’s voice as you read these things if you’re of a certain age and tie it to how people about 40 years old also have a certain affinity for CBS News’ Christopher Glenn’s voice, too, since he used to do the news breaks on Saturday mornings and CBS hourly news on the radio, but jeez, I think I need an old man’s nap before I do.

Although I didn’t like the pacing of the Rest of the Story segments translated to the page, these shorter pieces fit okay. For those of you who don’t know, the For What It’s Worth bits were just shorter segments of Harvey’s News and Comment instead of stand-alone pieces in their own right. The length varies, but the choppier radio broadcast style works better.

The vignettes are amusing. Now that we have Snopes, we know many of them are urban legends recounted, some knowing jokes with the artificial spontenaity of an America’s Funniest Home Videos nut shot (am I old enough that I have to explain that to kids, too?), and some things that might have happened. Just enjoy the stories and don’t build a worldview about them.

Paul Harvey was audio blogs, really. Some linking, little thinking, some wry notes, and some urban legendry. Enjoy them as such, for what it’s worth.

Books mentioned in this review:

Just when I get to breezing along these paperback pulp novels, thinking they’re all the same, I run into one that’s not.

Maybe I’ve been running in a particular series (The Executioner), so I get complacent and think that they all read like that, fast and engaging, and then I run into something like this.

Oh, not to sell it short: this book is ripped from contemporary headlines. A Texas oilman wants to kill an Arab leader for his own personal gain! If that doesn’t strike you as the summation of the left’s view of the 21st century, I don’t know what would, aside from that the post-2009 21st century includes RACISM! as the motivating factor for Texas oilmen and their sympathists opposing…. Well, anything.

Except this book takes place ca. 1974, when a CIA agent seeks out a South African son of an SS officer who’s out to kill Muammar al-Gaddafi. Wait a minute, a CIA agent protecting Gaddafi? This just in: I made a dartboard with Gaddafi’s face on it as an art project in middle school. I am now middle-aged. I would say, “WTF?” but that’s how the kids talk these days. Did I say “kids”? I meant “people who think they’re young, but are marketing to kids.”

Sorry, as a middle-aged man, I’m prone to the wandering thoughts that come with age. Where was I?

Oh, yes, this book I read in 2010.

Well, it’s a book that takes its inspiration from the international suspense pulps of the era. Ian Fleming inspired many, which is why the main character has relations with Israeli intelligence and Maltese natives in that way.

However, the book’s pacing really pulls it out of the ranks of pulp or paperback fiction; solid paragraphs and extraneousity slow the book down a great deal. The story is a bit meh. The set pieces are not so much predictable as slow to develop, and the main character’s main job seems to be running to authorities in various locations and asking for their help, which is not what one usually wants in a two-fisted pulp novel.

Apparently, this is part of a series and is the first in the series without the Secret Mission: prefix. So I’ll avoid those with it and try to avoid others in the series without it.

And I’m back to Don Pendleton by now, thank you very much.

Books mentioned in this review:

Secret Mission No. 17: The Libyan Contract

This is my second book of self-published Ozarks humor this year (the first was Branson Humor as you well recall). I liked this book better.

That’s not to say that this book is a laff riot. It collects some musings of a doctor as he goes through the business of being a doctor (ca. 1982). There are some amusing bits, but nothing that made me laugh out loud or anything. As a matter of fact, it continues my absolute descent in recent reading from Cosby to Bombeck to this.

The book has some things in common with the latter as they come from the same time period. But because it’s a small press book published in the area where I live, although there are no particular pieces dedicated to the Ozarks, I look upon it with affection. It strikes me as a collection of stories a relative might tell you, expecting laughter but mostly getting smiles as much for the relative as for the stories themselves.

Books mentioned in this review:

After the consortium began producing these books, it moved from a mob-centric plot to an international terrorist plot template. After all, the 1970s were over and the 1980s were beginning. Out with the Dirty Harry, in with the Rambo.

In this book, Mack Bolan is out to protect America from heroin coming from Turkey. The KGB and its mercenaries are using a guerrilla front group to grow and process opium. The KGB also has designs to encourage an Armenian-American to fund and front an Armenian rebel group so it can thwart the Armenian-American and publicly embarrass America and to drive Turkey into the Russian sphere of influence. To save the day, Bolan has to protect the Armenian-American from a mob-like hit in Beverly Hills and then to air drop into Turkey to rescue Americans and an attractive Kurdish woman and to blow up the operation.

As the book turns from the mob focus to the world focus, it does broaden the possibilities. It also leads to more complex plots and lenghtening books. If that’s what you’re looking for, you’ll be pleased that it’s more modern thrillerish. The end of the book features a number of cables coming in that tip you to the next several books available in the sundry series in the Mack Bolan world. I dunno. I’m probably romanticizing it in thinking there’s as much lost as gained in the transition.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is the last one written by Don Pendleton before he turned the series over to The Executioner, Inc., and they turned out hundreds of books in the series and others. As such, it does have an ending sort of feel to it as Pendelton finishes up with the War on the Mafia that covered the first books in the series.

As in Friday’s Feast, this book picks up on the final one week swing through the country that Mack Bolan takes after accepting a job working for Washington. It’s probably best if you not reflect on how Bolan can drive across country in a week while stopping and infiltrating and exterminating various mob bastions while doing so.

This time, he returns to New York to finish off the remainder of the families there who are reorganizing after his previous visit. It’s a pretty standard piece of Bolan fare with a couple of ambushes and set pieces where Bolan turns a bordello and Central Park into a hellground and then he infiltrates the mafia HQ using the same Omega/Frankie/Ace of Spades schtick. I don’t mean to diminish it too much, since I’m learning how relatively good the Bolan books are in the monthly pulp paperback line, but if you read them too quickly, you see they are very similar. That’s part of the comfort and the lure of them, I guess. They are put out by the Harlequin people, for crying out loud.

Books mentioned in this review:

After reading Fatherhood by Bill Cosby, I looked for another book of short pieces to keep on the bedstand. I inherited a number of Erma Bombeck titles from my mother, so I chose one of them. I wondered why Erma Bombeck doesn’t get much acclaim or even mention only a decade after her death and why I lump Bill Cosby in with Mark Twain as a great American humorist, but Erma Bombeck doesn’t percolate up to collective memory. Well, this book explained it.

It’s an amusing collection, but Erma Bombeck was a suburban housewife whose great success came writing newspaper columns in the 1970s and 1980s. Her columns in this book really tie themselves to that era and concern, so I cannot relate to them with the depth that I can to Bill Cosby or even to Andy Rooney. Sadly.

This is not my first trip through some of Bombeck’s works. I read some of them, perhaps even the same volumes, when I was in middle school and maybe early high school since my mother had them around and I didn’t have a library of several thousand volumes to read through at that time. Did I say middle school? I might have read some of them as early as elementary school, since it might have been before I moved to Missouri for the first time.

I remember one of the columns from this book, a column about a mother who died at 48 and left each of three boys a letter that said, “Don’t tell your brothers, but I loved you the best.” When I first read it, I had a mother. Now I have my mother’s book. There’s something poignant, self-consciously so, in that. One of the late of-the-cuff remarks in this book, about mothers who throw out their right arms when they step hard on the brakes, struck me. I’d teased my mother about that when she did that to me into my 30s, as though her thin arm was going to save me. But it’s an impulse many mothers who grew up in the era before mandatory seat belts and rear car seats must have had. It will be meaningless to kids these days, but I remembered it well, the karate chop to the chest in a tense automotive situation.

Will you like this book? Probably more if you’re over the age of 35 and can see your mother in it or see yourself in it if you’re over 60. Kids today and adults in the future will look at the sitatutions therein as though they were reading “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” So maybe someday she’ll be something of Mark Twain. But probably not, as humor columnists fall out of favor and are forgotten.

Books mentioned in this review:

Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession

I bought this book at a book fair down here, and I hoped it would do dual duty:

• I wanted something easy to flip through during a football game.
• I hoped to find some linear drawings to turn into wood burnings.

Well, I got one of the two, that being the first.

It’s a small, self-published collection of drawings produced by Mr. Hamblet during his drives and meanderings in Oklahoma and Western Arkansas. The images focus on rural buildings, barns and whatnot, with landscape around them. No people or horses. Mr. Hamblet demonstrates some talent with the pen.

Unfortunately, as far as the wood burning goes, the images are a little too busy for me, with a lot of pen strokes and detailed lines. I’m still at the clip art difficulty level when it comes to wood burning.

Since it’s not available on Amazon.com nor other bookselling Web sites, I’ve included the cover here so you don’t think I’m completely making it up:

This is a very short booklet about some architectural landmarks in the St. Louis area. Short paragraphs about each landmark accompany a photograph or a drawing of the landmark in question. Ms. Bradley does the photos and drawings.

As some of you might remember, I bought Ms. Bradley’s book of watercolors in 2008. Given that the books are 24 years apart, she’s maintained her interest in the architecture of the St. Louis area for a long time.

It’s an interesting little book to browse (you can easily do it between football plays on television) if you have interest in the St. Louis area and its history or architecture at all.

Books mentioned in this review:

You’re thinking that I’ll pretty much count anything as a book I’ve read, especially when I look like I’m going to fall short of the 100 annual goal. After all, I could flipping through craft books. How much lower can I sink? How about a book that’s nothing but hand puppets and titles? You betcha.

That’s what this book is: a collection of hand puppets, including a two-dimensional representation of how you’re supposed to make them and the representation of what it looks like when you’ve done it successfully. It’s only one side of the page, too, as this volume recreates a book published in the middle of the nineteenth century. Back when they didn’t have electricity and wanted to entertain themselves at by candlelight or whale oil lantern, this is what they did.

I thought the book was starting out from a bad spot when it showed this:

Click for full size

Look at that finger on the top hand. Is that the ring finger? Is it even attached to the hand? The book didn’t say anything about needing a knife to make any of the shapes.

Fortunately, the rest look easy to accomplish. With practice. Just what I need, another hobby. I’ll get right on it, once I figure out how to successfully operate a sewing machine and learn the harmonica.

A quick perusal, something you can do while watching the football game or, if you’re like me, trying to avoid watching the Packers play a good quarter and blow it in the second half. Which they did not do this week, I heard; I don’t know, I was breaking my own fingers trying to make hand shadows.

Books mentioned in this review:

I read Bing’s earlier novel, Lloyd What Happened, in 2006. Wow, what a different world that would have been. It was one of the first books I read after my first son was born, so I no doubt read it while being on call early in the nights during that first week. I was also an executive of sorts with an interactive marketing agency, so I could have been on my first step into the world where Stanley Bing’s characters live. Except, f course, I never was one for that way of life. Four years later, I’m in a different city and my life has slowed from a work-focus to a home-and-family-focus.

This book focuses on the head of a corporate Quality program who has a great secretary whom he helps through some life crises and gives good reviews and raises to, but she goes a bit off her rocker and brings a sexual harassement lawsuit against him and the company. This happens at the same time as a recession, so the man’s career ends pretty abruptly and under a cloud.

Bing chooses an unreliable narrator, a first person account from someone familiar with the story but not the characters under scrutiny. The narrator is a high level HR executive, friends with the eventual defendant, and a solid satirical corporate drone.

A very good book. I picked this up last week and jumped right on it. I could see why the Christian County Library thought this book was expendable; the last patron to check it out left her due date strip in it, and the book had sat on the shelf since 2006 without attention. A shame.

Books mentioned in this review:

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

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

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

Books mentioned in this review:

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

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

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

Books mentioned in this review: