Month: April 2010

This book compendiates gangsters, murderers, conpeople, and terrorists from the modern era (20th century, roughly, but with some late 19th century Wild West outlaws). Each section covers a type of crime, such as robbers, and each chapter within the section covers individuals or gangs within it, such as Black Bart and Timothy McVeigh. Each chapter contains a couple of sidebars and some suggested further reading. Ergo, this is one heck of an idea book for historical essays and whatnot. Also, it really serves the Jeopardy! play, as I found man of the criminals in the book to be answers for Jeopardy! questions while I was reading it.

On distraction it offers, though, is parenthetical appositives throughout to define each and every crime in common terms. As though larceny, espionage, and extortion were too obscure for the average reader. Worse, it does it each and every time the term appears for the first time in a chapter so that it just pounds simple definitions into your head.

I recommend the book if you are into this sort of thing and if you’ve got room in your life for a book that you can pick up, read a chapter, put down and pick up again some days later.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is the first part of a two-part set that was a Book of the Month Club selection in 1956, if I read my Internet correctly (and that Internet is correct). Funny, hey, how our grandparents actually bought classical literature for mass consumption? Funny and sad.

This book includes Kim, The Jungle Books, Just-So Stories, and Puck of Pook’s Hill, each a whole book in its own right. However, I don’t get to count them as individual books in my annual reckoning because I count physical books. So I’m going to have to read The Green Mile to balance things out.

Kim is the story of a young orphan, the son of an Irish soldier and a native woman, who joins a Buddhist holy man as the holy man seeks a location from Buddhist myths. Along the way, Kim plays upon his relationship with a Muslim horse trader and an English intelligence man to become a player in The Great Game. Kim’s experience as a beggar in India and his familiarity with the peoples there serve him well as does his native intelligence until he can become an active spy. When he does, he helps to thwart some Russian surveyors coming to measure for the curtains they’ll put up when they rule the region. The book dovetails with what I’ve read recently in Flashman, Sharpe’s Tiger, and Sharpe’s Triumph. Kipling is very respective of the different cultures within India and makes the reader appreciate them, too.

The Jungle Books mirrors a bit Tarzan of the Apes and The Return of Tarzan with the whole child raised by animals motif, but in Mowgli’s case, it is wolves instead of apes. I cannot imagine how Disney turned this into a musical, but if they can take The Hunchback of Notre Dame and do it, they can do it to anything. The books follow similar story arcs as Mowgli learns some things and then defeats an enemy or an enemy of the wolf pack, including a razing of a human village. It’s interesting how the whole Avatar motif gets called a remake of Dances with Wolves and whatnot, but in The Jungle Books, a human gone natural/native sides with the animals against man, too. But Kipling presents the native village as savage and superstitious, not representative of the contemporary sensibilities of the civilized (Mowgli isn’t leveling London or anything). I guess that’s the main difference and why one can forgive Mowgli for it when one cannot forgive Cameron for it.

I’ll be honest; I skipped Just-So Stories because I read it in a stand alone volume in 2008.

Puck of Pook’s Hill is a neat little book about two children in England who meet Puck, the last of the People of the Hills, and he brings a couple of historic personages to tell them their stories and an ultimate lesson. A Norman knight from the era following the Battle of Hastings holds a manor with the help of the Anglo-Saxon former lord and the duo travel to Africa with Vikings; a Roman centurion guards Hadrian’s Wall against the Picts and Winged Helmets as the governor marches on Rome to unseat the emperor; and a Jewish moneylender thwarts King John’s source of funds, ensuring that the barons will make him sign the Great Charter. The main lesson of the book is that the Sword leads to Treasure which leads to Law. A secondary motif is that the present (the end of the 19th century) is so far more advanced than the past that the children are better educated than the knight (he can’t read and refers to a mystical needle, the compass, which the boy produces from his pocket). In the 19th century, the children are familiar with the lineage of the British monarchy that the succession following William the Conqueror is mentioned as though it should be common knowledge and whatnot. A sort of double-effect message comes to an American reader in the beginning of the 21st century, though. I’m familiar with the history of Britain enough to know a bit about Hadrian’s Wall and William Rufus’s unsuccessful reign, but that’s because I’m particularly well read. A hundred years ago, I would be on par with a schoolchild. So civilization, or at least its education, is receding. Finally, one cannot read the book without commenting on the final chapter with the Jewish moneylender, which speaks of a secret cabal of moneylenders who behind the scenes control the fate of kings and kingdoms with their pursestrings. You know what? It’s fiction. Now perhaps better than in Kipling’s day, we are equipped to recognize and dismiss the thing as a stereotype. However, we’re not trusted to do so. Another way civilization or its education are receding.

So that’s four Kipling novel in under a year and a half, and i’m going to read the next volume soon. I guess I’m going through my Kipling phase like I’ve gone through my Dickens phase and my Hardy phase. Still, these are easier to read because they’re children’s books, and I’ve already promised to read them to my children in a couple of years. I can’t wait.

Books mentioned in this review:

I bought this book because it’s a Fawcett Gold Medal paperback. It looks like a John D. MacDonald book from the era, and it’s part of a series featuring derring-do much like the other little pulps I like to read. However.

This book’s pace is too slow, really, for pulp goodness. It features a Cajun American agent named Durell who goes to a fictitious African nation to spirit out its prince after a neighboring nation, spurred on by the ChiComs’ need for a railroad right-of-way, overruns the small nation. Durell has one chance to get the prince, a former student radical during his studies at Yale, out: an old woodburning steam locomotive and a single track. Durell is distracted and aided by a beautiful woman–the golden girl of the title–who turns out to be the prince’s younger sister, whom the prince wants dead to cement his claim to the throne.

The book’s scenes are pretty stock bits of action spaced well among long descriptions of the terrain that only pad the book out. The final climactic battle isn’t really that climactic, and as I mentioned, the pacing of the book is pretty poor.

But it’s the thirty-somethingth in the series, so someone in publishing must have supported it. Maybe the first books in the series were good enough to build a following and the author coasted from there.

I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re an absolute glutton like me.

Books mentioned in this review:

You know, I wouldn’t read a comic book and put it on the list here, but somehow I can read a YA adaptation of a film based on a video game (which is not a first: see here where I’ve read the novelization of a sequel of a movie based on a video game).

That said, come on, it’s a book about a military operation that incorporates the characters from the side-by-side fighter game and somehow gets Jean-Claude Van Damme in front of them. The plot is about a mad warlord in a backwater country in Southeast Asia who is using science to tip the balance in his favor on his plan to rule the world. The good guys, the AN (Allied Nations, a proxy for the UN), need to infiltrate the hidden base to free some hostages, and several non-military players get into the base to seek vengeance on the warlord.

Meanwhile, in a stunning turn of events (and the fact this is not the film version of Heavy Barrel), everyone drops their weapons and starts fighting with martial arts. Someone fires a bazooka stolen from the military, presumably a military museum. The bad guy gets his comeuppance. The book ends.

It’s a straight forward story with some back story fleshed out to the depth you’d expect. Maybe the backstories scrolled on the video game itself. But this book, like other YA adventures including those of Heinlein, really could serve as a gateway to more in depth reading. But in 1994, it probably just was a gateway to Street Fighter II.

Books mentioned in this review: