Month: November 2010

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.

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.

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.

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: