Month: December 2010

This book is 25 books later into the series than Double Crossfire, and they really must have been churning them out by this time. Much has happened in the Executioner’s world. He’s no longer doing terrorists in Turkey, now he’s freelancing or something and he’s in Southeast Asia, rescuing POWs. It was what all the pulp guys were doing in that era.

Sadly, the quality has declined greatly, and the character has changed. Now, instead of just killing bad guys, he’s also beating a Russian KGB official’s wife together with a chair leg as part of a trap. Not because she was going to squeal, but because she had to die. So it’s lost some of the essence of the character. The plot is movieish and a quick bunch of set pieces.

You want to know what caliber of book this is? At the end, Mack Bolan saves the POWs, who are repatriated through a bureaucratic process. Bolan goes to meet his Khmer guide, Eng, an attractive woman who leads a band of resistance fighters.

She looked up into his eyes. “Will you return to Bangkok with me?” she asked.
Then Bolan read the look. It was longing, plain and simple. He realized now that she liked him more than just a friend.

Oh, have mercy.

I got another later in the Executioner line here to read. I’ll probably hit it sometime next year. And, sadly, I’ll probably pick up more. On the one hand, with a series like this written by the shop writers, the quality is bound to be uneven to say the least. On the plus side, they can’t all be as bad as this, can they?

Stay tuned in 2011 for answers.

Robert Heinlein is like Ayn Rand with ray guns.

Okay, I said that to cheese off Robert Heinlein and Ayn Rand fans, but I think there’s probably some overlap. Heinlein works some political views into his books with paragraph-long statements of philosophy. A lot of authors do this–you can review the list of contemporary crime fiction authors who have cheesed me off with their flippant anti-conservative remarks–but the difference with Heinlein is that you get some building of an argument in those paragraphs, a defense and explanation of the viewpoint instead of just a glib insult. I like it better. Also, it tracks with my viewpoint.

This book collects 800 pages of short stories written over decades that make up the Future History timeline (most of the material; Wikipedia says there are others, and I think Time Enough For Love fits into the story arc). The Future History covers several hundred years, from Earth’s movement to the Road City model (where moving sidewalks built to superhighway size dictate commerce and growth) to the drive to put man on the Moon, the resulting interplanetary colonization and imperialism, the revolts, the rise of a theocracy in America, the revolution against the theocracy, and then the treatment of a subrace of long-lived humans when they are discovered.

The stories themselves are forty to sixty years old, so the space race and human development haven’t proceeded in the fashion depicted, but given that we haven’t gotten far into space yet, much of it could still come truish. For example, Heinlein doesn’t see moon travel as a government program (as it was), but a private endeavor (as it will be). So you have to overlook places where the author projects his expectations into the future that is actually our past and present (and future) that don’t follow along the lines of actual development. If you can get past that, you have a lot of exciting and engaging classic science fiction available to you.

Mostly short stories, but some long novellas and short novels in the mix kept me coming back. I was feeling pretty cocky after Thanksgiving when I’d read 95 books or so, so I thought I’d try to run through this in my drive to 100 books. This took me a month to read, but I’m still in good shape. And Heinlein is good fun. The stories are not hyper-obsessed with science like you get in more modern science fiction along the lines of The Forge of God or the works of Larry Niven, so the focus on story keeps one reading.

I’ve got more Heinlein on my to-read shelves, and that’s a good place to be.

It must be Year of the Early 1980s Good Morning, America Contributor here at MfBJN. In November, I reported on a book by Erma Bombeck, and now I’ve run through this collection by Mary Ellen Pinkham.

Like the Bombeck book, this book belonged to my mother, although I cannot imagine she used it much as cleaning and cooking were not her bailiwicks. This book is a bit of a time capsule to that middle-of-the-century period where housewives looked for tips and tricks to keep their homes clean and their tables laden within a budget. Personally, I wonder how much the world has changed compared to how much my status has changed when I look at these books. On the one hand, I have moved upward from the housing projects to a nice rural retreat in the 30 years since this book was published. On the other hand, technology and the culture have changed to some degree changed. The first chapter, for example, deals an awful lot with gravy and how to thicken, thin, extend, and otherwise deal with its defects. How many people under the age of 50 cook with gravy in the 21st century? Honestly, I don’t know.

At any rate, it’s a collection of grouped hints, as the title indicates. I don’t think I’ll take too many things away from it as the price of cleaning products has fallen to the point that it’s less expensive to buy a cleaner off the shelf for a dedicated task than it is to buy the precursors listed in the book. Maybe I’m just to bourgeois to think so.

I did see a couple of hints (toothpicks in screw holes to tighten the screws and toothpaste in nail holes to cover them before you paint) that my mother passed onto me. I don’t think she got them from the book; I’d wager they were such common knowledge that even my mother knew them. I still use the toothpicks thing, although I can afford filler now for holes before I have my painter come in and paint things in the shade my interior decorator designs for my feng shui. So maybe hints remain relevant for some people beneath me. I do see Heloise still runs in the local rag, after all, but my daily stock reports are not.

I loved this book. It’s a collection of stories about growing up just southeast of Springfield, Missouri, in the 1930s. The author moves with his family to a small homestead called Bethany Homestead with his family of 7. His father’s a Lutheran minister and a frequent missionary to Africa who really wants to return, but he serves as pastor to a number of churches in the United States. This leaves the wife and her children (10 by the time the book ends) on the little farm, which has some crops and a large orchard not to mention some cattle to tend to. The second oldest boy, John takes an active role in the household.

It’s a strange other country, the past. While some of the landmarks are familiar, the culture is different. For example, the author took a year off between finishing school and deciding whether to pursue further education. Not between high school and college, not between his undergrad years and going onto medical school. Between 8th grade and high school. During this year, his father is preaching in Nebraska and his brother is in high school already, so the 13 year old boy is effectively the man of the house, working outside the home for some extra income and taking care of chores and helping his mother tend the 8 siblings at home. 13! He also recounts travelling to the upper peninsula of Michigan to visit his father (who’s preaching afar again) and, instead of riding in a single Packard laden with his 9 siblings and mother, stays over an extra couple of days in Michigan and hitchhikes home.

I wondered if this sort of collection of stories would fly were I or a peer try to write it about our youths in the 1970s and 1980s, whether they would be interesting enough to draw any attention from seekers of esoterica 50 years from now. You know what? They just might. Some of my stories sound outlandish among my cohort now, only 30 years beyond their occurence. Perhaps in another 30 years they will be exotic enjoyments for readers. If anyone reads in 2040.

At any rate, I liked the book so much I’ll keep my eyes out for the others written by Hult and his immediate family. Also, last night, I returned to the used book store where I bought this book and bought six other memoirs in the same vein from different authors from the Ozarks.