Category: Book Report

Okay, I cannot tell you much about this book because it just came out today, and my beautful wife hasn’t read it yet, so I cannot give away the details, except:

• It’s a Sunny Randall book.
• Parker continues to explore his femispenser side, which I think involves doubting yourself, paying not only attention to your clothes but also your makeup, and crying. Crikey, I think I must have learned everything I know about writing women characters from him.
• Needs more gun play. Like Checkov said, if you see the big bald black guy in act one, he must fire a couple rounds by act three.
• The Parkerverse crossovers continue; in the last Spenser book, Spenser passed an unidentified Sunny Randall walking her dog, and in this book….Well, I cannot tell you, but rest assured, this will undoubtedly culminate in a Spenser, Jesse Stone, Sunny Randall, Jackie Robinson, Wyatt Earp, race horse, and Spiderman cross over you won’t want to miss! Until next time, Excelsior!

I bought this book for $1.00 at Hooked on Books in Springfield, Missouri, and it should serve as something of a reminder to me. Avoid the books with the red dots on the spine. If the book store puts them on carts outside, it’s because they don’t care if someone steals the book.

All right, it’s late and I am being melodramatic; the book’s not that bad, but its pacing reminded me of walking through thigh-deep water in blue jeans. Sure, it’s occasionally cool, occasionally exciting, but you’ve got to slog a way to get there.

The book is set in a 1987 dystopian future, where the Soviets have pretty much overrun Europe and the East, Canada and Mexico have sealed their borders to isolate us to not piss off the Soviet hegemon, and the only free country is Australia, and everyone wants letters of transit to the promised former penal colony–which is why when Ugarte….sorry, wrong plot there. But America has militarized into a fascist state, where the state raises children and rewards people for procreation. As a result, society revolves around dance clubs with copulation chambers in the back. In this world of countless constitutional amendments and daily terrorist bombings by one aggrieved group or another, crime investigations often fall to the primary suspects–who can exercise their 31st and look into crimes of which they’re accused.

This amendment comes in handy when Payne, a bioengineer, finds a corpse in his apartment. After the authorities come several hours after Payne calls them, they leave a yellow claim ticket that gives Payne permission, under his 31st amendment rights, to all materials the authorities gather; Payne originally decides to not investigate on his own, but he’s attacked by someone who wants the ticket, so he decides to investigate. Fortunately, he’s a bioengineer, because some biology is involved. Interspersed with the interpersonal melodrama in Payne’s life and the exposition about the state of the world, Payne does a lot of meticulously and dryly detailed technical things with lab equipment. Perhaps this can be done now. Perhaps it’s something in a biologist’s current fantasies. Who am I to care? Just the reader, and fortunately a dedicated one at that.

But, as I indicated, the plot offers just enough interest through the first half to make you think maybe, maybe it’s going to pick up. And it does, around page 140 (of 273). Finally, action moves along more quickly than explication, revelation replaces mere investigation, or at least the pages turned; perhaps the wind was just blowing more from a righterly direction to give them a good tail wind.

So it’s not a good pick up if you’re looking for a set-in-the-dark-near-future sci fi novel, or a medical thriller, to both of which this book undoubtedly aspires. However, it’s an interesting and heartening bit of historical perspective into the fictional nightmares projected from current evens that are now history. I mean, encircled by the Soviets, with even Mexico against us, and nary a Wolverine in sight? How strangely inspiring that our own current dark times might be so suddenly resolved, all of our worst fears overturned by resolution and confrontation of danger.

Until our future current dark times arrive, of course.

I bought my copy of this book at Downtown Books for $3.95 because I was feeling extravagant, and because I liked the second television show. TSR, the former role playing game company commissioned this book to promote its former role playing game, which was based not on the television show but on the original books from the 1930s (but not the film serial). So I read the book bearing in mind the comparisons that sprang from its precedents.

And the book lacks.

Of course it’s a role playing game novel. It features five adventures put together into a loose campaign, wherein Buck is updated from a World War I pilot to a 1990s ace who is purposefully suspended by a secret military program. After his revival in the 25th century, each of Buck’s adventures goes through the common RPG cycle: going to the store (wherein Buck and the reader are innundated with technical detail to increase the plausibility of the 25th century technology); briefing (wherein Buck and the readers receive the salient explication laid out by the dungeon master superior officer); adventure (wherein Buck does neat things in a progression of exotic locations); and debriefing (wherein Buck receives his experience points and resulting promotion in level/rank and the dungeon master superior officer gives the hook for the next adventure). Unfortunately, in Caidin’s presentation, this cycle is too obvious, and the formula too patented and used with appropriate license from the company that owns all role playing gaming concepts.

So it was a brief, mildly entertaining read crushed under the weight of its own rule books and descriptions of the items, back story, and rules of the game.

The back of the book features a reprint of the original Buck Rogers origin from the 1930s, which provides a means of comparison between the eras. So the book’s best impact is as a source of an alternate retelling of the myth. But it’s not a very good primary source to enjoy on your own.

One final note: Defense of Michelle Malkin‘s thesis from her new, often-assailed book In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror comes in the darndest places. Here’s a bit from page 309, wherein the sudden spy revelation, well, reveals the spy to be Japanese:

The Japanese used secret agents on a long-term basis. They would plant their people in a foreign land for years. They were part of the local community, a fifth column, so to speak. Then, when Japanese forces made their moves, they always had amazing knowledge of defenses and how to get through them. By now it was getting obvious we had some kind of agent on our hands.”

Undoubtedly, this is one of the reasons why the reviewers for this book call it RACIST!!!! I’m not historical scholar, so I cannot attest to the historical accuracy of the assertion, but I attest that the book’s not racist. It presents different racial groups such as the Mongols and the Chinese as different, with different agenda that oppose the main characters. Antagonists of another race or ethnic group is not racism in and of itself, but keep trying, kids.

I bought this book as a four books for four bucks selection from Quality Paperback Club, as the soft covers do less damage to the walls and furniture when I read, hm, opposing viewpoints. So that’s why I paid over a quarter for this book, and my bookshelves and floor appreciated the comfortable soft binding.

In spite of Al Franken’s best efforts, I learned two things from Al Franken’s book:

1. It’s important to remember, when someone tells you something, a fact or set of facts is being relayed to you through the prism of the teller’s experience and interpretation, and your miles may vary; that is, when someone tells you something happened, remember to seek out other sources for a richer context of any event. Hey, even if you’re present. More knowledge will lead to better judgment.
2. Al Franken is so full of excrement his hair should be brown? It is? My point, exactly!

Franken slaps around the label of liar widely. According to Franken’s definition, anyone who builds an argument by presenting any group of facts in a light to build to a conclusion, unless that conclusion is Franken-approved, it’s a LIE. Say that Walter Mondale chaired a committee that issued a report that concluded something, and you’re a LYING LIAR who tells LIES if you don’t say Mondale disagreed with the report. Got that? To avoid the LYING LIAR who tells LIES tag, which Franken would build into HTML 6.0 for his convenience, one must not only tell facts, but one must tell all facts, in all contexts.

Let’s illustrate:

Prosecutors?	LYING LIARS who tell LIES
Defense attorneys?	LYING LIARS who tell LIES
Debate teams?	LYING LIARS who tell LIES
Philosophers?	LYING LIARS who tell LIES
Grad student writing theses?	LYING LIARS who tell LIES

You get the idea.

Franken illuminates, inadvertently but gleefully, the poison infecting our political discourse; a lack of empathy for people with other viewpoints, a recognition that perhaps we share common ground and we can discuss, even argue, our viewpoints honestly. Nah, never mind, anything with which we disagree is mendacity on the part of those with whom we disagree.

Franken likes to posit himself as an answer to Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, George Bush, The National Review, Sean Hannity, and other popular commentators on the other side of the political divide. Unfortunately, he lacks one component they do: they’re arguing in good faith, even when they stoop to fire-and-brimstone rhetoric.

Franken’s book is so over the top in its own mistruths that I couldn’t stand it. Part canard, it recycles some of the basic talking points of George W. Bush’s opposition without reflection, but not without invective. In other places, it blatantly presents its own misrepresentations; I particularly disliked the imaginative “Operation Chickenhawk” chapter, which imagined a mission in Vietnam led by John Kerry featuring a platoon comprised of Republican leaders who did not serve. An underground campus literary magazine would reject the piece if submitted by a college sophomore, but since it’s Al Franken, it’s worth printing in a book? Jeez, at least Motley Crue’s filler material was sophomoric and prurient.

If pressed, undoubtedly Franken would respond that he’s a comedian, not a thinker. That’s a convenient cop-out. Sorry, Al, if you want to play, you’ve got to be subject to all the reasoned scrutiny I can muster after a couple beers. I give you an F, for Farce. Farce you.

I mean, to take this book seriously as a political statement would be like taking financial advice from Triumph the Comic Insult Dog.

At Hooked on Books, they have a bin of books marked Free with Purchase, so I always grab something. Once, I grabbed this book, and I have read it.

I’ve doubled the publication dates in the header because the book’s obviously an early sixties pulp novel, with its lurid cover and almost cartoonish action prose. However, sometime between editions, the “author” updated the setting a decade, changing a World War II secret agent into a Korean vet seamlessly.

Oddly enough, the book is set in Florida, much like Cancel All Our Vows, and like the other book, it features an almost textually unremarkable sexual assault, wherein the main character forces his attentions on a woman because she’s the type who needs it. By textually unremarkable, I mean that the book itself glosses over the assault as a matter of course–something reflective of the time and genre, probably.

Aside from that distasteful bit, the book’s a good romp. A wife and her brother kill the drunkard husband by sending the husband’s Cadillac into a canal when the husband’s drunk. The moment the cold water hits the husband, though, he “comes to,” thinking he’s a secret agent in a Korean river. He’s got to deal with his amnesia and to discover what’s happened in the twenty years he’s lost. Eventually, he recovers enough of his skills and his muscle tone (hidden beneath forty pounds of liquor) to break up a gun-running operation.

It’s easy reading, action movies in 60,000 words, and I ate books like this up when I was in high school. Perhaps that’s why I grew up misogynistic, my sensitivity destroyed by these books like the Greatest Generation and early boomers, who currently tut-tut hip-hop music for how it depicts women.

Well, I bought a used library paperback copy of this book from the St. Louis County Library as a discard, so I only paid a quarter for it. On the other hand, it is a used library copy of a paperback, so I am making no great investment in my personal collection. Still, I had not seen the book before, and I love John D. McDonald’s Travis McGee books and most of his other books (if you’re currently holed up in Florida, I heartily recommend you ride out the storm with Condominium).

This book precedes the heyday of John D. MacDonald’s writing career. The earliest McGee novel hits the scene in 1964, and McGee will lament about the migration to Florida that takes place when air conditioners become prevalent. Cancel All Our Vows precedes that era; the main male character is an executive, and the storyline takes place in a heat wave from which the characters retreat.

Unlike most of MacDonald’s other novels, this book is not crime fiction–a distinction blurred purposefully by the paperback publisher, who puts a gun on the cover even though one does not discharge anywhere in the book (what would Checkov say? Not, “Pardon me, we’re looking for the nuclear wessels–that’s another Checkov, you damn kids).

This book reminds me more of Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann. Both deal with attitudes about adultery and marriage, and both are set in the decade after World War II–although Cancel All Our Vows was written 13 years before Valley of the Dolls.

This book deals with said executive, having a midlife crisis (both he and his wife are getting old–they’re in their thirties! Undertakers are standing by!). When he meets the wife of a man he’s just hired, he starts thinking that cheating might be the answer to his emotional doldrums. He’s got a good house, a good wife, good job, good kids, the good life, but he’s missing something. Something illicit sex might provide. His wife notices and thinks about a fling of her own. Unfortunately, at the last minute she decides she doesn’t want to fling, but the college boy forces his attention on her, and they’re all flung. So she’s an adultress in her mind and in her husband’s, and then he goes with the little twitcher who drew his attention in the first chapter, and they drop peyote or something after she talks all crazy about opening the doors to the darkness of their souls, and woo doggy.

At times I felt bad for the main characters, and at other times I wished that maybe some deserved violence would come. But it didn’t, and the book ends on a more hopeful note than Valley of the Dolls.

These books are most interesting to me for the insights they offer into the mindsets of the past. These sort of conundrums continue to occur–Heather and I watched Lost in Translation last night, and some of the themes are similar–but the characters react so differently based on society’s expectations at the time. Interesting.

Which is about the most resounding endorsement I can give this book. Don’t pick it up expecting a crime book, no matter what Fawcett wants you to think. The ploy must have worked, for this paperback I have is dated 1987, some 43 years after its first printing, and it’s because John D. MacDonald wrote the book, not because the book grips readers that much.

The end.

I’d hate to reflect on what subtle secrets slip out about my character when the reader of this humble web log discovers that the last two books I have read stem from video games. However, if the reader overlooks the obvious mental deficiencies of such a reviewer….wait, you’re already here.

Okay, this book represents a quiz book, ten “games” of ten questions each. It’s based on the video game series which featured, as far as I understand it, a host named Jack who was a cynical, smart-mouthed character, much like the ironic characters iconified in the television show Seinfeld. This particular book was laid out like someone eviscerated a copy of Wired magazine, with hip fonts, bright colors, and 128 snarky pages to cover 100 questions.

But if you can pick it up for less than a buck at a yard sale, go for it. It’ll help you sharpen up for those unexpected trivia nights where you’re confronted with Hugh Hewitt, James Lileks, and Michael Nedved on a team without Michael Savage to handicap them.

Alan Dean Foster has done the novelizations for many movies, including the Alien series and Outland. So what’s the next challenge for an author like that? How about a video game novelization?

The Dig comes from the video game of the same name which ran right nicely on Windows 3.11 or Windows 95 boxes. Still, the storyline follows an archetype I like: a strange interstellar artifact shows humans that a greater intelligence exists. 2001, Ringworld, Rendezvous with Rama used the same conceit (although I think the Commodore 64 game Rendezvous with Rama came after the book).

When a strange asteroid falls into a slowly decaying orbit, NASA and the EU send up a shuttle mission to nuke the asteroid into a stable orbit. Once the astronauts successfully stabilize the asteroid, the commander, a scientist, and a journalist visit the surface for a moment of study and sample gathering. They discover what appear to be manufactured components on the surface and when they explore further, the asteroid activates and transports the trio to a far off planet, where they’re confronted with a number of puzzles, locations to explore, and objects to manipulate.

It’s not that bad, actually; certainly, since I know it’s built from a game, I know to look at it in that context, and I spent a lot of time (well, a couple of brain cycles) thinking about its impact, but the novel’s an interesting, enjoyable read, and I didn’t spend almost a decade reading almost 2000 pages to find out that the ultimate point is that it’s all an idle experiment of God’s (curse you, ACC!)

In a related note, the synergy worked. After buying this book at a reduced price second-hand, I’ve won an auction for this game on eBay (for $2.00) for this game. Now, I’ll retrofit one of my older PCs with the appropriate operating system and I’ll enjoy the adventure of Boston Low (voiced by T2’s Robert Patrick). Unfortunately, the media blitz worked almost ten years too late, in a post-shuttle, post 1990s world where the social structures and international cooperation illusions are ancient alien artifacts of their own.

I bought this book at a yard sale some years ago, and I’ve decided recently to add a volume of poetry to my mix of books on my nightstand (after my experience with the book of Leonard Cohen’s selected poems). So I read this book.

It’s only 100 pages of primary material, and doesn’t represent a collection of material showing a poet’s evolution. Hence, I could enjoy it and the poems within it much more easily and much more viscerally than I could something with footnotes or 40 page introductions indicating why the poet was good.

Oddly enough, Robert Frost published this book in 1962, which is within the span of years contained within the four volumes in the Leonard Cohen selection (1956-1968). Cohen’s material seems much more contemporary and Frost’s more archaic, but the lack of “sophistication” belies some powerful poetry.

Frost rhymes almost exclusively, and any serious poet who attended college gets that beaten out of them pretty effectively (and unserious poets rarely bother). So a contemporary reader, even I, can find himself or herself pooh-poohing the rhymes as unsophisticated. Sometimes, they are; he rhymes US with Russ (for Russian) at one point. I gave that up early in college, and prefer to work a little harder to make rhymes work.

But if you spend too much time carping about the rhymes and the simplicity of the language of the poems, you miss out on Frost’s ability to nail a phrase or line that captures something of human experience that you’ll want to quote and that his simplistic poems often have deeper meanings below the surface that you can fathom without a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary and certain material related to the Kabbalah.

So read more Frost. I knew once that it was good (high school, before I became more “educated” in my poetry tastes) and now again.

I can’t believe I read the whole thing.

I bought a copy of this book for $2.95 at Downtown Books, and I was in the mood for a good older (pulp, noir) book after watching Call It Murder, a movie I got as part of a Humphrey Bogart movie box set and which Humphrey Bogart gets first billing only because his last name begins with a B. So after watching a poor transfer of a decent play turned into a bad movie, I picked this book up. Nertz. I deserved it, I suppose.

This book won the Edgar Award in 1951 for best first mystery novel. Apparently, the author was a widely-published short story writer, and the back cover explains that he’s an expert craftsman who doesn’t like a single waste word. Unfortunately, you can flip the book open to any page and find wasted words, impersonal expressions, extraneous adverbs, and everything else.

If this book served as our only artifact, we might assume that 1949 preceded the important invention of dialog. Open this book and just look at the text, and you might think you’re looking at a Russian novel or an academic piece of nonfiction. Long paragraphs fill out the pages, with nary a line of spoken dialog between–and when the characters speak, they speak in paragraphs.

These two factors alone would deprive a book of pacing, but that’s not all. Walsh apparently conducted his research into the Manhattan train depot, the primary setting of the novel, because he spends pages upon pages describing its environment and its back corridors. Whereas I like glimpses behind the scenes of different business/industrial scenes, Walsh pours these wordy descriptions into even climactic action scenes. The antagonist should run down a corridor. That’s all I need to see. I don’t need to know what rooms branch from the corridor, or how high the windows in the corridor are, or upon what rooms the other doors open. Just get the antagonist down the corridor.

Walsh also uses a poor device to try to build suspense, wherein he cuts between the cardboard characters, some of whom are lucky enough to be distinguished by their archetypes but others are only different in name, just as an important event is going to happen. Short cuts might prove interesting and suspenseful if the reader could tell the characters apart or cared about the characters. However, when the clock sits at twelve minutes to noon and these cut scenes stretch into paragraphs and dialogless pages of characters reflecting that they’re scared/anxious/nervous because the upcoming event is important amid meticulous recounting of the staircases and balconies of the train station, the reader just wants to fast forward those twelve minutes so that over the course of ten pages, something important will happen.

Perhaps I’m a jaded modern reader who doesn’t appreciate the important ground broken by this crime novel. But I do know that pulp fiction published at the same time had more at stake than this book. The plot: kidnappers, amusingly spelled kidnapers in this book (obviously, it preceded the common spelling of the crime), kidnape a child and hold him ransom for (pinky to mouth) fifty thousand dollars!. A tough transit cop and his superiors want to find the kidnapers before they kill the child. Russeted onto the story, we have an understated love interest in the secretary of the businessman whose son was kidnaped. Also, we have the train station, which is not personified and doesn’t become a character in any sense like Ray Chandler would do to LA or Ed McBain would do to The City.

The plot, really, is secondary to the mind numbing description and language. One cannot escape them, and indeed I didn’t so much read this book as rubberneck the wreck it became.

One last thought, and pardon me while I spoil the climax for you. The only mirth I derived from this book I found in the climactic thirty page final chase, wherein the tough cop mortally, or at least seriously, wounds the bad guy with a gunshot to the upper chest, and the villian leaps from a balcony and runs through a door into empty office spaces in the train depot, and falls down some stairs, runs down a corridor, falls down more steps, leaps out of the way of a train when he finds himself in a tunnel, and then almost makes it back to the child to kill him. The legions of law enforcement, meanwhile, cannot find where this fellow went. Because apparently, in 1950, they had not yet invented bleeding profusely.

I don’t think it was supposed to be funny, but during those thirty pages of climax, I had a lot of time to enjoy the absurdity.

This book collects four of Leonard Cohen’s first volumes of poetry, including Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956), The Spice-Box of Earth (1961), Flowers for Hitler (1964), and Parasites of Heaven (1966). The book also includes some never-before seen poems, kind of like the bonus material you get on a greatest hits album. Except this collection is not greatest hits, it’s all the filler material, too.

I first heard Leonard Cohen, as I am sure many of my generation did, in the film Pump Up The Volume, where Cohen sings the theme song of the protagonist. Unfortunately, the credits and the soundtrack do not credit Cohen, so all this young man got was the Concrete Blonde rendition. But I persevered and discovered the I’m Your Man album. Good album. Leonard’s got a rich voice, and the songs are literary and lyrical in the best sense of the word.

So it helps to read the book with knowledge of Cohen’s voice. The voice can carry much of what the words cannot.

Cohen’s poems tread the mystical, where they allude to Judaica that I don’t understand. Then he’s throwing all sorts of Catholic imagery into the poems, which I don’t understand as well, but I’m more familiar with them; I went to a Jesuit university, you know.

The best section is The Spice-Box of Earth, wherein Cohen explores relationships in greater detail than the others. I could relate more to the poems, as I was once a young man seeking to get laid by young women. I appreciate the sensual confusion in the coffeeshop pheromones and cigarette smoke. Heck, the section made me feel ten years younger. I remember longing and loss.

But even the best poets have their off poems (apparently, Emily Dickinson had 1767 of them), and unfortunately readers have to wade through them. I took from this book no other poems I could recite from memory than when I began (I could recite “For Annie” which I remembered from an anthology I’d read before I heard I’m Your Man).

But I liked the book okay. I feel smart, reading poetry in my spare time and all. So if you don’t mind some free verse with a distinct coffeehouse flare, you won’t mind this book.

Post script: I would never knowingly participate in a poetry slam in which Leonard Cohen took part. He’s got enough A material, and he’s got the voice. ‘Nuff said.

I can count the number of Stephen King books I’ve read on both hands, and it makes it much easier that I’m not a Stephen King surviving protagonist, because they never finish with 10 digits. I’ve read The Stand, Eyes of the Dragon, the first three books of the Dark Tower, On Writing, The Dark Half, and this book. I really like his style and his attitude, and I liked this book too.

The plot: four friends on a hunting trip encounter an alien invasion or biowarfare during a blizzard. Cripes, it would be a simple enough pitch for a movie, but undoubtedly the two hour feature couldn’t begin to delve into this book.

I’m going to speak about a few things in my few paragraphs, the first of which is his style. As I mentioned previously, a horror novel is simply a fantasy novel wherein the heroes don’t know they’re in a fantasy novel until it’s too late. That gives King the opportunity to play with the timeline, using foreshadowing and flashback to great effect. The simple, throwaway foreshadowing in the beginning of the book really draws the reader in, but King knows when the hook has been set and lays off after the first third of the book. Swell. Also, King lavishes a lot of detail on most of the characters in the book that are more than names. It really bugs the reader when the good guys die, or when they lose fingers.

Secondly, King’s well read and slathers his books in allusions to popular and literate works. He alludes to Poe unself-consciously and mentions a boook by Robert Parker by name. Cool.

Also, I found this book an interesting artifact. Although King, in his author’s note, talks about writing this book in November 1999 through March 2000, Bush is the president (and it’s apparent that he’s not well thought of by many characters). The president has to give a speech about an incident in which aliens bearing infectious and dangerous, world-conquering philosophies spores. The book is published in 2001. That’s a little….creepy.

Of all contemporary mythmakers, if I had to guess whom students from the year 2200 would read from our era (assuming their studies of literature aren’t limited to the Koran or Mao), I’d pick King. He’s an engaging writer, he’s smart, he’s good at his craft, and he explores deeper human truths by transcending his genre.

I bought two copies of this book: one for a friend who needs intervention because he believes that Michael Moore has some good points, and one for me. Now that I have read the one for me, I’m almost sorry I bought one for him.

Because it’s not going to change his mind any more than reading blogs will. I’d hoped for a reasoned listing of the inaccuracies in the equivalent of a handy table, but although this book offers a couple of chapters with that sort of thing, for the most part, it’s a blog in binding. Andrew Sullivan and Tim Blair have essays in the book, and the other chapters contain a high snark content that one finds in political tract books and on blogs. For example, the authors spend a chapter psychoanalyzing Michael Moore and examining how he meets the traditional definition of narcissist. As much ad homenim as enumeration of fallacies and inaccuracies, this book disappointed me; I’d hoped for more of the latter and less of the former. At least they successfully avoided the word “asshat.”

Perhaps I was hoping for too much from a book entitled Michael Moore is a Big Fat Stupid White Man.

This book represents another piece of Internet reading published in book form. The author, a professor, has collected and condensed numerous blue book blatherings from students into a one hundred plus summary of history. As a two page e-mail forward, these incidents are funny. A book-sized collection, though, goes on too long.

The joke’s going to be on us someday, though. The mirth comes from we, the reader, recognizing the students’ errata, but the in twenty years, only the home schooled will be in on the humor. Of course, they’ll be running the world, so books like this might still get published.

Clutch your chests and call out to ‘Lizabeth, gentle readers, but I bought this book new, in hardcover, and I paid full new bookstore price for it.

Now that you’ve all choked down some nitro and your condition has stabilized, let me tell you why I did. I read another Hiaasen book earlier this year, and I liked what he did, so I bought another. Worth the price.

Hiaasen is unconstrained by series characters and, quite frankly, the bounds of sensibility when he produces his capers, and this is unexceptional in its exceptionality. A biologist on the take from a local farming operation fakes pollution numbers fears his wife has caught on and will ruin it all. So he pitches her from the deck of the ship upon which they’re celebrating, sort of, their second anniversary. Unfortunately, his newly ex-wife was a collegiate swimmer, so she survives the plunge and decides to come back from the grave to make his life problematic.

Chock full of entertaining characters and situations, mostly believable with the right suspension of disbelief (except for one or more moments of “Oh, come on” back story), and a fine addition to my read list, upon which this book is #44 for the year.

I am so smart and literate. Don’t you want to be my friend?

I bought this book at Hooked on Books in Springfield, Missouri, for a less than a buck. As it’s a frank discussion of race, I have to wonder how this book came to Springfield, Missouri. After reading it, though, I understand why it was $.33. More on that by and by.

I started reading the book with as open of a mind as I can, considering I am the blue-eyed devil (with actual blue eyes, no less). The book cover depicts McCall (I presume) with a hard look on his face. The introduction and first chapters indicate that McCall’s taking the angry approach to the discussion, but I didn’t write it off as a matter of course. McCall came from a tough background, including some prison time for armed robbery, but I don’t discount that out of hand; I’m just a white boy from the city projects myself, and I realize that but for some accidents of fate (not necessarily my whiteness, for I’ve known enough white people who’ve done less than admirable and often prosecutable things) I could have charted a different path.

So I gave McCall a fair enough reading throughout the first section, subtitled “Mixed Messages”. This section includes chapters “The Revolution Is About Basketball”, “Airing Dirty Laundry” (which I read despite an italicized plea for white people to skip it), “Men: We Just Don’t Get It”, and “Gangstas, Guns, and Shoot-‘Em-Ups”. Throughout this section, McCall espouses a sort of personal responsibility message, that blacks (abstracted to all people in my hopeful reading) should take personal responsibility and better their situations as best they can, regardless of the circumstances. Of course, I want to learn something from a book that’s not necessarily describing my life’s experiences, and apply the lessons of others to my worldview. Regardless of the author’s intent.

But the first section of the next chapter really set the tone for the remainder of the book. The next section, “American Dream”, begins with a chapter entitled “Father of Our Country” which posits that the founding fathers were hypocrites because Washington fathered children with one or more slaves who cannot now join the clubs formented around his progeny or something like that. I can’t argue one way or another whether these people have a case or not or whether it’s true; however, McCall doesn’t present a compelling case, either. His arguments come down to two:

• The alleged descendents have an oral history that says it’s true.
• All slave owners boinked their slaves, often without consent of the boinked.

Oral history? The Greeks had a oral history that actual dieties intervened in their wars. The Anglo-Saxons had an oral history that indicated that Beowulf slew a monster and its mother, the latter in its lair in the bottom of a lake. Oral histories prove only that people have been saying things. As for every single slaveowners boinking their slaves, undoubtedly for free extra slaves, all is an awful big number, and it’s refuted by one did not. Although I don’t have a single instance to refute the point, I can more easily accept one did not than all did. But this chapter’s only Fonzie revving the motorcycle before he goes over the tank.

The next chapter, “Old Town: The Negro Problem Revisited”, examines the gentrification of a black neighborhood in Virginia. Apparently, Old Town lies on a waterway, which is always a target for revitalization, from the Landing in St. Louis to the Riverwalk in Milwaukee. When McCall talks about the iniquities of eminent domain, I am with him. Frequent readers know how I feel about that. But McCall also charges some racial superiority issues when whites knock on homeowners’ doors and make offers for the homes. McCall thinks this is whitey talking down to the “poor” black folk; I see it as people making offers in the market, where both are free to choose what offers to make or accept. But I’m not as tribalist as McCall, who’s all about defending black ownership in a downtrodden area, even if that means the area has to remain downtrodden. I like revitalization, and I don’t mind it if it’s done without the power of the government.

This chapter, though, contained the passage that turned me from an “Oh, Please,” reader to a “Fuck You” reader:

I am reminded of an incident that happened several years ago at a Shoney’s restaurant in North Carolina. While heading to the salade bar, I heard a commotion. When I moved closer, I saw a thirtyish black man yelling at a scruffy white guy. It seems that the white man had shoved an elderly black man, who was standing in lin in front of him. The younger black, seeing the insult, intervened in his elder’s behalf. I got there just in time to hear the redneck angrily justify his rudeness. “He was in my way!” he snarled, pointing at the old man.

The white man’s audacity infuriated the brother. Stepping closer, he shouted, “He was in your way? Your way? Motherfucka, you ain’t got no way!”

The old man seemed embarrassed by it all. He stood quietly, watching the tension between the two young hotheads escalate. At some point, the brother stepped even closer to the white man–he got to within an inch of his noes, daring him to make a move. And as he did that, I instinctively slipped behind the redneck, readying my plate, which I fully intended to crash upside his head. [Emphasis mine.]

I didn’t know the old black man any more than I knew the brother defending him–we were all strangers. But I was fairly certain we shared some common experiences: If they live long enough, most blacks experience being deemed a problem because some white person or persons decide that we’re in their way.

That realization was enough to make that brother and me want to take out the wrath of slavery on that redneck–not only for hassling the elderly black but for all the Old Towns, where black life is disrupted or vanquished to accommodate white folks’ fancies, for all the times white America has said to blacks, Step aside. You’re in my way.

This is a Washington Post reporter explaining, even justifying racial violence. He was going to sucker this “redneck” to avenge slavery. He didn’t see how the incident started, but he’s ready to bust whitey over the head.

Never mind what else I have to say about this book. I finished it, but with less credulity than before. I cannot speak for all black experience, but neither can McCall. Our country is too large and the experiences of its people too diverse to base any all on something as simple as skin color. But McCall’s obviously got some issues. He throws out racial epithets like cracker and regional epithets like redneck to bolster his points, or to keep his voice and speech “real.”

I’m probably harsher on the book because when the book started, I thought the author and I shared different life experiences, we shared similar beliefs in personal responsibility. The reality of the author’s viewpoint crashed on me like Shoney’s china, though, and I realized that the author thinks I am to blame for the ills which befall his perceptions of the world. Defensive? You bet I am, but he was offensive first.

I bought this book as part of a package for signing up with the Writers Digest Book Club. As part of the package, I paid something like a dollar for it plus shipping and handling, and undoubtedly it was the last book in the required allotment of four or five to get the free Writer’s Market that year. To make a short story long, I don’t normally seek out this sort of book, but I got it, and I read it.

Essentially, it’s a little collage of writing ideas, some microessays about writing, and a lot of photographs. The style’s such that you can pick it up, flip it open, and have something to write or some lesson about writing. Numerous single-sentence mandates dictate that you should write about a particular topic or situation; other pages contain a single, often vertical, “horiscope message” that could serve as a plot. So there you have it.

The author embraces the writer lifestyle, which involves teaching college classes, going on writers’ retreats, and “getting published” along with all the touchy-feely, grok-the-word crepe that festoons the lives of the lifestyle’s participants. Personally, I’m not all into that–particularly the last part, apparently–so I could do without it. Still, it’s an interesting little book, a quick enough read (since it’s probably under 10,000 words all told in its unnumbered pages), and maybe something from it has stuck in my mind and has been encysted into a pearl of a story or essay for the future.

At worst, it’s book number 41 for me on the year and will add a small element of color to my trophy bookshelves.

I am sure some of you are going to ask me why I read this book in hardback. Hey, I don’t know. I just read lots of books. The little red dot indicates either I paid thirty-three and a third cents for it at Hooked on Books or that the International Masculinity Squad has someone in the treeline about to take me out for my gross transgressions against manhood. I guess I picked it out from the bookshelf outside the bookshop where the booksellers put the books they want people to steal. So I flipped a 33-cent piece onto the counter and walked out of the shop with this handbook for becoming The Total Woman.

All right, I read the book because I thought it would be amusing to read. It’s carbon-dated to 1973, which means it was written about the time I was born and coming home from the hospital. The back cover contains a photo of Ms. Morgan, who looks like an amphed-up Liz Crocker from the time period. A former beauty queen from an upper-middle class suburban Wonder bread world dishes out some advice to other high-strung married-too-early tract house denizens. Man, urban-born and 21st century me was going to laugh, laugh all the way through the book.

A funny thing happened on the way to that mockirvana. I started respecting the book and its viewpoint.

It’s not that different from any other self-help style, inspire-yourself book. Whereas other, more contemporary tracts tell you how you can be a better businessperson, salesperson, or more complete self-actualized Bobo, all of them seek to make you better at a particular role. This book’s not that different. It definitely presents a different set of lines in which to color–those of a Christian housewife–but it offers a certain amount of pluck, vibrance, and intelligence to the role. It’s not so much about remaking yourself as a Stepford Wife (a reference contemporary to the time in which this book was written, remember) as remaking yourself as the Wife of Bath.

Because although the book encourages a certain submissiveness on the part of the wife, it’s not because of a woman’s inferiority–rather, it’s because she can, and because she wants to be part of the whole that is the functioning nuclear family unit. Not only a part, but the backbone. Of course, in 2004, “nuclear family” is a perjorative in many circumstances, but I still personally admire the goal and the imperfect-but-striving examples in the world. So screw you if you’re too smart to be constrained by tradition and morality that won’t let you have open marriages or that require committments to your spouse and your children.

So, what should you do if you’re a Christian housewife who wants to strengthen her marriage (and, in most cases, fears that her marriage is failing or is not satisfied with its current state)?

• Focus on the good things
  You got married to this person for some reason, theoretically because you guys liked each other. Focus on those things, and make an effort to be more like the person you were then, and not the nagging harpy you are now. Okay, not nagging harpy, but look beyond the concerns of the day-to-day household management to reconnect with the people who have made the household.
• Feed his ego.
  He’s only a man, and he needs to be stroked. When he’s stroked, he’ll stroke back.
• More, imaginative sex.
  Okay, here’s my favorite passage from the book:
  

  Still another gal took the course [The Total Woman course, which this book describes] being held in her Souther Baptist Church. She welcomed her husband home in black mesh stockings, high heels, and an apron. That’s all. He took one look and shouted, “Praise the Lord!”

  Indeed. Sex comprises one quarter of the book, and she advocates dressing differently, wearing costumes, role playing, and other things–in the name of family values! Good marital sex helps a good marriage. Also, she’s an advocate of the female climax, which she says has helped many class attendees learn to appreciate sex. Morgan’s writing about the dark ages, undoubtedly, but it’s interesting to note that the book is geared toward church-going women. Contrary to the popular caricature, maybe women who are Christians and who go to church can be sizzling lovers.

  Don’t tell them, though, or those coastal Democrat types will come to carry off our womenfolk like the barbarian invading hordes they are.

So I read the book, and although I laughed at certain parts, I appreciated the sentiment and the intelligence of the author. She certainly seems earnest enough, and she’s smart enough; although the only endnotes are scriptural citations, she quotes Shakespeare and Robert Browning easily. Also, the churchgoing aspect of the book isn’t overwhelming–she’s not proselytizing, she’s talking about her convictions. The shortest chapter in the book, near the end, talks about her relationship with God. Interesting, a little personal and common, but not something the make the book unreadable.

If you can find a copy for under a buck (with shipping, if you’re Internet inclined), this book will offer a view of marriage from a viewpoint outside your own (most likely) and will offer ideas and insights that you might apply to your own marriage. If you want it to work.

For example, tomorrow night I shall greet my wife at the door wearing black mesh stockings, high heels, and an apron. (Don’t tell her, though!)

I have been a bad dog. I actually finished this book several weeks ago, and I planned to write a longer piece summing up insights I had into it. However, the book got buried on my desk, and I’m not in the mood to write a longer piece on it, so allow me to sum up:

• Book deals with the rise of an educated upper class (and upper middle class) and how these new members of society alter the culture. It seeks to explain why so many people wear Birkenstocks and shop at Whole Foods and REI.
• The Bobos (Bourgeoius Bohemians) of which Brooks speaks tends to conmingle the baby boomers with geek culture. It’s an interesting mix, and maybe he’s onto something, but I think his generalization might be too hasty.
• The bit about intellectual life, wherein he describes how a person can become a public intellectual, was quite amusing.
• Book seems dated, particularly in political area, especially when one thinks of foreign policy questions that none of us really speculated in 2000.

I understand that it’s chic to savage David Brooks in some literary circles these days, but I found this book accessible and thought provoking in a good way. It encourages musing about social trends, with all the anthropological and philosophical currents that go with it. I want to compare this book to Make Room For TV, but that sells this book short. Both deal with a sweeping orchestra of human experience above the more personal accounts I usually read. So it’s a good book, and a good change.

Oh, yeah, I paid $12.50 for it, but I wanted to read it when it came out, so I waited four years and got it for half price. It’s good that it’s remained relevant enough to be worth the price.