Category: Book Report

As some of you remember, I reviewed Bill Cosby’s Time Flies in February. I liked it, so I have invested in other books by Bill Cosby, including this one, for which I paid $2.95 at Downtown Books in Milwaukee.

I’ll give the customary ding to the pop-psych introduction by Alvin F. Poussaint, M.D. Again, this is like throwing a Dr. Phil introduction onto a collection of Andy Rooney pieces, or perhaps Dr. Laura in front of a Chris Rock book. Come on, the difference between the styles jars the reader, and to be honest, if I wanted to read a self-helpish treatise on love and marriage, I would buy a book with pictures, diagrams, and innovations I could not even imagine when I was a fevered twenty-year-old. I mean, it’s like getting served a bowl of brussel sprouts in Baskin Robbins before you can have any ice cream. Sure, I wolfed it down, spitting some into my napkin to conceal it, and then I rushed into the main course of dessert.

This book contains two parts. Part one deals with Cos’s youthful forays into love, which entails everything you expect: Lust, pounding hearts, sweet agony, heartbreak, loss, and all of the above by age twelve. Cosby captures the adolescent and early adult experiences of the opposite sex and the attempts to find a mate–which they did in the old days; now, I think kids just attempt to mate. So this first section really represents the strength of the book, and the stories are told with Cosby’s easy style. Good reading.

Unfortunately, the second part, Marriage, deals differently with his relationship with the woman who finally bagged the struggling stand-up comic who would only decades later evolve into the biggest sitcom star in the business. Perhaps he’s mining his marriage with a sitcom eye for humor, but the second half of the book really focuses on the nitpicking, and the little recurrent tense spots, and the stupid fights that occur in many marriages. As a sitcom veteran, Cosby also recognizes that the husband must be made into the often inept and impotent victim, and that’s how he paints himself. Henpecked. It’s hardly a flattering or inspiring vision of a marriage that’s lasted twenty-five years (as his did by 1989), and Cosby longs for an evolution to a state like his parents’ marriage of fifty years. Ye gods, he’s projecting another 25 years of hard belittlement.

Granted, Cosby hits on the benefits of marriage and at the end alludes to the joys of shared memories, but he disservices the day-to-day, which includes as many (or more, preferably) bright spots as nitterings.

Still, it’s an okay read if you’re a fan of light comic essays in Cos’s style, worthy of a library checkout or a cheap purchase.

Well, my friends, this book review represents a departure from those which have come before it. I ordered a copy of Eric Alterman’s What Liberal Media? The Truth about Bias and the News in paperback and have decided to test the new paint job in our bedroom by reading a flingable book in it. This book fits that bill already. So, in lieu of sticking a number of Post-It Notes ™ in it and then writing a couple of paragraphs when the heat of the reading is cool, I thought I might let you in on my thought processes as I read the book.

So, day one:

Objections:

• Page xi, in the Preface and Acknowledgements, for crying out loud. Alterman acknowledges missing the works of Robert Caro as he (Alterman) pursues an advanced degree in history–so he (Alterman) listens to the complete works of Caro on tape. Cheez, Louise, Alterman, that’s not scholarship, that’s killing time. When you listen to books on tape, they flow past you in a stream of someone else’s conscious narration, and once the words are past, they’re gone; you’re at the whim of the break in the tracks if you want to listen to a section over again, which is why I rarely do.

  Mostly I listen to books on tape to kill time on long drives to Milwaukee and back, or I used to do them when I had an hour long commute from work (or an hour and a half commute from work to my sweetie’s home, a quarter of the way across the state. If you’re listening to books for twenty minutes at a crack, you’re not paying them much attention. Cripes, I would not dare try to impress upon my mind the serious works of Tacitus or Gibbons through books on tape; I’d require the opportunity to re-read sentences until I grasped their very meaning. Alterman admits he–in pursuit of a college degree, for crying out loud (or swearing out loud in my case)–did less. It’s less respect to Caro on Alterman’s part than I am paying to Alterman, but it’s too late for me to borrow the abridged audio version of Alterman’s work, so I am stuck with my dollar’s worth (plus Quality Paperback Club’s Postage and Handling) of print. Heaven help me, and you, gentle reader.

  Fortunately for the both of us, I skimmed the rest of the acknowledgements.

• pp1-2 in the Introduction, a lot of name dropping, but I disagree. Whereas Bernard Goldberg and Ann Coulter quote people to indicate bias and slander, Alterman quotes people who indicate there is not bias nor slander. Goldberg and Coulter’s quotes represent primary sources, that is, indications that illustrate their points; when Alterman quotes sources who say there is no bias, it’s the equivalent of hearsay, since he’s not actually illustrating non-bias, but rather people saying there is not bias.
• p2 in the Introduction, Alterman quotes Pat Buchanan, for crying out loud, as though he (Buchanan) were a member of mainstream-right thought. Who are you kidding?
• p3 in the Introduction, Alterman refers to Ann Coulter as a blonde bombshell pundette. Ad homenim as Alterman points out that Coulter is an attractive (hem) woman, and hence should be judged lesser than, say, a homely man such as Alterman.
• p3 in the Introduction FIRST TOSSING POINT this comes a couple lines later:
  

  In recent times, the right has ginned up its “liberal media” propoganda machine. Books by both Ann Coulter, a blond bombshell pundette, and Bernard Goldberg, former CBS News producer, have topped the best-seller lists, stringing together such a series of charges that, well, it’s amazing neither one sought to accuse “liberals” of using the blood of conservative children for extra flavor in their soy-milk decaf lattes. [Emphasis mine.]

Got that? Alterman is saying that Coulter and Goldberg might as well have committed “blood libel.” The tradition to which “Mister” Alterman alludes says Jews use the blood of Gentile/Palestinian children in Zionist rituals of some sort or another. It’s often repeated these days in the Arab media to support the tradition of strapping explosives to Believers, women, and children to blow up Israeli civilians whose crime is stopping at a market or drinking coffee in a particular cafe. Damn you, Eric Alterman. I curse you only to the fate you deserve, whatever form it might take.

I would like to take a moment to apologize to Ajax and Tristan, the felines scared when I flung this book from my hands (towards the door, not the labouriously-painted walls) and to my beautiful wife, whom I upset with my foaming-mouth invective for Eric Alterman. You all deserve a better refuge when trying to sleep. I shall try to read this book alone, with a schnucking hammer with which to beat it, in the future for your peace of mind.

Day: 1
Pages read: 6.5
Chapters: Prefaces and Acknowledgements, Introduction (part of)

Full Disclosure: I remember trying to enter the contest for the Billy and the Boingers songs back in the middle 80s. I don’t remember if I actually completed the entry or not, but I do remember I did not win. So if you must, dismiss this review as sour grapes.

This is not the first copy of this book I have read; I cannot remember if I borrowed it from one of the rangers listed in a previous post (Thanks, Noodles) when it was new, but I bought it at a garage sale in years past along with my other recent funnies pages reads (The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes, Tales Too Ticklish to Tell) and I’ve read it now, with those same books.

This book actually immediately precedes Tales Too Ticklish To Tell, in that it introduces the Boinger storyline carried over into the later volume and introduces the basselope and Lola Granola characters.

What I said about the later book which I reviewed earlier remains true: It’s dated material. Still, I think this one is marginally better than the other. Since it deals less with the 1988 political season, it can focus on more universal themes, such as Tipper Gore leading a crusade to ramrod morality into rock music. Man, how things have changed, huh? But I digress. Because storylines involve Steve Dallas looking for a change from his lawyer work and Opus feeling his biological clock ticking–which leads him to his search for his soulmate (the aforementioned Miss Granola), Breathed gets to examine the human condition instead of the current political climate.

Face it, the human condition will remain mostly the same, regardless of the calendar date, which is why we’re reading Shakespeare four hundred years after he wrote his plays, or at least we’re watching movies on cable wherein Denzel Washington and Keanu Reeves play them, but why Berke Breathed is struggling against obscurity and why Garfield–mocked as a comic strip in the second comic strip in this book–is now a major motion picture featuring the voice of Bill Murray.

Well, finally I have saved enough money up from my, er, prudence with purchasing one dollar books to save up for a copy of The Private Eye in Hammett and Chandler by Robert B. Parker. He stripped some of the academic verbiage from the dissertation he wrote for his PhD and published it as a limited edition via Lord John’s Press in the early eighties. How limited? This printing was limited to 300; I think the more exclusive run was under 100, so there are fewer than 400 copies of this book in print. And I got one. Nyah, nyah.

Here are some pix:

Click any photo for super size

I’ve read all of Parker’s fiction, some of his profiles, and some of his nonfiction, but this represents the greatest divergance from his normal style I’ve seen. He stilted its prose to impress some review board, or whatever group determines whether a master becomes a doctor, so I realize I, consumer, am not the target audience. Still, it’s more stilted than most nonfiction I read for fun, Make Room for TV notwithstanding.

To summarize, Parker takes us on a six chapter, 63 page exploration of the hard-boiled detective character embraced by Dash and Raymond, exploring how they fit into the literary canon of American heroes. The first two chapters run through obligatory quotations from other critics and academics, which rather drags but undoubtedly proved that Parker did his research. Then, Parker explores earlier manifestations of the American hero archetype that led to hard-boiled private eyes: the frontiersman, demonstrated in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales and Daniel Boone’s legendary biography.

Parker doesn’t build a revolutionary case, nor does he really reveal any blinding insight into the scholarship of the hard-boiled detective–although my reading is certainly limited, but I have read some (American Tough, and so on). The biggest insight is not in the text itself, but in its relationship to how Parker would craft the Spenser novels.

Using this document, one can see an earlier step in Parker’s thought processes than The Godwulf Manuscript. For example, he notes that neither the Continental Op nor Philip Marlowe could really describe the code of honor to which they adhere. Spenser and Hawk, in Parker’s novels, don’t suffer, at great length, from this flaw.

So it’s an interesting read if you strive to emulate Parker’s success by imitation and ceaseless devotion, or if you like Spenser, I guess. Although there are no We’d be fools not to, there is one Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?–proving that this really is Parker, with the throwaway allusions that characterize not only his novels, his screenplays, but also, apparently, his most serious nonfiction. Thankfully.

P.S. Class, why is it that two of the vendors selling this on Amazon.com are both selling the exact same copy, # 245, of this numbered limited edition? Never mind, class; I am cynical enough to guess.

Unfortunately, I read this book immediately upon the heels of The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes, and this volume suffers by comparison.

It’s been sixteen years since this book came out, and it’s already not much more than a time capsule into the last two years of Reagan’s presidency. Whereas Calvin and Hobbes touched on broader human themes that sometimes touched on daily topics, but Bloom County’s storylines are completely wed to the period in which they were written. I mean, who remembers the Jim and Tammy Faye enough to find a penguin’s take on them amusing? The cover of the book depicts George (H.W., as he would later be known) Bush with Opus on his lap; it refers to the photo of Gary Hart with Donna Rice on his lap that spoiled his bid for the Democratic nomination in 1988. See how the topics fade to irrelevance and obscurity?

Bloom County, like Calvin and Hobbes, became iconic in that Opus was on everything in the late 1980s; apparel, plush toys, lunchboxes. However, unlike Calvin and Hobbes, which is fresh and funny twenty years later and probably will for a number of years yet, Bloom County’s as relevant and contemporary as Snuffy Smith. Unlike Watterson, who quit while he was popular (like Gary Larsen) to avoid a strip depicting Calvin in his little red wagon flying over a pool with a shark in it, Breathed has continued trying to breathed life into these characters through Bloom County and then Outland and now Opus whenever a Republican president needed a public lambasting by a penguin. (Read James Lileks on Opus last week.)

I bought this book at a garage sale some time ago to sell on eBay. It didn’t sell, so I read it. The hardback edition came out in 1990, 14 years ago. You want to feel old? Calvin would be in his early 20s today. No doubt he’d have given up Hobbes by now, unless he were a developer or a cartoonist and he kept Hobbes around to decorate his workspace.

I like Calvin and Hobbes, the cartoon. I liked this collection. Calvin and Hobbes were pretty popular in their day (Watterson, the cartoonist, discontinued the strip in the 1990s). Actually, they became so culturally iconic that even today, ten years later, you can go into an auto parts store and by unlicensed and unofficial decals depicting Calvin urinating on an automotive logo of your choice (Ford seems rather popular). Have you noticed that the last of the iconic cartoons, Dilbert, stems from the 1980s. Remember the 1980s, when iconic cartoons abounded? You couldn’t help but bump into The Far Side, Bloom County, Garfield, or Calvin and Hobbes apparel or pop-cultural references. Heck, even Cathy was touted as some zeitgeist for single women. Can you think of any cartoon created in the last decade that has captured that wide of an appeal? I couldn’t. I guess it’s the same thing television suffers; the fragmentation of the audience. Or perhaps it’s the decline of the newspaper. Or maybe they just don’t make them like they used to.

So what about Calvin and Hobbes made it successful? I reckon the use of an imaginative six-year-old gave Watterson the opportunity to take on very adult themes and to make them simple. When cutting through the normal nuance and adult-thinking, Calvin could mutter a throw-away punchline that would clarify an issue the way no six hundred word editorial column or two hundred page political book could. Watterson also built in great latitude when he made Calvin an imaginitive six-year-old; his incarnations as Spaceman Spiff, Stupendous Man, and Calvinosaurus keep the material fresh and interesting for the reader, and they probably kept the cartoon fresh for the artist.

By all means, enjoy the book if you’re a Calvin and Hobbes fan. If you’ve never read them, you damn kid, check it out. The material’s not dated and will last a couple of decades. By 2060, though, it will be as accessible as Andy Capp or Snuffy Smith.

My beautiful wife bought this book for me because she knows that I am a high acolyte of Parker. It’s definitely a Parker book, even if the main character morphs into a Jesse Stone knock off.

Set in the 1940s, it tells the story of a survivor from Guadalcanal who comes home to a wife who’s left him and a life that’s left him behind. He doesn’t care about anyone or anything, which makes him a good enforcer for the mob and later, a bodyguard. He gets a new lease on life when he’s hired to protect Jackie Robinson in his first season of play for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

So you’ve got the standard elements of Parker: Tough guy former military/boxer. Love interest who’s bad for him. Mob gunsels who adhere to The Code. Tough black guy with whom one can explore race relationships. The book blends elements of Love and Glory, the Jesse Stone novels, and Ray Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels (not so much Poodle Springs or Perchance to Dream).

It’s interesting to enjoy a little of the color of the 1940s, and it’s a heck of a lot better than the last baseball-themed crime fiction story I read. As a matter of fact, I was rather enjoying it in the beginning, when the main character was becoming a throwback to the old school hard-boiled characters, but like I said, it veers too easily into regular, comfortable Parker territory at the end.

Still, I shall buy the last of the three new Parker books this year and the three next year because Robert B. Parker and his Spenser novels raised me, and I am indentured to him. I accept the service, gladly.

Other views: Boston Globe, whose link I found courtesy of Bullets and Beer.

This novel certainly doesn’t represent the best of Alan Dean Foster’s work, but it’s an amusing book that hearkens back to the earlier days of science fiction, back when quick, short adventures in Del Ray editions shared a wild story.

When an automated plant that produces AI components becomes accidentally interested in finding higher intelligence than man, it begins building its quest into toasters, lawn care equipment, and other common tools it provides. Meanwhile, on Earth, which has become a park retirement community for residents of the outer worlds, five codgers of the title find an ancient ship of vast proportions which proves that a higher power exists. But what kind of higher power, and what should the oldsters do now that they’re in orbit with the armadas of the different human confederations showing up?

Like the last Foster novel I read, this one represents a short story run long. That’s part of the charm of this type of book, but unfortunately, Foster doesn’t weave the disparate plotlines together well, and some portions of the book run on too long to make the necessary word count for a novel. I think Foster might have found himself bogged down in the writing of the novel; I can even see the point where he followed Raymond Chandler’s advice and had a man walk through the door with a gun. Still, you have to admire a novel that combines a universe-altering cheese sandwich, writing advice from Raymond Chandler, and a hint at the Lovecraft mythos? The book was worth the price, $2.95 at Downtown Books in Milwaukee.

Confession: Gentle readers, given the range and the depth of the titles published with the Alan Dean Foster, particularly his penchant for novelizing movies (hey, I liked Outland!), I had the subtle doubt creep into my mind that Alan Dean Foster might actually be a name owned by a publishing house under which numerous people wrote over the period of the last three decades. Apparently, that is not so.

I bought this book as part of my “5 for $5.00” annual rejoining of the Quality Paperback club, which means that after shipping and handling, I only paid $16 total. And it’s hardcover, not paperback. But that’s enough about the pricing.

The book reminds me of The Book of Lists with a little less verve. Schott has collected numerous lists of trivia and has compiled them. No chapters. No themes. Just a hard dose of trivia for some of us to mainline before the shaking starts and our withdrawal begins. Still, I remember a couple of things from the book and I’ll spring them at odd times or to ensure that the North Side Mind Flayers trivia night team emerges victorious.

So do I recommend it? If you can get it cheap, or if you can borrow it, or if you’re into this sort of thing. It’s not a compelling read, but it is something you can pick up during commercial breaks when watching sports on television and can put down again when the action resumes without losing your place.

How could I pass any novel by the author who created Fletch when the library’s offering donated (not library copy) hardbacks for a quarter? I couldn’t! So even though this particular novel only hit my shelves recently, it enjoys the LIFO processing that the most compelling, and quickest-looking, reads enjoy. Let’s face it. Brian’s book shelves don’t enjoy proper rotation, which explains why The Sound and the Fury and its companions in a big Barnes and Noble Faulkner four-pack are enjoying the beginning of their second decade of dust-gathering, but this book flew off.

This book is a sequel to a book called Skylar, which I have not read. This book makes some reference to the earlier book, but it’s not required.

The plot, basically: Skylar, a country boy from Tennessee, comes to Boston for to go to a prestigious music school on a scholarship. Before he gets that far, he stays a couple nights with his wealthy relations. Sort of like if I lived with the Kerrys, maybe. But I digress. He’s a bird in the water, so to speak (ah, what one does to avoid clichés!) since he exudes native simplicity. Underneath it, though, he’s pretty sharp. So the book riffs on this disparity between how it’s done in The South and in Yankeeland. The book is billed as a crime novel, but there’s little, incidental crime in it. Much of the pleasure in the book comes in the character interplay.

Let’s see, we’ve got five million dollars’ worth of jewelry missing, and Skylar’s thirteen-year-old cousin is strongly suspected of murdering her junior high rival. We’ve got Skylar’s older cousin’s fiancé hitting on the strapping country lad and then dreaming rape sequences when he doesn’t respond. We’ve got rich relations on the brink of fiscal disaster. As Skylar appears, these things happen around him, and he gets to be the straight man and observer ot the mysteries’ resolutions.

Granted, the characters are somewhat stereotypical. If this were Steinbeck or Morrison, undoubtedly I would use the word “archetype” instead. Still, it was a quick and amusing read, and well worth at least twice as much as I paid for it. It’s particularly amusing if you are more non-coastal in nature and aren’t one of the bad archetypes lightly mocked by the good archetypes. A good, quick read.

This volume contains two previously published collections of Bob Greene’s work, 1983’s American Beat and 1985’s Cheeseburgers. Twenty years old. The pieces, collected from his column in Esquire called “American Beat” (who would have guessed?) and his columns in the Chicago Tribune, have held up rather well.

As part of his style, Greene often introduces the man, the visitor, or the writer into the story just like that. An abstract common noun, which allows the reader to pour himself (or herself, I suppose) into the story. This abstract serves as an observatory proxy, and appreciate the narrative device. I tried to identify what, specifically, I like about his columns, and I like this technique.

The subject matter, as well as the length, vary from piece to piece, but since this comes from the near apogee of his professional status, Greene gets to travel all across the country and talk to any number of important people, from Gerald Ford to Meryl Streep. I like the writing style, and I’m impressed with the lifestyle affected by the narrative voice. The book was well worth the $6.00 I spent on it, especially since it’s really like $3.00 for each book contained in the volume.

Listen, friends, I know I promised I would zing Bob Green a couple of times for the indiscretion that led to his downfall, but jeez, I read a couple of bits about him after finishing the book, including “The Sad Saga of Bob Greene” from Chicago Magazine and “The Confessions of Bob Greene” from Esquire, and I don’t want to jump on the petty bandwagon with other, more-refined and urbane columnists from Chicago and the media watchers who chatter like nightingales trying to capture the souls of the departed and downfallen.

I picked this book up at Downtown Books, Milwaukee’s premier used book store, last weekend. I felt like I needed some good throwaway fiction to intersperse amongst the serious fiction I read (and by “amongst” I mean before). So I bought a lot of Alan Dean Foster because I like Alan Dean Foster. The Spellsinger series, the movie novelizations, and so on.

At 179 pages, this book promised a quick read, which is important to a young man on a quest to read at least sixty books this year (and since this is book 29, I am ahead of schedule, but why wait until December to start taking shortcuts?). It was.

The book takes place on a heavily-forested world, where descendents of errant colonists have gone back to nature to survive. The tribe thinks a hunter named Born a trifle mad, or perhaps a trifle smart; he’s brave in an often incautious way. So when a strange metal demon falls from the sky, Born leads a troop to view it. When the rest of the group flees, only Born remains to discover the strange giant people within it. They tell him fantastic things and enlist his aid in returning to their station.

Foster does a marvelous job engrossing the reader in a strange and wonder-filled world. Although the setting is fantastic, Foster introduces the character, the environment, and the social structures well. That reflects what’s best about good sci-fi, and unfortunately about all that’s good about this book. Because the plot’s really a puffed up short story or novella, and the world in which it is set ultimately resolves into a Gaia-humping, collective-consciousness-espousing piece of mid 1970s drivel. Of course, that’s my visceral reaction to my disappointment. The texture and the colors are so well-executed that I wish the whole picture depicted something better.

I mean, I paid three whole dollars for it.

Whenever Heather and I travel, I like to pick up one of these silly little quiz books to help us pass the time. I picked up the Barnes and Noble edition of this book, for a number of dollars no less, because I knew we would be on the road this year. Unfortunately, although this book bills itself as a way to “Get your friends to reveal their inner selves with The Little Book of Stupid Questions“. Unfortunately, the book serves more to let you get to know David Borgenicht as much as to get to know each other.

Face it, quiz books of this sort should proffer brain teasers to elicit chuckles, amusing stories, or wry revelations on the part of those answering the question. Unfortunately, Borgenicht cannot help intruding with follow-up questions that presume the question will be answered a certain way, such as

If, by some quirk of fate, you run into your favorite celebrity/supermodel fantasy object, and, by some other quirk of fate, they [sic] come onto you, what would you do? What if you were in a committed relationship? Do you ask for an autograph afterwards?

or

When you’re in the shower and you see a little hair on the tile wall, do you fill your hands with water and try to splash it off, or [sic] try to pluck it off with your fingers? Why are we so predictable?

Some of the questions are seemingly rhetorical, as though Borgenicht couldn’t wait for Amateur Night at the comedy club.

If you ate your own foot, would you lose weight?

or

Do you think that the first time corn ever popped [sic] it scared the hell out of the Indians?

and furthermore

Why do people who use "correct grammar" sound like such dorks?

Even when he’s not cracking wise or writing with a smirk, he’s repeating himself. What would your name be as a rock singer/super hero/exotic dancer? Who would you least like to be haunted by/stuck in an elevator with/spend an eternity in hell with? I started skipping the similar questions, the rhetorical questions, and the repeated questions. Ultimately, it left about a third of the book qualified to do what it advertises.

However, Borgenicht does lead to hours of amusing speculation with this question:

If they can make a "black box" that is so indestructible that it survives a plane crash, why don’t they just make the airplane out of the same material?

Wow. Is Borgenicht plagiarizing from George Carlin’s Brain Droppings, or is he plagiarizing from Mike Barnicle’s column in the Boston Globe which itself plagiarized from Brain Droppings and led to Barnicle’s dismissal?

Wondering about that answer could eat up some drive time in the middle of Illinois, werd.

I got this book, in hardback, from the Quality Paperback Club for like a buck. I’ve been a fan of the Darwin Awards since I joined the IT industry and realized that I had an Internet browser right on my computer desktop and learned all the amusing little sites with which I could amuse myself when I needed a break from breaking the software (even when I was a mere technical writer, I was hell on code, werd). So I’m already familiar with the concept of the Darwin Award.

A Darwin Award goes to people who make spectacularly poor decisions that lead to their own deaths. Not just bad decisions; having a few beers and then driving up the Pacific Coast Highway while calling your ex-girlfriend and then going off the road and into the surf, that’s a bad decision, but not spectacularly bad. Spectacularly bad is drinking a couple of beers, climbing a telephone pole, and peeing onto electric wires. Macabre, no doubt, but amusing from a distance.

Because the book comes from a Web site, one has to wonder what the book format brings that the Web site does not. For example, I’ve read F’d Companies as well as and urban legend encyclopedia that resemble printed versions of Snopes, and in many cases, the answer is not much. As it is with this volume.

The book, as a value-added nod to the print medium, also contains an essay that begins each chapter. Unfortunately, the essays are rather short–600 words or less, I reckon–that lightly touches upon a topic unrelated to the chapter. These essays are light overviews of topics such as how the entries are picked, flame wars on the Web site, and transgenic animals, and they offer the depth one might find in a syndicated newspaper feature. A short one. But they’re unrelated

Each actual Darwin Award vignette is properly sized for a screen of text, so each is about a page or so in print. They’re quick and easy to read. That’s the plus for the book, but it’s also what’s on the Web site. So now that’ve said something nice about the book, I’ll sum up.

This volume doesn’t add much to the Web site, so it’s worth the money if “the money” is only a buck and/or you like to read this stuff offline or cannot type www.darwinawards.com into a Web browser.

As some of you know, I’ve been reading Steinbeck on and off for the last couple of years (Of Mice and Men review); what I said then holds true. Steinbeck’s as accessible and as easy to read as Hemingway, which means I’ve read a bunch of him, and the Faulkner I was supposed to read in college remains on my to-read shelves.

This book deals with a group of Mexican-Americans who live in Tortilla Flat, a small, er, suburb of Monterey populated by Mexican Americans. It’s set immediately after the first world war. The main characters are layabouts. It’s not so much a novel as a collection of anecdotes or loosely-related stories, a la Winesburg, Ohio. Actually, considering that the pastime of the main characters is stealing or trading for gallons of wine, perhaps this book should be called Winesburg, California. But it’s not.

To keep with the spirit of the book, I drank much red wine while reading it. The level in my bottle went down, down, and perhaps I enjoyed the book more for it. Still, I couldn’t apply too many lessons of the book to my life, since none of my neighbors have chickens I can steal, and because I like to think my life has more meaning than acquiring money for wine. I’m a Guinness man, don’t you know?

Still, the ultimate point of this book might be that there’s more to life than laying about and drinking. However, the thin characterization and even the thin narration don’t really compel the reader to make those conclusions. It’s sort of like an epidode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. We were lazing about, stealing for wine, and an incident occurred.

Unlike Star Trek: The Next Generation, though, you can sound a bit snooty when you say, “This reminds me of Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat….” So if you like quick reads in Great American Literature, pick it up. Especially if you can score it as part of a Steinbeck set at $1 each like I did. Werd.

This book is 20 years old. You like the Far Side? That’s yesterday’s newspaper. The Far Side has been out of business for so long, most young people today–indeed, most in that coveted 18-34 demographic–won’t remember it. Sort of like if you talk about Opus, or Bloom County, or Calvin and Hobbes in five years, or Dilbert in ten or fifteen (although perhaps Dilbert, like Hagar the Horrible, will remain in the funny pages longer than in the culture).

So I’m ashamed that this book is now one of those cultural artifacts I’m fond of reading–especially since I remember it in its pre-artifact days. The wry, outlandish humor remains, but I wonder how much of it would fly in today’s world. Particularly the gags with the mushroom clouds. Of course, in the early eighties, we had a Republican president that contemporary conventional wisdom thought was bringing humanity to the brink of its extinction. Looking back, the sepia-toned memories are less frightening since the bigger story turned out well. But I digress. Mushroom clouds? Not so funny. Office politics and corporate shenanigans? Funny and relevant, for a couple years yet.

Still, the book’s amusing enough in itself. One typically encounters Far Side cartoons individually, tacked on cubicle walls from Far Side calendars (or at least that’s how I encounter them on my beautiful wife‘s cubicle wall). En masse, such as a great book like this, one encounters a greater number of cartoons of varied punchlines, which means the end result is average–wherein the cubicle wall is very selective, choosing one or two cartoons from a year’s worth of cartoons reprinted from several years’ worth of cartoons.

Perhaps I just read this book too quickly (a single night). But I didn’t spend too much on it (4 books for 4 bucks plus shipping and handling from Quality Paperback Club), so I’m pleased with it. If you’re a Far Side fan, it’s worth it. If you’re not, it’s like a collection of Andy Capp’s greatest hits. Well, no, probably a bit better than that since most of us can identify with cattle on the moon better than English ruggers, but you get my point.

As you all know by now if you’ve been reading these book reviews and haven’t skipped over them to get to the snarky humor, I read a lot of books that are not only sociological studies, but also are artifacts of their time periods. What they say about whatever they’re talking about reflects the time in which they’re written as much as the subject they cover. So I picked this book for under a buck during one of those binges of used book-buying in which my my beautiful wife and I often indulge.

I read it over the course of a couple weeks during my lunches at work. I even pasted a number of Post-It notes into the book with snarky comments so I could do a longer, more reasoned evaluation of the book. However, since it’s been on my desk here, just to the right of the MfBJN mainframe for a couple of weeks now, this is all you get. Sorry.

You can pretty much guess how the book’s going to go from the title. Unfortunately, the book’s cover doesn’t have the proper soap opera score to illustrate the way you should read the title. Ideally, it would be Video Fever: Entertainment? [piano tinkle] Education? [tinkle] or Addiction [heavy chord DUM DUM!]

Charles Beamer, high school teacher, examines the video game craze as you would expect a high school teacher might. He goes to video arcades (remember them?), asks questions to which anyone not called “faculty” in a professional capacity would raise an eyebrow, and then extrapolates results from a limited statistical sample.

You know what he found?

Bad elements liked to hang out in arcades, smoke marijuana, and sometimes those bad kids stole a couple bucks from their parents’ purses or wallets to play. Sometimes, games were the “only friend” of the players, and other anthropomorphic mayhem ensued. Beamer “examines” the typical player archetypes, from the preteen misfits to the 20-somethings blowing off steam. He briefly examines the benefits that video games might provide–raising a generation comfortable with that fad “computer” thing.

But he’s just waiting to get into the harm video games provide. Stealing quarters from parking meters. Smoking pot (brother, have we got a surprise for you in a couple years, when people start to smoke crystallized cocaine). Antisocial superpredators–no, wait, sorry, that’s what latchkey crack babies movies or GTA would later provide. As a result, the tail end of Generation X has no hope at all.

Then he examines what can be done, which devolves from a study of good family life into a screed favoring extremely strict Christian discipline. Frankly, that particular turn in an attempted even-handed sociological study couldn’t have been more jarring if the author had written Iä! Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!

So it’s an amusing tract, almost worth the thirty-three and a third cents I paid for it (if that much). I’m not sure it’s worth the hours I spent reading it, but hey, I’m jumping on that grenade for you, gentle reader, to spare you the horror.

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Marginalia:

As I mentioned, I noted some sections for extra snarkage. I’d hate to have wasted all those expensive little yellow slips with adhesive on one end, so I’ve included the best for you below:

• p11:
  

  It’s dark inside arcades and video game centers, womblike, comforting, exciting. Lights flash and flicker seductively in many colors from strange and alluring sources. Sounds of battle beckon the players to death-defying heroism, courageous exploits hardly possible in the ordinary worlds of school and home, and hours and hours of fun!

  Jeez, man, I’ll admit my mother smoked cigarettes while I was gestating, so I remember the womb as dark, soft, and warm (or so I remmeber through the recovered memories). What was your mother smoking to make her womb like a freaking video arcade while you were gestating?

• In a section called “Tricks of the Trade”:
  

  A distributors’ [sic, and from a TEACHER no less] problem that makers assist in solving is “burn-out” among players who become tired of playing the same games in the same places. One tick the markers use is to provide distributors with decals and pop-in microchips; the decals slide under the tabletop on the front of the machine, making it look like an entirely new machine, and the exchange of microchips changes the way the machine plays in a way so the playes believe it is a new game.

  You heard it here first. JAMMA is a trick! played upon poor, unsuspecting quarter-thieving, ganja-smoking teens. Except swapping the boards (not just the chips, brother) does make a new game. Of course, Beamer’s technical comprehension is limited.

• p67, introduction to the chapter “Do Video Games Harm Anyone?”
  

  Perceptions of experiences are more important than the experiences themselves. There are people who can find joy hidden in even the most tragic situation, and there are others who cannot be satisfied or made happy no matter what their experience of joy. We see ourselves and our experiences uniquely, and “real facts” are distorted and shaped and changed by any number of factors–how we feel about ourselves, our memory of past experiences, and our expectations of a situation.

  Just put down the epistemology and back slowly away before you harm yourself and others. “Perceptions of experiences are more important than the experiences themselves”? Jeez, whatever your mother was smoking must have been potent.

• p135, in “Appendix B: How the Games Work”:
  

  Home-delivery systems have been heralded as the “coming thing.” Promoters say that soon (even now in some areas) it will be possible for you to shop for groceries or any other product from your home.

  Well, it took a couple years, by Cosmo and Webvan took right care of that. Note to younger readers: In the later part of the last century, two Internet companies called Cosmo and Webvan got lots of venture capital to lose trying to do just that. “Even now in some areas” would take eighteen years from Beamer’s prognostication to be proven unready. Cripes, it’s 2004, and I have to explain Webvan.

• p136, the real pain sets in when Beamer describes how arcade games are programmed in Basic [sic] where a pyxel [sic] is manipulated and a byte is 1000 [sic] bits and wherein
  

  Two other terms now come into play, and both refer to program commands in response to a player’s action. The first term is “poke.” Poke is a command meaning “go to” some pyxel or matrix on the screen. When a player fires the cannons or lasers of his spaceship to destroy an asteroid or a space invader, the microprocessor understands only “Poke.” On a microchip, an impulse flashes toward a number of pyxels in a direct line (a line that appears direct on the screen but actually is moving diagonally or slantwise across tiny dots) toward the edge of the screen.
  The second term is “peek.” It is a command meaning “look ahead.” The microprocessor is asking a microchip to look ahead of the “poke” command to see if there is anything along the line of “poke.” If there is, then another subprogram goes into operation: a collision occurs, an invader is blown up, lights flash, sound blares.

  In Beamer’s world, upright arcade games are written in mangled Commodore BASIC 2.0. I’d weep for Babylon, too, if I were projecting the future across these flawed sightlines.

The Holy Tome of Mitnick, describes the various means through which social engineers infiltrate your company to extract sensitive information. Coupled with a bit of technical knowledge, a bit of insight into large corporate community, and two heaping tablespoons of audacity, these fellows play upon the good will of corporate insiders to get into places where they shouldn’t.

Each chapter and section analyzes different techinques used and psychological traits preyed upon, with sample scenarios (often told from real-life hearsay), but you, gentle reader, should buy this book, learn from its contents, and trust no one. Granted, I started out paranoid cautious, but this book reminds you to not trust that friendly voice on the phone and to vet people you meet in person.

Of course I recommend the book. Read it now!

And just so you know how much I value this book, I paid whole paperback book club price for it!

This book is supposed to be a whodunit. It’s more a WTF?

The book is set in 1962. The backdrop: The end of the Mets’ miserable season. During a ballgame in late September, Jerry Fielder, a “businessman” with a shady reputation, is murdered in the pressbox with a number of people nearby. Who could have done it? Who cares?

For starters, the first person narrator is a somewhat minor character, recounting things that happen to other people. It’s kind of jarring to try to keep that bit straight. Second, it takes like 70 pages until the murder is committed. Thirdly, it’s difficult to keep the suspects straight, much less the investigating characters and the partners and whatnot. Some characters call suspects by their first names, others by their last names, and at by the middle of the book, I gave up trying to keep it straight, instead, I just wanted to get through the book.

Someone did it. Or did someone else? Who knows? The Mets didn’t win the pennant that year, and the scorecard for the game in question was the vital clue. A fielder’s choice was marked an error. So you see, the title’s a pun playing on that, not the character’s name! Ha hah! The gimmick got ya!

Ha hah! I paid under a buck for it in hardback, of which the author got what he deserved: nothing!

Excuse me, I am bitter because my own masterpiece has not yet been published, and it only takes fifty pages to get interesting. Where’s the justice, I ask you.