Category: Book Report

Well, I have done my part to help maintain Jasperwood and to keep Lileks in Hummels and cigars. I read The Bleat, his Back Fence column with the Star-Tribune, and even his weekly Newhouse News column. That’s all free, though, and does little for Lileks’ bottom line, which is probably higher than many peoples’ top lines, but still. By reading off the Web, I was not empowering Lileks. Much like you freeloading readers are doing by not sendng me cash or visiting my Amazon wish list and sending me goodies. Not that I am trying to put a guilt trip on you; I know you’re all heartless socialistopaths who think we should be just doing this because we can, and you want it. But I digress, gentle skinflint reader.

So I went out and bought The Gallery of Regrettable Food, at full price no less, to send a couple pennies’ worth of royalties to Minnesota (the poor man’s Wisconsin). Unfortunately, I was disappointed with the work.

As you might know from viewing Lileks’ Web site, the Gallery represents photos and some snarky wit about recipes collected in books released in the years when Baby Boomers’ parents were cooking. Lileks started the project based on a cookbook he found among his mother’s effects. The book’s wit might be spot-on (Heather liked the pages she browsed), but unfortunately, it didn’t rub me the right way for a couple reasons:

• As a rule, I am deferential to older generations and their wisdom. I don’t mock it, even when it’s goofy. Well, maybe I do sometimes, but this book led me to a high horse, and you can lead a man to a high horse, but you can’t make him drink. If you lead him to Guiness, though….what was my point?
• I read this book too soon after Make Room for TV, a book which examined old television shows and extrapolated from them to score Marxist/Feminist points. Lileks’ book doesn’t make political points, but it does make light of the knowledge of our forebearers. Or at least the knowledge of those who marketed to our forebearers. Still, I had too much anti-Spigel venom built up to appreciate what Lileks was doing.
• I have a closet full of these books from when I was doing the eBay thing. I’d pick them up for a dime and list them for a couple of bucks. I sold a couple, too, to people looking for their parents’ recipes, or perhaps to the parents who lost the recipes in a divorce settlement or something. Still, Lileks cuts into the resale value of these treasures I own.

Still, I am glad I bought the book. I’m happy to underwrite Lileks, even though this particular tome is not my bag. I imagine his next volume, Interior Desecrations, will be some of the same. But he’s a good writer, and soon he should have some collection of his other writings coming out which I’ll enjoy more.

You might wonder why I bothered to read this book, whose full title is Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Actually, I wondered a bit myself while wandering through this Marxist/Feminist inquiry into the impact of television on life of the bourgeois in the ten years after World War II. Then I remembered. Because I paid a whole quarter for it at the library. Plus, it just sounds cool if someone asks what you’re reading, and you can answer Marxist/Feminist inquiry into the impact of television on life of the bourgeois in postwar period. Not that anyone asked. But I was ready to answer.

So I sloughed through five chapters and 187 pages of this book, remembering for a brief moment (if you count three weeks’ worth of head-shaking lunches as “a brief moment”) what it was like in college. When I would be assigned something like this, or would be assigned some topic tangentally related to this for a paper whose research would lead me to this book, and I would read some of it because I had to. Let’s face it, this thing wasn’t aimed for the mass paperback market.

My second problem with this book is the author’s faulty methodology. The first, of course, is that she’s a Marxist/Feminist academic, but to bring that up would be ad homenim, and people are allowed to believe stupid things because this is still a free country. When it’s no longer free, we’ll be mandated to believe those stupid things. But I digress.

Spigel builds a history of repression in America in what she calls the Victorian period, willfully or foolishly applying a historical term that denotes a period British history. Calling it the era of the Robber Barons wouldn’t have had the same connotation of repression and need, though, so she calls the last portion of the 18th century through World War II “Victorian” for, I would assume, the whole world, not just Britain. Granted, this is just a quibble over language, but since language is how we communicate concepts, I could tell pretty early how different the author and I conceptualize.

So, about the methodology. Spigel surveys magazines from the immediate post World War II period, examines the advertisements for televisions, and compares them with some prepackaged thought in the form of other academic pabulum which agrees with her basic M/F premises. As a result, she tells us about the repressed suburban bourgeois and how television was a tool of The Man to hold them down.

Brothers and sisters, I cannot tell you how goofy the ultimate intellectual content of this book is. Spurious assertions, laughable on the face, abound. Americans felt ambivalent to television because it was used as a weapon in World War II? Spigel forgot to footnote how commercial broadcasts brought the Axis to its knees. Perhaps she just meant sounds carried invisibly, magically through space. The more intellectually rigorous sections of the book do offer two sides to an issue. For example, if men don’t help the housewives at home, they’re pigs. If they do, it’s because they’re powerless at work and seek to assert their control where they can, in the home. Truly, Spigel has a dizzying intellect.

Sometimes, though, she makes a coherent, almost reasonable argument, such as asserting that television provided a proxy communal neighborhood at a time when suburban sprawl removed people from their traditional, more urban neighborhoods. Unfortunately, Spigel took this argument elsewhere, leaving me with a small idea with which I could agree. I hold tightly to this single idea, because otherwise I wasted a bunch of time and twenty-five cents, which is about a thirty-secondth of a six-pack of Guinness.

Academic textbooks that share this worldview spend a lot of time analyzing existing metaphors, images, and other artificial constructs and magically reveal, through their scrying, that the premise with which the academic began the inquiry is actually the conclusion. Unfortunately, they (like this book) write syllogisms in space.

So there you have it, gentle readers; the missing book. I meant to do a longer, more reasoned review pointing out where Spigel diverges from reality, but then I realized I have better things to do. Were I an academic, teaching three sections a week, perhaps I could have time to fit it into my salaried day. But it’s not worth my leisure time. And this book is not worth yours, unless you’re like me: a book slut.

I picked this book up in a Barnes and Noble in Springfield last year. Off the remainder rack, for $6.95, so don’t think I am out there buying all sorts of expensive books. However, based on this book, I’d be happy to buy another of Lupica’s novels.

The story revolves around the recruiting of an American ex-pat living in Europe to a struggling NBA team. After seeing D. Gerard play in a charity game, scout Eddie Holtz is determined to bring him back to play for the New York Knights. When D. Gerard removes a cap, Eddie’s shocked to see it’s a woman. He think she’s got enough game to run with the males in the NBA, and he convinces Dee that she ought to take her shot at the big time. He convinces his boss to take a shot on integrating the NBA, and the boss is happy to, if only for the novelty. But when Dee starts to play, she’s got to prove she deserves to be in the NBA.

Seemed to me that the first Lupica book I read was a mystery, so I almost expected a corpse to turn up in this book. Well, one does, sort of; but it’s not a mystery. It’s a mainstream novel, one I could enjoy. I don’t watch basketball as a matter of course, but the book conveyed enough authenticity in digestible form that my rudimentary knowledge of the game didn’t hinder my comprehension.

Most of all, I liked Lupica’s writing style. Easy to read, smooth and comprehensible, kinda like Guinness for the eyes. Of course, I remarked to Heather that Lupica’s style is rather like my own. So perhaps I am prejudiced.

For those of us keeping score at home, this is the 19 book I have read this year, and the 18th review you’ve suffered through. Thanks. And sorry for the review for the missing book, which you’ll suffer through when I get around to it.

I don’t know if it was inappropriate or not, but I read The Dilbert Future at work. Unlike most Dilbert books, which lament the workplace environment and the world’s dysfunctional state, this book laments the current state and the state the world was going to be in. So it represents a forward looking bad employee attitude.

Scott Adams took his cartooning insight into trends that were nascent in 1997 (or 1996, which is when I assume he wrote the book) and projected them out into the future. With some wryness, of course, but with some sincerity, too. His futurism is hit or miss, but he did pick up on some interesting things which came true. Some don’t, however. We don’t all have ISDN, but we do have cable modems and DSL, which are gradually supplanting the dial-up lines used in 1997. And this Internet thing has gotten a whole lot bigger. Not as big as the hype which would peak within a couple years of this book’s publication, but bigger. Adams also picked up the trend of blogging:

Prediction 52: In the future, everyone will be a news reporter.

Jeff Jarvis is so behind Scott Adams.

So Adams takes his best stabs at the future, and the book’s amusing enough with that. However, with the ultimate chapter, “A New View of the Future”, Adams goes careers off into a I’m Not Really Here-style weird Buddhist musing. He talks about how future paradigm shifts will indicate our current perception of the experience of time is inaccurate, and the near past, near future, and present are all the same, or similar, or something. He’s sincere. Hey, I am all for keeping an open mind, but this bit lacks a big enough dose of skepticism for me.

Still, it’s only a chapter, and it’s not the whole book, so I can overlook it and say the book’s amusing enough to read.

When I finished this book last night, Heather asked me if I liked it. I said, “It’s okay.” Was it a good book? she pressed. “It was okay,” I responded.

There you have it: this is a nice book.

It’s about 40% biography, wherein John Stossel tells us about his evolution as a thinker and a commentator, and 60% survey of libertarian positions on issues. It’s an unfortunate mix, because it really didn’t do too much for me.

Stossel tells us anecdotes from times throughout his career when he was working as a consumer advocate reporter for local affiliates up until he became the 20/20 presence and network gadfly. These anecdotes and insights are the strength of the book. It could have used more of Stossel’s personal account of his odyssey. The first four or five chapters describe it.

Unfortunately, the remainder of the book is not much more than a laundry list of what libertarians believe (less government, more personal responsibility). The very chapter titles reflect this: “Welfare for the Rich”, “The Trouble with Lawyers”, “The Left Takes Notice”, “”It’s Not My Fault” and up to “Owning Your Body” and “Free Speech”. Stossel works in a few anecdotes–including the one excerpted in Reason–but mostly he just conducts a survey course.

Perhaps it’s a good primer for the people who’ve seen Stossel on television and don’t know much about libertarianism. If so, he assures them that others share the vision they might find attractive. Heck, he even invokes Ayn Rand a couple of times. But it doesn’t offer a detailed, reasoned argument to sway thinkers–or to offer arguments for the believers who want to them.

Of course, it’s not Bias when it comes to harsh indictment of media, and it’s not Ann Coulter or Michael Moore polemics to rouse the rabble or enrage the heretics. It’s more even-tempered than that, and it does treat the reader fairly, and the opposition sympathetically. Stossel even offers kind words to the police state government and contemporary society, noting that we’re remarkably open and free even while we’re moving towards crackpot nannyism.

That Stossel’s a nice boy.

So that’s what it is; a nice, rational, but ultimately lightweight treatise (if that’s not an oxymoron) on how one man became a libertarian (or small-l liberal) and what it means to him.

Ah, a light mystery romp. This is the first book of Carl Hiassen’s that I have read, and it probably won’t be the last.

It’s the story of a newspaperman who’s gone from the front page of his small Florida daily to the obituary beat, punishment for his forthright (and possibly self-destructive) nature. As he grows older, he starts obsessing about the ages of famous people when they died, and whom he’s out lived–without contributing as much.

When an obscure 80s pop star dies, Jack Tagger suspects foul play. He’s right, of course; what kind of mystery would it be without it?

You know, Hiassen might just be the funniest writer to come out of the Miami Herald ever. The voice of the book is light, vulnerable, and humorous. It’s a good light read, and I look forward to my next Hiassen novel.

Yep, that’s all I got for a review.

I know, I know. You’re all saying, “Brian, why are you reading a book that goes in the Self-Help / Psychology / Inspiration section?” Easy question.

Because I am a promiscuous book slut. I’ll read anything with two covers. Sometimes two at once even. Good, bad, beautiful, ugly, I just cannot stop. Also, I thought the title indicated this particular work was a mind-over-matter, Zen or Hindu ascetic equivalent of Gainpro. There, I admitted it.

It’s not. What it is, however, is a dose of practical, populist pragmatism for the masses. Of course, since I spent forty-five thousand dollars and interest on a Philosophy degree, everything relates to Pragmatism, Existentialism, Objectivism, Dialectic Materialism, or Rudimentarialistic Sponteneal Constructionism.

The core message is that you have to believe in yourself and your abilities to make the efforts and to take the chances to succeed. Much like William James’s parable of the mountain trail, or Thoreau (a Transcendentalist, not a Pragmatist, don’t you think I know that?) telling you to aim high, for men can hit what they aim at. Schwartz directs much of his energy and the book at being successful in business, particularly succeeding in a corporate environment or as an entrepreneur. As such, he does intimate that you can get by with just the right attitude without bogging down your pretty little head with technical aptitude. I’ve worked for too many project managers who got an MBA from Schwartz’s academic successors to heed that augury. I forgive him, though.

I forgive him because the style of the book is accessible and easy to read. Easier than Charles Sanders Peirce, anyway. And since it deals with everyday problems and situations, it makes pragmatism relevant to everyone. Undoubtedly, it’s helped the two generations preceding mine, as the book was originally published in 1959 and revised in 1967 before being reissued as a paperback in 1997. So while the concepts are applicable, the book’s quaintly dated whenever he mentions salaries, housing prices, or veterans (from World War II and Korea) taking night classes.

So grab the book if you can find it cheaply. It’s inspired me a bit, and I’ve even put a quote from it on my whiteboard:

Persisting in one way is not a guarantee of victory. But persistence blended with experimentation does guarantee success.

That’s better advice than I’ve ever gotten from an underpants gnome, werd.

In his characteristic Author’s Note at the end of the book, Anthony admits:

I wrote “Ghost” the story, about 10,000 words long, somewhere back in 1961….

No doubt. This whole volume smacks of a sixties sensibilty. The Author’s Note describes how long and hard it was for Anthony to get this thing published. It’s not that the book is bad, but it is dated with a sixties sensibility.

The plot deals with a time-traveliing ship, the Meg II, sent into the future to search for a source of energy for the starving planet. And maybe some insight into what happened to the Meg I. The world from which the Meg II launches is a slightly dystopian future, where space travel exists but is looked down upon by earthbound residents as a waste of scarce resources. So far, so good.

But the timeship is rooted to its original time by a psychadelic psychic beacon whose connection to its origin time cannot survive strong emotions from crewmembers. So it goes without saying that the free-love rules will lead to strong emotions, and there’s a suicide, and suddenly the ship finds another entity moving through time. A galaxy, or a ghost. Once the ship meets the entity, suddenly it’s a bad acid trip having something to do with the Seven Deadly Sins and when the crew groks understands the nature of the entity, the book ends.

Incarnations of Immortality, it ain’t.

I brought this book along on my vacation as some light reading for the flight to Florida. The full title of this book is Freefall: From 41,000 Feet to Zero – a True Story. To make a long book short, on July 23, 1983, a 767 bound from Ottawa to Edmonton ran out of fuel in mid-flight. Somewhere east of Winnipeg, the engines just shut off at 41,000 feet. Fuel starvation, it’s called. But hey, without any explosive fuel, the passengers only had to contend with dropping from eight miles in the sky at 400+ miles an hour–no fireball needed!

Yes, I brought it and yes, I read it on the plane–a 757, thank you, not a deathtrap 767 like in the book. Some people read horror books about clown-looking serpent demons who come out of storm drains, but they’re pikers. You want real terror, put something at stake. Like your life aboard one of those damn contraptions while your read about a hideous plane disaster

You want to know why flying a plane is scary? Because a cascading system of simple failures can lead to disaster. Suppose you’ve got a fuel sensor, redundant of course with two channels, but instead of getting 5v to one channel, it’s getting .9v and the whole sensor blanks out instead of switching to the working channel, and then a mechanic discovers a work-around but the mechanic at the next airport disables the work-around, and the visor-wearing Quebecker fuel guy hand calculates the fuel in the tank by multiplying by the specific gravity of pounds (1.44) instead of kilograms (.8), and suddenly you’ve got 61 passengers and 8 crew watching personal in-flight movies of their lives on the backs of their eyelids.

I’ll admit, the book helped take the edge off of the flight. Its pacing is slow and non-suspenseless. It’s as though the authors took a Reader’s Digest Drama in Real Life and stretched it into two hundred plus pages. The authors manage to work in the biography of all of the crew, many of the passengers, some people in an unrelated nearby plane, and the complete history of the town of Gimli, Manitoba. The fluff, while adding depth to the book, really detracts from the suspense.

Without appropriate apprehensiveness from reading this book, I had to turn to Heather’s uncle in Florida, a former engineer for Pratt and Whitney, for tales of terror. Remember Des Moines? He does, and he can tell you in great detail what happens when a stress-fatigue crack sends a turbine blade through the control cables on the wing.

As some of you know, I hold Robert B. Parker in the in the highest esteem. Of course I buy his books when they come out, whether they’re Sunny Randall or Jesse Stone, or especially when they’re Spenser novels.

This novel represents the best of the Spenser novels. For those of you who are not in the know, the Spenser character spawned the 1980s series Spenser: For Hire which starred Robert Urich. So they’re crime fiction. This piece finds Spenser working for a wealthy woman who wants to catch her husband in flagrante delecto for a divorce. The husband turns up dead in his office at a large energy-trading corporation while Spenser’s outside tailing, which Spenser cannot abide. Spenser finds himself with an onion to peel; each layer of sex, scandal, and big business leads to another. Red herrings abound. A tightly-crafted plot, and Spenser muddles through with some help from his friends.

Sure, Parker derives some from the Enron scandal and even some from his own previous work, but it’s a damn good read and a damn good thirtieth birthday present to the Spenser character and his fans. ‘Nuff said.

When I drove to Milwaukee, I listened to a couple of Bill Cosby CDS that were originally released as Bill Cosby LPs in the late 1960s, when Cosby was fresh from I-Spy and before he embarked on the Fat Albert thing and The Cosby Show. If you damn kids don’t know what an LP is, Google it. I enjoyed his warm storytelling style of humor and the easy chuckle-style amusement it brings, so I stopped by Downtown Books in Milwaukee and picked up a copy of Time Flies, a book written during the height of his Cosby Show celebrity.

The tone of the 30 year-old Cosby’s stories contrast with the book written by the 50-year-old Cosby; the book deals with Cosby turning 50, and he reminisces about his former glory as an athlete and talks about the loss of memory, physique, and other things that come while the eternal footman goes to the coat check room for you. The essays don’t mourn the loss with disappointment or rancor, but more a nostalgia. I liked the book and read it pretty quickly.

An interesting, extra poignant moment in the book is when Cosby compares his aging physique to that of his son, Ennis, as they play basketball together. The young reaching its prime, the older recognizing the fundamental shift and the nature of the cycle. Ten years later, the cycle was broken when Ennis died, but seventeen years ago, they played basketball together, and the father thought of his mortality while the son didn’t recognize his own.

Unfortunately, the publisher or someone has seen fit to include an introduction by Alvin F. Poussaint, M.D., that really detracts from the book as a whole. Before Cos can start, the doctor has started talking seriously about the prospect of aging and the fears faced by aging people (as opposed, I suppose, to dead people, who are very mellow indeed). We readers could have figured out Cosby’s overall message without some therapidiocy slathered onto the actual text before we read the text. Thanks, doctor, for getting me in touch with my inner senior.

I paid a dollar for this book at Hooked on Books in Springfield, Missouri. It was on the rack of cheap books that they keep outside the store because they don’t care if someone loots them. That’s the kind of book I bought for a dollar.

The book takes place aboard a space ship containing survivors from Earth’s social breakdown, en route to a planet around Barnard’s Star. All but one are in suspension for the trip, leaving a single person to wander the ship for the five year trip, checking on automatic instruments and going mad with guilt for the sins he committed while stealing the ship. And others.

Much of the book is told in flashback, flashbacks to an Ehrlichian future imagined by those whacky Brits in the period between world wars. The remainder of it represents a descent into paranoia and a climactic delirium that almost tells the untold story, but allows the user to concoct his own meaning if he cares to. Okay, I did a little the night I finished the book, but that’s it.

It’s a light read and I spent only a couple of nights on it. It helped that many of the 184 pages featured concrete poetry, drawing words on the page with other letter much like ASCII art. At least it got that part of the future right.

Book Review: All the Trouble in the World by P. J. O’Rourke (1994)

This book examines some of the worst problems that the world thought it faced in the 1990s: Overpopulation, famine, ethnic hatred, plague, poverty, and such; for each chapter, P. J. O’Rourke goes beyond the statistics proffered by the movements and think tanks to examine the roots of the issues in the fertile beds in which they grow. As you can expect, he presents his usual irreverent viewpoint in smirky prose. For example, the chapters bear these titles:

1. Fashionable Worries If Meat Is Murder, Are Eggs Rape?
2. Overpopulation Just Enough of Me, Way Too Much of You
3. Famine All Guns, No Butter
4. Environment The Outdoors and How It Got There
5. Ecology We’re All Going to Die
6. Saving the Earth We’re All Going to Die Anyway
7. Multiculturalism Going from Bad to Diverse
8. Plague Sick of It All
9. Economic Justice The Hell with Everything, Let’s Get Rich

Within each of the chapters, O’Rourke visits a symptomatic location that exemplifies the problem. For “Overpopulation”, he ventures to Bangladesh and learns why so many people want to live there (it’s the most fertile soil on the planet) and muses about how overcrowded man really is by comparing population densities of other locations (such as if the entire population of the planet in 1995 would scrunch together with the population density of Manhattan, we could all fit inside a region the size of the former Yugoslavia. Bangladesh has the same population density as the suburban city of Fremont, California, so O’Rourke delves into why the country seems so overcrowded and Fremont seems so American. Therein lies the rub; American government and society are open and dynamic, whereas Bangladesh’s government is not. They have a Ministry of Jute, designed to promote jute, the leading agricultural export of Bangladesh. You know, jute–the key ingredient in burlap, which was a very popular packing material a hundred years ago.

O’Rourke gets behind the pamphlets and examines not only causes, but the factors that lead to the continuation of problems as well as some amusing extrapolations: You want to embrace diversity? They have in the Balkans. Of course, that’s not the tribalism that comes from diversity, it’s the tribalism that comes from private ownership of guns, undoubtedly.

When O’Rourke’s on, he’s amusing to read, biting, and obviously arguing from a wealth of background. When he’s not, he’s simply presenting a travelogue of places he’s traveled and drank. Still, this book is more of the former, which is what I expected from the title.

This book extends the world created in Niven’s “The Flight of the Horse”. The book comprises the short stories, “The Flight of the Horse”, “Leviathan!”, “A Bird in the Hand”, and others, as well as a new novella “Rainbow Mars”.

The short stories were published independently between 1969 and 1973, so they’re designed for independence and are farily self-contained. They describe enough of the world in which the stories are set that the reader can pick up what he or she needs to know as he or she needs to know it. In a slightly dystopian future, the UN rules the world and the position of Secretary-General is an inherited position, inherited by idiots. The sceintific arms of the UN compete in bureaucratic battles for budget, and the time travellers need to keep the current Secretary-General amused with their procurement of extinct animals. They try, but often they fail with results that we in their past will find amusing.

The longer work “Rainbow Mars”, coming almost thirty years later, builds upon these earlier stories. A new Secretary General is more interested in astronomy than extinct animals, and the time travellers have to find a way to keep themselves relevant–and they do. They need to bring an extinct Martian from the past.

Larry Niven demonstrates that he’s got a great talent for weaving myths, traditional stories, and classic science fiction stories into a narrative that pays homage to many (too many perhaps). Unfortunately, the people who put this book together put it together in the wrong order. “Rainbow Mars” should not lead off the book; it should follow those that came before it to provide context; although I had read the short stories earlier, I could have used the refresher. I guess the people who put the book together wanted to realy differentiate this volume from Flight of the Horse and Other Stories. They didn’t do us readers any favors, though.

So although I’d recommend the book for the Niven fans amongst us, I’d recommend you not read it in the order in which the publisher presents it. Read the short stories, and then the novel. Especially if you can score this book for two bucks like I did.

I know, you readers understand that if I am reading a book from the last two years, it’s probably a gift. And you’re right. my beautiful wife gave me this volume for Christmas, and I’ve read it already. During lunches at work, mostly, which identifies one of the best parts of Andy Rooney and other broadcast essays: They’re short capsules that render themselves easy to read in short doses. Unlike books you cannot put down, which require you to invest large blocs of time, books of short essays allow you to pick up the book and put it down and pick it up and put it down again. Such books fit easily into the working day and the busy nights of modern men. And let’s face it, I’ve sampled Rooney and Charles Osgood, and Rooney wins hands down.

This particular book captures a number of Rooney’s “A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney” segments from the television news magazine Sixty Minutes (as do many of his collections). The book starts in 1982 and finishes with some from 2003. It offers an interesting retrospective of a chunk of history I recognize as my formative years, as seen from a man who’s older than I am now. I don’t think that means much, but he does reflect on four presidential administrations, including two terms of Reagan and Clinton.

Some people don’t like Rooney because he’s a curmudgeon, but I don’t hold that against him; after all, I am a curmudgeon in training. I do recognize that he’s a little to the dovish side of me when it comes to foreign policy (he’s all butter and no guns), but I find enough wisdom in his damn kids bits and other non-political things to enjoy his writing.

One thing I don’t appreciate, though, is his reluctance–even defiance–in using apostrophes. Throughout this book, he doesn’t use apostrophes in contractions–at least not consistently. In the introduction, before I can no longer enumerate the typos, he informs me he’s not using them because he composed the pieces to be spoken on television, so he’s omitting the apostrophes since he didn’t pronounce them. It’s a jarring read, especially since he later brags about how many grammar books he has on the shelf behind his desk. Still, I forgive him, since the editors of his other books and his contemporary pieces on the CBS.com Web site have convinced him that most things should read easy, too.

What of this book? It’s a font of wisdom and foolishness. It’s an I-Ching, not quite the touchstone that apparently is The Godfather, but its 500+ pages offer insight into the modern condition that most classic philosophers don’t.

This edition of The Book Wars contains advertisements for Federal Express, now more commonly known as FedEx, facing each chapter. The publisher is Whittle Direct Press, and it’s part of a series entitled “The Larger Agenda Series”. It’s out of print, and Amazon’s never heard of it, so no link for you.

Back in 1990, I was starting college, and I read the academia-critical works of Charles J. Sykes (ProfScam and The Hollow Men). So I served my tour in the Curriculum Wars, participating as appropriate, so I’m familiar with the book’s message and the time period in which Atlas wrote it.

The Sykes books are definitely partisan in tone, written to inflame the passions and mobilize the troops. This book, on the other hand, makes the reasons for the other side clear.

Atlas wrote this book somewhat as a response to Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, which details the fall of the Great Books Curriculum. I haven’t read the primary text, so I cannot comment on it.

In this book, though, Atlas explores the reasons that some of the new hippie English Department personnel (sorry, I mean resources) want to overturn the canon. Essentially, they want to introduce new ways of relating to literature, including literature from underexplored cultures. Some want new veins of ore from which they can mine publish-or-perish papers. Some want to stick it to The Man. Whatever the reasons, Atlas characterizes them more as misguided than evil. Which differs from Sykes.

Atlas defends the canon, but only slightly. He remembers a time when Joe Suburban bought Everyman’s Library editions (or Colliers Classics) of the canon and read them. Some people might not have understood them, nor picked up all the subtlety that professional interpreters would, but they realized that reading the books could better you.

I attained an epiphany while reading this book. The Curriculum Wars really are meaningless. The Old Booksters and the New Diverse Canoneers fight over the hearts and minds of kids who just don’t care. Those who want to read and better themselves will do so. Case in point: me. I read for pleasure and to keep my numble mind occupied. I survived an English Degree no worse for wear.

The real problem is that people just don’t do that anymore. Perhaps both sides have made the books inaccessible through constant obfuscation for publication, or perhaps… well, this book obviously doesn’t speculate on that.

Regardless, the book’s short–under 100 pages less ads–and it inspired me to redouble my efforts to read those great books and small remaining on my shelf. Sykes’ books incited me, but this one inspired me.

Rumpelstiltskin is the first Ed McBain book I didn’t like. Not Evan Hunter books–heaven knows the distaste I have for Last Summer–but the first Ed McBain book. I’ve read quite a few.

It’s an early Matthew Hope novel. I don’t like the series as much as the 87th Precinct series, to be honest, and I get all of the Florida color I need from Travis McGee novels. But it’s not the series that does it for me.

The plot of the book’s okay. A former pop sensation (whoops, rock since it was in the 1960s) is going to make a comeback at a small bar. She opens to bad reviews, and then gets killed. Matthew Hope, who spent the hours before her demise having curtain-climbing good sex with her, is briefly a suspect. The deceased had a trust fund due to pay out in a matter of days, so her father and her ex-husband make good suspects, with each standing to benefit depending upon the fate of the dead woman’s daughter, kidnapped at the time of the murder, don’t you know?

No, the plot’s all right, it’s the execution thereof that lacks. The book is paced poorly, and there’s no pressure on Hope. He’s a suspect, but he’s cleared quickly. So he’s got lots of time to meet new people, have a little wall-scarring good sex with another attorney, and jet to New Orleans for….well, his daughter’s around, so no sex, but just foreplay to the blossoming intrattorney relationship.

Meanwhile, the author fits in his characteristic asides, but they’re rather clumsy. There’s a three page treatise about how a woman can have red hair and blonde pubic hair, including the relationship of melanin levels and genetics in the occurrence as well as the difficulty experienced by a woman in the 1960s and 1970s growing up with it and how it impacts her psychological and sexual development. Wow, that’s quite a bit of research, Mr. McBain. Thanks for sharing your report with the class. Fortunately, the three pages end with some lamp-crashing, nightstand-tipping good sex.

It’s a short novel, clocking in at about 215 pages. I slogged through it. If you’re a big fan, you will, too, but I don’t recommend it for someone looking for a good, light read.

Sometimes it strikes me how readable the classics are. I’ve always found the works of Hemingway exceedingly accessible. Of course, I find the works of William Shakespeare and Ben Johnson accessible, and often funny. Regardless, I’ve recently been on a Steinbeck kick since I picked up a matching set of some of his books in nice Collier hardback editions (although I must include the obligatory Amazon link to a paperback edition). I’ve read Cup of Gold and The Winter of Our Discontent and enjoyed both. So when I was looking for a more classical turn from the sci-fi on my shelves, I went back to this collection of Steinbeck novels (for which I paid $1 each at an estate sale–good deal at those estate sales). And I selected Of Mice and Men.

I’d never read it before. I realize many of you read it in high school, but somehow I dodged it in high school and in my numerous college classes. Yeah, I got an English degree, but before you use this single anecdote to thrash English programs and modern education today, remember I chose to read this of my own accord at 31. On the other hand, such enlightenment probably is a statistically insignificant minority of college graduates, so feel free to thrash academia anyway. I do.

So, about the accessibility of this book. It’s written in modern English, even modern American, so it requires no footnoting. And unlike modern “classics,” old time classics, part of the canon disparaged by peers of mine in English programs who never evolved beyond English majors–that is, they never grew up and got jobs outside of the English department–some of these books dealt with weightier matters than nihilistic couplings of college professors or the emotional melodramas favored by Oprah. No, life and death were on the line.

The edition I have clocks in at 186 pages, but the margins are wider than the term paper from a twelfth-grade wrestling stand-out, so it’s a quick read. Not Old Man and the Sea quick, but I went through it in a couple days. Another good selection if you want to impress your book club with your classical educational leanings but don’t want to spend a lot of time on it.

Of Mice and Men tells of two traveling farm workers, Lennie and George, who find work at a ranch after getting in some trouble in Weed and leaving in a hurry. They’re working to earn enough to buy their own land, but of course they encounter obstacles, or mainly an obstacle, and then there’s a surprising ending where George has to defuse a nuclear bomb while Lennie holds off a number of Columbian revolutionaries with a half-full revolver and a bottle of whiskey….

Well, not really. It’s not that bang-and-flash, but the book delves into the nature of friendship and man’s obligations to right and wrong better than most blockbuster thrillers or buddy cop movies do. Plus, it makes you sound smart to allude to a John Steinbeck novel, which is why I do so frequently. Maybe it won’t make you sound smart. Maybe it only makes me sound like I’ve read only one Steinbeck novel, once, in high school. But I am a slightly better person for it and I’m not angry at the writer for wasting my time. Does that count as a rousing endorsement? You bet.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, and that goes for stupid is as stupid does and a fool and his or her money are soon parted. This book collects a number of essays and nonfiction pieces that appeared in The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, and other periodicals or publications. Each essay explores a scammer or a scam in detail, but most of the scams come from around the turn of the century (as the book itself is almost forty years old).

Two things strike me:

• The heights that the best scammers reached.
  Charles Ponzi, whose very name is synonomous with the pyramid scheme, bought a bank and a brokerage firm with the money he made from working class Bostonians who wanted to earn fifty percent interest in 90 days. Oscar Hartzell lived for over a decade in style in London while purportedly seeking to settle with the English monarchy for the Francis Drake estate–but really he was just after his “investors'” money. That’s long jack, my friends. Nowadays, nobody lives that high on the hog with so little production but venture capitalists, their pet executives, and government officials. At least swindlers used their wits and not their contacts.

• The same scams are still running.
  Three specific examples: The Nigerian scam (help me transfer my ill-gotten gain from my African country); the here’s-a-bag-of-money-you-can-hold-it-if-you-give-me-slightly-less-of-your-money-as-a-deposit (which really needs a popular nickname), and the pyramid scheme (now more popular than ever as women’s “Gift Clubs”). The population is getting more technologically knowledgeable, but not necessarily more savvy.

Of course, the best swindles aren’t in this book, because the best swindles are not reported or solved. Still, the book’s an interesting read, but not widely available. I paid $6.00 for this copy….wait a minute…the penciled-in price claims it’s a 1966 first edition, but it looks like a book club edition….

Fine art of swindling, indeed. Curse you, Sheldon! Next time I am in your book shop, I am pulling the books out by putting my fingers at the top of the spine.