Category: Book Report

Well, I wish I could say that my confusion between Willa Cather and Eudora Welty is easing with my reading, apparently, a couple of Cather novels in the recent years. Oh, but no. I had this book before me with the author’s name right on it, but I got to thinking Eudora Welty wrote O Pioneers! which I read in 2018. Wow, four years ago? I feel a little better about forgetting who wrote it then, even though I said at the end of the book report:

I do have a copy of My Antonia around here somewhere; this book was a pleasant enough read that I won’t hide from the other novel if I find it.

Apparently, it took me four years (!) to find it even though it was in the front rank of my office bookshelves. You know, where I go most often when looking for a new book to read. In my defense, I probably passed over it a couple of times looking for something quicker or something that appealed to me more in that moment. But I finally picked the book up.

The book is very similar to O Pioneers! Both are set in Nebraska during the sodbusting years; however, this book follows a young man, Jim Burden, sent to live with his grandparents and his friendship with a young Bohemian (from Bohemia, not just wearing hemp) whose family arrives on the same train. She is the Ántonia of the title; the name is pronounced the Bohemian way, not the way to pronounce the small town down the county highway from where I lived my last years in high school. The Shimerda dwelling is basically a cave, and they really do not know how to farm or bust sod, coming from a city in Europe, so they need help, and Jim and Ántonia bond as he helps the children learn English. They have some youthful adventures; then Jim and his grandparents move to town when they rent their farm, and Ántonia, who is a couple years older than Jim, gets a job in one of the houses in town, and although they are not quite peas-and-carrots, when a traveling dance instructor troupe comes to town and hosts dances in a big tent, Jim hangs with Tony (as he sometimes calls her and I’m going to for the rest of the review because the accent on the A is a bother) and some of the other hired girls. Then Jim goes to Lincoln for college; another of the hired girls moves to Lincoln and starts a dress shop which does well, and she spends some time with Jim, but he becomes distracted from his studies, so his mentor, who is moving to Massachusetts to teach at Harvard, encourages Jim to come along, and Jim does. And then, twenty-some years later, Jim returns to Nebraska and sees Tony and her family, which includes her illegitimate daughter, the result of her dalliance with the son of a local railroad baron; the boy had promised to marry her, but he was not a good man, and after they lived together in Denver for a while, he abandoned her, pregnant, to return to Nebraska in shame. In the years since, she married another immigrant and they’ve had a large family. Tony has grown old, lost some teeth, put on some weight, whilst Jim, presumably, has aged better with his law degree and urban lifestyle. Jim feels the same connection with Tony as he had when they were kids–a kinship, more brother and sister though the middle part of the book indicated some romantic leanings–and he promises to visit the family and her boys in the future. And, finis.

One of the dings I, well, dinged O Pioneers! for was that it was a series of short stories or, more truthfully, sketches that Cather stitched together to make a book. You know, this book is also broken into sections. The first two, “The Shimerdas” and “The Hired Girls”, deal with the introduction of the characters and their lives on their respective farms and then their subsequent moves to town (Jim when his grandparents rent their farm, Tony when she hires on at another household). These two sections comprise the first 200 pages roughly of the 277 page book, and they hang together pretty well, hinting that there might be a cohesive plot. The next section, “Lena Lingard”, is about the hired girl who becomes the dress maker and meets up with Jim Burden in Lincoln; we still might have some plot advancement if she really does rival Tony for the author’s affections. Oh, but no. She mentions Tony is going with the ne’er-do-well son of the railroad businessman and seems to like him a lot. In “A Pioneer Woman’s Story”, the next section, takes place a couple years later, when Jim comes back to the Nebraska town after graduating law school and hears the story of Tony’s betrayal and her raising her new daughter at the old Shimerda place. Then the last section, “Cuzak’s Boys”, takes place decades later. The narrator has updated us on the other hired girls and how they’ve gone on in the world. Lena continues to be a successful dress maker, but she has gone to San Francisco and joined another hired girl, who had gone to Seattle, opened a business of ill repute, but sold it to join the Yukon gold rush where she made out big. When Jim, the narrator, returns to Nebraska, he visits Tony, now Mrs. Cuzak, and meets her family. And, that’s it. Ultimately, the book offered indications there might be a plot, which kept me reading along a little better than O Pioneers! (I presume), but ultimately it is just a series of sketches, and the whole My Ántonia title and repeating of Optima dies… prima fugit make one suspect that the author might have wanted to convey more a mood of nostalgia and the loss of youth, but that alone is a little disappointing after 277 pages.

Still, an easy enough read. I note that, like The Red Badge of Courage in the heavy use of colors as adjectives–one cannot go pages without blue sky or orange this or red grass. I think modern writers have been trained to not use colors as adjectives, but they’re easier to see in one’s mind’s eye than other obscure shades used as adjectives. The pamphlet that Reader’s Digest provided with the book says the author became friends with Stephen Crane, and one wonders if this tic was part of his influence on her.

I did flag a couple passages in the book for comment.

Regarding the back story of two Russians who have moved to Nebraska, someone relates that they had been drivers of dogsleds taking a wedding party home, but when the party was beset by wolves, the two men sacrificed the entire party to save themselves.

We did not tell Pavel’s secret to any one, but guarded it jealously–as if the wolves of the Ukraine had gathered that night long ago, and the wedding party been sacrificed, to give us a painful and peculiar pleasure.

C’mon, man. In the 21st century, the Right Thinkers Who Talk On Television have assured me that it’s Ukraine and not the Ukraine. A hundred years of common usage must be publickly discarded so that the current Right Thinkers Who Talk on Television can teach us rubes something and prove their own shibbolestication.

Regarding town living in the late 1800s:

Most Black Hawk [residents of the town, not the tribe] fathers had no personal habits outside their domestic ones; they paid the bills, pushed the baby carriage after office hours, moved the sprinkler about over the lawn, and took the family driving on Sunday.

You know, when the Monkees were singing in 1967:

They were echoing criticisms of the literati of fifty years earlier.

Although I think I just marked the passage because I did not realize sprinklers were a product of the 1800s.

Eh, I flagged a couple of other things and was not really sure what I wanted to say about them when I flagged them.

At any rate, still, a worthwhile read just to remember what life was like a hundred and forty or fifty years ago–and might be again!

As you know, gentle reader, I’m a bit of a fan of his for years (ah, jeez, I posted his video “Midwest Horror Film in October 2020). So when we saw (well, my oldest saw) this book in Baraboo, I had to have it. So we do. I have read it, but he has not yet.

It’s a large hardback running about 288 pages (including acknowledgements and credits) with a fair amount of imagery, photographs, tables, charts, and wingdings with chapters on The Basics, The Language, The People, The Setting, The Driving, Food & Drink, and so on. If you have seen any of his videos on YouTube, you’ve got the flavor of the humor.

Still, it works a little better in the short, three-minute videos than in a three hundred page book. I started it whilst on my vacation in Wisconsin, and I read about half of it, but I set it aside for a while to freshen it up a bit in the second reading. I had a couple quibbles with the book, first and foremost a certain love for Chicago that I assure you proper Wisconsinites do not have. Anyone from Wisconsin who expresses this desire to go to Chicago or any place in Illinois for that matter is suspect–but let us remember that Berens himself moved elsewhere and won an Emmy as a newscaster before returning home to be a Wisconsin-schtick comedian. Also, the book pays a little to self-consciously to recognizes native Americans, women, and other groups who might not have gotten a lot of recognition in the past, but now get all the recognition that’s handed out. Still, it’s only sprinkled in, but if you’re sensitive to the themes, as apparently I am in the 21st century, then you’ll spot it. But it’s just a little bit and not hectoring or particularly off-putting.

I only put a couple of flags in the book, all in the college section. First, my alma whattamattayou is not listed in the intro paragraph as an example of a midwestern university. Second, the book mentions Carleton College in Minnesota, and I remember that college was one of the first to send me brochures, which I liked to look at, but I was committed to going to my alma moneyforadecade since I was 10 years old–but I do wonder how my life might have been different if I had truly gone away to college (as I lived with my father, I was technically a commuter and more a resident of Milwaukee than a student bound to the university), and the last is a mention of Southern Illinois University, which threw me a bit–I did not realize that Southern Illinois University-Carbondale was technically “SIU”–I always thought of it with the town appended, but that’s because I’m a big fan of SIUE, which is Edwardsville, closer to St. Louis and home of the sound.

So a book amusing in spots, probably a bit long. Worth it at a book sale, although I’m not sure it’s worth $27. But I am a bit of a cheapskate when it comes to books. But I’ll keep an eye out for more from Berens, on YouTube and at book sales.

This book is a former library book from Palm Beach County that ended up at ABC Books (from whence I bought it in April). It runs 176 pages, with lots of pictures, but it’s really more of a training plan than an instructional guide. It starts with some conditioning exercises and stretches, and then it goes into punches and combinations, with progressions detailing what you should do in weeks where you work out three or four times a week.

It does talk about combinations using numbers, which is something my dojo has started recently (well, within the last three years), but our dojo’s numbering system differs from the book’s (and our dojo really doesn’t talk about tae kwon do strikes now at all). The book also has a couple of different punches that my dojo does not focus on–a straight right (which is a shorter right than a right cross) and an overhand right, which is a high hard one, like a straight or cross punch but coming kind of down over the opponent’s guard. And the book emphasizes a boxer’s stance, where the lead shoulder is turned more toward the opponent than my school teaches, as that position, although it puts you on a better guard as you can hide behind your lead hand/shoulder and present a smaller target, it pretty much neutralizes your rear arm and leg. Of course, left to my own druthers, I would spar this way all the time.

At any rate, not quite as informative as Boxer’s Start-Up: A Beginner’s Guide to Boxing–remember, that book had a lot of really good illustrations identifying body pivots and angles of motion. But I guess it makes me more of a martial artist that I can sit and read books about the subject when I’m too lazy to go to the dojo.

As you know, gentle reader, I am a sucker for these Marxist comic book introductions to various thinkers (see also Sartre for Beginners and Einstein for Beginners), so when I saw this book at ABC Books last August, I knew what I was in for.

So, yes, the book is a Marxist tract that basically implies that Machiavelli was in favor of a proletariat revolution of sorts, but aside from that, it does talk about, yes, The Prince (which is clearly not a satire) and provides context both historical and biographical to its composition.

It has paragraphs (and cartoonish illustrations) that describe Italy of Machiavelli’s time, including the importance of the d’Medicis, the Borgias, and the revolutions and counter revolutions in the city states of the time. So, as I was saying, good context for Machiavelli’s writing and a description of his non-writing career (and how he wanted his writings to ingratiate him to the powerful).

But it recognizes that The Prince is a small part of Machiavelli’s output–apparently, he thought his Discourses on Livy was a more important work–but it gets all the attention and draws everyone’s ire even though it’s a dispassionate study as much as a moral prescription for power. But the book puts it all in context and makes me want to read Discourses on Livy.

Oh, and of course it makes sure to erroneously say that national socialists/fascists are “on the right,” and it does lay out that Margaret Thatcher was pretty close to Hitler (although, the book is strangely hard on Bill Clinton).

So these books are plenty informative, and they’re quick reads since they have less actual text in them than a Diary of a Wimpy Kid book. And they’re funny when you can point at the obvious Marxist insertions and assertions.

I hate to say it, but I rather hope I find more of these books in the wild. I am not so enamored with them that I’ll order them full price, though.

I am continuing my, well, I would call it a march through the children’s classics that I have in the Children’s Classic series (such as Hans Brinker, Black Beauty, and Heidi). Given that I’ve only got four or five in the set, it’s a pretty short walk indeed.

You know, I started reading this book to my boys when they were younger, but we didn’t get very far–Alice did not even make it to Wonderland before we put it aside. I passed the bookmark where we’d left off, and Alice was still in the hallway.

So if you don’t know the arc as it were, Alice is out with her sister one day, and she follows the rabbit with the pocket watch down a rabbit hole that leads to a hall with a door to wonderland. She has some adventures in the hall before getting into Wonderland proper, and then she gets right-sized to go through the door into Wonderland, where she meets the royal court of cards and whatnot.

They’re simple, kind of silly little bits of whimsy, but when you stop to think about how many tropes and allusions to the stories one knows without having actually read the book–I mean, I knew about the bottles changing Alice’s size, the cards and the Queen saying “Off with their heads!”, and the white rabbit with the pocket watch amongst other things. Maybe I saw parts of the cartoon when I was a kid or read a kid’s book about it when I was actually a kid. One wonders if anything by Dan Kinney or Dav Pilkey will have similar cultural reach. The books about today’s current thing written to teach kids the current party line certainly won’t.

You know, I actually flagged something in the book. It must have been the time Alice used a gun chambered in something other than the ammo she purportedly used. Let’s open the book and see:

‘Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.’

That’s advice from the Duchess to Alice, and I think they’re words to live by.

As you might remember, gentle reader, I watched the Gary Cooper film Sergeant York with my boys in 2020, and I bought this book shortly thereafter. I took it on vacation with me to Wisconsin earlier this month, and I read it in a night or two. It’s a pretty fast read, as I assume it’s based on notes taken while York talked to the biographer (Skeyhill). This leaves York’s voice in the vernacular, which might diminish the readability a bit, but it’s not hard to follow once you’re used to it.

When I saw the film, I found it odd that the film focused so much on York’s youth and his draft and subsequent attempt to get a conscientious objector excuse. But it follows the book, which talks a lot about York’s region, family, and upbringing before getting to the war three quarters of the way through the book, and then it’s presented as his diary and official documents about the battle that earned him the Medal of Honor, so that’s really only a small part bit of the book. The book does go on into greater detail of York’s philanthropic endeavors after the war, supporting education and building a school in his county.

So I enjoyed the book a lot.

I did mark some things in it, though.

Continue reading “Book Report: Sergeant York: His Own Life Story and War Diary by Alvin York / Edited by Tom Skeyhill (1928, 2018)” →

This is the best Mormons In Space Love Story I’ve ever read!

Well, that’s a twee oversimplification of this book, but twee oversimplifications are a blogger’s stock in trade.

This book centers on a Martian secret agent, Cody Greene, who is on death row for not getting married by a certain age. He’s rescued by a beautiful engineer who herself was reaching the mandatory marriage age. But, as a twist, he is to investigate her for resource theft–specifically air stolen from one of the domes making up the different colonies on the planet. They’re married at first sight, and they find themselves attracted to one another, which gives the book the majority of its motion–will they give into their desires/love for each other, or will the secret agent continue to keep his new wife at arm’s length to investigate her? Also, Cody’s mother, from whom he is estranged, is a powerful politician/government official who might be pulling strings and manipulating him. Oh, and the new Mrs. Greene is a blonde, blue-eyed beauty, but she is half Korean and was raised in the Asian colony, so she tries very hard to look Korean and has a Korean mindset–spartan domicile, Korean cooking and dining, and so on.

So the book has a lot of interesting plot things going on, but it’s definitely weighted to the romance angle, which culminates rather disappointingly. The actual intrigue, presumably who is actually stealing the resources and who is pulling the strings behind the scenes, is kind of on the back burner to the “Do I give into my attraction?” and “I was about to give in, but now my suspicions are reset!” dithering. We get a couple of incidents and little to tie them together, and the book’s climax is more of a cliffhanger to the yet-unavailable second book in the series.

So it was a quick, light read, and for the most part, it worked, but a bit long on the dithering in the romance. Hopefully, the next book in the series will be better balanced in that regard–after all, the will they/won’t they Dave-and-Maddie tension (c’mon, you damn kids, that’s an allusion to Moonlighting, which was a television series in the 1980s) was resolved, so that dithering can’t be reproduced. And I’m looking forward to seeing how Farnsworth works in the other genres (fantasy and straight ahead romance).

If I can find the books; they’ve disappeared into the stacks, only to be rediscovered decades hence.

I read this book over a week ago, before my vacation, and just a little after Thin Ice and Other Poems. This, too, is a chapbook, with poems on the right page and photos by the author on the left.

Unfortunately, the printing quality does not do justice to the photographs. The poems are, however, a cut above Thin Ice and Other Poems, with some imagery and fairly clear points–mostly about the cycle of life, with a lot of thematic influence on plants growing and dying and a lot of reliance on colors, especially yellows and greens. But the poems at least have imagery and try to evoke things, although again, I would say the lines are too short, broken too often by line breaks for ponderous pauses.

Of course, I find myself writing fairly run on poetic lines these days, so I can’t really complain too much about the line length. No, wait: This is my blog. I will complain all I want.

So overall middle of the road; average. Which is not something to sneeze at in poetry, given all the bad poetry I read.

I bought this book in April at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale. In the past, they have bundled chapbooks up five or ten for a buck; however, this year, they did not, so I paid a whole dollar for this book. I picked it up last week when I was not falling asleep quickly enough, and I thought a quick chapbook might take my mind of the troubles my mind invents at eleven o’clock.

So, this book has a copyright date of 1981 but a signature block from 1986, which meant that she was peddling these at least five years after publishing them. The back notes that she has also published another collection of poetry, a book on painting and selling art (specifically kachinas, the native spirit beings in Pueblo cultures), and a book on how to write and sell poetry, fiction, plays, and local history. So she was a pro and no grandma writing poetry, although she might have been a grandmother (although none of the poems really mentions children).

But, about the poetry: Meh. I mean, it’s got some of that look at the poem feel that dominates so much modern art. Self-consciousness that says, this, the poem, is what is meaningful–not that the poem, or the art, wants to draw attention to some meaning beyond itself.

Perhaps I am being to unkind, perhaps I am trying to fit my criticism into my standard template, but nothing here really captures my interest, makes me want to read it out loud, makes me want to read it again, or really makes me feel like I relate to the poem. The title poem is:

I ask questions.
You smile
Shake your head.
“Thin ice,” you say
Silence rests
A wall between us.

That’s it. Most of the poems fall within those line lengths, although some are a couple of lines longer. Some of them have repeating motifs, such as the Gypsy king or referring to the kiva, but mostly they read like the work of someone who felt compelled to write poems every day because one is a poet. Although, to be honest, reading through the complete works of any poet like Keats, Shelley, or maybe even Frost (probably not), one gets a lot of clunkers.

At any rate, I did come away with a couple of new words (kiva, a sacred place for Pueblo Indian rituals, and kachina, a Pueblo Indian spirit–the author does live in New Mexico, you must know, and if you don’t you might miss some of the references). But overall, not impressed.

I bought this book last summer on a trip back to the St. Louis area. As I mentioned then, Mr. Corrigan as the editor of the Webster-Kirkwood Times, published at least one of my letters to the editor. So full disclosure on that, not that I pull punches on people who’ve published me (of whom there are very few) or people I meet in person (sorry, again, S.V.).

The subtitle of this book is “The Rodents That Conquered Popular Culture”. So when I started reading it right away during our vacation in De Soto, but I got fifty or so pages in and bogged down. I had expected a light-hearted look at squirrels, but instead, it looked like it was really turning into a serious study of squirrels. So it languished on my chairside table for a year until I decided to clear the table of some books that had been on the table for several years untouched (rest assured, gentle reader, I did leave some books on the table that had been there for several years untouched–I do have stretch goals of reading them sometime in the next couple of years). In the winnowed stack, this book remained, so I picked it up again, starting not from the bookmark but from the beginning.

And on this second pass through, it occurred to me that this is not about squirrels per se; this is a book about how squirrels are portrayed in different media, with each medium having a different take on squirrels, whether they’re cute or a menace, based on the type of thing that sells in that media. So wait a minute–Corrigan is a professor of media at Webster University–is it possible that this is a book about media and is only using squirrels as an example? I felt kind of clever catching on, whether I caught onto the real purpose of the book or not, and it helped me power through.

Although by the end, I wondered if that was really the point. Or if perhaps the author lost the point. Or padded it out with more squirrel stuff.

The early parts of the book:

• Preface: Mass-Mediated Squirrels, an introduction.
• Introduction: “Hot” and “Cool” Squirrels, which talks about the types of media (print versus electronic) and whether they favor stories about danger and menace or cool and funny.
• Squirrels in Children’s Books, which talks about
• Squirrels Make the Headlines, which talks about newspaper stories where squirrels are portrayed as a menace to homeowners, the electrical grid, and cars.
• Squirrels for a Television Age, which talks about squirrels on television, especially local news and short segments on national programs where squirrels water ski or are dressed up–amusing and cool.
• Squirrels in PR and Advertising and also as town mascots–also cool.
• Movie Madness: Squirrels in Cinema about squirrels in movies, mostly in comedies.
• Cartoons and Animated Movie Squirrels which deals with cartoon squirrels (not Rocky; he was cool on television).
• Comics and Video Game Squirrels, especially Squirrel Girl who apparently became an Avenger after I started paying attention.
• Legendary American Squirrels about squirrels
• Squirrels in Myth and Folklore, mostly the Norse squirrel who was like a four-footed Loki.
• Postscript: Squirrels Unlimited which promotes further study of squirrels in media.

So you can see the progression of sorts of squirrels in different media in kind of a historical context of the march of media, but then we get chapters about legendary squirrels, which makes one wonder if it is supposed to be a book on squirrels, and not on the media using the metaphor of squirrels, after all.

At any rate, the illusion or miscomprehension got me through the book. It could have used some editing–some bits are repeated almost verbatim within the same chapter, as though the book might have been different articles with similar material that got stitched together without removing the material repeated in the different source essays.

So kind of an academic book, but I’m not sure which direction its academic study is.

I have some flags in the book; let’s see what struck me as I was reading.

Continue reading “Book Report: Nuts About Squirrels by Don H. Corrigan (2019)” →

I got this book at S.V. Farnsworth’s book signing at ABC Books in April. As I predicted, I picked this book up first as it’s a collection of short pieces and poems.

The subtitle is “Creative Nonfiction with Poetry”, but the creative nonfiction pieces do not rise to the level of full essays. Instead, they’re more like diary entries and/or writing exercises, some poetic musings on incidents or elements of her life, but not necessarily things abstracted enough to draw the reader in so that the reader says, “Oh, yeah, me, too.”

For example, we get glimpses and allusions to abusive men her mother dated, and we get glimpses of the author’s younger years, whether getting ready to go to engineering school or serving as a missionary in Korea or ending up at Missouri Southern State University in Joplin, where the author lives now. But it’s not a autobiographical enough to tell those stories completely, and some of the gaps and questions a reader has–what happened to the engineering track? What was it like in South Korea? are not covered.

The poems, too, were a bit underwhelming, with a nice bit here or there, but nothing that really grabbed me or made me want to read it aloud and feel it in my mouth.

I’m still hopeful that the fiction, of which I have a bunch, will read a little better. Certainly, the prose is not bad, but it really doesn’t get a running start to anywhere. Hopefully, the longer form work will be better.

Sorry, S.V.; however, I totally invite you to pick any of my work and savage it in any medium you favor.

Gentle reader, this is the last of the Executioner books on my shelf. Alright, alright, alright: I do still have SuperBolan books, Able Team Books, Stony Man Farm Books, and Phoenix Force books. Still: I got my first Executioner novel in 2007 and read it, Panic in Philly, later that year. I got the books in big chunks: 47 books in the 2011 as a birthday present from my beautiful wife and at the Friends of the Clever Library book sale in 2013. I have not counted, but I have probably read nearly 100 of them from #3 Battle Mask from 1970 to #373 Code of Honor from 2009, which I bought new in the grocery store (and, briefly, was caught up on my Executioner novels until I received the birthday gift that week). So, overall, it’s been a mostly enjoyable experience. But onto this book.

This book comes seven years and 83 books after the previous book on my shelf (Blood and Fire). The books are still 220 pages, but unlike the two previous, the title has no real relevance on the plot or action. Bolan is on the trail of some chemical weapons, and he has to team up with two mercenaries who are out to find and retrieve an even more frightening weapon–a sonic weapon that can immobilize people within its radius and make them forget years of their lives. A couple of set pieces later, and Bolan triumphs, of course.

I flagged a couple of things:

A jab took the man in the chest, the power of Bolan’s forearm and biceps muscles driving his adversary backwards.

C’mon, man, the biceps muscles handle moving things towards the body, not extending the arms. That’s the triceps job. And much of your punches, including jabs, should come from twisting your hips, not just using the arms.

Well, okay, I flagged one thing. But it’s interesting to note that in 2004, the terrorists are all right-wing groups even in Executioner novels. No more Marxists or Communists. Which probably makes this a good place to stop with the Executioner novels. If even the Executioner books start trending toward the political, I might not ever read another piece of fiction from the 21st century. Which is probably not true, but still.

At any rate, the jump ahead seven years from Blood and Fire to 2004 saw great changes in my life. In the interim, I had gotten married and gotten started in a career in technology–and I’d even made my mostly final move to quality assurance from technical writing. In a couple of months, I would start my own company to bill as a consultant, something I’ve done for the most part since. And in short order, my aunt would pass away, leading me and my beautiful wife to consider having a family, which, clearly, we have (and we’re almost done with these days). Of course, I’ll be going back to other series in the Bolanverse, so I’ll still get to relive the time in my life where I was when the book was fresh. I don’t do this with normal books, but with the Bolan books, I have. Probably due to the monthly subscription nature of the series.

So I ordered this book from Amazon a while back because although I have read some of his nonfiction (most recently Fresh Lies in 2011(?!) and Mommy Knows Worst in 2005, when this blog was fresh and new–although I have read The Gallery of Regrettable Food and Interior Desecrations before I was book reporting), I have not delved into his fiction.

According to his Wikipedia entry, Lileks has four books of fiction: Falling Up The Stairs from 1988, which precedes this book and has the same characters, so this book alludes to that book; this book, from 1995; and then two books released exclusively electronically, Graveyard Special in 2012 and The Casablanca Tango in 2014. I have on the Internet and reading Lileks for a long time, so I remember when he was talking about writing and releasing those books, and it seems more recent than eight to ten years. But when you get to a certain age, a decade was just a little while ago.

So this book is the second book featuring local newspaper columnist Jonathan Simpson, formerly of a big city daily but now writing food columns for the local free weekly (see book #1 for details). After doing a radio spot with a local personality whose ratings are in free-fall, Simpson is hit by a bullet meant for the radio talker. After being in a coma for three months, he starts looking for the assailant. Well, sort of: He can’t actually walk, so he’s around people who kind of investigate and who carry him or push him in a wheelchair for a while. Meanwhile, he deals with the large house that fell into his lap (see book #1) and a potential love interest with alopecia.

I started reading the book thinking it was great. The writing is pure Lileks, with the digressions into different learned subjects and amusing metaphors. But I got about one hundred pages in, and I realized that the protagonist wasn’t really leading the action–things were happening to him. About page 150, he starts taking some agency, but the plot was kind of convoluted and the story-pacing was slow. The whole exercise was a platform for Lileks to, well, Lileks. Overall, his blog The Bleat and columns are better sized for that.

So I was a little disappointed with it, ultimately. I will probably pick up the first of the two books (and by pick up, I mean order from Amazon since they’re not thick on the ground around here) as well as his other nonfiction from the era. But I am impressed that Lileks had a big publishing contract in the 1980s and 1990s. I mean, wow, okay. One might think his career arcked downward early–his biggest book publishing and syndication came before the turn of the century–but I hope he doesn’t think that. After all, I enjoy his columns in The National Review and The Bleat every day.

And even with four novels to his credit, he’s several ahead of me.

Last year, gentle reader, you might remember I read a collection of poetry written by residents of one or more nursing homes in the Beverly Enterprises (A Bend in the Road). Well, this year, as you might know, my mother-in-law moved into senior housing not too far from Nogglestead, and it turns out that two years ago, during the recent-malingering-unpleasantness of 2020, the residents there wrote a book of their own. Well, sort of: as my mother-in-law says, it was mostly the residence director of some sort and a resident, a professional writer, with some suggestions by other residents.

At any rate, the story is a soap-opera-style melodrama at a senior living facility. A mysterious count, complete with cape, comes, and secrets start spilling out about administrators and some of the residents. The chapters are short and punchy, and they end with cliffhangers as though they’re episodes of a soap opera. Unfortunately, the book itself acts only as a season of a soap opera, so most of the things within are not actually resolved, which leaves room for the next season and more intrigues.

As I understand it, they’ve begun work on the second book. Which will be interesting to see now that my mother-in-law, a former English teacher, is on site. One wonders whether she will collaborate closely with the current writer…. or take it over. Probably the former–she’s mellowed.

So an amusing read, but probably most interesting if you have a personal connection to the home of the writers.

Well, well, well: This is the second Executioner novel I’ve read in a row where the title is meaningful (the first was Tiger Stalk). One of the characters in the book uses “blood and fire” as a bit of an epithet. Spoiler alert: As his name is not Bolan, it’s Bolan fire and the speaker’s blood.

So some new Jamaican custom drugs are flooding the east coast, and when the usual law enforcement moves in, they make some minor busts, but cannot move up the chain because someone in law enforcement is tipping them off. So the feds turn to Bolan, who, along with a trustworthy agent, runs some unannounced operations which lead to a Swiss syndicate’s chemical plant in Jamaica. So the set pieces include operations in the US and on the Caribbean island.

And, you know what? It was a pretty good book. It checks in at the now-standard 220 pages (well, then-standard), but it moves along well. It makes me almost sad or nostalgic that I have but one more entry in the series–which is just as well–I read a contemporary Bolan book, and it was longer and again bloated. Some of the 220-pagers seemed bloated when the 160-page authors were padding them out, but the last couple fill those pages without fat. On the other hand, any book over 300 pages can’t really be punchy, and that’s what I prefer in my men’s adventure fiction.

I did tag a couple things that seemed odd.

A figure partially showed itself around the corner at the end of the passage, leading with a nickel-plated shotgun.

A nickel-plated shotgun? I have never heard of such a thing. Handguns, surely. But I guess they exist; I just did a search for them and found them online. So I’m learning something new instead of trying to teach something to an author who might be long-dead.

Also, remember what I said about “no padding”? Well, I see clearly that the author likes the rhythm of prepositional phrase strings. Which I use a lot myself. Which others (*cough, cough* Strunk) would probably call “padding.”

“How far do you figure?”

Grimaldi looked back. “Two klicks, two-and-a-half, maybe.”

The soldier took out a pair of gloves and a D-ring from his kit bag. He slung the bag, attached the ring to his belt, then clipped it around the rope. Lastly, he pulled on the gloves. “Meet me back here in half an hour,” he told the pilot, then he kicked out of the helicopter door.

Once again, someone lacks a sense of scale; I remember dinging Lee Child for pacing issues.

So say a 5 kilometer round trip. Even if Bolan runs six minute miles, that’s almost 20 minutes in transit time to and fro. And six minute miles tend to be run on a track, not in the jungle. So this would be a very speedy reconnaissance indeed.

Eh, you know what? In the best of these books, like this one, the little things, the inaccuracies, are a fun little find, but not debilitating to the plot or the adventure. In some, like a pondrous Jack Reacher book, though, they provide the second tap, the coup de grâce, to the enjoyment.

This volume is part of the mid-20th-century Nelson Doubleday Children’s Classics series (as were Hans Brinker and Heidi). As I have previously mentioned, I bought these books before I had kids and missed the chance to read them to my boys when they were young enough to be interested in children’s books. So I’m working through the volumes in the set since I read Hans Brinker for the 2022 Winter Reading Challenge.

I could have read this book for the Winter Reading Challenge as well as it had a category of non-human main character. I thought this book would be one of boy or girl and his or her horse books that were quite the rage for a while. Also on television–I remember Fury in syndication, and My Friend Flicka somewhere. I know when my aunt gave us her kids’ books that we got a couple of entries in mystery series along with kid and dog or kid and horse books. I never got into the genre when I was younger. I lived in the city, man; I could not imagine having a horse of my own.

But this book is told from the horse’s point of view. Black Beauty, the horse, although he later becomes known by different names, starts out with his mother romping in a pasture. He’s sold to nice aristocrats and enjoys his younger years, but when the wife takes ill, he’s sold to another set of aristocrats who favor a bit that pulls the horse’s head up (the book rails on this bit a lot), and then he ends up getting sold into different sets of circumstances and manual, or equine, labor, from pulling a cab to pulling freight and finally ending up an older horse sold at a down-market horse fair to a farm looking for a cheap horse, and he’s reunited with a groom from the olden days and lives happily ever after.

So it’s got a bit of a be-kind-to-your-horses message to it that must have been ahead of its time. But for its brevity–it’s 124 pages–it took me a while to get through it because I’m not much of a horse person, and the novelty of it being nominally from the horse’s perspective was not enough to draw me along when the prose really didn’t.

When blog and Internet friend Blogodidact mentioned his mother wrote a book, of course I rushed right in and ordered it. Thankfully, his mother was not in a touring production of a Broadway musical or local revival. As I have mentioned, I buy my friends’ (and, apparently, their parents’) books and music, which is about ten bucks a pop. I once supported someone I knew in musical theatre, and tickets for the four of us were $120 or so. So thank goodness for the greater ambition of original works. Of course, I would not say this in real life to the fellow who starred in Jesus Christ Superstar, as his “a pop” has been known to sideline me from martial arts classes for months. But, where was I?

Oh, yes: This book falls right into my wheelhouse of small-town personal and historical memoirs, except that instead of some unknown person writing about growing up in Missouri or the Ozarks, we get stories of growing up in the San Fernando Valley in the 1930s and 1940s (and beyond a bit). The author’s father is a studio art director, but when Great Depression I hits (I’m numbering them, as I expect Great Depression II: Candlelight Bugaloo to come any day now), he buys some property in the valley, and the family sets up a ranch with small animals to tide them over. So you’ve got stories about managing animals and construction interspersed with celebrities popping in (Alberto Vargas pops over for an artist group paint session, for example). Eventually, the father gets another job with the studios and works on a number of known films with Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne, and others. In most of those anecdotes, the celebrities don’t drop by, but we get the stories related from the father’s perspective, sort of.

So I really liked the book because, as I mentioned, it has the flavor of a rural memoir with the injection of the old-time movie business. Which is not to say that I did not tag a couple quibbles, which I did, but I will tuck them under the fold so that only Van and his family have to see them.
Continue reading “Book Report: In the Valley of Yesterday by Jeane K. Harvey (2020)” →

I bought this book last summer in Berryville, Arkansas. Whilst I am bogged down and bored with the children’s book I’m reading, I have been looking for various other things to read between chapters, and I settled on this volume, especially as I recently succumbed to latent nipponphilia when listening to Understanding Japan: A Cultural History.

However, this is a Barnes and Noble book, so it’s more of a coffee book akin to Samurai Warriors than an actual history. It is lavishly illustrated, which unfortunately often means watermarking images behind the text that make it hard to read in spots, and its text relies heavily on Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai and The Book of Five Rings, texts which Professor Ravina tut-tuts because they’re written a bit anachronistically.

At any rate, it collects some aspirational material about how to live like a samurai, the warrior code and whatnot, interspersed with some stories and legends of samurai. Unfortunately, many of the non-Hagakure and Five Rings sources are unattributed, so one cannot look for those source materials for further reading.

So a bit thick for a simple browse, and not detailed enough for real study. But, I suppose, if you’re looking for a bit of self-help in how to live well, you could do worse.

I thought this might be the first of the Executioner novels I’ve read this year, but apparently I read Terror Intent to start the year. Which proves, I suppose, either how forgettable the later Executioner novels are or perhaps how long ago January was from now in my mind.

At any rate, this book is a rare artifact in the Executioner series in that the title kinda refers to the plot: Mack Bolan goes to Sri Lanka to find an American diplomat held by the Tamil Tigers. C’mon, man, if you’re of colonoscopy age like me, you cannot read Sri Lanka without a muddy British accent and pronouncing it Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon, can you?

Spoiler alert: Mack Bolan does not beat any shopkeepers to death with their own shoes, although this book was written long enough after the film came out that the author could have inserted such a scene. Or perhaps dropped in a Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon for us. But no.

So Mack Bolan meets up with an intelligence counterpart who is playing all three ends against the middle: the government of Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers, and the Americans–I have not done the calculations to determine exactly what number of agent that makes her. She’s ostensibly in the service of India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), but she’s sleeping with the head of one of the factions of the Tigers. So when I read Pergelator yesterday, and he mentions RAW in terms of a film he watched, I was all like oh, of course I know what that is. So these books have some small educational value.

Bolan, like my middle school (and high school) Dungeons and Dragons group, does not use the encumbrance rules. Check this out:

A large canvas carryall at his feet contained more gear, including extra clips for the Uzi, as well as for the Beretta and Desert Eagle. Additionally, a 5.56mm M-16 A-2 assault rifle, fitted with an M-203 single-shot grenade launcher, lay beside a small radio transceiver to send messages to the fishing boat waiting in a port in India just across from Palk Strait. An assortment of M-40 and 40mm fragmentation and incendiary grenades, C-4 plastic explosive, miniaturized detonators, trip triggers and timers, and three compact missile-launching LAW 80s completed the portable armory.

He’s carries this bag various places, but it’s well over a hundred pounds of equipment easily, so he should not be carrying it with one hand. I don’t know how big of a carryall that is, but that’s a lot of weight and cubic dimension for a single bag. But I can’t talk. It was not uncommon for my fighters to go into a dungeon with a 10′ pole, 50′ of rope, carrying a pole axe, two handed sword, long bow, and food and water for a week (plus whatever loot we found).

A serviceable book in the series, torn from the headlines of 1997–and the civil war in Sri Lanka, which began in 1983, would last until 2009.

So maybe one can learn things even from these men’s adventure paperbacks from time to time.

Well, it only took me a week to read this book–I bought it at ABC Books a week ago Saturday, and it was a nice book to intersperse with my reading of The Red Badge of Courage.

The book is a series of very short stories–most of them are only a couple of paragraphs long, but they’re not broken into individual chapters–dealing with animals and zookeeping and talking a bit about the evolution of zookeepery over the last fifty years, from the concrete cages of the 1970s–heaven help me, but I kind of remember those kinds of exhibits at the Milwaukee Public Zoo when I was but a kid and Chandar, the white tiger, was there–to the more lavish and proper habitat that you see these days.

Crocker specialized in snakes, so a lot of the stories deal with the slithering fellows, but many of the anecdotes that do not feature snakes indicate how dangerous it is to work at a zoo.

I did flag a bit in the book:

One weekend day in the early ’80s, I got a phone call about a lion loose on North Glenstone in Springfield. I think people had called 911 to report spotting a lion. At that time, I lived not far from the location, perhaps a two-minute drive. By coincidence, another zookeeper, Terry Letterman, was at my house.

Terry and I jumped into a vehicle and headed to the location, which was a motel just south of the intersection of Glenstone and Kearney, on the west side of the road. By the time we got there, animal control had already caught the cat and had it in one of the holding units in their truck. It was an African lion, about one-third grown by my estimate, and weighed perhaps seventy-five to one hundred pounds.

The animal was not aggressive. Animal control drove to the zoo with Terry and me following behind. Once we arrived, animal control let the cat out. I straddled the lion, grabbed it by the scruff of the neck, and walked it into a stall in a building located in the southwest corner of the zoo property.

It didn’t take long to locate the owners. They were traveling through Springfield with the cat and had stopped at a motel at the corner of Glenstone and Kearney. They left to eat, and while they were gone the lion got out of its crate and wandered into the swimming pool next door. I’m sure this caused a bit of panic as the people evacuated the pool area.

That motel has been in the news recently as it was closed, and the corner slated for redevelopment, but squatters on the property had caught bits of it on fire in March, and it was torn down while I was reading this book.

I passed the property several times recently as it’s just north of ABC Books.

Also, I could have stopped the quote with the mention of the motel, but I finished out the story to give you a sense of how long the individual anecdotes are. Not especially detailed; more spoken history written down than anything else.

So a quick and amusing read. As I mentioned, this is the second copy of the book that we have at Nogglestead–my beautiful wife got a copy first, and she read bits of it to me, so when I saw that the author was going to be at ABC Books, I made sure to go up there and get my own signed copy.