Category: Book Report

This book is one of several books tied into the original Kung Fu television series from the 1970s, in which a half-American Shaolin priest with a bounty on his head wanders the west having adventures. It ran for a couple of years and then ran in syndication for far longer (ask your dad what “syndication” is). Then, in the early 1990s, a spin-off appeared featuring the grandson and great-grandson of the original character, and that series played for longer than the original. I think I saw more segments and/or episodes of the spin-off than the original. So I didn’t come to the book with an existing love for the characters or story.

The book starts much like a pilot of the television series; in a series of flashbacks, Caine’s training is revealed and the events leading to his exile from China and the bounty on his head. In the present day of the book, which is the old West, Caine is fitting in with a bunch of railroad building Chinese immigrants driven by a harsh and murderous foreman who insists upon following the exact route planned for the railroad even though the company’s pesky geologist predicts disaster in blasting through mountains. When the disaster occurs, the Chinese rise up and only Caine can protect them from slaughter at the hands of the railroad guards.

It’s a short paperback, but it’s not as quick a read as could be expected. There is little dialogue, and there are stretches of paragraphs or pages of unnecessary musing–I guess this is the character development. The flashbacks aren’t problematic, though, and if you’re not familiar with the television series, they do provide a bit of parallel tension as his training unfolds.

I’ve got a bunch more of these paperbacks, and I’ll read them by and by. It did interest me in looking up the television series, but it doesn’t look like it’s free on Amazon Prime, so I won’t rush out to buy the DVDs for them. But the book is working its marketing and synergy magic, albeit forty years later.

Books mentioned in this review:

I’ve been reading this book to my son(s) over the course of the last two or three years. It’s a 368 page book, so cut me a little slack. Also note that we did the book in fits and starts, where we read a bunch of Aesop together, both boys and I, at the outset, but once we got into the relatively bloody Grimm brothers, we held off a bit. Eventually, the older boy wanted to hear the stories more than his younger brother did.

At any rate, we’re through it now. I’m not going to go into great detail because it’s been three years, and I’ve forgotten any of the lessons of Aesop’s that I might have learned. I will sum up some thoughts on each:

• Aesop’s fables are good for children. They have a message in them, and their fanciful use of animals will make the children pay attention.
   
• The Brothers Grimm are pretty bloody. There’s a lot of chopping getting done and bodily harm, but most of the stories have a redemptive element if not a Christian message. Famous Grimm stories include “Rapunzel”, “Hansel and Gretel”, “Cinderella”, “Little Red-Cap”, “Little Snow White”, “Rumplestiltskin”, and “The Golden Goose”. When Disney got a hold of them, the films had more survivors than the stories. Which is the same complaint I had about Disney’s Hamlet. Also, the brothers reuse elements of their stories, so if you read the whole kit and kaboodle at once, you’ll feel a sense of deja vu.
   
• Hans Christian Andersen has a reputation about being child friendly, but his stories are about as bloody as the brothers Grimms’, and they often don’t end on a note of redemption. Instead, some like “The Emperor’s New Clothes” just kind of end abruptly, while others end like “The Shadow” end with a nominal protagonist losing in the end. Hans Christian Andersen is not unlike a children’s Stieg Larsson. Famous HCA stories include the aforementioned “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, “The Little Mermaid” (which does not probably end like the Disney film), “The Ugly Duckling”, and the source for at least one Kate Bush song (which does not end the same way as the song or its video).

      

All in all, a good collection. Now we’re going to read the Harvard Classics Arabian Nights, and three years’ hence when we finish that, the lad(s) should be ready for Plato and Aristotle.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book shares an awful lot of plot with The New War. Grimaldi flies Mack Bolan into the jungle, where Bolan is supposed to rescue a man from an enemy camp, and then Grimaldi returns to save the day.

This time, though, Bolan is returning to Vietnam to exfiltrate a soldier who stayed behind and who knows about American POWs still held by the Vietnamese. He joins up with some Hmong in-country and runs into difficulty when a beautiful resistance fighter fancies Bolan over another man in her unit, and that man is a hothead who might cross Bolan to get the girl.

Unfortunately, this book was a bit of a slog for a variety of reasons. For starters, there are some technical inaccuracies to consider: For starters, the method of getting Bolan into the jungle is for him to eject from a Harrier (the new hotness at the time), and then for the Harrier to fly back to base. With part of the canopy missing. Presumably, Bolan will land and go on fighting, albeit an inch or two shorter for the time being (ejecting from a fighter is not the same as jumping from a skydiving school, kids; it’s a violent action that sometimes knocks the ejected unconscious). Then there’s a lot of bringing weapons up to the hip in firing position. Oh, and the firsts. When thinking about how good Grimaldi is, Bolan thinks, “I’m a pretty good pilot myself.” Uh. That’s new. And he lights a cigarette. And he sheds a tear. So Bolan in this book is a bit more of a stock action hero than the man shaped by the history of the first forty books in the series. He even moons over the Hmong woman even though he’s got the love of his life in America. On the other hand, the contact with Stony Man Farm is dismissed, and we don’t get chapters of Hal and April fretting or remembering what an awesome guy Bolan is, either.

Still, I think I’ll take a break from the series for a bit.

Oh, and if you’re wondering whether I’m actually reading Julius Caesar or merely using its presence on my chairside table as a pretext to read junk: I’ve finished The Civil War, but it’s all Super Mario Brothers on poor Caesar. “Thank you, Caesar, but victory is in another castle!” And so Caesar is off to Egypt. I’ve got the Alexandrian War and the Spanish War to go.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book says its text is by Abraham Lincoln and the photos are by Mathew Brady; however, only the latter is true for the most part. Although the book does quote Lincoln on every page, the editor’s text far outweighs Lincoln’s words. The book is 200 pages of photographs, and the images themselves take precedence. The editor provides a light running history of the war accompanying the images, and then Lincoln gets his say at the end of each snippet of historical text. Lincoln’s comments come from speeches, letters, and cables he sends during the course of the war.

It’s a quick perusal–although it’s 200 pages, I ran through it in a little over an hour–but the book has a good summary-level review of the Civil War and, most strikiningly, the photographic record of a war one hundred and fifty years ago.

That’s before the Internet, child. And before television, even over-the-air broadcast television.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is a 1949 paperback. Let that sink in for a minute. It’s sixty-five years old. That’s a quality paperback. And it was in pretty good shape before I started sticking it in my pockets and sitting on it for a couple of weeks.

At any rate, this book covers ten painters considered “old masters” in 1949, including:

• Leonardo da Vinci
• Raphael
• Michelangelo
• Titian
• Bruegel
• Rubens
• Rembrandt
• El Greco
• Velasquez
• Vermeer

Each chapter includes a two-page intro by the author that talks about the text selection for each author, and then the text that follows is some writing about the author. I have to say that generally, because some of it is biographical, some of it is interpretive, and some of it is fiction. For example, for the Renaissance Italian fellows, we have some biographical sketches of da Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. But for Titian, we get a bit of purple prose describing Titian’s works in glowing and abstract terms. For El Greco, we get a section of On Human Bondage, a novel. So it’s unfortunate that the chapters are uneven.

This book also includes a number of black and white reproductions of some of the artists’ work. It’s unfortunate that they’re only in black and white, though, but given this is a little pocket paperback from the immediate post World War II period, it’s understandable. Still, the writers often talk about the artists’ unique use of color and that’s not something the reader can see.

Still, it’s a good quick summary course in these artists and could serve as a stepping stone to further interest. I’m more interested in Vermeer now and have researched him a little on the Internet to see some of his works in actual color.

So it’s an effective book, for sure, and it made me lament contemporary art museums and the elementary school rubbish on the walls there. But that happened because few enough people in the middle of the last century cared to make artistic judgments for themselves and instead let the academics and critics dictate taste.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is really one of the last books I read in 2014, but it’s taken me a while to write it up because I’m a procastinator and because I wanted to nearly-simultaneously write it up for the professional(?) blog. But now that I’m content to recycle most of the content, it’s much easier. It’s always much easier when you just give up.

As its title implies, this book really does contain a set of rules for programmers to follow: The left pages have the rules in large font, and the right pages have the rules explained in a paragraph or two. The book focuses not only on programming best practices, but also on software development best practices, and these are much more applicable to modern programming than the pre-object oriented programming lessons.

For example, first and foremost are the rules about making sure your program answers the users’ needs. Rules like:

1. Fit your program to your users’ needs.
2. Aim your program at the widest circle of users
3. Explain to your user how to use the program
4. Make it easy for the user to run the program

Other rules cover interface design, such as Display results with pertinent messages which are just as relevant now as it was when the interface designed displayed only green or amber text.

Even the discussion of loops, variables, and breaking your program into sections has a sort of relevance because it discusses these things philosophically, at a high level, in a way that programming how-to books and online language tutorials do not.

It’s a quick read or browse; although it’s roughly 220 pages (which is still slim by modern, $60 computer book standards), it’s really less than that since the text is not densely packed on the pages as described above, and it’s worth the time for the insights not only into the crystallized rules but also in the recognition of some software development problems and goals predate the Internet, which I am pretty sure some of our younger co-workers don’t know.

But now that I’ve read it, I’m torn. Do I put it on my regular read bookshelves, or do I put it on the computer programming bookshelves along side twenty-year-old hardware primers and introductions to the C programming language (some of which are thirty years old)? Well, the decision is probably less philosophical and more practical in nature: there’s space on the regular shelves, whereas the computer bookshelves are tightly pressed with books I have not read. Also, they’re behind four comic book long boxes containing most of my comic book collection and a couple other boxes of paraphernalia.

So I’m definitely putting it on the regular shelves. Because I’ve read it completely, unlike the other computer books which were for reference, text books, or the hope thirty years ago that I’d be more of a knowledgeable IT professional than I actually am. Not because I’m lazy.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book follows closely on the heels of The Violent Streets. I’m not sure Mack Bolan will ever get a full night’s sleep for the next forty years.

In this volume, Bolan is called to protect an Iranian military figure on the run after the revolution who has been hiding in the United States. The night before he is deported from the country, an elite squad of Iranian commandos has been dispatched to take him out. Bolan looks over the compound and finds the security is Mafia, and that the Iranian’s American wife wants out–and the Iranian is not above killing her lover in front of her to teach her a lesson.

So Bolan comes in, finds an unlikely ally in a mafia guard and that someone inside the Iranian’s circle is ultimately behind the whole thing, tipping the Iranian government off.

The pacing of the book is pretty good, mixing action and the Bolan War Journal style drop-ins a little better, but it’s still less than seamless. As these are early books written by the staff writers at Gold Eagle, they’re bound to be less smooth than later editions as the book and myth of Bolan becomes clearer. After all, none of these guys read the first forty books before writing them, and this patch of first entries was written at the same time, so the little tics each author introduces contradicts other ones.

Also, this volume identifies a possible flaw in the way the books are written. On page 91, Bolan gives his silenced pistol to the wife of the Iranian for her protection. On page 111, Bolan shoots a bad guy with the very same weapon he no longer has. Then, later in the book, a bad guy has the gun after having taken it from the wife. I can’t help forensically musing that the author wrote the action set pieces first as though they were identified in the outline most clearly and then filled in the other stuff which lead to this particular gaffe. And no one noticed it. Maybe the author didn’t read the whole book through in its entirety in its order. Perhaps someone else punched it up and added this. But this whacky error made it into the book.

Hey, I’m no saint. In my own novel (Available now!), I had an eight day week and demonstrated the old revolver-for-a-semiautomatic switcheroo. But I read the book over and over again looking for things like this, and I found them.

The Gold Eagle books are probably rife with errata like this and with other inconsistencies as authors not familiar with the character but familiar with the tropes of the genre insert them into Bolan books (as we’ll see next time).

On the whole, the series has its up books and its down books, but overall, the quality might not suffer too much from the Pendleton books, although this is yet an optimistic view in my experience and with the hopes that they straighten out a bit and fly truer. Time will tell.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book finds Mack Bolan in St. Paul immediately after returning from Turkey (as described in Double Crossfire, which I read in 2010 before I filled in gaps in the series). One of the Stony Man operative’s sister has been raped, and it’s a like several other rape/killings that have been haunting the Minnesota capital for years, off and on. Bolan investigates and discovers that elements of the police are covering it up because the suspect is the son of an elected official, and they want to use the knowledge and cover up as blackmail on the pol.

Then Bolan shoots most of the bad guys. finis.

Still, it’s a good read, certainly better than The New War, and I can see now how the house, by removing Bolan’s focus solely on the mob, broadens the variety of plots and adventures Bolan can have (and by now has had). This one is a little more vigilantish with the bad guys not being terrorists or external enemies, but domestic crime elements. This will definitely keep the series fresh. Unfortunately, the Bolan War Journal asides that talk philosophically about the nature of Man and the Hobbesian worldview must be mandatory, and in some books they’re not grafted well into the narrative. Instead, whole chapters are dropped in with a couple of nouns changed to reflect the current plot. Also, the books generally contain a roll-up of the overarching storyline from the Bolan books, especially the Mob War of the Pendleton books. These, too, jar expositionally when they’re inserted. They’ll probably move away from them as the number of non-Pendleton books increases, but they don’t aren’t well done in these early books.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is the first that Don Pendleton did not write in the Mack Bolan/the Executioner series, and, boy howdy, don’t we know it. Fantastic Fiction says it was written by Saul Wernick, and I’m pleased to see this is the only entry this particular author wrote in the series.

In it, Mack Bolan goes to Columbia or Panama to exfiltrate or eliminate an agent with intimate knowledge of…something. When Bolan gets there just ahead of a hurricane, he finds the jungle lair of Islamic terrorists is a missile base and a base capable of reprogramming satellites. The makers of the satellites have provided a liaison to help the bad guys log into the satellites for some undisclosed reason. The bad guys’ bosses in the middle east want them to launch the missiles, but in the jungle, the terrorists’ plan is far more dramatic: to crash a satellite into the Panama Canal. So it’s up to Bolan to stop the plan, save the day, exfiltrate the agent and an attractive defector from the cause, and the pilots of the first helicopter that arrived to retrieve him.

So, plotwise, it’s an international thriller and not just a mafia hit. But the style of the writing is the real Louisville Slugger to the cranium. It’s less gritty and consistently introspective as the Pendleton books; it’s more florid in descriptions and does the Men’s Adventure thing with the guns, although when someone brings an automatic weapon up to the hip “in firing position,” one has to recognize that fifteen year old video gamers are probably better versed in military operations, practices, and tactics than your average men’s adventure paperback writer in the golden age of the paperback original.

Also, the guy had a thing for exclamation points. In prose. Fiction. A lot! And the plot, although workable, didn’t use much of the supporting players. Only the pilot Grimaldi makes an appearance, dramatically appearing in the hurricane with a gunship. Also, the book lacks tension, as the risk to Bolan is told rather than actually conveyed in the text. He eliminates half the base on one sortie and then worries about the other half on the next sortie. At one point, we’re concerned about all the people Bolan has to protect, then after Grimaldi’s heroic flight through the hurricane, he arrives at Bolan’s camp. And, hey, right behind him is a rescue chopper! How conveniently placed to take care of one plot point.

A subpar outing in the series, I hope. Although I’ve read a couple in the line after Pendleton and they haven’t made much impression on me. They will make more of an impression and get more of a direct comparison here as I read them consecutively and pretty quickly.

You’re not really asking, but I’ll tell you I’m almost done with the Gallic War by Caesar; I’m to Book VIII which was written after Caesar’s death to complete the account. It was written by someone other than Caesar, or so the story goes. Or did Julius Caesar fake his death? This is the Internet. All possibilities are equally valid unless they require contact with the actual physical world.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is the sixth printing of the book from 1990, which means it was in print for at least eleven years. Which is something to note of its own accord.

This book closely follows the events of Monday’s Mob, Terrible Tuesday, and Wednesday’s Wrath. I’m not actually reading one of these per day, although it might seem like it. It’s taking me about two and a half calendar days (not, surely, sixty hours each). How’s that Gallic War that you claim to be reading coming along? you ask. I’m to the part where a couple of tribes band together and challenge Caesar. So, I’m somewhere between Book One and Book Seven.

Where was I?

Oh, yes. Hours after leaving New Mexico, Mack Bolan is steeped in doubt about his future with Washington, so he asks for a little space from his government contacts. He goes to Miami and infiltrates a mob project to build undersea tunnels from the Everglades to Mexico and Caribbean islands to facilitate smuggling. So it’s the craziest plot yet.

It’s also a very segmented book, and not in a good way. The first 120 pages or so involve the set-up and then Bolan infiltrating the site acting as Frankie, a mob bigwig looking in on operations. He finds a vast complex underground where engineers are using slave labor pirated from amateur smuggling operations to build a great undersea network of smuggler’s subways in the limestone strata beneath the sea. When Mack gets out from his probe, we get twenty pages of him getting together with his Washington contacts and discussions with scientists about how such a thing could be remotely feasible enough for a book plot. Then we get 20 pages of Mack blowing it up. However, at some point after Bolan left, the mob got onto his game and redoubled patrols. A bit of whiplash there; I put the book down one night after the scientists were talking, and I opened it up and the mob was onto Bolan. I actually backtracked to see if I’d forgotten something overnight, but apparently not.

At any rate, this effectively wraps up my reading of the tail end of the Pendleton Mack Bolans; all the others out from here are the stable books. They probably lack the philsophical asides that Pendleton deftly inserted (or made into full discussions at times). And, brother, I’ve got a long way to go to clear my top shelf off.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book takes place about 12 hours after the events of Terrible Tuesday. Given the nature of the last “week” of novels that Pendleton wrote, the timing of it would be tricky: Bolan goes to different cities across the country and does his thing there within the span of 24 hours (usually less, since he does not begin exactly at midnight). If you’re reading them back to back, you go “Hmmmm.” This probably wasn’t a problem when they first came out, as the books were months apart.

In this book, the “Hmmmm.” involves people apprehended at the end of Terrible Tuesday. In the twelve hours it takes Mack Bolan to fully heal and whatnot, those mobsters are sprung from jail, transported to New Mexico, and tortured slowly–in other instances where Pendleton refers to “turkeys,” that indicates torture over the course of days or weeks, not hours. But Bolan bursts into a torture scene, executes the torturer, and then impersonates the fellow who’s involved with a paramilitary plot to steal weapons from the nearby military bases. It’s the same military fellow from Colorado Kill-Zone which I read back in 2011 when I only had 20 Executioner books on my to read shelves. The Old Days.

At any rate, Pendleton is beginning the transition in these books from the previous focus on mob activities to more military thriller sorts of plots and operations. This will ease the transition into the stable of writers to follow and how Mack Bolan starts his life as a government operative.

A quick enough read, obviously. I’m a book away from finishing the ones I’ve in this week (I’ve previously read Friday’s Feast and Satan’s Sabbath). And then it’s into the world after Don Pendleton, where the books are up and down.

We’ll see if I continue my, erm, “discipline” of reading Executioner books as I read Caesar. It might not last many of the “Don Pendleton’s” books.

But that’s okay. I have other books to choose from.

Books mentioned in this review:

I know, I know, you’re quoting back to me what I said last week: “In 2015, I hope to finish more books, and as always, I hope to read a better quality of literature….” How does it explain that the last two books I finished were this book and Monday’s Mob?

I’m reading Julius Caesar’s The Gallic War, and after every book or half book, I take a little time to read from cheap paperbacks. As these paperbacks are shorter than The Gallic War, I’m finishing more of them as I read one piece of longer work. So there.

Mack Bolan, on the second day of the last week of his free agency, swings out to California at a tip from Leo Turrin and stumbles into a plot of the new California Concept. A group of retired mobsters and the remnants of Bolan’s previous visits have gathered in a plan to build the world’s foremost data and electronic signals interception facility to gather as much information as they can for their nefarious schemes, and it’s up to Bolan to stop it.

Man, what a world that was where the plot of men’s adventure novels involved the mob doing this sort of thing. In the 21st century, it’s the government doing it, and the electronic and wireless transmission of information is much greater.

If only they weren’t the 1970s, I’d want to live in the sweet, innocent world of the 1970s.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book follows Tennessee Smash which I read in 2010 and not Washington I.O.U. which I read just a week or so back. So I’m reading the books far out of order (at least I was and should not be unless I find a bunch of earlier ones in Clever or Ozark this spring).

At any rate, the nature of the series, at least in the Pendleton years, is such that you can have an overarching knowledge of the series to kind of orient yourself, but the books themselves are episodic enough that you can pick them up in any order.

This book is the first of Bolan’s last week as a free agent before he goes to work for the government (and the last of the books Pendleton wrote for the series). He takes his war wagon (it’s the war wagon years) to Indiana to find a Chicago mobster who fled the carnage there. Along for the ride is government agent April Rose (it’s the beginning of the April Rose years). Bolan hits the mobster’s hideout, but the mobster is not there. Bolan spares the houseman from the site with the latter’s promise that he will go and sin no more.

The mobster has summoned other remaining leaders of the midwest to a secure location to talk about splitting up the territory, and the mobster gathers the fleeing head man and April Rose to the hard site while the parley occurs. Bolan has to hit the site but rescue April, and he does so by making a grisly exchange with the houseman: The heads of the bosses and April Rose in exchange for sparing the houseman and the fifty other gunsels from a watery grave.

A quick read, to be sure, and a little outlandish–Bolan in the missile-firing war wagon is less at risk than before and it’s a little less than satisfying to read this part of the series.

Additionally, Pendleton describes a “large lake” as being five or six acres in size. I ascribe this to a city man writing about rural areas, but I can’t quite pin that to Pendleton (mainly because Linda Pendleton is watching). But it’s a jarring note that echoes throughout the remainder of the book.

So if you’re into men’s adventure novels, you could do worse.

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This book is the source for the George Clooney film of the same name, but a quick perusal of the film’s plot indicates they differ widely.

In this book, a business consultant whose job it is to counsel laid off employees across the country is nearing a million frequent flier miles on an airline. His employer has given him pretty free rein to travel the country to meet with clients, and the consultant also travels for some pleasure and for some of his side projects. He’s left a resignation letter on his vacationing boss’s desk, so in a week he’ll be out of a job. But he should make the million mile club before then, before they cut off his company credit cards.

He’s been travelling like this for many years, and he’s got no home but the series of airports and hotels he calls Airland. He’s got his own set of rules and expectations from other business travelers, and he’s working on a book with it. He also thinks a secretive consulting company might be trying to recruit him through a series of tests and contacts with his clients and friends.

It starts out a lot like a Stanley Bing novel (see Lloyd What Happened and You Look Nice Today). A bit wry, with an obviously unreliable narrator. However, over the course of the book, it becomes clearer just how unreliable the narrator is: he’s having a breakdown of some sort, or perhaps an entire psychotic episode where none of it really happens.

Which is unfortunate: I would have preferred a better payoff for what was a pretty engaging narrative and voice.

As I finished it, I didn’t think it would be the sort of character George Clooney would play, so I’m sort of interested in seeing the film now to see how little they overlap. And it’s definitely possible I’ll like the film better than the book.

Books mentioned in this review:

I have an embarrassing and stunning admission to make: I have read this book twice even though I didn’t like it. Not exactly. Let me explain.

This book is based on a desktop calendar that features pictures of cats, sometimes doing things that make them look a little guilty, accompanied by qouted captions where the cat is saying something. And they include the cat’s name, age, and hobby. Here, have a taste:

Obviously, this one would have come from December in the calendar.

Most of the captions have a sexual or drug use angle, and all of them are not funny. As a matter of fact, some of them are so not funny that they’re enjoyable for the spectacular badness. Although it’s been seven years since I had the calendar, I remembered some of them.

But this collection is really the sweepings on the floor of cat caption industry. Your Facebook wall or Twitter feed have better examples of the genre.

This book was a Christmas gift, as was the desk calendar. But at least with the book, I was able to flip through it in a couple hours instead of over the course of a year, one dreadful cat sex caption at a time.

Books mentioned in this review:

I got This book at a garage sale in June, and it looked like a good short read that sums up the career of Conan.

It is indeed a chronological history of Conan taken from some comic book series or several, which means in addition to the canonical material there are some references to other stories not written by Robert E. Howard. The text is presented in a legendary history sort of fashion, with the non-Howard stories blended as more legend and the Howard stuff as more history.

This book is a smaller book of a larger work, and that leads to some unfortunate consequences, namely that the text was sometimes very hard to read. The book is by the publisher DK, who does a lot of comic book stuff, so the pages are full bleed graphics with text atop them. Sometimes, the contrast was not very good. To make matters worse, the font size doesn’t appear like it was designed for the size this book is. Instead, it looks as though they took the plates from a larger, more coffee table sized book and just shrunk everything down, including the text. Look:

For Pete’s sake, I almost had to go out and buy a pair of cheaters for this book. Or an electron microscope.

At any rate, it’s an interesting and brief book on the history of Conan and features some interesting art work from the comic books, but the book’s format itself hinders it quite a bit. Go for the full-sized Conan: The Ultimate Guide to the World’s Most Savage Barbarian instead.

Books mentioned in this review:

Shortly after reading Last Seen in Massilia, I rediscovered this book on my to read shelves. So I thought I’d take on a thicker tome.

Well, if you’re classically educated and over forty, you might well know how the book turns out from its title. For those of you too young or too public school to know, the three legions were Roman legions defeated by an alliance of German tribes in the Battle of Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD. The Romans never recovered the German territory lost.

At any rate, this book covers a couple of weeks leading up to the battle. The Proconsul is vain and overconfident. The commander of the Eagle legion is smitten with a woman captured in the raid of a small German outpost who craves to be taken care of in a Roman way. Another lesser leader craves the first commander’s position. A brutal but effective legionaire flouts the rules and rules by fear. The legions’ historian is eager to write a scholarly treatise about the downfall of the legions even though he does not believe it to be true. Then the proconsul demands the German woman and an Achilles/Agamemnon storyline breaks out as the commander is stripped of his position and his self-definition. The lesser leader takes command and leads his men into disaster, and then the army decamps into a disastrous ambush in Teutoburg Forest.

The book is deep and well-written with a lot of characterization and a lot of detail about life in the Roman legion. It was not as expository as Last Seen In Massilia, either, and the book delved into the politics of not only the Romans but also the Germans who were unsure about uniting under a leader to attack the Romans when the Romans were not actively at war with the tribes.

I liked the book a lot, and I was sad to discover that the author appears to only have written this two novels. The second is a contemporary (to its time, which is 1958) book entitled Let Us Find Heroes; I will keep an eye out for it.

Books mentioned in this review: