Category: Book Report

The name of the artist from this book probably isn’t on the tip of your tongue. It’s probably further from the tip of the your tongue than even Frederic Remington if you think of artists who painted the old West.

But you probably know something of Fred Harman’s work indirectly.

Fred Harman, before he took up painting seriously, was an illustrator and cartoonist who created the comic strip Bronc Peeler. Which did not get syndicated so well, but Harman moved back east and renamed it Red Ryder, and boy, howdy, it took off. The comic was carried in a pile of newspapers, and its popularity led to comic books, novels, dozens of movies, and a television show. It made its creator rich enough to retire to Arizona to paint.

Of course, in the next century, we only know the name because of the film A Christmas Story where Ralphie wants a Red Ryder licensed product.

At any rate, about the art: It’s vistas and broncos. Probably less adeptly administered than the images by Remington, but they’re okay. It ain’t my bag, baby, as far as art goes. One thing about this volume, though, is that Harman himself wrote the text about the images, so you get the voice of the artist instead of an academic, which makes the text a little less dry.

Worth a browse during a football game if you like picture books between plays.

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I recognized the author’s name, and when I Noggled him, I remembered that I his other book that I read.

But this book is different; it does not take the snark summary view. Instead, it gives a couple hundred words on individual events such as The Murderer from the Mayflower, the First Kamikaze, H-Day in Sweden, the Man Who Walked Around the World, and more. It’s like a Damn Interesting collection. (Are those guys still around? It would seem so.)

At any rate, a much better read than The Lowbrow Guide to World History, and I’m envious. I almost wish I could gather the steam to put out a collection like this. Maybe I will sometime. I still have like 3 ISBN to fill.

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In my grim tour of the recently deceased (starting with Elmore Leonard), of course I would pick up a book by Frederick Pohl since he passed away earlier this month. This book isn’t the first of Pohl’s work I’ve read, though. I’ve even reported on Man Plus eight years ago.

At any rate.

This book is set in the future about a hundred years. After a nuclear exchange has wiped most of the Soviet Union and the United States out, China and India have split what remains of the world. The former United States are now republics and collectives in the Chinese mold. One young man, denied the opportunity to study at the University, is a farm laborer until he finds a part of a murder victim in his rice paddy. This red herring puts him into contact with an attractive Han police inspector, and his testimony at the trial brings him into contact with a surgically schizophrenified professor at the University and in the know about the alien ship approaching Earth and asking to speak to the President of the United States. Faster than you can say “Jack Ryan,” the lad is the president for presentation sake and he’s on his way out into space to meet the visitors….

You know, I could go on, and I have when recounting it for my beautiful wife who thinks it sounds interesting enough that she might read it. And she doesn’t tend to science fiction.

It ends a bit abruptly, but it goes in such directions. It builds the world, and then things happen to shake that all up, and…. Well, it reminds me (again) how untethered (in a good way) science fiction from those years could be. Almost anything could happen. I haven’t read much contemporary sci fi, but I get the sense that it falls neatly into subgenres–Military sci-fi, urban fantasy, fantasy, and whatnot–that makes it less wonderful and imaginary.

Of course, I’ll drop back into my paperback suspense fiction, but once in a while, science fiction is good to make me just wonder.

Books mentioned in this review:

I’ve owned a couple of Elmore Leonard books for a while, but I hadn’t read one until now. Mr. Leonard’s recent passing prompted me to pick up this book.

I have seen the film, of course, because for some strange reason in the waning years of the twentieth century, I saw George Clooney movies. In the cinema. Huh. That was a weird time.

At any rate, it read pretty well, too. Of course, seeing the movie before reading the book means I had in my head the appearances of the main characters, so I’m not sure how well Leonard described them. The action is punchy, the situations different and amusing.

I have one or two more Elmore Leonard books scattered amongst my stacks. When I stumble across them, I’ll pick them up.

It’s neat to find an author new to me that I enjoy. I know, it’s not like I lacked indicators that Leonard’s books were good. But sometimes it takes a little push to get me to read something.

Books mentioned in this review:

I’ve already read one Matt Helm book this year (The Ambushers and another book by Donald Hamilton (Murder Twice Told), so I guess it’s not a change of pace at all that I picked up this book.

Within it, Matt Helm gets involved in solving the disappearance of several boaters in the Bermuda Triangle area. He’s under the thumb of a rich Texan whose fiance is among the missing and who pulls some strings in Washington to get an agent on it. Helm is also running ahead of some assassins who are targeting him and from a former associate and lover who wants him dead–and whose help he needs to unravel the conspiracy.

It’s an interesting bit of thriller, a bit slower than The Mordida Man, but there really is a bit of a cut over somewhere there in the 1970s where the paperbacks become more punchy.

I enjoyed it, and I think I’m about out of Matt Helm books. I’ll have to hope for some luck at the autumn book sales.

Books mentioned in this review:

It’s been over a year since I read a Ross Thomas paperback (The Pork Choppers in November 2011), and I’ve been mostly reading paperbacks this year, so I picked up this book for a change-of-pace from my normal paperback haunts.

Unlike The Pork Choppers, this book is a straight ahead thriller. The plot stems around a secretive group that snatches the leader of a terrorist cell close to the ruling leader in Libya (a different colonel, as Khaddafy is overthrown in the near future of this 1981 novel). The Libyans think the CIA took him, so they snatch the president’s brother and hope to exchange the two; unfortunately, the terrorist died in the snatch, and it wasn’t the Americans. While the CIA muddles about trying to figure out who and where, a fixer summons the Mordida Man, a veteran and one-term Congressman known for getting important people out of the clutches of Mexican drug lords.

The book is fascinating: It’s a pretty good read, thirty-two years on, if you can relate to the olden days before cell phones and the Internet. It’s strange how undated elements of it are: the non-US vs. Soviet spymastering, for example, and that the bad guys are still bad guys 30 years later (contrast this for the extra suspension of disbelief you need for WWII thrillers: by the 1970s, our former enemies were our allies). There’s one bit of dated technology, though: the automatic garage door opener makes its appearance twice, including one where it’s sort of marvelled at.

But the book mixes up the good guys and the bad guys and has a third side playing against both that adds a dimension. Given the intra-side fighting, and you get an exciting read coupled with enough brutality that you realize that anyone is expendable in pursuit of the plot and the story.

Wikipedia says he was a well-respected thriller writer of his day, and I believe it.

Books mentioned in this review:

I bought this book from a book review in the Wall Street Journal. So that review was pretty compelling, and it sounded like it would be a fun book. And so it was.

Mark Edward talks about his life and times as a psychic. Well, he thinks of himself more as a mentalist, a showman who might have some gift but who mostly entertains people and sometimes helps them with their problems as a sort of counselor and storyteller. He doesn’t take himself too seriously, and he knows the business is some level charlatan and yet he’s hopeful he is making something good of it. Of course, he would, being the author of the book and trying to present himself in the best light. It makes for a very complex narrative voice that really pulls one along.

And what a story he tells. Edward has worked for the Psychic Friends Hotline, has done radio, has done infomercials, has worked the party circuit, and has done private readings for a fee.

So he’s earnest, and he’s self-aggrandizing, but he doesn’t take the business or himself very seriously, so the book was a joy to read.

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I have tried to read this book many times in the years past; the first time, actually, was when I needed something portable to stick in my pocket so I could read it at the airport while waiting for my sainted mother’s flight to arrive. That, my friends, was six or eight years ago.

So I stuck it in my pocket again recently and, since I’m running behind on my reading this year (I might crack forty books this year if I buckle down), I resolved to finish it. And I did.

But I bogged down a bit in the same spot as last time.

The first part of the book is as much history as mathematics: Asimov explores ancient civilizations and how they began enumerating and coming up with the basic concepts such as 0, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. So far, so good. Not only is this basic mathematics, but it’s history and narrative in nature. Then, when he gets to square roots, exponents, and higher order concepts, the history that makes the first half of it so easy and enjoyable to read evaporates, and he focuses on proofs and formulae. As such, the juice that made the book succulent dries up. Yeah, I learned some things, but some of it rolled right over me, and I was content to let it do so.

But at 140 pages, it can be a quick enough read once you give yourself permission to skim the formulae at the end. It’s also a bit of a gateway for me to acutely wanting to refresh my math skills. So if you’re into that sort of thing, give it a whirl. There are a couple of others in the line, Realm of Algebra and Realm of Measure, that I’ll keep my eye out for, but you don’t find a lot of Asimov at book sales and garage sales. Sadly, people have turned from informed and informative books like this to reality television and Twilight fan fiction tie-ups.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is one of Heinlein’s young adult rocket jockey pieces, the ones that made him famous and wealthy enough to do his longer, adult sleep-with-your-mother books later.

The book is set in the near future of its publication date (1947). A trio of high school seniors build a rocket in their back yard (roughly). It fails on launch testing, but their steady improvement has brought their attention to a government scientist, a sort of maverick, who happens to be the uncle of one of them. He has them join him in building and outfitting a real rocket on the cheap (government funds are tight, you know) and flying to the moon. When they get there, they pick up radio signals from someone who has beaten them to it… Nazis!

In the 21st century, the book is an artifact. Nazis have been played for fictional foils in the seventy years beyond their actual shelf life, but in 1947 and shortly thereafter, there must have been a real fear of redoubts of holdouts in places like South America. Going to the moon must have seemed like quite a dream. And high school students with that ability and interest? They must have been more common then.

The book depressed me a bit on the meta level. Here was young adult literature in America’s prime. Science lectures wrapped into it, reasoning skills emphasized, and every boy is a tinkerer and a good shot. Some kids who read this book probably went on to make the trip to the moon a reality. Meanwhile, in 2013, young adult fiction is all fantasy, vampires, and intrigues. Not what man can do, unless man is doing it to another man for some slight advantage.

One could argue that we’ve really lost something in how we entertain our young and what aspirations it leads them to. But one would probably waste one’s time.

Books mentioned in this review:

I picked up this book at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale a year ago, and I regret not macroing out the spelling of Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale because, gentle reader, I do not touch-type, and typing the name of that particular affair takes a lot out of me. Pardon me while I go nap to recuperate.

Ah, that’s better. Now, about this volume.

As you might recall, I read John Varley’s Millennium three years ago and liked it better than the Kris Kristofferson film.

This book is Varley’s first, and like much speculative fiction of the era (and maybe this era, too, but I get the sense a lot of stuff these days is either urban fantasy influenced or space marines stuff, mostly because I’ve read some of the latter and read blogs from Marko Kloos and Larry Correia–I dunno what contemporary science fiction is like outside of that). This book deals with a genetic scientist who is put into prison and sentenced to death for working on the human genome and cloning. It’s told in the milleiu of invaders who have driven humans from earth to outposts in the solar system because they, the invaders, favor intelligences like that of dolphins an whales. Similar creatures exist on Jupiter, and the invaders ignore humans who do not bother the invaders and the like intelligences. A technologically advanced transmission has erupted from somewhere near Ophiuchi (O-fee-you-key) 70 and helps humanity advance, including genetic technology (which has gone ignored by humanity but a few outlaw scientists).

Anywho, a politcal heavyweight on the moon rescues the scientist by presenting an illegal clone to take her place for the execution. He copies her memories and then trains her to work for him, killing her when she tries to escape and replacing her with a clone. After some number of tries, she goes to a moon of Jupiter and encounters a teacher clone and they plot an escape. And another clone goes to Pluto to try to find a way to Ophiuchi after the transmitters demand payment of hundreds of years of scientific knowledge. And allies of the scientist revive a clone she herself left in place.

For a while, it gets a little confusing remembering which clone team is doing what and why, especially as I had to put the book down sometimes for a couple of nights.

And then the book comes to a resolution, very abruptly, in an unsatisfying fashion.

It’s kind of how Lost ended. Remember that television show? Remember all the plot lines and questions, and how they ended it by setting up a final set of questions they could almost answer, and they did so in an unsatisfying fashion? This book has a lot of compelling things going on, some early questions about the nature of self and whether clones are you, machinations of a politician playing games several steps ahead of the characters, and this all gets abandoned for an abrupt ending that does not answer many of the questions.

It’s an interesting read for the speculative nature, but ultimately left me a little disappointed. But if I find another John Varley out there, I’ll pick it up and hope for better.

Books mentioned in this review:

I can’t believe I read the whole thing.

This tome is one of the 1000+ page books I’ve been going on about reading for the last year or so. It actually took me over a year–something like a year and three months–to read this book. Short stories will do that–offer you the ability to stop after only five or ten pages in a night, where a longer work with longer chapters will at the very worst compel you to read maybe a dozen, and then maybe another chapter.

Then there is “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”. I’m not a fan of the Dreamlands portion of Lovecraft; I know he sometimes liked to dabble in the very fantastic, but part of the grounding in his stories is that the bizarre and dangerous happens to people in the real world. When we get into the Dreamlands stuff, where Randolph Carter goes through a series of adventures in his dreams, where the weird does not have the grounding in every day life or reality, I sort of lose caring. So when it came time to read “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”–which I had never read before–I had to slog. For weeks or months.

At any rate, if you’re a fan of Lovecraft, this book will please you (your Dreamlands mileage may vary). It includes all the fiction, including the longer pieces such as “At the Mountains of Madness” and whatnot. In college, I read a number of shorter paperbacks of Lovecraft’s work, each based on one of the cornerstone stories (“The Lurker on the Threshold and Other Stories”, “The Colour Out Of Space and Other Stories”, and so on). So many of the pieces were familiar to me, but many of the shorter, lesser stores either I had not remembered or had not read.

So all in all, it’s a great collection if you’re in the mood for Lovecraft. And sometimes I really, really was, and sometimes I was not. His archaic style sets a certain gaslight feel to the stories that you cannot get elsewhere, and the language will teach you many neat words. In my twenties, I learned the words “foetor” and “eldritch” from Lovecraft, and I started keeping a list of words I wanted to drop into conversation. However, I misplaced that notebook eight months ago, so I don’t know what words I wanted to learn, and I didn’t learn them very well before that. Ah, well.

In addition to his fiction, the book includes some short stories he wrote as a kid and draft portions of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and Lovecraft’s nonfiction essay “The Supernatural in Literature” which explores the history of what he calls the “weird” in literature up until his present day (the 1930s). He name-checks a lot of authors throughout history and identifies works he likes. It’s a fifty page treatise, and it at turns made me want to read some historical Gothic fiction and bored me. He lavishes praise on Algernon Blackwood, though, and the complete tales of Blackwood is one of the few books I’ve actually put down with the intention of not picking back up, so I will probably avoid the authors he mentions except Lord Dunsay and maybe Machen. Or not.

This is less of a book report than marking my achievement. Sorry.

Books mentioned in this review:

I did not come to this book with an open mind. As many of you might recall (and given the readership of this blog in its 10th year, I mean ‘Gimlet and Charles’), I was a big fan of the Weber and Dolan radio program back in the olden days. I used to listen to them, first when I worked in the testing lab at Data Research Associates and shared a dark closet with a gruff fellow who was not much for conversation–as if I am one for conversation. Then I listened to them whenever technology and legality allowed them to stream it on the Internet and I had an operating system that allowed it.

How much of a fan was I? I asked my brother to go get me some of their autographed coffee mugs from the station back when he lived in Milwaukee and I did not, and he did it.

As you can see, I still have them proudly displayed in my office.

So I’m a homer as far as the author goes. I forget where I saw that he had a book, but when I saw that, I had to have it.

At any rate, the book.

As you might guess, Bob Dolan’s brother Tim has become the Cardinal of New York, the head of the American church. Bob tells stories about growing up with Tim and their relationship to shed insight into his brother’s character and into life itself. Some of the conversations are a little too exact, which means either they were recreated or, more likely, that Bob recorded them when he thought about writing the book. Some of them do have an interview flavor after all.

I really enjoyed the book. Bob pokes fun at himself, and much of the book is as much about Bob and his travels with his brother as his brother ascends the Church heirarchy. There are a bunch of Catholic themes in the book and some good Christian messaging, but it’s not overwhelming or proselytizing. Mostly, it’s musing, remembering, and humanizing a powerful figure in a way only a brother can. However, the book is more about Bob learning about himself and life with his brother’s occasional counsel as it is a bio of Timothy Dolan. Which is what I related to anyway.

You want to know what kind of man Bob Dolan is? When his brother was in Rome for something or another and Bob’s family was there to celebrate it, Tim gets a couple passes to meet the Pope, wherein he goes up to the Pope at the head of the church and the people with him get to speak to the Pope and maybe get a blessing. Tim offers one of the passes to Bob, and Bob lets his wife go instead. There’s as much for us to learn about life and love from Bob Dolan as his older brother, maybe.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is a stunning departure from the series, wherein Mack Bolan….

Aw, who am I kidding? Mack Bolan hits a hard site in Phoenix and follows its bosses to a big deal meet-up in Miami, where the mafia heads are getting together to finally take drastic steps to eliminate The Executioner. He liberates a couple women who were under the thumb of the mob and shoots a lot of bad guys and perpetrates an audacious assault on a couple of hard sites. In other words, it’s a lot like the other books in the series.

What’s most interesting in these books is the evolution of the mythology and the beginning of the plot points that get resolved later. In this book, the Talifero brothers are introduced; they’ll hound him off and on for a couple of books.

The book also has a side plot where Bolan helps and is helped by Cuban counterrevolutionary guerrillas. How quaint. In 1970, perhaps that seemed like a possibility. In 2013, that’s a very dated relic.

At any rate, I pick these books up as filler or breaks from longer reading. I’m getting a little down on them, especially when it comes time to say something intelligent about them on the Internet, so maybe I ought to read something else for a while.

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This book is not an Cole/Pike book. It’s more along the lines of Demolition Angel, wherein the book focuses on a member of a branch of the police force that’s not your ordinary detective or street cop. In Demolition Angel, it was a member of the bomb squad. In this case, it’s the K9 unit.

A patrolman is shot and left for dead after being in the wrong place in the wrong time. His dreams of joining the SWAT are out the window, but he remains on the force if only to find the people who killed his partner. He joins the K9 unit and learns the ways of dogs and partners with a former Marine bomb-sniffing dog from Afghanistan and together, they piece together what’s going on.

It’s an engaging read, happily free of political asides that only serve to remind me that the author would rule me if he could, but there are still a couple of knocks. The shifting points of view include anthropomorphizing the dog which seems a little unserious to me. Also, the ending is very abrupt and cinematic.

But Robert Crais is still one of the few living authors I can read.

You’re forgiven if you think I’ve reviewed this book before. But that was Suspects, which I read back in 2006.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is the third in the Executioner series and the earliest I have (and one of the last I got). In it, Mack Bolan is fresh from his big LA expedition that left his team dead or in jail, and he’s still in California. He turns to an old army associate to give him a new face as the old one is widely known. The Mafia catches wind of his plans and learns where he went, but not before Bolan infiltrates the local den as a freelance headhunter looking for Bolan.

It’s standard fare, pretty good for the Pendleton books. It introduces Hal Brognola to the series. It has events that later books refer too–and most of the later books refer to the events of these first few books a lot, and then the later books a little. I wonder what Pendleton must have thought about these books and series and how long they would have gone on. Could he have expected to write thirty-something of them over a decade? It might have made these early books a bit tighter in their universe. Or maybe I’m making that up.

At any rate, one more down, seventy-seven (of the Executioner series alone) to go.

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I was wandering around the library, minding my own business, when I caught sight of this book. At first, I thought the title was Call of Cthulhu something, as if Chaosium was releasing a set of new novels with based on the Cthulhu mythos and its roleplaying game. Then I saw it was not, and the title is what it is, and I thought all the better.

The books is about a young man who, as a college student ten years prior, but down a sorority house of vampires and rescued a young lady. The event wrecked his psyche, and he’s been a barrista, mostly, since that period, and he clings to the woman he saved. She’s joined the FBI and is in the Boston office, looking for Whitey. Their relationship is friendship-only since she doesn’t have a lot of respect for him and because she’s a lesbian.

One day in his coffeeshop, a bad customer leaves behind a MacGuffin, a computer disk, that the man pockets. While he delivers coffee to his FBI friend, the bad guys shoot up the coffeeshop looking for the disk. It contains login information for a Second-Life sort of virtual world where the guys are working together to piece together a working incantation to awaken Cthulhu, and they’re going to try it at a mall near a power center.

It’s an amusing book, and I enjoyed it. It’s not a thoroughly professional job, as the pacing is just a little meandering at times where some excess is not trimmed–who am I to talk? It’s got a bit of an X-Files vibe going on and a touch of Odd Thomas in it, albeit in the third person. By that, I mean it’s conversational, and there’s really no sense of menace to it. You don’t think the characters are in real peril–who am I to talk?–and the climax, such as it is, doesn’t really seem like a climax and there’s a second subadventure climax in it.

Still, I liked the book enough that after I finished reading it and returned it to the library, I ordered it in paperback just so the author could get his buck-three-eighty.

So now that that’s out of the way, it’s back to H.P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction. Only 250 pages to go.

Books mentioned in this review:

Fresh from the enjoyment of the Matt Helm book The Ambushers, I picked up this book, two of Hamilton’s novellas packaged together for the burgeoning Hamilton fan base.

The first, “Deadfall”, deals with a chemist who had been under suspicion for meeting with a beautiful female Communist agent, is confronted again at his new workplace by the FBI. The questioning leads to further suspicion, his resignation, a meeting with the woman whom he has not seen in a long time, and playing the FBI against the Communists as he seeks to clear his name and to keep his former fiance from murder charges. A bit slow for modern tastes, but I can see how it fit in with the times a bit. A nice bit of twist to it in that the demure former fiance turns out to be a Communist agent and the very attractive former Communist agent is really working for the FBI. It’s sort of a twist like from the film The Mask, but forty years ahead of the Jim Carrey film, of course.

The second, “The Black Cross”, deals with a married professor who has married an attractive young lady and brought her to his old hometown in New England, where she begins to chafe at the monotony of it. After a drunken row at a party, they are involved in a deadly automobile accident that kills her. In his dazed state, he thinks he sees a man murder his wife with a tire iron. The police discourage the man from pursuing a murder investigation, and he wanders around in a bit of a daze trying to figure out who might have killed her, uncovering some secrets from her youth, including connection with a West Coast night club owner and blackmail. Hamilton does a bit to get us wondering who’s on the professor’s side and who is not, and it eventually comes to a climax that clears it up.

The two novellas date from 1947 and 1949, so they’re immediate post-war pieces, but without the punch of the hard-boiled forties guys. The second, in particular, is a bit wordy and dense for the prose’s impact. I wonder if the GI Bill sending a bunch of guys to college made the paperback writers and magazine writers do this up. Sometimes, it’s effective, like in Ross MacDonald or John D. MacDonald, but sometimes it is not effective, and bad lofty pulp is worse than the punchy, pre-Gold Eagle sort of paperbacks. Or even many Gold Eagle things, for that matter.

So I like the Matt Helm series, where the first person narrator kinda tempers this impulse, but this book was not all that.

Books mentioned in this review: