Category: Book Report

I got this book fresh on the heels of reading The Joy of Junk. This book pales in comparison.

Apparently, it’s some sort of annual compendium, as it bears the number 8, but I’m not sure what it’s collected from. What it represents is a collection of projects that use things you might throw out to make kitschy little crafts.

Frankly, they could have called it Trash to Painted Trash You Can Give For Gifts. Most of the projects end up with a final product that you look at and say, “Oh, that’s a clever use of a .” That is, most of the things don’t transcend their origins. If you make anything out of an old coffee can, for example, you end up with something that looks like a repurposed coffee can. I prefer my projects to transcend the origin of the materials.

It’s not my bag. Maybe if you’re into the country style or whatever style relies on cutesy sayings and homespun appearance, you’ll get more than I got from the book. Me, I got one project idea and the recognition that aluminum cans are a good source of serviceable metal to use in crafts.

This book follows Arizona Ambush in the series, so I get to feel like somewhat of an insider when Bolan refers to the events in Arizona and I know what he’s talking about.

Unfortunately, this book ropes in a large number of other characters from preceding novels, characters who now work with the government in a special group targeting the Mafia. So the reader who comes to the series late (me) is left outside a little, and the book spends whole chapters filling in expository backstory rather than shooting-em-up. So the book is not the strongest entry in the series. I understand from Wikipedia that Bolan eventually works with this group, so the whole “what is the agenda not only of the Mafia, but also of the bureaucrats and lawmakers on the good guys’ side?” intrigue will probably grow, too.

That said, the plot of the book gets a little short shrift. Bolan goes to Memphis and Nashville and works with SOG (the special operations group) to rescue a couple of members in an attempt to infiltrate the drug-running arm of the mob. In doing so, he meets a country-and-western song maveness married into and under the thumb of the local boss and uncovers a plot to blackmail powerful politicians.

Overall, a weaker entry in the series. I really ought to try to get some of the earlier work. Definitely in the middle of the three I’ve read recently.

Books mentioned in this review:

I read this book because I watched a television program, Criminal Minds, because it had Green Bay Packers wide receiver Greg Jennings making his acting debut in it. Well, I watched enough of the program to see Greg Jennings appear, which was about half. And in that half, the program referred to The Illustrated Man twice. I’d passed over this book a couple times recently when picking over my to-read shelves for something quick to read. So when Greg Jennings, indirectly, encouraged me to read it, I complied.

Like The Martian Chronicles, the book creates a sort of wrapper into which Bradbury inserts his existing short stories. In this case, it’s a tattooed wanderer whose tattoos move and tell stories of the future at night. A camper encounters the illustrated man and watches the stories. In the beginning, we get some italicized addition to each story to keep the thread of the book going, but Bradbury abandons it by the end, although the epilogue returns to the frame story.

I haven’t read Bradbury in a number of years (before the blog, but within the last decade, I think I reread The Martian Chronicles). I liked him well enough in my youth, but in my middle age, I find him a little bleak. Many of the stories deal with death, aliens triumphing over men (or men triumphing over aliens with their consumer culture, still an indictment of humanity). Reading this, I cannot help think that Bradbury could have written Avatar since he shares a lot of thematic ground with Cameron. Maybe these themes were challenging sixty or seventy years ago when Bradbury was writing the stories, but now that they are a prevalent part of the modern mythology/culture, they lose resonance and fade really into the background. I need to rinse my science fiction palatte with some Heinlein soon.

A little note: in the television program, one of the people says that the illustrated man has a blank spot on his back to show the future in the film version of the book, but not the book. Untrue. The book does have that spot.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book represents the second Mack Bolan book I’ve read in the last year; the first, Missouri Deathwatch was a later entry in the series. This book is far earlier in the series and represents a better piece of work. The writing is tighter and snappier, and it doesn’t rely so heavily on the repetition of conventions.

In this book, Bolan goes to Arizona to tackle some drug trafficking, and he uncovers a military-type unit comprised of several fellows with a score to settle with Bolan from some unpleasantness in ‘Nam. This unit is part of an internecine war among the mafia whose stakes include an owned U.S. Senator. Bolan shows up and muddies the water, pretty much playing both ends against the middle and eliminating this particular bunch of bad men. As he does.

A better entry in the series, as I said. Although let’s talk about Bolan’s Warwagon. It took the book a long time to mention it’s actually an RV, which was a shame because I spent a lot of time trying to imagine a GMC that can support a full rocket battery, communications center, arsenal, and can unobtrusively tail a bunch of scared mobsters. Come to think of it, I still can’t, but I’ve never seen the Arizona highways. Maybe the desert is hilly enough that they would not see the RV that followed them from Tucson to their desert lair turn just a mile down the road and parallel their course. Maybe. But that’s the only real “Huh?” bit in the book.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is kinda like reading a collection of episodes of Creative Juice in that it provides as examples a number of step-by-step projects using old cast-offs to make new decorative things. One can make a jewelry box from a craft box and some old drawer pulls for legs, for example, or one can use the pages of books (perish the thought!) to create decoupaged storage boxes. Really, the most use of the book is in the tips for what sorts of cheap raw materials you should look out for at garage sales and the different ways of looking at and using ordinary things as parts of crafts. The more exposure to that one gets, the more crafty in an arts-and-crafts sort of way one can become. So the book is worth flipping through for that alone, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Books mentioned in this review:

Okay, now I feel kinda dumb. Not only did I slog through a contemporary political screed book, but when I sat down to review it, I find I’ve already read it and reviewed it in 2006. I didn’t remember it. That should be an indicator of what I thought of it this time and, apparently, what I thought of it then, too.

A simple book to write, it’s a list blog post stretched into a couple hundred pages. It does call out some liberal influences that you might not be aware of (and which you’ll forget soon after reading, as I apparently did), but Goldberg is a little abrasive and name-calling even while attacking certain liberals for being abrasive and name-callers.

A difference in reading it today versus 2006: Three of the hundred are now dead. Anna Nicole Smith and Michael Jackson died from the very lifestyle excesses for which Goldberg pillories them. It seems gauche now to read someone speaking ill of them. The third is Teddy Kennedy, and Goldberg focuses on his political career, so it’s less unseemly to read harsh words about him.

I doubt the book will get any better with age, but these sorts of books aren’t supposed to have any longevity. On the plus side, I will remember now that I have read it. Twice.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is a short series of essays, some originally appearing in Gibson’s local newspaper, about life on a small farm in northwestern Arkansas. Gibson deals with calving, moving rocks, the benefits and pitfalls of owning goats, and other rural concerns. The essays are short and enjoyable, often with a wry sense of humor to them. Not a bad little collection.

I’m really getting into these rural accounts these days. The pattern began with Growing Up In The Bend and continues with other things I’ve since added to my bookshelf. Perhaps the inclination ties together my love for history and my new location in the rural Midwest.

Books mentioned in this review:

I know you’re asking yourself, “Gentle reader, what is the longest a book has sat on Brian’s to-read shelves before he got around to reading it?” Gentle reader, I just want you to know I don’t find it odd in the least that you refer to yourself as “gentle reader” in your own mind. And that longest book, so far, has been about 30 years.

I received this volume as a gift from my aunt and uncle in the late 1970s or early 1980s. We were living in the Berryland housing project in Milwaukee when we received this, a student desk, and a small two-shelf bookshelf from them (and maybe a couple more books). I remember this book distinctly because it was outsized. And to be honest, in 1981, I was not interested in sea stories. I was probably reading The Great Brain series, Encyclopedia Brown, and whatnot.

Fast forward to 2010 (and from 2010, it does seem like a fast forward), and I read historical novels, sea novels, and especially in the recent past, I read Rudyard Kipling. So I took this book from the to-read shelves. It hadn’t been on the to-read shelves for very long, though, since I’m pretty sure I didn’t carry it to Wisconsin nor count it on my to-read shelves for much of my youth. Sometime, though, I plucked it from my mother’s bookshelves or my mother’s estate’s bookshelves and reclaimed it. So I’m being maudlin a bit to say I’ve owned it for 30 years without reading it, and the chain of custody was broken.

But, Brian, what about the story?

This book is a coming-of-age story. A spoiled rich youth falls off of a Europe-bound steamer and is rescued by fishermen from a Gloucester schooner fishing the banks off of Newfoundland. When they don’t believe that he’s really a rich lad, they put him to work on the boat and he learns the value of hard work. Well, there’s the plot. It moves along very well–these are really the equivalent of Young Adult novels, back when YA novels taught children to work hard, grow up, and contribute to society. I think most of them now teach kids to serve Gaia and to love one another, even when the other does not love them back.

The book, as part of the Educators Classic Series, also includes a little afterward that tells about Kipling’s life and that describes sailing throughout history and especially in the era of the novel. You know, these old timey educators’ books with their endnotes and footnotes are pretty interesting if you’re not already an expert in the subject matter (as I am not–I read a Patrick O’Brian book and immediately wanted to take a Master’s level course on ships). In modern times, though, I expect all that extra material is, again, all about serving Gaia and how those damn white men didn’t love one another.

It’s an interesting book, a quick read, and a glimpse into another era from that other era. Kipling’s faster to read and more accessible than Dickens or Hardy and could serve as a good gateway to classical literature. I’ve already promised to read Kipling to my children. No other books are official promises for when they get older. Kipling, and Captains Courageous, are.

Books mentioned in this review:

I bought this book 1) because it was at a book fair for a buck and 2) because it was written by Humphrey Bogart’s son. I wasn’t 100% sure when I saw the book at the book fair, but come on, the book’s named after a famous misquote from Casablanca and the guy made sure his middle name was in it. He ain’t Joe Hill here, hiding out and trying to make it on his own.

So this book follows the story of a private eye in NYC named R.J. Brooks, the son of an actor and an actress (write what you know! Hey, Margaret Truman made a good living at this sort of thing) who rarely sees his mother and avoids her mostly when she is in New York because she didn’t pay him much attention when she was a child. When his mother is murdered, Brooks can choose between self-pity and finding her killer–and something about her in the process.

The book is an interesting, weird blend. It hearkens back to old school pulp detective stories with spots of brutality for its own sake, but in our own date and time this really isn’t appropriate (says a fellow whose first novel–unpublished–is full of the same). There’s the attempt at emotional stuff as the private eye works through his feelings for his mother (I can relate–as you remember, gentle reader whose name is ‘Charles’ and represents my only long-term reader–my own mother passed away just over a year ago.

But the story doesn’t really move forward much on the detective’s initiative. The resolution of the main plot line is driven by the italicized-text bad guy, whose thoughts pop in from time to time to remind us of what’s at stake. Finally, when the time and wordcount is right, the bad guy kidnaps the love interest and streetwise sidekick, ties them up in the dead actress’s bedroom, and awaits Brooks. Then, in a laughable climax, the bad guy picadors Brooks and holds him at bay with a fencing foil with a sharpened point. To make it dramatic, the bad guy gives Brooks a toy sword to defend himself. In a room full of furniture, Brooks tries to defend himself from a death of a hundred little pricks. Come on. If I think I would do better than the hero in a climax, it really takes one out of the moment.

I mean, it’s not that bad of a book. Most of your pulp boils down that way. Because it’s a sort-of semi-biographical imagining that mixes the old and a new in a not entirely convincing fashion, it’s…. not a particularly good book, either.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is one of Carl Hiaasen’s, so you know what to expect. Off-beat characters, a smart hero who is at odds with mainstream Florida society and development, and some zany situations. Unfortunately, this is not one of Hiaasen’s strongest works, but it’s one of his earliest.

When a witness to a four-year-old disappearance tries to sell her story to a television investigative reporter suspiciously close to Geraldo Rivera, she tells them that the now-retired investigator is important to the case. So the television crew accosts him. Then the witness tells her former boss, a poorly skilled but wildly successful plastic surgeon who killed the disappeared woman during a simple rhinoplasty, that the investigator is cooperating with the television program to take the heat off herself, which inspires the plastic surgeon to put a hit on the former investigator, who has to figure out why New Jersey hitmen and then local talent want him dead this time.

Unfortunately, this particular book features an anti-MacGuffin. One of the hit men loses a hand to a barracuda and instead of getting a regular prosthetic, he has a Weed Whacker® attached to his stump. Every time that the book mentions this, it pulled me out of the amusement into dismissing the whole thing as absurd. Maybe this seemed funnier in 1989. To Floridian newspapermen.

It’s an okay way to pass the time. I read this in paperback, and the book has more of a paperback vibe. I would hate to have bought it in hardback.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book compendiates gangsters, murderers, conpeople, and terrorists from the modern era (20th century, roughly, but with some late 19th century Wild West outlaws). Each section covers a type of crime, such as robbers, and each chapter within the section covers individuals or gangs within it, such as Black Bart and Timothy McVeigh. Each chapter contains a couple of sidebars and some suggested further reading. Ergo, this is one heck of an idea book for historical essays and whatnot. Also, it really serves the Jeopardy! play, as I found man of the criminals in the book to be answers for Jeopardy! questions while I was reading it.

On distraction it offers, though, is parenthetical appositives throughout to define each and every crime in common terms. As though larceny, espionage, and extortion were too obscure for the average reader. Worse, it does it each and every time the term appears for the first time in a chapter so that it just pounds simple definitions into your head.

I recommend the book if you are into this sort of thing and if you’ve got room in your life for a book that you can pick up, read a chapter, put down and pick up again some days later.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is the first part of a two-part set that was a Book of the Month Club selection in 1956, if I read my Internet correctly (and that Internet is correct). Funny, hey, how our grandparents actually bought classical literature for mass consumption? Funny and sad.

This book includes Kim, The Jungle Books, Just-So Stories, and Puck of Pook’s Hill, each a whole book in its own right. However, I don’t get to count them as individual books in my annual reckoning because I count physical books. So I’m going to have to read The Green Mile to balance things out.

Kim is the story of a young orphan, the son of an Irish soldier and a native woman, who joins a Buddhist holy man as the holy man seeks a location from Buddhist myths. Along the way, Kim plays upon his relationship with a Muslim horse trader and an English intelligence man to become a player in The Great Game. Kim’s experience as a beggar in India and his familiarity with the peoples there serve him well as does his native intelligence until he can become an active spy. When he does, he helps to thwart some Russian surveyors coming to measure for the curtains they’ll put up when they rule the region. The book dovetails with what I’ve read recently in Flashman, Sharpe’s Tiger, and Sharpe’s Triumph. Kipling is very respective of the different cultures within India and makes the reader appreciate them, too.

The Jungle Books mirrors a bit Tarzan of the Apes and The Return of Tarzan with the whole child raised by animals motif, but in Mowgli’s case, it is wolves instead of apes. I cannot imagine how Disney turned this into a musical, but if they can take The Hunchback of Notre Dame and do it, they can do it to anything. The books follow similar story arcs as Mowgli learns some things and then defeats an enemy or an enemy of the wolf pack, including a razing of a human village. It’s interesting how the whole Avatar motif gets called a remake of Dances with Wolves and whatnot, but in The Jungle Books, a human gone natural/native sides with the animals against man, too. But Kipling presents the native village as savage and superstitious, not representative of the contemporary sensibilities of the civilized (Mowgli isn’t leveling London or anything). I guess that’s the main difference and why one can forgive Mowgli for it when one cannot forgive Cameron for it.

I’ll be honest; I skipped Just-So Stories because I read it in a stand alone volume in 2008.

Puck of Pook’s Hill is a neat little book about two children in England who meet Puck, the last of the People of the Hills, and he brings a couple of historic personages to tell them their stories and an ultimate lesson. A Norman knight from the era following the Battle of Hastings holds a manor with the help of the Anglo-Saxon former lord and the duo travel to Africa with Vikings; a Roman centurion guards Hadrian’s Wall against the Picts and Winged Helmets as the governor marches on Rome to unseat the emperor; and a Jewish moneylender thwarts King John’s source of funds, ensuring that the barons will make him sign the Great Charter. The main lesson of the book is that the Sword leads to Treasure which leads to Law. A secondary motif is that the present (the end of the 19th century) is so far more advanced than the past that the children are better educated than the knight (he can’t read and refers to a mystical needle, the compass, which the boy produces from his pocket). In the 19th century, the children are familiar with the lineage of the British monarchy that the succession following William the Conqueror is mentioned as though it should be common knowledge and whatnot. A sort of double-effect message comes to an American reader in the beginning of the 21st century, though. I’m familiar with the history of Britain enough to know a bit about Hadrian’s Wall and William Rufus’s unsuccessful reign, but that’s because I’m particularly well read. A hundred years ago, I would be on par with a schoolchild. So civilization, or at least its education, is receding. Finally, one cannot read the book without commenting on the final chapter with the Jewish moneylender, which speaks of a secret cabal of moneylenders who behind the scenes control the fate of kings and kingdoms with their pursestrings. You know what? It’s fiction. Now perhaps better than in Kipling’s day, we are equipped to recognize and dismiss the thing as a stereotype. However, we’re not trusted to do so. Another way civilization or its education are receding.

So that’s four Kipling novel in under a year and a half, and i’m going to read the next volume soon. I guess I’m going through my Kipling phase like I’ve gone through my Dickens phase and my Hardy phase. Still, these are easier to read because they’re children’s books, and I’ve already promised to read them to my children in a couple of years. I can’t wait.

Books mentioned in this review:

I bought this book because it’s a Fawcett Gold Medal paperback. It looks like a John D. MacDonald book from the era, and it’s part of a series featuring derring-do much like the other little pulps I like to read. However.

This book’s pace is too slow, really, for pulp goodness. It features a Cajun American agent named Durell who goes to a fictitious African nation to spirit out its prince after a neighboring nation, spurred on by the ChiComs’ need for a railroad right-of-way, overruns the small nation. Durell has one chance to get the prince, a former student radical during his studies at Yale, out: an old woodburning steam locomotive and a single track. Durell is distracted and aided by a beautiful woman–the golden girl of the title–who turns out to be the prince’s younger sister, whom the prince wants dead to cement his claim to the throne.

The book’s scenes are pretty stock bits of action spaced well among long descriptions of the terrain that only pad the book out. The final climactic battle isn’t really that climactic, and as I mentioned, the pacing of the book is pretty poor.

But it’s the thirty-somethingth in the series, so someone in publishing must have supported it. Maybe the first books in the series were good enough to build a following and the author coasted from there.

I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re an absolute glutton like me.

Books mentioned in this review:

You know, I wouldn’t read a comic book and put it on the list here, but somehow I can read a YA adaptation of a film based on a video game (which is not a first: see here where I’ve read the novelization of a sequel of a movie based on a video game).

That said, come on, it’s a book about a military operation that incorporates the characters from the side-by-side fighter game and somehow gets Jean-Claude Van Damme in front of them. The plot is about a mad warlord in a backwater country in Southeast Asia who is using science to tip the balance in his favor on his plan to rule the world. The good guys, the AN (Allied Nations, a proxy for the UN), need to infiltrate the hidden base to free some hostages, and several non-military players get into the base to seek vengeance on the warlord.

Meanwhile, in a stunning turn of events (and the fact this is not the film version of Heavy Barrel), everyone drops their weapons and starts fighting with martial arts. Someone fires a bazooka stolen from the military, presumably a military museum. The bad guy gets his comeuppance. The book ends.

It’s a straight forward story with some back story fleshed out to the depth you’d expect. Maybe the backstories scrolled on the video game itself. But this book, like other YA adventures including those of Heinlein, really could serve as a gateway to more in depth reading. But in 1994, it probably just was a gateway to Street Fighter II.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book proves that there are some things that should be left untried, some experiments should remain conceived in the mind of the inventor and not carried out to their horrible, unholy result. Edward Hoch should never have tried the novel form.

I love Edward Hoch’s Nick Velvet short stories. Short and snappy. This book is not.

It takes place in the near future of 1974. A team of surgeons on an island off of Baja California seek to reanimate a man from cyrogenic sleep using parts from other cyrogenic sleepers whose maintenance payments have lapsed, including the brain of a murderer. When the operation finishes, people start dying. Is it the reanimated sleeper? Or one of them?

The book pays homage to Ten Little Indians and names the earlier work. However, this book is a bit of a chore to read since the characters are cyphers who are really just names and specialties except for the woman, who is sex on a stick, and the investigator who was supposed to look in on the scientific institute’s finances (his tech investigation bureau, HQs atop the World Trade Center, natch). Finally, the numbers dwindle and the authorities arrive just in time for the real murderer to be unmasked.

The author builds tension with customary devices such as splitting up and weapons remembered halfway through the book as well as actions and behaviors on the part of the characters that I could not adequately suspend disbelief to enjoy the book.

On the other hand, the book describes a board game called Laser that hasn’t been invented yet, but it sounds interesting. I might have to work on it.

Books mentioned in this review:

I thought I’d read a quick bit of drama to break up a larger multi-book volume that I’m also working on currently. A full evening play. You know, something you could read in a night. Ha. This one took me three nights.

It’s not a straightforward play, unlike the stuff I’ve read by Neil Simon recently or even this author’s own Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. It’s a bit, erm, stylized, which requires a lot more attention reading and relies on some conceits and whatnot that you have to keep in mind to follow along.

For example, this book takes place in a future England from 1972, where England has landed on the moon, but tragedy struck there as the lander was damaged and the two landing astronauts fought each other to see who would survive, and the television audience back home saw the fight live. Fancy that: in 1972, they thought everyone would go to the moon.

Also, the government has been taken over by a totalitarian left (but I repeat myself) party that has rounded up the usual suspects and has replaced the Archbishop of Canterbury with some other government minister. The main characters are a philosopher who holds a chair at a university where the ultimate leader has a band of professors/acrobats (the titular jumpers) and his wife, a former musical actress who lost it singing a moon song after the above mentioned astronaut incident.

During a party, when the professor is working, the wife shoots one of the jumpers.

She deals with covering it up with the help of her “therapist” who does some strange things with her and might be schlepping her.

The professor works on a major presentation and tries to reconcile with the wife. Then an inspector, a fan of the wife, shows up. He might know something about the dead jumper, but he squelches the investigation for a chair at the university (open as said jumper is dead), maybe some autographs, and maybe some schlepping.

I think I’ve given you the nutshell of this piece. I don’t even remember how it ends. I certainly didn’t get the point.

On the whole, I think the nicest thing I can say for it is at least it’s not French drama.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book not only covers not only making necklaces with beads, but also how to make beads from different things such as clay, fabric, and papier-mache. As part of a series, the book focuses on necklaces and the projects include traditional bead stringing coupled with some wire work.

Projects include:

• Papier-Mache bead necklaces.
• Flowering vine necklace made from clay-sculpted flowers and chain.
• Marbled beads made from clay.
• Faux Millefiori (Venetian glass beads) made from clay.
• A necklace incorporating feathers.
• A seed necklace.
• A necklace made with hardware washers and leather thong.

Each project offers a couple of photographic variations on the main project. They really do spark your imagination; I really enjoy most the books that go astray from basic beading techniques.

I do have a couple of notes about the book, though, that are less laudatory:

• Whatever font they chose for it has a little loop that connects the tops of st and ct whenever they appear (in words such as lost and impact, for example, the loop connects the last two letters). That was distracting.
• Individual numbered steps in the projects include more than one action. As an occasional technical writer, I find that irksome. A single action gets its own step. Not
  1. Gather your materials. Mix the paste. Tear up some paper. Wrap the paper around a core bead and apply the paste.

  That’s not a single step.

Still, worth your time and trouble perusing it if you’re looking for some new ideas.

Books mentioned in this review:

This is a small paperback from the same publisher as the Adam-12 books I read recently. It’s a book from the “Man with No Name” series tied into the Sergio Leone films starring Clint Eastwood. The book features an ensemble of characters and sort of plays up the camp of the series. The Man With No Name is the best shooter ever and always shoots four times to hit four bad guys as fast as he can. Unfortunately, as he has no name, the other characters call him Nameless, which is troublesome.

In it, the Man with No Name comes upon a town at the edge of a badlands. The badlands feature a group of bandits, of course. At the outskirts of the town, an Englishman has built a castle and staffed it with hired guns. An insurance salesman–or is he?–proves to be almost as good with a gun as the Man with No Name. Two scientists, one British and one American, have gone missing and are presumably held by the bandits who have not made ransom demands for some reason. The Man with No Name investigates and eventually has to storm the castle, of course, with his compatriots who also include the sheriff of the town and the cranky old editor of the local paper.

It’s not a bad book; pulpy and paperbacky, but not poorly written. In fact, the book has a number of similes that are plain awesome, like “shrieked like a banshee in labor.” That’s some shrieking.

Books mentioned in this review: