Category: Book Report

This is an early book in Scott Adams’s collections, one of those whose cartoons are reprinted in Seven Years of Highly Defective People. So I got some deja vu.

As always, the cartoons are amusing. I’m sure I relate to them because not long after this book was published, I left the world of retail and light industrial to make my livelihood in an office, and I didn’t know how to behave. Fortunately, it’s a lot like Dilbert, so eccentricity was okay.

By the way, if you’re keeping track at home, by the time this book was published, Wally was not yet Wally.

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I bought this book last week at a book fair and thought it would make a good break from the thick books that have been bogging me down this year. Indeed, it was not only a break, but a retread of sorts, since this book collects material from earlier Dilbert books and provides a bit of gloss or exegesis to the characters Adams created and what he was thinking of. This includes thoughts about the origins and evolution of Ratbert and Dogbert as well as the character who would become Wally but who was called by many names over the first couple of years.

Considering that this book came out in 1997, that means Dilbert is coming up on its 20th anniversary. It seems like it’s younger than that, but probably only because I think I’m younger than it would make me. Additionally, one has to reflect that Dilbert really caught on because it was partially established when the Internet rolled around and geek/engineering culture ascended. Adams really was in the right place at the right time.

So this book shouldn’t be the first of the collections you get; you can get the same cartoons elsewhere, and Adams’s commentary is interesting if you’re really into Dilbert. Or if you’re an Adams drone who will buy any book he publishes, like me.

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This book, unlike the previous books in the series I’ve looked over, doesn’t deal with a state in which I’ve lived, only one I’ve visited (and have read a large number of books about). So the book didn’t make me homesick, but it did give me a sense of wonder and a desire to visit the state and maybe even live in it a bit (as Mary Schmich said, “Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. Travel.”).

The book also has a brief summary essay about Florida history that made me realize one thing: The United States must be the only country in the history of the world that has named so many places for its sworn, and defeated, enemies. For example, Osceola. Why don’t they teach that in the colleges instead of the usual drivel?

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Well, this is a collection of watercolors, religious figures and whatnot, accompanied by some verse presumably by Ms. Lasky.

Not as good as some of the other art books I’ve reviewed recently. But it didn’t take long to look at or to review.

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This book collects two previous volumes’ worth of one liners and insults, meaning it’s 416 pages of quips and acid tongue baths. Most of the stuff is dated and not very good, but the book has enough amusing clips and whatnot that it rivals an Ogden Nash volume in the number of potential IM statuses and tweets you could use to sound clever.

If you wanted to republish this book, you could retitle it as the Giant Book of Tweets. If you’re hankering for reading a big book of that sort thing, this is is your bag.

Of course, everyone who knows me will now have to doubt the originality of my zingers. Because I had no comic sense before, and now I’m even parts H.L. Mencken and Dorothy Parker.

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This book is a collection of lighthearted verses about the business world. It falls somewhere between an Ogden Nash volume and The Complete Geek (An Owner’s Manual).

The verses are light-hearted but sometimes pointed, and unfortunately they’re not very poetic. I mean, Ogden Nash isn’t the most poetic of authors, but he can turn a phrase that you’ll want to tweet. But LaConte’s pieces are too earnest and common to warrant that.

It’s not that long in reading, as it contains only 30 poems, and maybe you’ll find something in it you recognize if you worked in a traditionalesque corporate office environment 15 years ago.

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This book focuses on Michigan, unlike Great Lakes: A Photographic Journey. It doesn’t contain any text aside from photo captions, either, but it does share some of the images from the other book. As such, I didn’t like it as much as I would have. Also, it includes Detroit, romanticizing a city which probably shouldn’t be romanticized any more.

But the imagery made me homesick for the upper North Midwest again.

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I tried to read this book, a monograph published around the turn of the 20th century. However, as I read the biography of Gainsborough, I found that some of the pages were not cut correctly, which means that I could not open some of the pages. Fine, I thought when I got to the first one, I’ll skip this pages and keep going. As I continued, there were several such pages which rendered reading of the biography pretty tough.

So I looked at the pictures. English portraiture. Pretty boring stuff. I did come away with the fact that England didn’t really produce a lot of known painters and that they liked portraits.

I also learned that my sainted mother did a report on Gainsborough in the third grade, ca. 1957, and remembered one of his paintings. Ah, the strange, meandering pathways to knowledge.

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This book collects some of Nash’s work in an around the World War II era, complete with mocking tones about Mussolini and Germany. However, it includes some gems of zingers and whatnot and amusing enough poetry to read aloud to a couple of children who don’t get the point but like to chant when they hear words they recognize.

I liked the book, and I hope some day I get to use “Who was Ogden Nash?” as a Jeopardy! question.

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This book is a monograph, I think, which means it’s a short autobiography along with photographs of selected work by the artist. This particular volume is special in that it contains not only a clipping of the artist’s obituary from a 1966 New York Times, but it is signed by the artist.

He led an interesting life, born in Lithuania in the nineteenth century and moving to America at age 4. He lived in poverty and quit school at 13, but he had a talent for art and worked in lithography until he saved enough for a trip to Europe. There in France prior to World War I, he painted, hung out, and met his wife. They came back to America and managed to support themselves on art fairly well.

His work is modernist, where the lines of statuary blurs to sculpture. His figures, mostly nudes or busts, blur the lines and don’t strive for absolute anatomical correctness but do resemble the human form. I liked it well enough.

I inherited this book from my aunt, and she searched and searched to find more information on the artist and the monograph. Four years later, with wikipedia and better online book listings, I found enough to know the book isn’t worth the amount she’d hoped it was worth. Back in the day, I got her and another friend of mine into going to garage and estate sales looking for things to sell on ebay. Me, I had a couple hundred bucks a month positive cash flow–not including the neat stuff I got myself out of the proceeds–but neither of my women companions really ever managed to list much on ebay. As a result, Pixie’s house is littered with stuff she bought (oh, and how we would fill her station wagon up, stop and unload it, and then fill it up again on a Saturday), and my aunt accummulated a large number of books and some ceramics that scattered to the family when she passed.

There’s a metaphor for or lesson of art in that perhaps. But I am too lazy to find it.

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This is an early Tom Clancy book, and you can really tell if you read it soon after one of his later books. For starters, it’s under 400 pages. This comes at the expense of some of the elaborate cast of characters you get in later books, where Clancy fleshes out even minor characters with a page or two of their own. Instead, only the major characters–and eventual recurring characters–get the treatment, which is odd, because later books don’t go into as much depth. I guess Clancy expects you’ll remember who Jonesy is (he’s the one possessed by the alien Mr. Gray, isn’t he?).

At any rate, a Russian sub wanders off the reservation, and the whole of the Russian navy chases it to the edge of American waters. Jack Ryan suspects the Russian captain is trying to defect and needs to come up with a plan to establish contact and to somehow get the sub and its new propulsion system into American hands. You know, like in the movie.

Clancy’s not at his peak building tension here, either. The final climactic sub battle seems almost tacked onto the story and relies on quick scene switching, and I mean after a paragraph in many cases, to artificially attempt to create tension. It’s not as effective in that short of bursts; Clancy gets better at it and at continually building tension to a resolution as he matures as a writer.

Still, a good book. You know when they study literature after the next Dark Age, they’ll read Clancy and King from our era.

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I admit it, I bought this book (finally) because Ron McLarty was Sgt. Belson in the television series Spenser: For Hire.

It got some critical note and some commercial success (I hope), because it’s ultimately a pretty good book. An obese Quality Control inspector in an action figure factory spends his lonely nights in an alcoholic haze. After a week at the cottage with his folks, they die from an automobile accident just as the father finds the crazy disappeared sister. This quite frankly breaks the fellow from his moorings and from his current life.

He sort of stumbles on a cross-country bike ride to claim his sister’s body, and the narrative splits between flashbacks that tell the story of the happy suburban life’s disintegration as the daughter goes crazy and the man on his meandering voyage of self-discovery.

This is the second of the crazy sister books I’ve read recently (the other being The Moment She Was Gone which I read in December), and I’m pleased that this book didn’t resort to a cheap gimmick to twist it. I figured out the exact moment where the narrator would have died if we were going for an Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge twist, but that didn’t erupt. Instead, we get a measured (but slightly fantastic) story about a man’s reawakening when everything he knew goes.

I recommend it.

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I bought this book because it was $1 at St. Michael’s and because our family and I have recently become fixated on this show. We watch it every night, and I took the online contestant test recently.

That said, the book is a little underwhelming. It was published in 1990, when the new show was 4 years old, so it’s a very high level gloss over the show. A bit about Alex, a bit about contestants, something about how it’s taped, and then lots of trivia answers, mostly laid out like game boards so fewer questions would win more space.

I guess there are some other books out there about the show that give a real insider’s view of the process, including a couple written by contestants. I should check those out.

So I guess it was an okay thing if you’re into the game show, but as I said, underwhelming.

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Now this is a funny play.

A staid Irish-American professor approaches the family of one of his former students, one of his former hot students, for money to produce his play about a murder. The family? Oh, yeah, the Family.

It’s a two act bit, of course, because none of these new kids have the stamina for a five act play, but it has structure, it has wit, and it worked for me.

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I don’t know why I am such a sucker for Neil Simon plays. They’re short, as are all modern plays, and they’re often amusing, but frankly they tend to lack a proper story arc in the two acts. I Ought To Be In Pictures and Chapter Two are pretty good, but Biloxi Blues and Broadway Bound just kind of drop a couple of scenes out of Simon’s life, fictionalized, onto the stage. I guess Lost in Yonkers is somewhere in between. However, the lesson I’ve learned is the closer the story tracks to Simon’s life, the less interesting it will be.

This play has two acts about a young writer working for a comedy/variety show in 1953. We get two acts of the writers who work there ripping on each other and making jokes as fast as they can. Their mercurial boss, the head of the show, makes an appearance. The HUAC is at work, and the network wants to cut the show. Then, in act 2, we get more of the same and the show ends.

This is the weakest of the plays of Simon that I’ve read, and it also tracks autobiographical, perhaps proving the my theory. On page, it’s less funny than a public domain episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show which has a similar vibe vis-a-vis the working environment without the benefits of wacky situations and an hot young Mary Tyler Moore.

As a side note, I always read the original cast list that appears in the front of the book and see whom I recognize. In this case, it’s Nathan Lane as the show host. I also recognized Mark Linn-Baker’s name, although if you would have asked me, “He played the American cousin on the television sitcom Perfect Strangers,” I would have been at a loss. But give me the name, and I recognize his most famous role. A note of amusement is that he played the guy without the accent in that show, but in this play he portrays a Russian immigrant, so he’s the only one with an accent. Huh.

So it’s a quick hour’s worth of reading, more worth it if you’re doing a paper on Neil Simon’s works than if not.

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Even though in later years, Evan Hunter/Ed McBain got a little onto the bash Bush wagon, the bulk of his work occurred before he went nuts, and I read most of it so far before that, so I cut him more slack than I do someone like John Sandford. So I don’t think anything of picking up a new Hunter novel, especially since it looks like Last Summer was an outlier in its pathology.

This book details a kidnapping of a crime world figure’s son while he’s vacationing in Capri. The Nanny, with whom the Ganooch had left the urchin in the states, calls one of the lesser men in the underworld circle to help her figure out what to do. He employs various methods and criminal plans to try to raise the ransom money before the Ganooch comes home or worse…. if anything could be worse.

Hunter names the chapters after characters who appear in them, often for the first time, and on the page facing each chapter we get a photograph of those people, apparently taken of not only Hunter and some family members, but other people he knew. An addendum tells who the photographs really are and makes reference to some of the other material in the book so you know he wasn’t making things up. The photograph gimmick was amusing and worked for me.

I get the sense that Evan Hunter liked to write. Most writers, you don’t get that sense or worse. But he liked doing novel things with his novels.

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This is a quick little comic, almost-heist of a novel set in the movie industry. A washed-up marginal producer about to commit suicide gets one more chance when his nephew from New Jersey shows up with a script about Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone. Smelling his last chance, the producer sort of misleads a hot but impressionable action star into wanting it and then gets a budget and an office at a studio. Once he’s set, he only has to completely have it rewritten into an action flick and shoot it in Hungary. When that falls apart, he can always go with unplanned B: attaching major Oscar talent to it and shooting it as an actual period piece.

An amusing read. I was saddened that the author hadn’t written many books between now and then and wonder what to think now that its sequel is coming out fifteen years later.

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After I read the first book in the Sharpe series, I realized that I didn’t have the second book in that series, so I looked around for other historical fiction on my shelves, and I came to this book. I’d seen the movie Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, but apparently that is a later book in the series. This book introduces Jack Aubrey and the surgeon characters and describes Aubrey’s first command.

Meticulously researched, the book describes the technology, procedures, and military of the era as much as any Clancy novel. However, the pacing on this book is very mellow and languid. A lot of exposition, some action, more exposition, some politicking, some exposition, action, and the novel kind of ends without a real climax.

As such, it’s not as compelling as Clancy or Cornwell, but still interesting enough that I wouldn’t mind reading the next in the series.

Apparently, I’m really getting into British military history ca 1800 with the Sharpe and Aubrey/Maturin books. Reading these makes me want to do my own research so I can really be steeped in what the authors describe, so that the exposition isn’t educational but merely a reminder. Maybe I should get into Civil War fiction instead since I already have a good library on it.

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First of all, let’s log the defect. The book is called St. Louis 365, but it includes February 29, so it should be St. Louis 366.

That said, it take each day of the year and relates a set of things that happened on it in St. Louis history. Sonderman and his assistants scoured newspaper archives, apparently, to come up with this list. It includes a lot of one-off tidbits that give you neat little origins for street names and whatnot throughout the city and county, but also provide some narrative in identifying events in a series for larger stories, such as the Greenlease kidnapping and the World’s Fair in 1904.

It took me a while to get through it, since it’s not a book that drags you along. It is, however, a good book for stop and start, pick it up for a couple minutes in a doctor’s waiting room, sort of reading. I started reading it last year when I was going through browseable books during ballgames and only finished it in January.

But a good idea book and something that will give me odd bits of trivia to throw out randomly in conversations where the trivia don’t exactly fit and will meet a sort of stunned silence as people puzzle out the irrelevance. But that’s why I read.

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Any book with Ann Coulter on the cover, you kinda know what you’re getting. Ann Coulter.

This book is a little schizophrenic, as it really has two parts. The first is normal liberals are bad men and women sort of thing you get on the Internet and in Coulter columns. Whereas she’s amusing in columns and in short doses, sometimes a book-length treatise by Coulter grates on my nerves.

So I was fortunate, surprised, and pleased when the book took a thoughtful turn into exploring intelligent design versus evolution debate, exposing some of the holes in the evolution theory and keeping the mouth, or its textual equivalent, to a snarky minimum throughout.

I don’t read the debates nor the supporting materials very closely, but Coulter’s treatment was a decent survey of it. After a couple chapters of the normal political nyah nyah of which this blog often joins in.

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