Category: Book Report

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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When reading Clancy books, you come away from them about seven hundred pages later with the description, “It’s the drug war in Colombia one,” or “It’s the nuke at the Superbowl one,” or “It’s the one with the submarine.” This one happens to be the one with the drug war in Colombia.
Maybe that’s better than you get with a lot of thrillers, especially ones of this size.

The British first edition I have here clocks in at 816 pages; you know what? That’s sort of okay, since Clancy is quite honestly writing serious epic stuff here. Even though this one doesn’t bring the United States to the brink of a major war, it has enough tension within it to mostly sustain its size. Clancy uses his standard characters of Ryan and Clark (and introduces some soon-to-be standard ones in this book). Additionally, he details a lot of incidents and makes a lot of throwaway minor characters into actual characters.

Plot summary: The US government sends covert troops into Colombia to report on drug flights leaving; when the drug lords kill an important government official, the government orders them to start attacking. And then the government abandons them when it’s convenient, but Jack Ryan and Clark don’t let that happen.

There’s a lot of double-dealing, a lot of plot turns, and it almost makes you forget you’re reading 800 pages of fiction. But not quite.

Still, it moves along faster than a Dickens novel (but Dickens novels, being shorter, are quicker to the finish line). It’s also quicker than an O’Brian Master and Commander sort of book, which carries the same amount of technology cut into it (albeit an old-fashioned technology). And a meal of Clancy really sates your thirst for his books for another year or two and opens a big space on your to-read bookshelves for stuff coming from book fairs this year.

If that’s not a book report damning with faint praise, I don’t know what it; however, I did enjoy it.

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Man, I lament that the St. Louis paper doesn’t have a real metro/lifestyle columnist, what with Bill McClellan and his “Here’s a bad guy who’s in a bad situation, don’t you feel bad for him” schtick and the black guy. But when it did, I didn’t pay too much attention. Aw, heck, I was just a kid.

This book collects a hundred or so columns from Viets’s tenure at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and she covers the South Side of the city with an eye for amusing anecdotes and St. Louisisms. As I’ve now spent more time in St. Louis than my home town, unfortunately, I enjoy these stories way too much.

So I should go forth and look for more of Viets’s collections or try some of her fiction. I shall.

Aside, tying in books I’ve read. The cover shot for this book, unavailable from Amazon, was taken at the Coral Courts motel; the first couple of columns talk about its preservation attempt, and Viets wrote about it in the forward to the book Tales from the Coral Court, which I reported about in November 2007.

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Oh, spare me. Is there any damn thriller writer operating after 2000 who doesn’t feel compelled to take shots at Republicans and/or President Bush? Because Ed McBain did it, and Robert B. Parker does it, and with this book, Sandford gets his digs in. We’ve got the closeted gay rich former Senator and his circle of evil gay Republicans, we’ve got the clandestine meeting with an RNC official at the museum because nobody from his work goes there (maybe it would be better for the Republic if they did, haw haw!). Hey, did you know the RNC HQ was reinforced because a teacher tried to blow himself up at it to protest Republican educational policies (I don’t blame him, says the first person narrator). Don’t get me wrong, Sandford has his bad apples in the Democrat party, too, but they’re bad apples, gun nuts, and thugs in the party; it’s not the party itself nor its views that are a priori bad. Does Sandford think he can get away with it because he thinks that Republicans aren’t literate enough to read books not written by Ann Coulter? Or does he think we should be thick-skinned enough to take a joke, even though we take that damned joke every day in the media, from the government, and throughout the Internet? I don’t know, but jeez, I lost a lot of respect for Sandford.

That diatribe aside, this book distills most of the bad aspects of a Lucas Davenport number and transplants it to Washington, perhaps so Sandford can become a national thriller writer and not a regional author. There’s a crime, or series thereof, but the book spends an awful lot of time worrying not about right or wrong or serving justice, but serving political ends. How will this play? How will that play? How should the hero do this to minimize political fallout? And so on. I can take some of that in a Davenport novel because they weren’t always that way, and if I read them out of order, I can mix in the better novels with the lessers. But here, Sandford dangles it all out. A disabled Afghanistan vet now works as a fixer for the White House Chief of Staff and has to investigate the disappearance of the closeted gay rich Republican former Senator who might have a politically damaging “package”–evidence of corruption–that could hurt the reelection chances of the President. His first goal is to protect the Democrats in power, natch.

After a while and some more dead gay Republicans, the situation is resolved with the stock ambush-in-the-woods.

So, Sandford, how come all the veterans in the book are disabled Afghanistan vets except for, you know, the psychotic ones?

Ah, who knows. I’m glad this Sandford book is the last on my unread shelves for now. I think I’d be a better person, and at least in a better mood, if it were still up there.

Meanwhile, I think I’ll confine myself to old crime fiction again, back before they were compelled to attack the political beliefs of roughly half of the country.

Or Robert Crais, who hasn’t done this sort of thing so far. I hope I didn’t just out somebody.

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I got this book at a garage sale last April, along with 10 others in the 20-something volume series. You know what? Ultimately, I made a mistake. The eleven I have are not contiguous in the series, and after this dose, I want to read the series in order. So instead of a cheap set of books, this one might prove to be pretty expensive if I have to fill in the books at full price.

This book details Private Sharpe’s participation at the seige of Seringapatam in 1799. Not just a grunt’s level view of life in her majesty’s army, but a good look at that nevertheless with detailed but readable. Sharpe gets under the skin of a sargeant and is drawn into striking the man, which warrants a flogging whose number is not only gratuitious, but also a death sentence in the tropics. He is reprieved and sent into the enemy stronghold as a deserter. His real mission: find a senior intelligence official held captive and get his information and, if possible, him out.

An excellent set of books, if this is any predictor.

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Although I would read anything with Ed McBain’s name on it pretty eagerly (well, okay, the Matthew Hope novels are not as compelling as the 87th Precinct novels and such), I buy and hold Hunter novels with some trepidation. I didn’t like how Last Summer turned out, so I fear that each will come with some sort of sudden, unsettling twist at the end.

This book starts when the twin sister of the narrator disappears from his mother’s apartment; she’s run off apparently. As the family gathers at the mother’s apartment, flashbacks tell the story of the troubled young woman, prone to traveling and telling exotic stories that are unbelieveable. Recently, the narrator has had to travel to Sicily to get her out of a mental health ward. He starts connecting the dots and incidents from her past and wonders if she really is crazy.

I wondered if we were in for a twist such as the narrator didn’t exist, the sister didn’t exist, or some sort of incest or molestation thing. But I was pleasanly surprised. The book is really just the story of a family coming to terms with the number of times it has overlooked, willfully, examples of schizophrenic behavior and what they do when they cannot deny it any longer.

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This book includes a 30 page vast summary history/travelogue about the Great Lakes region and a number of photos from the area. I thought the overview history was interesting enough as an idea source for historical pieces, but I really started taking it with a salt lick when they told me about Pierre Jacques Marquette in one place and identifying him as Father Jacques Marquette in two places. So maybe use it for ideas, but not as source material once you get the ideas.

The photos were beautiful. One of Chicago is taken from about where the Hyatt stands on the Chicago river, and the view is up Michigan Avenue. I can see the place where I posed for a picture beneath the Chicago Tribune building and can almost make out the place where the stairs take you down to the Billy Goat Tavern.

Two of Milwaukee feature the skyline, one looking up Wisconsin and Wells and another from over the breakwater pier. I showed Heather where my father took my brothers and me fishing, where Heather and I ate at a little cafe right as it opened, and where the art museum’s addition is (not pictured in these older photos). I’ll have to look back at them to see if I can pick out Downtown Books and the Safe House.

So, yeah, it made me homesick during a week where it’s been cold enough here but not snowy, unlike my home.

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Last month, I read Back to the Future, so I was surprised and pleased to find I actually had this book in paperback hidden behind the trim in one of my book cases. As you know, gentle reader, the Sauder bookshelves have decorative trim that turns inward on the book cases; if you’re a double-stacker, like me, you know to put paperbacks behind the trim and then full size hardbacks when it ends. So if you want a paperback, look behind the trim. I was looking for a paperback, and I found this one.

Unlike its predecessor, this book follows the shooting script of the film pretty well. That is, I only found one particular deviation (“Mom! You’re so….big!”). I suppose that marks a good adaptation, ultimately, as it recreates the enjoyment I had of the film (since I saw the film first, and most recently about 4 years ago when my wife got me the trilogy for Christmas). I don’t know what it would do for you if you didn’t see the film, but it’s a good enough romp.

Assuming, of course, you had seen the first film or read the first book. The middle part of a trilogy is hard to enjoy on its own.

Unfortunately, I don’t think I have the third novelization of the movie (although I do have the trilogy of movies, which this book encourages me to watch). And I want it.

Oh, you want the plot? Marty goes to the future, saves his kid from a mistake, and then finds a mistake of his own in that future has altered the present, so he has to go back to the past again to save today and tomorrow. His, anyway. Ultimately, he ends up stuck in the past until he gets a message from further in the past and has to turn to Doc Brown of the past to help him into the past. Even spilling the plot makes me want to get the third book from Ebay or something.

So I’m a fan, and I have a pre-vote-for-your-paycheck-going-to-embryonic-stem-cell-research era poster of Michael J. Fox on my wall, okay?

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I like Royko; I liked some of his other books (Dr. Kookie, You’re Right and Like I Was Sayin’, for instance). This book, however, isn’t the best of the lot, although it’s supposed to be The Best of Mike Royko.

The book contains columns from across the decades and papers for which Royko wrote, so it’s really got the historical summary course thing going on. Worse, the selection of the pieces probably reflects as much the decisions of the compilers and the times in which they lived rather than Royko; after all, these selections don’t tend to overlap the columns in the books he compiled. As a result, Royko comes across a little more straight ahead Democratic pundit than he probably was, although his views did skew that way. His columns, though, have more humanity and sticking up for the little guy against the big guys than the collection’s selection ultimately identifies.

Of course, I’m not a true Royko scholar; that’s just what I get from his books.

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This is a novelization of a sequel to a movie based on a video game. The only way it could be more geeky were if there was a comic book in its lineage somewhere (yes, I know the game series has a comic book based on it, but that’s not directly in this book’s pedigree, so it doesn’t count).

The book follows the movie, wherein Lara Croft seeks vengeance on the murderers of a couple of childhood friends and to prevent a scientist who’s into selling bio-weapons from acquiring Pandora’s Box and all that it holds. It’s a pretty quick bit of reading and really did make me want to watch the film, its predecessor, and a raft of other titles from King Solomon’s Mines/Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold, Romancing the Stone/Jewel of the Nile, Firewalker, and the host of other Indiana Jones knockoffs.

Unfortunately, though, the book does do some in-filling of character development, and it might overdevelop a character and make him to sympathetic for his ultimate fate. Much of that doesn’t serve the actual story well as it makes the end a bit shocking.

But a nice bit of filler between the heady novels in my queue.

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This book, the last in the Travis McGee series, represents the most existentially maudlin entry in the series. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; I rather like the wistful tone taken in some of the books, but this one hammers it pretty hard.

It’s a pretty pedestrian plot as far as McGee novels go. Hired by a rich man to find his stolen yacht, McGee finds it with the bodies of two American teenagers and a daughter of a Peruvian diplomat/drug trafficker aboard. Suddenly, people connected with the case begin dying, and McGee has to survive long enough to figure out if it’s to cover up for the crime or as revenge for the crime that he’s being targeted.

I’ve read this book before, and as I purchased this latest copy of it, I misremembered which one this was. I thought it was the one where his wife died, but that’s earlier in the set and probably not as melancholy.

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