Category: Book Report

I saw this play staged in 1993 or 1994 in Milwaukee at the Milwaukee Rep or one of the subsidiary theatre groups that shares the space down on Wells; at the time, I thought it was the best drama I’d ever seen on stage. I still do, but unfortunately I’m not going to the theatre as much as I did when I was a poor college student making $6.60 an hour and paying tuition. I don’t know how that happened. So my experience hasn’t gotten much broader since the middle 1990s.

This book tells the story of a successful artist, Jonathan Waxman, who visits the home of his collegiate flame in England on the eve before the opening of his first European show. There, he finds a painting from his student period that captures something of his innocence before he became famous and rich and a self-made producer of commodity art. Or maybe it’s his meeting Patty again, a woman whom he dumped unceremoniously because she was not Jewish and who’s now married to an English archeologist whom she does not love.

The play is told in a series of scenes told non-chronologically and in as varied of places as the English house where Patty and her husband live; Jonathan’s boyhood home; the college where they went to school; and the opening itself. When the Milwaukee Rep staged it, I didn’t get the correct sense of the scenes between Jonathan and his German interviewer were at the opening, so I lost a bit from it.

But I got a bit out of reading it that I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t seen it first; perhaps that’s the way to do these plays, unlike movies. Watch them live first and read the book after to see what you’ve missed.

At any rate, I liked the play and I liked the book.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book collects some of the handwritten letters sent by Ronald Reagan during his presidency to people he knew, government officials, and the general public who wrote him. Apparently, the editors were noodling among the former president’s library and uncovered this collection written in his own hand, which they felt gave it a personal touch that would get to the heart of who Reagan was or something. They picked some of the best from each year, add an introduction to each year that details what was going on at that time, and let her rip.

Of course this book reflects the best of what remember from Reagan: his optimism, his faith, and his conservative beliefs. These letters, often written in response to common person critics who wrote to him, do reinforce the man’s impression. How cool is the thought, though, that if you had written Ronald Reagan, he might have dashed a couple lines off on his stationery in response. That’s fascinating.

I worked on this book for a month or so, which explains my recent acquisitiveness of Reagania.

I’ve only read two or three books of letters in my life; this, Raymond Chandler’s, and maybe Ayn Rand’s. This one is the most accessible because I have direct memory of the events to which he refers and because the letters are very brief.

Recommended.

Books mentioned in this review:

Well, I’m counting this as a book I read even though it really is a picture book. Aside from an introduction and an acknowledgments section, the book contains photographs, mostly taken by helicopter, of Detroit and its environs. The selections include a number of corporate headquarters (Ford, GM, K-Mart, American Motor Corporation), a couple of old churches, some of the new developments and high-rises constructed to handle the 1980s resurgence of Detroit predicted by Detroit boosters, a couple shots of Tiger Stadium (Home of the 1984 World Champion Detroit TIGERS!), one picture of the Pontiac Silverdome (where a football team and basketball team played, or so I hear), and a several shots of nearby farms/neighborhoods/and so on.

The only thing I’ll remember from this book, aside from the obvious lesson in urban “resurgence” promised year after year by urban moneyspenders, is a catch phrase. The book also sports a number of thumbnail photos of collections of vehicles taken from the helicopter which sport the phrase “as art.” A bunch of schoolbuses in a parking lot, a number of automobiles outside an automotive plant, a number of train cars in a train yard. The caption is “School buses as art” or “Transport containers as art.”

From this day forward, “as art” shall verily apply to any collection of common goods that I want to elevate to the heights of pretentiousness. Think of this blog, for instance, as “English words as art.”

A quick look at Amazon shows that the photographer did later editions of this book, perhaps with later photographs. But this is the 1985 edition, worthwhile not because the city of Detroit is worth anything, but because of the hysterical historical significance.

Man, I am glad this guy didn’t express his affection for Milwaukee this way; otherwise, I’d have to examine and review the book earnestly.

Books mentioned in this review:

This is actually the first of the Walter J. Black Classics Club/Classic Editions books I have completed; not bad for a fellow who’s been accummulating them for a couple of years now. However, the Dickens Classic Editions volumes (with the green stripe on the spine instead of the red for the Classics Club books) are fiction, and I’ve been tearing through it this year, particularly “classic” literature, so I nabbed this bit.

First, a word on the editions. The printing’s cheap, as it’s rife with printing mistakes like double impressions, some lightly washed out inks, and whatnot. But these editions aren’t fine leatherbound things; they’re designed to sell cheaply to the masses from magazine ads, mail order. So why am I collecting them? Because I inherited four from a grandfather, that’s why! Not Classic Editions, though; the Dickens works I have are just gravy. Perhaps I’ll evolve a rationale for collecting these instead of fine leatherbound editions that centers around defense of the middlebrow and the middle class. Give me some time.

Now, onto the story, which I did not particularly care for.

In his defense, this was Dickens’ second work (or so Wikipedia tells me). But the title character is a passive spectator in his own life. In his defense, Oliver is a child; however, if you’re going to title the book after someone, it might be more interesting if that character plays a role instead of plays the prop.

A poor orphan falls in with a bad crowd and participates, unwillingly and sometimes unknowingly, in a couple of crimes in between bouts of highbrow people being taken with him and helping him out, keeping him like a pet. Then all the loose threads are tied up. 541 pages later, the end.

Like many of the classical literature things I’ve read this year, the book really begins to move about 60% of the way through it; in this case, that’s somewhere in the 300s. Modern audiences don’t tend to have that attention span, I expect; if you’re going to have a lot of pages, a clown demon better rip a boy’s arms off in the first chapter.

Additionally, I have to wonder about what reading all this classical literature does with my sense of the past. Of the four big ones I’ve read (Anna Karenina, The Three Musketeers, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and this) all take place in the past, but the actual centries vary widely. However, as far as I am concerned, the time periods aren’t that different; horse and buggy days, the aristocracy and the poor extremely different, and so on and so forth. Has the last century been that radical that its very decades were different epochs akin to the centuries or millenia of old? Or am I just confused by my own life experience, where I can tell the differences easily because I lived them?

That’s a bit heavy for a simple book report, but I’d like to see those who hit this post for a Google search for oliver twist book report defend that unread and pasted assertion.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book collects a bunch of quotations and a couple of poems about happiness. Eh. But the best part is the photos ca. 1972 of people in various states of happiness and 1970s dress. I highlighted some of them when I bought the book, but let me share a few others. They always bring a smile to my face, announcing happiness. Or perhaps it’s merely a smirk identifying wry superiority; maybe that’s the best I’ve got.

Ah, feeding marijuana to the ducks. Obviously, this is some weird LSD trip; I’d rather have seen an image from about two minutes further into the trip, where the ducks’ bills turn into little aligator snouts with six inch teeth and the hippie girl flees screaming from them, only to jump from a bridge into the dark safety of the water below.

“I’m not giving you the flower, lady; I’m trying to sell these weeds I stole out of Mrs. Busby’s garden so I can afford to buy a shirt or a bottle of Mogen David.”

I’ve had nightmares like this. I am a small child, falling, falling. Instead of hitting the ground, a strange man in a leather vest appears out of nowhere to catch me. It’s my father, and this is the genetical line which I perpetrate through my very existence! AHHHHHHHH!

No, that’s not a fifty yard line or something that would make sense; instead, it’s the gutter of the book because an image this astonishing needs to be spread across two pages.

The prophet ran from the mountains and crossed the fields to warn the villagers that the discosaurs were coming. The villiagers thought he was mad. Only four years later, unheeding of the warning, the villiagers bought velvet suits and silk shirts with the top half of the buttons missing.

This is how the West was almost lost. I’d pay extra for a DVD that features these people in a deleted scene which depicts Clint Eastwood on his walking horse coming into the scene, getting told he was harshing their mellow, man, and shooting the man in the leg and freeing the Indian woman to go back to her tribe.

I think I paid a dollar for this book. I mean, the text is meh (which is about what one expects for a book that collects inspirational junk for review; it’s a hardcover Ideals magazine without the topical relevance). But the pictures are awesome.

Books mentioned in this review:

At worst, this book is nothing more than a set of Bob Greene’s columnesque riffs surrounded by a narrative gimmick and some wish fulfillment (43 year old network correspondent finds true love, sex with 25 year old grad student). As the book begins, that’s about the best I hoped for.

The book follows three friends from high school who, after their 25th high school reunion, take the summer off to relive some of their youth. They travel randomly, whimsically across the country. Ben, the network correspondent, lives alone after his divorce and dotes on his 8 year old daughter from a distance. Ronnie married into money and ended up chairman of a large public company by accident. Michael stayed in their small Ohio suburban town and taught school. Their adult life roles cause some friction for them, as do situations they find along the way. But friendship wins out for some reason.

The story moves along with incidents and asides that don’t add to a larger movement and don’t resolve anything. Ronnie’s father goes into the hospital; Michael meets his first high school love and seems in danger of sacrificing his happy home life to it; and Ben finds out his ex-wife is going to remarry. Then they move on to somewhere else. Ronnie picks up a woman who’s not his wife and she travels with them a bit. They sleep in the Elvis Suite in Las Vegas. Then they come toward the end of the summer and encounter some life-changing events.

I suppose I wanted to see this book as something more than the “at worst.” Perhaps it played to my proclivity toward Bob Greene’s work (see review for He Was A Midwestern Boy On His Own from earlier this month). Perhaps it played to my proclivity to undertaking life-altering lifestyle changes in the summer (or in the spring, as it were). But I enjoyed the book slightly more than I thought I would, and the book was maybe slightly better than the worst case.

But it’s not a good book, and Greene has been wise to stick to nonfiction since.

So it’s worth it if you like Greene’s work; you can find a used copy easily at a garage sale or book fair. Take my word for it; I’ve bought more than one first edition for a buck or two each.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book, one of John D. MacDonald’s paperback originals reprinted when his Travis McGee novels took off, covers a story of one Alex Doyle, former resident of Ramona Beach, Florida, and his return home. Back around the end of the war, orphaned Alex Doyle decided to join the military; on the night before his induction, he went drinking for the first time and awoke from his overindulgence with some cash stolen from his adopted family’s store in his pocket. Run out of town (but allowed to join the military instead of jail), Alex Doyle serves honorably and joins the State Department. But when the Department of Defense needs a scientist to return to the organization, they turn to Doyle to shepherd him back because the scientist married a Ramona Beach woman and settled there. To get the scientist back, Doyle promises to solve the scientist’s wife’s murder.

It’s a short novel, a paperback thriller. I liked it well enough. It lacks the depth of some of the Travis McGee series, but come on, it’s a paperback thriller.

Worth a couple quarters if you find it at a book fair, or a couple bucks if you’re a raving John D. MacDonald fan like me and find it in a used bookstore.

Books mentioned in this review:

I forget which book fair I bought this book at this year; I do remember thinking it was great to get a copy of a non-book club edition of Alistair MacLean’s work, but when the Book Fair Employee put this in the box, she tore the dustjacket almost completely. Swell.

I probably hadn’t read this book since high school. It’s centered around an Interpol narcotics investigator going to Amsterdam to sniff out a big, organized crime syndicate shipping heroin abroad. It’s interesting that it’s a commonplace crime handled as though it’s bigger than it is. Some of the response to the drug thing is over-the-top, but this was early in the war on drugs, before it became commonplace I suppose. The point of view is a little different from many MacLean books in that this is a storyteller first person. Unlike other first person points of view, where the I is supposed to play it straight, this storyteller withholds information and foreshadows later events to make a better story. I think it’s a good point of view, a bit of the double-effect narrator going on, and think I should try it again.

A good read, quick enough (a little over 2 nights for me) and probably readily available at book fairs or the link below if you’re interested.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book, an 87th Precinct novel coming from the old tradition of hardback mysteries under 200 pages in length, is a throwback even at its publication date. The phone numbers within it appear as town plus five digits. In Isola. In 1980. So I guess it was on the shelf for a decade or so before publication.

In it, Carella investigates the murder of a known writer whose fiction books were so-so, but whose nonfiction book on ghosts was a runaway bestseller. The murderer also killed a woman outside the writer’s apartment building, and then moves on to kill the writer’s editor and try to kill the writer’s girlfriend, a medium–but the killer attacks the woman’s twin sister inadvertantly. In the course of the investigation, Carella encounters some actual ghosts, marking one of the few if not the only time the supernatural makes its appearance in these books.

It’s a decent enough thriller and a quick enough read.

Striking, though, is the back of the book which features two long paragraphs of praise for Ed McBain and this book from Stephen King. Ed McBain’s been plying his trade for 25 years, and the book company puts an endorsement from a relatively recent, although popular, upstart to sell more books. How Mr. Lombino must have felt. Of course, he probably sold more books on account of it, so he probably was okay with it, as he was a professional.

Books mentioned in this review:

This completes my recent reading of three great novels set in Paris (the others: The Three Musketeers and Hunchback of Notre Dame). This book, number 148 of about 260 featuring Killmaster Nick Carter, offers everything a growing boy needs. The action and the story are tied together. The story moves. The cover’s not as lurid as one would hope from a paperback original, but one can learn to accept.

Plot Summary / Spoiler Alert!

Nick Carter is ambushed, saves damsel, sleeps with damsel; Nick Carter is ambushed, kills a couple ambushers, one escapes; Nick interviews model who might be an expert assassin, sleeps with her; Nick is in building that explodes; Nick sleeps with woman he saved; Nick ambushes model, kills level bosses, discovers model is only a junkie; Nick finds another model, dead, declines to sleep with her; Nick drives Ferrari fast; Deus ex maquina encounter as Nick discovers big boss and kills him; Nick drives Ferrari fast, rescues his boss; book ends with more implied sleeping with damsel formerly in distress.

Fortunately, no trained goats tempted Nick, or it would have been a much different story.

Now, I can read some quality junk fiction to clean some from my shelves.

Books mentioned in this review:

As you might have guessed, gentle reader, I’ve been on a French Lit kick for some reason lately; I guess it was because The Three Musketeers was good enough to warrant another look at a potboiler from France in the nineteenth century. Well, this book is not quite that fast of a read.

For starters, the first third to four ninths is mostly exposition. We’re introduced to some of the characters through a long and mostly meaningless scene depicting the titular cathedral during a festival of fools. Some extraneous ambassadors are in town, and Quasimodo, the bell ringer, is elected the king of fools. The poet/philosopher who wrote the main drama finds the audience’s attention continues to be diverted by all sorts of interruptions, comings, and goings, and ultimately he’s disappointed. Dejected, he wanders about Paris and ends up in the neighborhood frequented by the vagabonds, who’ll hang the intruder unless someone saves him by marrying him. Against all odds, the beautiful Esmeralda does.

Then, we get not one but two long essays on architecture and the way Paris looked in the time period in which the book was set. Remember, like The Three Musketeers, this novel was a historical novel when it was written, so the author must have felt the need to pad up 40 pages of exposition to educate his readers. But it really kills the pacing of the story.

To make a short story long, this book really collects a very brief number of scenes with a lot of words dedicated to them (much like other older books, I’ve noted). Ultimately, the author lavishes detail on characters that play minor roles in the action (although major roles in the story, I suppose; the action and the story being two different things here).

Spoiler alert!

So Esmeralda falls for a philandering captain of the guard; a repressed bishop fixates on Esmeralda; the poet/philosopher drops out of the book for a while as the bishop stabs the captain while he’s entertaining Esmeralda, framing the young pseudo-gypsy for the crime; as she’s sentenced to hang, the bishop offers to save her, which she rebuffs; the hunchback steals Esmeralda from the hangmen and takes her to Notre Dame, a sanctuary for criminals; the bishop meets the poet and gets him to foment a rebellion of the vagabonds so they–bishop and poet–can secret Esmeralda from Notre Dame; the bloody uprising occurs; the bishop and the poet steal Esmeralda and her trained goat from the church; when they reach the opposite shore of the Seine, the poet takes the goat instead of the alluring Esmeralda to whom he’s already wed by the laws of the vagabonds; the bishop again pleads for Esmeralda’s love, and she rebuffs him; and they all die, including the subplots, except for the captain of the guard, the poet, and presumably the goat.

I don’t know how you can turn that into a Disney film; I suppose it’s only American audiences’ lack of knowledge of the basics of the plot that allowed it to happen. I mean, Disney wouldn’t dare to try Hamlet. And the hunchback: not a nice guy.

So I’ve got one more French book to go and then I am thinking about knocking off some junk from my to-read shelves before the next book fair later this week.

Wish me luck.

Books mentioned in this review:

As you know, gentle reader, I like Bob Greene’s books well enough to spell his name correctly most of the time. This is the first I’ve read in two plus years (since Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War in March 2005 and Bob Greene’s America in May 2004).

It collects a number of his columns from Esquire and the Chicago Tribune again, so he’s back in his sweet spot of short narrative nonfiction with the occasional forays into "People and Things That Happened Because I Am A Columnist" or "Things I Made Happen Because I Know Michael Jordan" filler material. Of course, we cringe when he talks about calling a seventeen year old girl in 1988 and talking to her about her sexual arousal watching Dennis Quaid in The Big Easy and wonder is that the one?

Greene trends more mawkish than Andy Rooney, so he falls beneath the old curmudgeon in my estimation, but he did make a career at it whereas I’m only making a blog of writing my insights. So I respect the man and enjoy his work enough to pick up a collection of columns from time to time, but I’m not exactly plunging into the first edition copy of All Summer Long, one of two first edition copies that have passed through my hands and have remained on my to-read shelf.

Books mentioned in this review:

 

 

This book collects a number of Andy Rooney’s newspaper work from the late 1980s and early 1990s. As they’re not based on current events, they’re aging well, although a couple of his cast-off ideas have come to pass (a news scanner? Hello, RSS). As you know, I am a fan of the author (see also Years of Minutes and Word for Word).

So I like the author, I read his books, and I get, more and more as I age, where he’s coming from.

Unfortunately, the book finishes with a couple of eulogies that Rooney wrote for some long time friends and co-workers, which is a real downer of a way to end a book; coupled with the fact that Tangled Vines ended with eulogies, and suddenly old Brian is feeling a bit of end-of-life melancholy.

Books mentioned in this review:

I got this book as a selection in the Readers’ Digest World’s Best Reading (remember them?) back when I thought having a number of books in handsome hardback editions was a good way to expend that gratuitous money I was making. As I got random books from old college syllabi, I eventually determined that book fairs would provide easier access to the great literature I wanted. Still, I’d seen the movies (The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers), so I thought I’d give the book a try.

It’s a pretty good book; I read it faster than Anna Karenina, and I liked it better. It’s a swashbuckler; instead of The Russian Question, we get court intrigue. Oddly, both books started out as serials, but The Three Musketeers strikes me as more engaging and entertaining.

I guess watching the films first helped me to get context, much like reading a Cliff Notes will give you an idea of how things will go so you’re engaged in getting there.

So I liked the book enough that I’m more impressed with the form, that is, serialized novels that have made their way into our literary canon. Which is a good thing since I have so many Charles Dickens books lying about.

In a stunning turn of events, this book marks the fourth and final book from this list that I had on my to-read shelf that I hadn’t yet read. I’ve read them all this year.

Maybe I need another hobby. Nah.

Books mentioned in this review:

Ross MacDonald was writing Raymond Chandler novels into my lifetime. How odd.

This book tracks Lew Archer as he looks for a missing woman whom he’d given a ride. He finds a twisted set of intertwined well-to-do families still living under the shadow of crimes committed during the World War II years.

So the reader comes along, sometimes picking up insights because it’s a twisted hard-boiled detective mystery that put him ahead of Archer, but the book and the crimes are labyrinth enough that you still won’t figure it completely out until the end.

I enjoyed it. I’ve probably read it before, and might read it again if it’s in one of the Archer omnibuses still on my to-read shelves. Hopefully, though, I’ll wise up and not buy another copy, but when I’m in a book fair berserker frenzy, I cannot be sure.

Books mentioned in this review: