Category: Book Report

I received this book as a Christmas gift. It provided a couple hours of browsing while watching baseball, as it’s that sort of book: a number of Top 10 lists about various and sundry subject grouped into categories like music and sports and leisure. Definitely a coffeetable/browsing sort of book, as there’s not much text besides the lists, the sources, and the occasional tidbit.

The first chapters on science and nature didn’t really hook me, as I really have little interest in the top animals by size or the most common or uncommon elements. Once we moved into to the entertainment sections, though, I could get through more of them in a sitting.

Probably not worth the amount it’s going for on Amazon, but it was a gift. If you’re looking for lists, you’re probably better off with The Book of Lists series, which offers more interesting lists with better commentary/detail on the list items.

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I hoped the book would be a good idea book for historical essays. However, the “But True” part was overstated. Maybe it would be a good book for fiction, particularly science fiction and fantasy, ideas instead.

I guess I should have guessed by page 43, in a piece about Springheeled Jack, where the sentence “But one theory that does fit the facts is the alien hypothesis.” appears. Prior to that, we’ve got some interesting historical anecdotes which might provide fodder for historical research and some “Hmmmmm” essays, but this piece on the English folklore tips the author’s hand: he’s ready to accept the Fortean and the Fate magazinean as “true”.

Well, that’s not what I was looking for in this book. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve read many of the anthologies of the mysteries of the unexplained (Reader’s Digest, of course), but I was hoping for something more, um, proveable from this book. Not (from p311-312, in the chapter “The Green Children” which doesn’t provide much more data than the Reader’s Digest book and lacks the black and white reimaginative photo) “The only credible explanations seem to point to extraterrestrial life or a parallel world.” Not (from p370, the chapter “Doppelgangers”, which comes after the chapter “Vampires” and the chapter about the intelligent life on the moon) “Until scientists can open their minds to the reality of the doppelganger, societies will continue to live in fear of this phenomenon.”

Some of the things prove interesting food for thought and speculation (Was Edgar Allan Poe a murderer? Who was Prester John? What about that song by Reszo Seress?), but ultimately I was a tad disappointed that the material skewed speculative fiction instead of speculative historical fact.

I don’t know how much more I can explain that. I did, however, read the book. Whether fiction comes of it or not remains to be seen.

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This is a short Perry Mason book (171 pages, but the short chapters make it seem like less). When a woman is framed for carrying narcotics, Perry Mason proves her innocence, but it turns out that the charge was part of a greater plot to discredit her as a witness for a will of a wealthy woman. When the wealthy woman’s recent bouts of stomach illness prove to be arsenic exposure, Mason semi-investigates but has to find out the real story when his client is charged with her murder.

It’s a Perry Mason novel. Quick, pulpy, and not dated much. I cannot get enough of them, and someday I hope to own the complete set in Walter Black editions.

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I have the movie tie-in edition for this book, so it has Arnold Schwarzenegger on the cover and movie photos inside. The novel, however, is not the movie. As I do a number of these books upon which movies were based, I’m discovering vast differences in the books, and at least between this one and First Blood, I’m ultimately disappointed in the book.

In this book, Richards is married and has a kid and he goes to the network to participate in the Running Man game show to get some money to support them. Instead of a confined area with comic book villains, the contestant tries to hide out in the open United States with law enforcement trying to find him and citizens looking for him for bonus money. I don’t think that would have been good movie material, so I can see why the movie changed it a bit.

Still, I enjoyed it a bit until we came to a sudden absurdity and the final climax which was ultimately dissatisfying. We end up with the offer from the movie, where Richards can be one of the network people, but ultimately he exacts suicidal revenge upon the network.

It’s definitely not a Stephen King book, so you should expect a different writing style. It’s not bad for a pulp paperback, but a little unsatisfying, as I mentioned. I liked the movie better. Of course, I was kind of hot for Maria Conchita Alonso, so that last goes without saying.

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Well, this book certainly wasn’t steeped in the hard science fiction that is hard to read, nor the bureacratic science caper that would thrill readers of Bob Woodward’s books about the presidencies, although it does feint in this direction by making the main character an ambassador and a diplomatic negotiator who’s made governor of Mars in a tough spot. After establishing the colonies off world, Earth has become dependent upon them for food and for resources. A strike and violence threaten that, so as punishment for siding against a career politician in adjucating a corpor/national plot to annex part of Australia, the negotiator finds himself sent to Mars not only to solve the problem, but to find out who wants him dead enough to invade his home and kill some of his employees and his dog.

It could have been boring, I suppose, but it’s space opera. The bureaucrat picks up a gun and investigates, gets into scrapes on the fourth planet, and ultimately comes to a successful resolution. The ending is very abrupt, though, and it’s clear that either Shat or his ghostwriter had watched Total Recall, but it’s a fun enough book with semi-Libertarian demirants against The Man.

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Well, that’s interesting. Given how this book ends, they must have done a Morrell on the story to get a whole television series out of it.

If you’re not aware of the plot, it involves a psychic from Maine and a politician from New Hampshire who might become President with disastrous results. Actually, it’s more of a character study of the psychic from Maine who awakens from a coma with the ability to recognize the future and the present and the past from a touch of a person or an object. He solves a serial killer case and then encounters the politician, but given that the main story bit comes late into the book, the ending ultimately seems a little rushed and the story goes from the first person limited omniscient narrator to a series of letters and then back to action. That cheapens it a bit.

The book runs only 350 or so pages, which is very short compared to King’s later work. Later works which sometimes seem to drag, but are not often rushed.

The book also contains a number of noteworth allusions: One to Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct stories, where Cotton Hawes has his white streak of hair from a knifing; one to the novel Carrie, written by King himself; and unfortunately, one to the Dirty Harry movies, but Harry’s gun is misidentified as a .357 Magnum. Very contemporaneous to the time in which the book appeared.

A pretty good book in King’s line.

Books mentioned in this review:

I love Mike Lupica’s fiction, and this is the first of his nonfiction I’ve tried. Its subtitle is “How Sports Got Away From The Fans And How We Get It Back”. I read it over the course of two nights, and each was different.

I read the most of the book on the first night, and I almost felt like I’d been plagiarizing Lupica’s points about sports since he wrote it in the middle 1990s, and I hadn’t cared enough to make points until after 1999 or so. Still, he lays into the owners who don’t understand the sport, city “leaders” that give rich owners what ever they want just to attract/retain a sports team for the prestige it gives the city and themselves, the players who are out for themselves at the expense of the sport and the fans, and the fawning media that offers little but rah-rah coverage and machismo posturing from its jock-wannabes sports reporters. So I was really into the book.

On the second night, I got further into it and into some solutions. First, though, we have the problem of all the white people in attendance at the sporting events when most of the athletes are black and Hispanic. All righty then, I thought we’d covered that with the expensive nature of sporting events, but Lupica needed another chapter, so he introduces with a Bryant Gumbel bit about showboating as cultural and then goes into some sort of racial overtones of his own. And then he offers as a megasolution a consumers’ watchdog group for sports fans headed by Ralph Nader (this, remember, is when he was a semi-obscure consumer advocate before he became a semi-obscure presidential election spoiler).

Ultimately, the book is a bit repetitive at the end and really seems to want some sort of macro-level top-down solutions to the crisis in sporting, but ultimately I think that the problems inherent in the sports world are reflections of the diminishing class in the country at large. So having a special commission or board of fan poobahs along for rules changes or whatnot would really only give a set of corruptive influence to another set out people who would ultimately lack class and would act in their interest as board members instead of fans.

So my enjoyment of the book is not unqualified, but since I agree with many of the viewpoints, I appreciated seeing them represented in print by someone I enjoy reading.

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In the midst of reading a Jane Austen novel triggering an Anna Karenina moment, I read this collection of Dilbert cartoons from a decade ago. Dilbert’s comedy level is pretty good and pretty consistent, and fortunately the corporate world has continued to live down to the comic strip’s estimation.

What more insight into it do you want? It’s Dilbert, for crying out loud.

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Even after reading McBain for 20 years, I’m always amazed that I come across books that I don’t seem to have read. Granted, he wrote them over the course of 50 years, sometimes more than one a year. If I tried to read all of them and all of the Evan Hunter books and Smoke books and whatnot, it would take a whole year. Of course, given how many there are, I might have forgotten this one and only think this is the first time I read it.

This is a Deaf Man book, so the cops of the 87th Precinct dial up the dumb. They find the Deaf Man’s clues inscrutable until such time as it’s too late for them to stop the plan. I knew from the first clue what he was talking about, and I don’t live in Isola. But the cops who normally act rationally get a whiff of the Deaf Man, and they live down to his characterization.

Also, this book has a lot of unrelated subplots. The best of his books have a main crime and a subplot with some character soap opera within them. This book includes the Deaf Man’s plot, a murder mystery, an abandoned elderly case, Eileen Burke’s dealing with her transition to the hostage negotiating team, and Kling dealing with the breakup with Burke and meeting Sharyn Cooke. That’s a pile of stuff packed into one limited space, padding the book out to 350 pages and sort of scattering attention.

Don’t get me wrong; the writing is still excellent, but the potency is diminished.

I will probably read this book again; either I’ll pick it up at a book fair for a buck and forget about reading it now, or I will actually collect all of them and read them all in chronological order for fun.

Books mentioned in this review:

Wow, this book has something for everyone. Girls making connections in period costume for the women, and the 36-year-old man ends up with a firebrand 19-year-old hottie (played in the movie, apparently, by Kate Winslet) for the 36-year-old men.

This book is Jane Austen circa 1811, the language is more elaborate than one gets into with modern books, so it takes a bit of patience to read compared to pulp fiction. However, it’s not a hard, inscrutable language; just something that requires attention.

The book outlines a period in the late teens (marrying and matchmaking age, natch) for two lower upper class sisters: Elinor, the older, who is very sense-oriented, that is, she is proper and full of etiquette and the stoicism required of a lady, and Marianne, who is sensible–that is, captive of the senses. Or maybe I’ve got that backwards. However, they move in their circles and fall into and out of what passes for love in that class-conscious society.

The ending sort of bothered me; a bit contrived, and even the villains live happily ever after. I’d prefer a bit of comeuppance to them, maybe not a truly Dickensian bad ending, but at least some psychic misery. Austen is too polite even for that.

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I am such an easily led reader. The cool kids mention Heinlein, I read the Heinlein. Instapundit mentions Greg Bear, and I read one of the Greg Bear on my shelves. I think I bought both this book and its sequel, Anvil of Stars, from Downtown Books in Milwaukee some years ago because he has a lot of books, so if I liked the books, I could get a lot of books. Also, Ted Nugent sings about his brother, Fred Bear. So Instapundit mentioned the book, and it was like Pavlov ringing a bell.

That said, this book provided me with flashbacks of bad Niven, too present in my memory. The book covers an alien invasion whose first appearance is a couple of strange geological structures that appear out of nowhere. Then, a series of disconnected scientists hold a bunch of meetings and put together some papers about what might happen. Then, an alien appears that might or might not be a natural alien or just a biological construct. Then, pre-meetings, politickings, and a religious President who thinks the alien invasion–and probable destruction of the Earth–is punishment from God.

Seriously, the first 200 pages of this book are event, meetings, politicking, papers, hard science. The book cuts between disparate groups, some of whom I forget between their brief cut scenes. But the main characters are hard scientists, a science fiction writer, and politicians (sorry, national leaders). This is supposed to be hard science fiction, which I can take when it when the characters are good and the plot moves along. Unfortunately, with this book, I don’t really get into the characters, the plot drags, and ultimately the enemy who is destroying the Earth is so abstract that I can’t really get a mad-on. The author treats them like a force of nature. And there’s another group of aliens who are helping to save a few Earthlings–they cannot stop the inevitable destruction of the Earth. They, too, are unclear.

However, in the last 200 pages (slightly less), some of the good aliens possess–as in take over the wills of–some of the characters, and then the possessed characters work toward salvation of a small number in arks that will take them elsewhere. So that happens.

I guess that allows me to put a finger and pixels to another annoyance about the plot: The events happen to the characters. They don’t really influence the story, it just takes place and the people go along for the ride. Or die.

The book certainly bears a lot of influence from Lucifer’s Hammer; in the afterword or whatnot, the author thanks Niven himself. Sadly, it’s not as good as good Niven. It’s worst than bad Niven. Hard Science Bureaucracy Fiction.

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Ah, now that’s better. This is a nice, serviceable bit of pulp paperback reading. The second book in the Matt Helm series, The Wrecking Crew shares the name of one of the Matt Helm movies starring Dean Martin, but they’re not that similar. Whereas the movies are sort of Austin Powers, winking and nudging at the motif, the books are more earnest and straightforward.

Matt returns to service as an assassin, and his first real mission sends him to Sweden under the cover of a freelance photographer. After writing a telling article about a master spy, a writer is apparenty killed in an ambush. The widow has an article of her own and commissions Matt to take photos of northern Sweden. But Matt’s real purpose doesn’t seem too secret. So why does the superspy leave Helm in place?

The writing’s better than things I’ve read lately; it’s not John D. MacDonald, but only John D. MacDonald is. The plot twists a bit, and it tends to take you on a bit of a ride, but it’s enough fun for a paperback.

(My first review of a Matt Helm book here.)

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Wow, I’ve never actually wondered what pulp fiction would read if it were written by an actual 12 year old gamemaster, sitting behind a screen and rolling a couple of d20s, but this book is it.

I mean, we’ve identify people who engage in non-traditional sex as perverts or nymphos (nontraditional includes oral sex, multiple partners, and whatnot). We have exclamation points throughout! We have descriptions of rooms wherein you can imagine the pauses so you can put the furniture on the graph paper and know that the door is on the north wall, about 10 feet from the west wall. These descriptions indicate An Encounter is going to happen, wherein the good guys’ guns come out, and the words caress each Browning Hi-Power pistol and Uzi SMG. When the lead flies, the author goes into great detail describing the trajectories and major organs each round hits coupled with names and details about the deceased as if to ensure the reader that the gamemaster, er, author had information and details on index cards, and dang it, he’s going to use them.

Unfortunately, the author didn’t share the index cards with whatever sort of editing staff might have existed at Critic’s Choice paperbacks, because the typos abound, including misspelling the main character’s name once.

After enough of the sequences, the author decided one was the climax, and the book ends.

The end result, sadly, is an actual poorly-written, poorly-paced paperback that is endured rather than enjoyed.

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I am reading the series so out of order. This book falls sometime after the earlier books, but before the later books. That being said, the quality of the books and their lack of dependence on the storylines across the books for fluff. Sure, the books contain some of that, but the books build the overarching storylines, not the other way around. And each of the books is compelling enough in its own right.

This one tracks Lucas Davenport, who has just broken up with Weather (but you know what happens later if you read these out of order, to which this is past and prologue). Someone kills the CEO of a bank undergoing a merger while the CEO is deer hunting with various other executives of the bank, most of whom would lose their jobs if the merger went through. So there are plenty of suspects and opportunity. As the novel progresses, the novel looks into the dealings to see who will suceed the deceased as CEO, and the business dealings reminded me a bit of some of John D. MacDonald’s paperbacks. Like MacDonald, you get enough difference in tone and subject to keep the books fresh.

Definitely a welcome rinse for my last mystery reading experience.

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All right, this book offended me.

Of course, as you probably know, I read the early Spenser novels in my formative years, and the books led me to Thoreau and Chandler and whatnot and provided me with a basic set of dictates for manliness. Intelligence, strength, and sarcasm. But then the thing happened, the Spenser Valediction/Catskill Eagle bit, and the Spenser books declined. Slowly, I suppose, but still, they’re now just collections of television scenes, many of which could be excised if anyone dared to incense a best-seller.

Then came the Sunny Randall books and Jesse Stone books (of which this is one) so that Parker could continue to revisit the themes sewn up pretty much in the Spenser books: namely, that strong, decent people can be in messed up relationships for decades, and that’s okay. It takes a strong man to bear the cuckold horns. Also, let us not forget the autonomy thing (lectures provided handily in each book in case it’s your first Parker read); let us remember the tough guys of all races (with “honorable” representatives from African Americans, Italian Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and white guys); let us remember the positive homosexual characters (minimum one per book, and many of them are tough guys, too).

I read the books out of a sense of duty, but as I said, this one offended me.

It has all the normal flaws, some of which I allude to above. An ethnic tough guy (Apache) comes back to Paradise. He, like the other main characters in Parker books, are Sex Gods, right? Attractive women want Crow (not Hawk!)/Jesse Stone/Spenser/Sunny Randall (a Sex God in female form). There can be no conversation between attractive women and the Sex Gods without the undercurrent of sex. Then, we have the scenes with the shrink, wherein Stone and his therapist go over why he’s stuck on stupid. Then, finally, we have a minor sympathetic character who’s married but cannot resist the Sex God, so she commits adultery and then confesses she feels no guilt for it, and another adulterer confides that sex between adults is a good thing if it makes you feel good, husband and four kids be damned. Just don’t tell him.

Oh, for Pete’s sake. That goes beyond promiscuity, which I don’t have a problem with. But justifying and rationalizing adultery? Give me a break. With that blow, the series has a total of zero recurring characters that I respect. None. No one for me to identify with. No reason to read.

I’m probably overreacting, but I traced some influence of my personal code of ethics to Parker’s earlier work. I am beyond disappointed with this outing and don’t know if I’ll bother with the other Sunny Randall/Jesse Stone books from here on out. I just picked up the movie Stone Cold just last week, and if I get the others, it will be because I like Tom Selleck, not because I like Robert B. Parker.

Even aside from my moral high-horsing, the book is flawed. Contrary to the oft-reprinted AP review, the dialogue in this book is not crackling, wry, sparkling, or whatever the thesaurus wanted to stick in there for this Parker book. The plot is forced, the resolution relies on the now-frequent shootout trap for organized crimesters, and….

Jeez, can you tell how I feel about this book? I’m so spitting mad about it, it’s like my review wanders out of the room and comes back to add just one more bit of venom? For the sake of consistency, I’ve put the Amazon link to the book below, but jeez, save your time and money.

I cannot believe I pay full price for these things any more.

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After the Niven, I wanted something with a little more zing to it. I’ve had this book on my shelves for a bit, so I took it out. I misremembered it as a collection of short stories; instead, it is a Science Fiction Book Club collection of three of Heinlein’s juvenile novels from the 1950s: Tunnel in the Sky, Time for the Stars, and Citizen of the Galaxy.

Back when I was in middle school, M. Gene Henderson had a collection of Del Rey imprinted paperbacks in the hard library binding which I tore through in the sixth grade and the first part of the seventh grade. Hence, once I knew the nature of this book, I’d expected I’d find something familiar in it, that I’d read one or more. Actually, although one was familiar, I hadn’t actually finished it. More on that by-and-by.

Tunnel in the Sky deals with students in high school participating in an off-world survival class. Their final exam is to go onto an unknown planet and survive for a couple of days or a week and finding the rescue point. A teleporter device sends them off, but as time passes and the students fight amongst themselves, they realize they’re on their own. Then Johnny Rico a young man has to help them form a society in the wilderness. Suddenly, they’re rescued.

I almost read Time for the Stars at M. Gene Henderson; however, the subject matter deals with a subject that was touchy. I was at M. Gene Henderson for the year and a half immediately following my parents’ divorce and our subsequent move from the friendly environment of the Milwaukee housing projects to the wild suburban world of St. Charles, Missouri. During the course of the divorce, my mother took us on a two-bus transfer excursion to see an attorney who was going to evaluate the children’s interests in the case and act as an advocate for my brother and I. During our meeting, he suggested a crazy custody arrangement: my brother and I spend six months with our mother and then six months with our father, a complete split down the middle of the year. However, in addition to the semiannual jerking us from school to school, the attorney also proposed that my brother and I actually split up so that one of us was each with a parent during those six months. Boys and girls, this was before the crack epidemic, okay?

So Time for the Stars deals with a deep-space probe program using identical twins with telepathy as the communication mechanism. One goes on a deep space probe traveling at near light speeds, and the other remains on earth to receive instant messages from psi. Well, at age 11 and fresh from the divorce, I couldn’t handle that topic, so I didn’t read the book. I read up until I got the conceit, and then I read the last chapter where the old brother and the young brother (travel at light speed will do that to you, or so Einstein tells me) meet again.

Now, 20 years have passed and my brother and I are naturally estranged, so I could get through it, but not without some meloncholy about my brother and my estrangement. So one twin goes in the ship, has some adventures, and gets in touch with his real relationship with his brother. While dozens of light years away, the ship’s excursion runs into disaster. Suddenly, they’re rescued.

Citizen of the Galaxy deals with a young slave sold to a beggar on a distant outpost. Neither is what he seems, and as the beggar-slash-spy is captured, the young slave follows instructions left by his adopted father to discover his past. It’s a big one. Suddenly, the book ends.

That’s a knock I’ll throw on Heinlein: Man, the books just kinda end out of nowhere, with little resolution to the main problems in the book or with pat resolutions. Maybe I just don’t grok Heinlein to that level. But they’re quick, engaging books that carry you along and don’t have the flaws that Niven’s books do.

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Wow, it’s been almost three years since I read N-Space, the collection to which this book is billed the sequel. How do you get a sequel to a collection of short stories, snippets, and novel excerpts? Beats me, I am not a marketing flack for a publisher.

Like that book, I didn’t care for this book too much. For starters, it pads the nearly 500 pages with excerpts and scenes from novels (a disturbing number of which I have already read). It offers a number from his Warlock series, which I haven’t read and might have to look into. Other than that, it dabbles mostly in the Known Space arena.

It did, however, allow me to put my finger on one of Niven’s flaws: his books are best when the science isn’t actually a freaking character within it, particularly the one that speaks most. The later Ringworld novels fell into this trap, as did one of the stories in this book (“The Borderland of Sol”) whose only purpose was for Niven to noodle about the conceit of a quantum blackhole. The narrator is a space adventurer who follows along with Carlos Wu, father of Ringworld‘s Louis Wu, as they uncover a scientist engaged in piracy. The bulk of the story is Wu knowing the science of what’s going on and not spilling it until they’re in the pirate’s lair, where the pirate scientist gives a lecture on quantum black holes.

The nonfiction bits talk about how much Niven likes to deal with the hard sciences and that, in one of the many science fiction convention memories he treats us to, he and a group of artists and writers got a conference room set aside so they could create a world, including the topography, the aliens on it, and their culture. They worked in the room for the whole convention, and that was it: people putting together a world. Niven was surprised that more fans didn’t stop by to see this riveting action as artists created the images, writers wrote up the prose, and everyone brainstormed without a freaking story.

Niven, apparently, lives for this stuff, but readers don’t necessarily. Ergo, this book is okay for real Niven fans, but casual science fiction fans should probably stick to the real novels or the real collections.

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