Category: Book Report

I didn’t care so much for Nature Girl, but this book hearkens back to Hiaasen’s strengths. A winning lottery drawing has two ticket holders: a black woman from a small town in Florida and one of a pair of self-styled white supremecist militia wannabees (who belong to the NRA). The black woman wants to buy a stretch of undeveloped land to save it from developers because her turtles are from there. A mob attorney from Chicago wants the land as part of a way of laundering money in a money-losing development. The militia men (who belong to the NRA) want the black woman’s lottery ticket because they don’t want to share the lottery winnings. So they take it, and the woman and a newspaper reported try to find them and retrieve the ticket. Throw in a dopey convenience store clerk who wants to be in the band–no, the militia, a Hooters waitress that one of the militia men (who happen to belong to the NRA) has his good eye on, an ATF agent smitten, unrequitedly, with the lottery winner who is not in a militia (or the NRA), and a newspaper feature writer who started out with a fluff piece about the lottery winner and a price on his head by a judge whom he cuckolded, and we’ve got a Hiassen novel. It ends, mostly, on a key with some gun play and violence, in which the heroes (who do not belong to the NRA) use firearms and a well-placed stingray to defeat the enemies.

So it’s a pretty good book. Hiaasen, post Murrah, gets in his digs at militias and then stripes the whole NRA as kooks, but several of his characters are responsible gun owners. Some people might take issue with that distinction. Also, he relies a lot on the “newcomers are spoiling Florida” motif that has been popular with Florida writers since the invention of air conditioning. But the book is enjoyable and entertaining, so it’s easier to not take the minor polemics as earnest.

So this book is one of Hiaasen’s better novels. I can say that having come off of reading one that was not.

Books mentioned in this review:

I can’t believe I read the whole thing.

Sorry to be summoning forth the memory of old Alka Seltzer commercials, but zowie, this is a 601 page book. It’s an Anna Karenina-sized collection of mystery short stories.

It’s a large collection of short stories, to be sure, but it’s a very good collection of short stories, so don’t get me wrong. It took me a couple of weeks to read it, but that’s because even the best book of short stories might be hard to put down, but sometimes they can be hard to pick up again, particularly when they’re 600 page books of short stories and you’re a fellow who likes to read a couple of books a week.

This collection, though, is definitely of higher quality than some of the collections of short stories I’ve picked up in the recent past (even better than The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction Fourteenth Series). This book runs a gamut, from serious literary writers like Pearl S. Buck and Bernard Malamud to science fiction luminaries like Robert Silverberg (see my review for Three Survived) to my mystery standards (John D. MacDonald, Ed McBain, Ross MacDonald, Erle Stanley Gardner, Mickey Spillaine, and Ellery Queen).

The styles vary, but the quality is definitely high, and it’s worth the buck I paid for it at St. Michael’s book fair this winter. Heck, for the dollar, I got a lot of nights’ reading from it, which is both good (efficient spending for prolonged reading) and bad (prolonged reading means less clearance of the to-read shelf and too little blog fodder).

The link below lists it as low as $.34 currently (plus shipping). Worth all of those pennies and more.

And when you’ve read it, explain the Bernard Malamud story (“My Son The Murderer”) to me, because I didn’t get it. Since it was the last story in the book and the only thing standing between me and logging the book as my 15th trophy of the year, I didn’t mind. But I didn’t get it, either. Blending multiple 1st person points of view across multiple paragraphs? The intro said there was a crime in it, but I didn’t see it.

Books mentioned in this review:

Heather gave me this book for Valentine’s Day, and I’ve already read it. So you know where I stand on Lupica. If you don’t, here’s a refresher course: Wild Pitch; Full Court Press; Bump & Run.

This book, unlike those named above, centers around a crime. A former national sports columnist who retired after the subjective of an investigative story killed himself returns to his hometown on Long Island. A high school student who covers high school basketball games for the local paper comes to the adult sportswriter with a possible clue in the death of the high school basketball manager’s death and its possible relationship to a hazing incident with the team.

So there’s your setup.

What follows is decent prose and a passable story interrupted too often with exposition about school hazing and its barbarity. I mean, brother, sodomy with a broomstick is enough in its description; you don’t have to have two separate characters in a limited omniscient point of view reflect at the page’s length about how brutal it is. I mean, we don’t get that sort of thing in other murder mysteries, unless I’m missing the entire cockfighting murder mystery subgenre (Well, I wouldn’t say I’m missing it, Bob).

The action builds credibly once you get past the editorials against high school hazing and the meticulous recounting of other incidents nationwide (almost requiring end notes). Until we get to the extraordinary double deus ex maquina at the end, where someone else sums up the story and lays it at our investigator’s feet and someone else appears to get the investigators out of the climactic jam at the end. Unsatisfying.

However, I still like Lupica and will gladly accept any and all gifts of his work in the future.

Books mentioned in this review:

I picked this up at a yard sale or at a book store cheap, much like the MENSA Think Smart Book that I read in 2004.

This book is the same schtick, with chapters on different kinds of puzzles. Unfortunately, this book’s previous owner had penciled in a number of the answers, which really rather spoiled it. I mean, I was trying to prove or disprove those answers instead of answering them myself.

So it’s worth a quick read and a couple pieces of silverage, but for Pete’s sake, open it up and make sure it’s unmarked. Don’t fall prey to the same problem I did. Unfortunately, the next time I pick up one of these books used, I’ll not remember to do that, ultimately proving that I am not MENSA material.

Books mentioned in this review:

 

Oh, my God, they killed Rush Limbaugh.

Well, maybe it’s not really supposed to be Rush, but a national radio/media figure is strung up in Paradise, Mass, and that means Jesse Stone has to figure out who did it. It’s a decent enough crime fiction piece, but it’s padded out with the Stone/Randall era Parker relationship musings.

Unfortunately, whereas the Susan Silverman/Spenser stories have 30+ years of real novels to work through, where the relationship was often secondary and vividly lived in Spenser’s adventures, in the Stone series the Jesse/Jenn Stone issues are actually co-hosts (and, apparently, the Sunny Randall/Richie issues are special guest stars). Stone, his lovers, his shrink, his co-workers, and pretty much all of the eastern seaboard represented in this book spend an awful lot of time talking about not understanding what’s wrong with Stone and his “love” for his ex-wife.

Which almost ruins a decent crime fiction story.

You know, if it evolved as small portions of the books or if the crises were lived out instead of talked out, I wouldn’t mind so much. But these Stone novels really do amp up the worst portions of the Spenser novels. As though the fans were saying, “More psychobabble, less detection.”

But I still buy all the latest Robert B. Parker books new.

Books mentioned in this review:

So here’s a book about an elite assassin named Rinker coming to St. Louis to settle some old scores. I can relate to that.

So this is the second book in a row featuring a female assassin out to avenge the loss of her family (see also Dirty Work). In this case, it’s a woman whose boyfriend and the father of her child are killed in an apparent hit in Mexico. As he belonged to a crime family, the common knowledge is that he was the target, but the woman bolts and returns to America. She, an elite assassin, was the target. Now that she’s lost the baby and her lover, she wants to end the war her way.

So she makes her way to St. Louis, where she had been a hired gun for some organized crime figures. Since she had once danced with Lucas Davenport (in an earlier book, no doubt), he comes to St. Louis to help the FBI track her.

She goes on a pretty good tear, shooting her enemies and hanging out in my current environs, but then she kills an FBI agent, and they turn serious.

Come on, I was reading the book not so much for the plot at that point, but to see how well Sandford did with St. Louis. He spent some time here, that’s for certain, because he gets most of the details right. The better he did, though, the more the game became to spot the inaccuracies. Like when Davenport talks about the town of Ladue, as though the municipality were anything but a suburb. Or when he continually capitalizes the C in Laclede’s Landing. Or, most egregiously, when someone rushing out of Soulard gets onto I-44 instead of I-55. Silly Minnesotan!

So it was more fun than playing pin-the-fakery-on-the-Randisi.

So I liked the book enough; as you know, gentle reader, I’m becoming a minor Sandford fan. However, like the aforementioned Dirty Work, the book ends somewhat poorly. There’s a murder at the Botanical Gardens, an improbable escape and recovery, and then even more of an improbable final act that ends in the death of the elite female assassin. But it won’t stop me from reading further Sandfords, which is fortunate; this book represents the earliest of the three or four my beautiful wife gave me for Christmas, and I have to read what’s on the shelves.

Books mentioned in this review:

  

I inherited this book from my aunt who died in 2005. She was probably not a big Stuart Woods fan, but rather a purchaser of books at yard sales who hoped to make money on them on eBay. Which is good, because this book then doesn’t reflect poorly upon her tastes.

The book centers on a series character, Stone Barrington, a lawyer who doesn’t work in the courtroom but rather as a fixer. He hires an inept camera man to photograph a husband in flagrante delecto, but the photographer falls through the skylight and lands on the husband, who has been murdered by a superstar assassin. What’s more, he’s taken the only photo of her known to exist. But Barrington is in trouble for his lackey’s presumed killing of the husband.

Well, then we get British Intelligence involved and the New York Police Department (Barrington, former NYPD himself, has a friend on the force who accompanies him through much of the novel). Barrington jets to the Caribbean to retrieve the bail-jumping photog and arranges a face-to-face meeting with the assassin, and re-beds a member of British Intelligence. It’s clear we’re not dealing with a depth of characterization here, but really a plot that moves along quickly and provides a nice read.

I even pointed out to some people while reading this book that you can shelve some characterization when you’ve got a well-paced plot that drives action forward. It’s forgiveable, I said. It’s light reading.

Until….

200 some pages into the book and the story could have concluded. But no, the events had to hinge upon a random event in the Caribbean. Not a coincidence, but a it’s sick cousin the contrivance. With this contrivance, the story continued and eventually denouementated in a rather unsatisfying fashion.

I was with it for about 2/3 of the book, and the remainder was painful.

I won’t go out of my way to pick up any new Stuart Woods, but I’m afraid I might have another of Woods’s work in the pile here. I mean, I am not angry, merely sad, and perhaps another book that handles its plot better would revive my interest. But if you’ve got a plot-driven book and the plot makes the reader say, “Oh, come on,” you’re in trouble.

But hey, you can buy it in paperback here:

Books mentioned in this review:

As I mentioned in my review for Assassin of Gor, I bought this book at Patten Books to round out my collection of early Gor paperbacks. I paid $3.95 for it, which indicates how much I enjoy the fantasy series so far.

It’s fitting, I suppose, that I read this the most immediately after Assassin of Gor, as this book is the prequel. In it, Earthman is grabbed while camping by a spaceship and taken to a castle-like home of his father, another Earthman taken to Gor. He’s trained to be a Gorean warrior and is sent to the city of Ar to steal its home stone and to reduce its strength in the eyes of the other city-states on Gor before it becomes the dominant nation.

The book is shorter than the later ones in the series, and it reads almost as a tentative dip into the fantasy milieu. At the end, Tarl Cabot is returned to Earth and wonders if he’ll ever see Gor again. Of course, with forty years since the first novel in the series and twenty some years and twenty some novels gone by, we know he will. Still, I found it interesting to see the first try. And I’ve got number 2 around here somewhere; I know Ko-Ro-Ba, Cabot’s home city, will fall and Talena, his love, will be taken somewhere on Gor, but I don’t know how. Which is worth finding out.

The new (!) editions below are expensive; if you look around, you can find these books for a couple dollars each in used bookstores (in different editions). Yes, they’re paperbacks, but take it from your gentle author Brian J. that there are few authors for whom he’ll spend green on the paper. Norman is proving to be one. John D. MacDonald is the other.

Books mentioned in this review:

 

This represented the rarest pleasure: An Ed McBain book that I hadn’t read before. I’ve read most of the 1980s/1990s/2000s Ed McBain books more than once. So even if I don’t recognize the title, a moment will come when I’m reading the book that I’ll click into recognition. And I’ll keep reading the book because I like Ed McBain.

This book, again, travels to the 87th Precinct, where a new black mayor has been elected. Of course, this would be the beginning of the Dinkins era in New York. You remember that, don’t you? No? Well, Giuliani sort of cleaned the town up and made the city safe enough that it could worry about banning smoking and trans fats. So when I read these books, I tie them to New York history of the time.

The book centers on a woman who has two murder attempts on her life. She goes to the police, and they track down the attempted murderer–her husband’s ex driver. In the meantime, the husband has hired an out-of-town private detective to protect her. But when the attempted murderer is murdered, the plot thickens. It looks like the husband might have hired the driver to kill his wife, but if he did, why did he hire an out-of-town private detective to protect her? We all see where it’s going, and I stayed on to watch it unfold under the masterful direction of Mr. McBain. I almost got the twist at the end, too.

Meanwhile, Kling has broken up with someone, so we know where the book fits in the sequence from that, and Steve Carella’s father’s murderer is brought to trial, so we know where it fits in the sequence from that. So even though I hadn’t read this particular volume, I still felt in touch with the master narrative.

Frankly, it’s encouraging to find a McBain book I didn’t read before; it means that not everything on my to-read shelves of known quality is a rerun.

Books mentioned in this review:

In July (2006), I read In Someone’s Shadow to my son. Since then, we’ve been working on the innumerable inscrutable complete works of Emily Dickinson. So, to give him a break after a hundred or so, I read him this collection. Most of it, anyway.

Compared to Dickinson, McKuen is a breeze to read. I’ve done my share of coffee shop open mikes, so I’m familiar with the flavor of easy, first person emotional free verse. I understand the line breaks and can read them aloud with the self-conscious and self-important air of the turtle-necked hipster. That doesn’t make the poetry any better. As a matter of fact, it detracts.

Overall, although many of Dickinson’s pieces are riven with weird capitals, unfathomable line breaks, and often run to the simplistic, they’re built on imagery often whereas McKuen’s, like other poems by free versers of the era and all juvenile journaler poets moving into the English programs of today, rely upon the biographical poet narrator saying I did this or I did that or I loved you or I served in Korea. Sure, it’s cathartic for the poet narrator and it can speak to a subset of people who share your experiences directly, but the words don’t evoke the emotion through imagery. They report it in the idiom of the day.

Ultimately, it explains why so many Rod McKuen books are available at book fairs, I suppose.

(Oh, my, and I bought so many volumes at the Carondolet Y Book Fair this year. It’s going to be a long year of poetry-reading, gentle reader.)

Books mentioned in this review:

 

No doubt, I picked this book up because I thought it was a compendium of true cases (back in the old days, I hoped to write for DamnInteresting.com and expected I would need constant pointers to interesting cases). But, no, this book is a collection of short fiction collected from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and was edited by the Director of Marketing for those two brands. Trying to extend the brand, you see, into some hardcover publishing dollars since Ellery Queen aren’t churning out the books like they used to.

The anthology collects its stories from a number of decades, so some seem dated (not that I disprove), but others are remarkably contemporary. As you might have noticed, gentle reader, I’ve returned to a fondness for short fiction because it lends itself to easy truncation of a night’s reading when I need to go to bed. Forgive me that I don’t enumerate the stories here, but I’m lazy. Overall, the book was entertaining and short and worth the buck I paid for it. There you go.

Books mentioned in this review:

I bought this book for a buck at some book fair this year. I don’t think I’ve read any Mike Royko since high school. Many people of Internet age won’t know who Royko is, as they’re steeped in Internet stars like James Lileks, Mark Steyn, Andrew Sullivan, and whatnot. The era of the mega columnist, with a string of syndication papers and inane commentary, left behind those like Royko, who seemed more of a Metro columnist than a humorist or a commentariat.

I mean, who does this any more? Here in St. Louis, there’s Bill McClellan and the black guy. I don’t know if either of them has written a book, but I tell you something, in 20 years, I won’t have ever gotten a copy and I won’t read it with pleasure.

Sure, Royko is what some would call a bleeding heart. But it’s a very communitarian liberalism. He came from humble origins and kept the blue collar edge in his writing. I can sympathize with blue collar origins in a rust belt city. So although he obviously doesn’t like Ronald Reagan, he doesn’t alienate readers who perhaps don’t.

This was Royko’s last collection published in his lifetime. Man, if I had known that would have read this with a sad, sepia overtone.

Recommend it? Yes. Read more Royko. He’s amusing, short, and often right even when he’s left.

Books mentioned in this review:

Heather gave me this book for Christmas along with a number of earlier Hiaasen novels because she knew that I enjoyed (see also Strip Tease, Skinny Dip, and Basket Case).

This book, however, suffers from the same slow start that stifled Strip Tease. Unfortunately, it has a slow middle and a slow end, too. Whereas the normal whacky Hiaasen characters come out of the Florida backwoods to amuse, ultimately, interact. We have a half Seminole on the run from his own demons and the ghost of an unfortunate tourist whose body he sunk in the swamp; a philandering ne’er-do-well telemarketing salesman and the mistress who’s above him; an activist and off-kilter single mother seeking revenge against the telemarketer for interrupting her dinner; a lecherous man lusting for the single mother; the ex-husband of the single mother; a private detective trailing the telemarketer; and so on.

Unfortunately, the book doesn’t have a real central plot; instead, we’re following along a set of subplots that will intersect on a small Florida key. When we finally got the whole crew onto the key, I thought it would be a quick resolution, but I still had 100 pages left, and I was disappointed.

The book isn’t Hiaasen’s best, and it’s definitely the weakest of the four books I’ve read so far. Heather was disappointed at my disappointment, but I tried to reassure her that one book had to be the worst. I hope this one was.

Books mentioned in this review:

 
 
 

This oversized book offers 52 individual projects that it claims you can do over a weekend and groups them by season. The difficulty of the projects ranges just about from sweeping your basement to building a summer cottage, but they all run about 3-5 pages, some with illustrations. Most of the projects offer only a high level overview, really, of what you’d do, and most offer pointers to others in the series (also by Dan Ramsey) for further details.

Still, this book is supposed to be an inspirer; you’re supposed to get ideas about what’s possible and then either try something or get a more detailed set of instructions and then try something. Although I didn’t find any projects that fit for my house, the very brevity of the chapters reminds one that it’s not that hard to do most of these things. It takes a bit of planning and a bit of time, but it’s not surgery.

Recommend the book? If you can pick it up for a couple of silver pieces at a book sale, sure, or if you can borrow it from the library. I don’t know that it’s worth the shipping and handling for an Internet buy, though, but in case you feel differently, here’s a handy link to Amazon:

Books mentioned in this review:

I bought this book at Webster Groves Book Shop for full price, gentle reader; yea, verily, I spent $13.95 plus tax on this book whereas I could have bought it online for the low, low price noted below or some smaller price at a chain bookstore because I live in a smaller town now (surrounded by St. Louis suburbs) and need to support the local merchants. Why, my very wife suggested I write down the ISBN numbers of books I was interested in so we could order them online, but I resisted, because I don’t think that’s playing fair to the small content stores we were frequenting that day. I did, however, put down most of the $60 in books I’d picked up since I already own thousands of unread books already.

But I did buy this one, especially since its back cover promised:

A nature book unlike any other, Jordan Fisher Smith’s startling account of fourteen years as a park ranger thoroughly dispels our idealized visions of life in the great outdoors. Instead of scout troops and placid birdwatchers, Smith’s beat–a stretch of land that has been officially condemned to be flooded–brings him into contact with drug users tweaked out to the point of violence, obsessed miners, and other dangerous creatures. In unflinchingly honest prose, he reveals the unexpectedly dark underbelly of patrolling and protecting public lands.

That and the title promised me something the book was not.

For starters, allow me to say that the writing is good. It’s vivid, it describes something that I haven’t seen well enough that I want to see it. However, it’s themetically vapid.

It sounds as though the book is designed so that it will describe a lot of encounters with bad men and thrilling pursuits in the wilderness. The first chapter itself lends itself to that, with an encounter with a drug-addled badman who, after a party on the beach, tries to throw a baby through a car window after an argument with the baby’s mother (driving the car). After a brief search, the rangers find the man when he wanders back onto the beach and collapses of an overdose. This, the first chapter, provides most of the excitement of the book.

Afterwards, the chapters include incidents that serve as springboards into the author’s opinion on environmentalism as filtered through the California state bureaucracy. The actual noir incidents occur in the flashbacks of reports to which author had access, and the book presents them in reverse order of their excitement. The author talks to someone who is following up on a cold case featuring a sheriff’s deputy who might have killed his wife and buried her in the park. The author goes on into the history of his current station, scheduled to be underwater when they build a new dam, and then the chapter is over, with nothing resolved. He only talked to the guy opening the cold case and looking for the grave of the missing wife.

When the author has a woman claim rape from a miner in the park, and the miner is beaten within inches of his life by the woman’s boyfriend, the author goes into the history of mining and the impact of the gold rush on the natural area around the park. Oh, yeah, the woman’s boyfriend might be making meth in an abandoned mine. The author fills in the appropriate papers and turns it over to the sheriff’s deputies, but he doubts anything will be done.

And so on, and so forth. About 100 pages in, I realized that the book I’d expected, based on the title and the back cover, were not forthcoming. I turned to the acknowledgements and saw someone told the author he could make a good essay out of his experiences. Hell, yes, he could have, but it’s a heck of a stretch in a memoir termed noir and promising encounters with bad men. Instead, I was treated to a number of chapters describing the history of the particular park and a subtle indictment of civilization for impacting the beauty of nature.

Aw, screw it. Or so I think the author said about chapter 10 (“Weak as Water”). Following some reminisce of accompanying parents of a drowned boy to the site where he drowned (not actually the drowning itself, which the author was nearly present for, but the accompanying of the parents to the site later), the author writes chapter 11 about a trip to an abandoned camp of a miner who was ornery. Before the camp was abandoned. Never mind, the scenery is lush and the trip to the camp mildly exciting as we read about damming upstream and its impact on the whitewater river impacted by miners in the previous century. But the camp is abandoned. And then we get the unvarnished rant.

In chapter 11, the ranger gets Lyme disease and abandons his dentist and job, and not in that order. Or maybe in that order. Lyme disease mucks with the narrative, and I was skimming. I mostly skipped the Epilogue, whereing the Mighty Heroes of California Environmentalism blocked continuation of the dam (putting Sacramento at risk, but from the chapter where the author recounts his fruitless search for a missing woman and the history of a flood that threatened Sacramento, I know he’d rather Sacramento drown than The Wilderness be spoiled). Maybe it did. I don’t even think I skimmed the last bit of the epilogue.

Well, there you have it. The book disappointed me greatly. I expected some dynamic tension of the ranger as a hallmark of civilization in the wild, cognizant of the folly of modern man and sentimental for the disappearing wilderness, but this fellow seems to root against civilization. Period. Also, let it be said that the Mariners trade paperback edition is on cheap paper and oddly enough smells of a freshly sharpened pencil every time I open it. I’m savaging this book especially on the account of the publishers who sent me into a genre I wouldn’t like. I liked the sound of the book from its title and its back cover so much I almost bought the book next to it at Webster Groves Book Shop because it sounded similar, but with a different bent. But thanks to this book, I’m leary of dabbling in this genre again. I bought this book in late November and bought it a month later–that’s phenomenal by MfBJN standards. But this one tome might have killed my interest in the genre of modern ranger novels.

In a personal note for Jordan Fisher Smith when he Googles himself: Dude, you write well, and I hope your Lyme disease is better. I didn’t like your book.

Books mentioned in this review:

After reading Ancient, My Enemy, I was in the mood for some more science fiction short stories from the silver age of science fiction. This collection, apparently the 14th from the heydey of Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine (now back in print, apparently).

Okay, the book collects 17 short stories into 251 pages of reading, not counting the introduction that explains why it’s all relevant. It’s good enough short stories, and as I look over the titles, I can remember them after a week. Only one, “The House by the Crab Apple Tree” by S.S. Johnson, will stick with me at all.

Each story also includes what I suspect is the original intro bio bit from the magazine. It’s interesting how many of the writers really were journeymen, dashing off short stories for a tolerable existence. A couple of them are remembered today, but most aren’t. Probably only one or two of them made a really comfortable life of it. Such is the life of a real writer who has to do it for a living and not some dilettante writing short stories for fun. Today, those journeymen are working as business writers, copy writers, and technical writers, so their fame and recognition will be far more fleeting than the sales circulars and software manuals they’re producing as their life’s work.

Don’t get me started on the life of backwater bloggers whose daily hit totals have dipped under 100 again.

Thanks for reading, and come back tomorrow for more Christmas cheer the MfBJN way!

Books mentioned in this review:

Through some strange quirk of fate or ill-done packing when we moved, this book ended up on my to read shelves even though it became clear when I started it that I’d read it before. That didn’t stop me from reading it again, though, so that counts as a testament to my enjoyment of Gordon R. Dickson’s short fiction.

This book collects some of Dickson’s work from the 1950s and the 1960s, including:

• “Ancient, My Enemy”: A prospector on a distant planet who finds that one of the primitive members of the regressed native civilization has found him to be an ancient enemy.
• “The Odd Ones”: A pair of intergalactic observers and philosophers who try to glean the meaning and morality of a pair of humans they encounter.
• “The Monkey Wrench”: A Venutian ne’er do well hides from his socialite wife in a remote meteorological outpost and enters a risky bet with a former classmate.
• “Tiger Green”: A ship and its crew become ensnared by a jungle and confounded by the natives who live in it. The four who resist a strange madness struggle to understand its source and save themselves.
• “The Friendly Man”: A time traveller from the past reaches a distant future and finds a friendly man awaiting him. Suspiciously friendly.
• “Love Me True”: A soldier faces trouble when he brings back a ferret-like pet from a distant planet. As he should.
• “Our First Death”: The first death in a colony threatens to destroy it.
• “To the Bone”: A human explorer finds an extraterrestrial vehicle on an outlying planet, only to have that vehicle destroy his ship and survival gear. The extraterrestrial intelligence underestimates the nature and ability of man at his most primitive.
• “The Bleak and Barren Land”: A Colonial Representative, banished from earth and sent to a backwater planet, must handle the conflict between an advanced and inscrutable native race and the first shipload of authorized colonists on the planet.

A quick and interesting read, these stories remind me of my youth when I ate up simple science fiction stories like this. Again, like the last Andy Rooney book I read, this reminds me of the kinds of things that inspired me to become a writer. Perhaps if I spend more time with them, they’ll inspire me to keep writing.

Books mentioned in this review: