Category: Book Report

I probably inherited this book from my aunt, and I selected it because I’m a sucker for book of list sorts of things and other capsulated books where I can browse and pick up trivial knowledge. Like who Beethoven thought was the best composer ever, and so on. Of course, I’m not going to tell you the answer. If you want to know, you’ll just have to wait for the question to come my way in competition, and hope you’re snacking on pretzel rods at my table in trivia night and not sitting across the table from me, rubbing your unused pie pieces like Captain Queeg.

The book crosses into some gauche territory, with its descriptions of how to best butcher and prepare human flesh for consumption, and into some unintentionally tragic territory, such as awarding Worst Office Building Honors to the World Trade Center. But it’s a good bit of reading, amusing, and unfortunately not something to take as gospel. For its text describes the worst sport, which the Aztecs of Peru….. Well, never you mind, it still provides authoritative answers to unasked trivia questions which might prove true.

But not the Aztecs of Peru.

I bought this book last summer for $4.95 because I didn’t think I was getting enough science fiction in my diet and because I think Ringworld was one of the best science fiction novels I’ve read (and Lucifer’s Hammer/Footfall wasn’t a bad novel, either). So I felt safe buying a collection of Larry Niven short stories. So comfortable, I bought the follow-up collection, Playgrounds of the Mind, at the same time. At $10 for the pair, it was like a penny a page.

The book begins with an introduction by Tom Clancy, who was quite the hot writer at the time. The book collects not only short stories, but also: novel excerpts (which I skipped); introductions to the short stories that provided insight into the science fiction writer’s life of conventions, collabaration, and research; and nonfiction detritus including reminisces about colloquia and assorted musings. In short, it’s a book I’d like to collect someday.

Unfortunately, I found the collection long and daunting. The nonfiction bits really didn’t add much to the stories, and since I bought the book because I am a fan of Larry Niven’s writing and not Larry Niven, I thought they watered the pieces down quite a bit. Some of the stories run fairly long, too, so it wasn’t like a normal collection of stories which allow for quick bits of reading in short time frames. Granted, that flaw simply fits into what I was looking for and is not inherent within the book.

It’s a good enough collection, with evocative, imaginitive riffs with enough hard science to back them up. But I won’t read Playgrounds of the Mind immediately.

One interesting note about the colloquium I mentioned above: it took place in 1980-1981, and it involved a number of scientists, space-thinkers, and science fiction writers putting together a policy paper to submit to the Reagan administration. 1980. The Shuttle program was coming online, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and Battlestar Galactica (okay, BSG1980, which never happened as far as I am concerned) were just going off the air, and man had walked on the moon less than ten years before. It pains me how little we’ve progressed since then, and if I could go back in time to tell them how little the space program and space exploration would progress in the next quarter century, they would probably think I was an agent of an increasingly desperate Soviet Union determined to sap their morale.

Where has that societal optimism gone?

When I saw this Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book at the library for a quarter, I knew I had to have it. I mean, sure, it’s a children’s book, but what child in 2005 reads anymore, and how can they understand what it meant to the previous generation? I mean, I’ve got the equivalent of the title character in my closet because it’s no longer powerful enough to run the latest operating systems.

No, you damn kids, you’ve always had computers and game consoles. I remember reading this particular volume as a boy in the housing projects. We couldn’t afford an Atari, much less the Tandys displayed in the Sunday paper color inserts. Granted, I had no exposure to real computers or even Ataris at that point, but I read lots of books, and computers seemed cool.

So in that world without video games, we had Choose Your Own Adventures. You get a page or two introductory text and a question of what you would do next. Each question had two or more answers with pointers to other pages, and you would flip to the page of your chosen action and continue with another page or so of action before coming to another decision. CYOA were the FPS of the first Reagan Administration, werd. Each book had numerous paths and 20 or so different endings, some happy and some not, and sometimes the action was recursive, but each book allowed you to read it a couple of different ways and a couple of different times. By the time all was said and done, really you only had a short story sized text, but it was an interesting means of passing time. Choose Your Own Adventures were the most popular line, but other publishers picked up the concept.

This particular adventure begins when you win a computer-programming (note the quaint hyphen!) contest and receive a Genecomp A1 32 sixth generation computer, serial number 2183 and answering to the name Conrad. Conrad’s no ordinary computer; his artificial intelligence can make you millions of dollars, make you happy for a brief moment, or help you communicate with the Soviet premier or bottle-nosed dolphons.

Yeah, I bought it, and I read through it a couple of times for old time’s sake. Of course, we don’t name our computers anymore (HAL, Edgar, Conrad, you were doomed by the 1990s), but these books inspired my imagination. When I finally got access to an old Apple II through school, 20 input "What would you like to do now?" closely followed 10 print "Hello, world!" (DRL! Maybe that’s Commodore 64’s BASIC 2.0 and not AppleBasic).

So is it worth the quarter? I reckon if you’re an old school geek. You might be able to sucker a kid into reading it, but he or she will find this particular book in the series more dated than others.

I bought this book at A Clean, Well Lighted Place for Books for $4.98 because, let’s face it, I was binging. But I’m better now, and I’ve almost finished all the books I bought there on Saturday, so it all balances out sort of.

This book was written by one of the guys behind the Worst Case Scenario Handbook, which is apparently a whole brand now. Since Borgenicht wrote it with his brother and the book’s title lacks “Worst Case Scenario,” I assume he didn’t retain control of the brand he helped create. Still, the book follows along the same format. Situation, and how you should solve it. For example, you want to spy proof your room, interrogate a suspect, rescue someone who’s hanging off of a cliff, or climb down the face of Mount Rushmore. You see, unlike the disasters in the WCS books, these doomsdays are man-made, and you’re the only one who can save the world.

Amusing and perhaps slightly informative, but sometimes outlandish and fictionesque, particularly the Paranormal section (How to Predict the Future, How to Fend Off A Ghost, and so on). Still, it’s a good read when spaced out over the course of a couple of days, with a couple of lessons per sitting. Like information gleaned from the WCS books, I’m glad to know some of these things are possible (How to Escape a Sinking Cruise Ship) so I’ll be a little more confident if I encounter the situation; of course, by then, I will have forgotten the details and the book will be on the bookshelf instead of in my pocket, so ultimately it won’t be helpful. Just entertaining.

I read this book mostly during a bus ride through Sonoma. Its familiarity–I’d seen most of these stories as episodes–, its dearth of character development, and its short story format continue to make it easy to read this book in short bursts.

The stories include:

• Who Mourns for Adonais?, the Apollo one.
• The Changeling

  The story with Nomad, the little probe that could destroy–whose plot was recycled as Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

• The Paradise Syndrome, where Kirk becomes a shaman named Kirok.
• Metamorphosis, which introduces Zefrim Cochrane of Alpha Centauri, who becomes Zefrim Cochrane of Earth in Star Trek: First Contact.
• The Deadly Years, where away team visitors get a radiation sickness that abnormally ages the away team, er, landing party. Sorry, I got confused, but this happened to Dr. Pulaski in Star Trek: The Next Generation, too.
• Elaan of Troyius, where the attractive barbarian woman with chemically-attractive tears doesn’t want to marry the prince on another planet to stop the bloody wars between the two, so she cries all over Kirk.

You see, you old school geeks, you’re nodding along because you know which episodes I’m talking about–some of you even know the episode numbers, the air dates, and their star dates.

It’s interesting to note, as I often do, about how much younger the protagonists were in the 50s and 60s. Rarely did they breach the dreaded thirty barrier. Now, any protagonist under thirty means you’re reading one of those angst-ridden 20 something sleep-around literary novels. In the genres, the characters are typically older and wiser.

I bought this book along with the other MacDonald paperbacks that I have been reading lately at Downtown Books in Milwaukee for $1.95. Good stuff.

It’s another business world kind of book, like A Man of Affairs. Gevan Dean hasn’t been home in a number of years, not since he walked away from the family business and the family after his brother steals his fiancee. The Florida playboy comes back home after someone murders his brother, and he finds the family business in shambles. When the local attorney comes forward too quickly with a proxy statement so Gevan can sign over control of the company, Gevan becomes suspicious and uncovers corruption and espionage whose discovery led to his brother’s death–and might lead to Gevan’s.

This book mixes crime fiction and the business maneuvering more than A Man of Affairs. It was a pleasant read and quick, good for an airline trip to San Francisco. Also, since it’s a paperback, it fits easily into the backpack.

A note about the dual dates in the title: this edition of the text is a revision of the original, and the revised text is copyright 1961. The particular printing comes from 1988. I don’t know that you care, but I do like to include it anyway. Because I am a bibliophile.

I know, I know. I’ve read a book based on the Darwin Awards, which is a Web phenomenon. I bought Philip Kaplan’s book, even though his site right there on the blogroll. I read a complete book of Urban Legends even though Snopes is on the blogroll, too. So it should not shock you, gentle reader, that I bought this book when I found it on the discount rack at A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books in San Francisco this weekend. Face it, I like reading the Internet when someone else prints and binds it for me.

The book Jump the Shark distills the Web site. The author picks a number of classic and recognized television shows and identifies a single moment where the show turned its corner and began its inevitable slide into mediocrity and from thence to DVD releases (although, when the site was created in 1997, who could have known how big those re-releases would be?).

The book devotes about 90 pages to television shows, so it selects from the Web site’s extensive catalog. Then the book begins applying the concept to music bands…. and celebrities…. sports teams…. politics….

So I give kudos to the book for going beyond the Web site. The reflections on when bands lost their edges was fun (and prompted my beautiful wife of six years to snatch it from my hands to read on a flight).

However, perhaps the extension of the metaphor to political personages and to political concepts was ill-advised. Communism jumped the shark with the fall of the Berlin Wall? So the purges, the famines, and the deaths of millions didn’t register, but the made-for-television images and the pageantry of what might be called the final episode of Soviet Influence did. Hmm, that seems ill-advised. Suddenly, we’ve tripped from light humor into places where this reader wants to sniff a slight political bias from the author who lives in New York with his wife and two kids. I didn’t buy this book to sniff for political biases, nor to consider politics at all within the confines of this book.

So did this book, well, leap the mako? Not really. The short vignettes and page-or-so treatments made it an easy read, perfect for travel time or for those moments you can snatch during the day. It distills the Web site’s often nebulous comments into succinct snark, but one should read the throwaway-trivia and asides with some skepticism. I found one blatant error in the book and a couple of asides that don’t jog with my memory. But overall, the experience is positive, worth the five dollars I spent so that I could clutch its covers with white-knuckled eagerness instead of the arms of the airplane seat.

I bought this book at A Clean Well Lighted Place for books in San Francisco. It was on the discount table for $4.98, and I thought I would get enough mockery out of it to make it worth my fin. I was probably wrong.

The full title of the book is I Can’t Fight This Feeling: Timeless Poems for Lovers from the Pop Hits of the ’70s and ’80s. The book collects a bunch of lyrics from 1970s and 1980s pop fare, imposes arbitrary and dare I say “Random?” line breaks upon them, and calls them poetry. When coupled with music, some of these songs are enjoyable, potentially meaningful three minute vignettes into poetry that I laughed at in high school. Ah, high school, when I worked as editor of the school literary magazine, whose mockery would keep bad poets out of print; now that I am an adult, the only person’s poems that I can keep out of print are my own and I can only do that by submitting them to every poetry magazine from Poetry to Highlights for Children. What was I talking about?

Oh, yes, this book. The introduction is not from the editor, but from some obscure pilot, Fred Schnieder of the B-52s. He explains that these really are poems. The rest of the book refutes his assertion. Because, folks, let’s just face it: poems use images to evoke emotional response. Pop songs like Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical” or “I Honestly Love You” or Orleans’ “Still the One” or Barry White’s “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe” or Bon Jovi’s “Bad Medicine” don’t rely on images so much as testimony from the poet-narrator. Actually, of all those I listed, “Bad Medicine” comes closest since its very conceit is a metaphor (your love is like bad medicine). Oddly enough, this would mean that Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” is one of the poetical highlights of the book.

The only song of the 35 that would stand alone as a poem–that is, it relies on imagery and has a good internal consistency in its dreamlike surrealism–is “Time After Time” by Cyndi Lauper. Perhaps “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” by Looking Glass would fall into the poem category, seeing as it’s a traditional ballad that tells a story and actually includes images (a braided chain made of finer silver from the north of Spain, etc., etc.). However, unlike other songs in the book I can hear within my head as performed by the original artist, “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” comes with a visual. A former co-worker, soon-to-be the head of the Technical Writing department, admitted that she had been a pom-pom girl in high school, and that after a couple of glasses of wine, she’d be likely to re-enact a routine based on the song. So, gentle reader, I must diss Looking Glass simply because the song can make me imagine a drunken Peggy smiling and kicking and waving imaginary or improvised poms. Although the imagery is the most vivid, I don’t think Looking Glass intended that particular image.

So, I would certainly not recommend this book for you, gentle reader, unless you can find it at a garage sale for a quarter and you can enjoy the absurdity of sharing these poems, read aloud with full Shatner-inflection, with your loved one (or ones, Utah readers). My beautiful wife has taste for poetry and distaste for cheese, so I don’t think I got a full verse of "poetry&quot out before she told me to stop under threat of bodily injury. I don’t the heart, or perhaps other masculine anatomical features, to tell her this was supposed to be her anniversary gift.

Bonus: The only laugh out loud line came from John Waite’s “Missing You”:

stop this heartbreak overload!

Come on, the line’s something best mumbled over when singing the song, which I adore; however, seeing it in print, with an exclamation point, sent me into near hysterics.

As with a number of my other John D. MacDonald books, such as Judge Me Not and On The Run, I fully acknowledge the jonesing with (or jonsing, if I need to drop the silent e) that drives me to pay $2.00 each for John D. MacDonald paperbacks. I am glad, glad, you hear?

I bought this book at Downtown Books in Milwaukee (the place to go in Milwaukee for used books, werd) for $1.95. John D. MacDonald’s other works, including the Travis McGee series, get reprinted ad infinitum so their prices are cheap. All of his works are worthwhile, though, no matter the cost. Please visit my eBay listings after I make this assertion to drive up the prices….wait–I’m not selling my copies, you damn chiselers.

This particular book represents another of MacDonald’s forays into Big Business. When a junk bond/leveraged buyout king swoops into a family-run business after the patriarch dies, a self-appointed self-made man (the first person narrator) invites himself onto a Bahamas retreat where high finance and human nature collide. The narrator, Sam Glidden, wants to keep the heirs of the owner from selling the company to a corporate raider. But on the holiday in the sane where the sun and the sex are easy, can he hold to his ideals?

Crikes, this book was written almost fifty years ago. With the easy sex and the high finance, I found it easy to forget–and to follow along.

Were I less loyal to my patron saints (Parker, Frost, and Billy Joel, amen), I would find John D. MacDonald’s miracles hard to discount. Each of his books, whether ignored in individual paperbacks or apotheosized in Travis McGee omnibus editions, contains the same ambiguous characters, the same lush descriptions of big business or maritime “salvage,” and the same lush descriptions.

If you stumble across this paperback through a “friendly” loan, steal it. If you find it at a garage sale held by an underfed woman and her dozens of underfed children, buy it. If you can inadvertently purchase it from a reputable used boook store, buy it.

When I grow up, I want to be John D. MacDonald. Although, with LASIK surgery, perhaps I could avoid the heavy plastic glasses frames.

I inherited The Dick Tracy Casebook Selected from my aunt, who undoubtedly bought it at a garage sale to sell on eBay. So I got it free, which explains why I got it, since I’m not a particular fan of the comic strip.

This book collects some representative story arcs from the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Each story arc begins with one of the contemporary (for 1990–who knows what they do now) producers of the comic strip. Each one elevates, to the point of comic apotheosis, the forthcoming collection of black and white panels. Chester Gould at his greatest, this period in Dick Tracy, that period in Dick Tracy. It was a cartoon serial, for crying out loud.

As a serial, each story contains a single plotline. Given the daily nature of the serial, though, a large number of the individual panels sum up the action so far; that is, of a day’s three or four panels, the panel deals with something that has already happened. Indeed, sometimes whole daily strips catch the reader up on the story so far. It gives the stories a particularly recursive feel.

The nature of the storylines also seemed, at times, a little as though Gould was trying to run the stories a little longer until he could maybe get his next idea. Two of the stories run 50 pages; at about the midpoint of the “Crewy Lou” story, the cops had Crewy Lou, but she escaped and a sudden brother decided to spend over a week trying to kill her for the dishonor to her family. And then she conks Tess Trueheart over the head and steals Dick Tracy’s car and spends a week or so driving it through mountains. And so on and on.

Perhaps I’m not the comic connoisseur, but I didn’t dwell over the panels. I didn’t contrast the styles nor depictions of Dick Tracy at times in his career. Nor did I study the character names to determine their underlying meanings. I just read for the story, much like the book’s selectors did when they first read Dick Tracy and quite unlike, so the introductions suggest, the book’s selectors do now that they’re doing it for a living and want to promote the comics as something more than drawings, exposition boxes, and dialog bubbles.

I enjoyed the book, but I won’t subscribe to the paper to receive it, and I won’t run out and collect all sorts of Dick Tracy comic books or collections. There you have it. Besides, I already have too many books on my to-read shelves as it is.

I wanted a good reading copy of The Fountainhead, so I cruised eBay for one. I mean, I have the first edition, but I don’t want to spill beer and danish toppings on it. I also have my first paperback copy from college, but I’m a hardback snob. So I cruised eBay and found a nice International Collector’s Library edition ca 1968, complete with heavy paper, leatheresque binding, and attached ribbon for book marking. Oh, yeah. And for such a low price (shipping and handling extra)!

So once I bought it, I put it on my to read shelf. And now I have read it for the fifth time.

What can I say? I like the book. I read it first, a library copy, before my freshman year of college. I’d been challenged by the startlingly-literate machinist next door to elevate my reading habits if I wanted to be an English major. So I remembered flyers for the ARI’s The Fountainhead essay contest scholarship and figured it was Literature. So I consumed it at the most formative time, that summer when a young man leaves his boyhood home and tries to become a man.

The book seemed very long back then when I was used to 175 page crime thrillers, but now that I have graduated to 1000 page Stephen King books, it seems almost like a quick read. I’m surprised every time how approachable the book is; the book avoids the speechifying that sank Atlas Shrugged. Rand also had a better hero in this book, Howard Roark, with whom the reader struggles throughout the years that pass in their epic sweep.

Howard Roark, architect. He’s thrown out of architecture school for being a nonconformist and has to strive through a series of setbacks to be the man he is and to be an active architect without compromising his ideals. He won’t, of course, because he’s a Randian hero, but it continues to inspire me each time I read the book. So I’ve read it again for the first time in five years, and I’ll read it again in another five years, when I need a reminder of the freshness and vitality I felt and feel about my ideals when I read this book.

It’s not much of a book review, but let the fact that I paid eBay shipping and handling for a copy of this book so I could read it a fifth time speak for me.

I inherited this book, but it is marked fifty cents, so my aunt must have gotten a fairly good deal on it at a yard sale. It’s probably worth that much, but not more.

For those of you who don’t know, you damn kids, Paul Harvey is the Internet for radio. His news programs are full of folksy, mostly true eye-twinkling stories of Americana interspersed with drop ins for macular degeneration medicine and expensive bed systems. Sort of like Charles Brennan’s show on KMOX, except with wit, charisma, and intelligence. Paul Harvey’s The Rest of the Story features longer bits that tell an anecdote or story about a known or unknown historical persona. Once again, the stories Paul Harvey tells are as true as the Internet: probably true, but don’t base a doctoral dissertation on the premise or anecdote.

This book captures 81 stories of that nature. Paul Aurandt, Paul Harvey’s child (not a love child left behind in Indiana, either; Aurandt is Paul Harvey’s last name) collects them, and although I don’t know if it’s really the case, I suspect he wrote them. Did Paul Harvey read them on the air? Who knows? The style, unfortunately, reflects that tone and pacing, though.

Unfortunately, the pacing of a short radio program doesn’t translate well to the page. It’s too short and choppy. I’ve a similar complaint to Charles Osgood for his collections of The Osgood Files. It’s odd, though, that radio doesn’t translate well, whereas television vignettes of similar duration–such as Dennis Miller’s rants or Andy Rooney’s minutes–do. Were I that interested, I would break down and scan the programs for variations in rhythm displayed when the speaker knows he cannot see the audience and they him.

At any rate, the book was a quick read, easy to pick up for a short duration of reading, and engaging in that these stories want you to guess before the conclusion whose story you’re reading. So it’s a short time waster, brain fodder, and probably eighty percent or more accurate.

I bought this book for $5.98 at Barnes and Noble because it looked interesting and because I had a gift card to blow.

It’s a collection of aphorisms and “laws” coined by columnist, commentators, and humorists covering the workplace, and to be honest, covering working for the government in a lot of cases. It’s a quick read, and a lot of the axioms and maxims provide crystallizations of core truths in a handy fashion that allow you to quip them. For example, I’m going to use It’s easier to defend consistency than correctness as soon as possible.

Also, it was a quick read while I work on the longer fiction books that I’m reading. And to let you, gentle readers, that I am still literate.

I inherited this book from my aunt, whose legacy filled my to-read shelves with horror and mystery novels. I’m growing to enjoy Stephen King and Dean Koontz, so their presence in my library is welcome. Stephen King is an American master, truly, whose books will be read hundreds of years in the future assuming 1) people still read books, and 2) all American texts have not been burned.

First of all, this book is a book without antecedent. Not precedent, but antecedent. When I tried talking about it with my beautiful wife during our evening rambles around the subdivisions in our neighborhood, she couldn’t always understand what I was talking about when I referred to It. So I had to say Stephen King’s It, like I was titling the miniseries and hoping the name Stephen King would draw viewers which the title alone would not.

The book is not without its flaws. This comes from King’s Epic period, which spawned The Stand and the beginning of the mercifully-split Dark Tower series. This book weighs in at over 1100 pages, and I hit the AKM (Anna Karenina Moment, wherein the reader realizes he’s read enough to have completed one long novel and realizes that he’s got the equivalent of one or more novels to go–and is tempted to read one or more complete novels instead). The quality of the writing doesn’t suffer, really, but the quantity tends to overwhelm it.

The book deals with seven youths who confront an eldritch, foetid horror in Derry, Maine, in 1958, and when the eldritch, foetid, other-worldly horror resurfaces in 1985, the middle-aged children of Derry return to confront it again without the imagination of youth to protect them from unreality.

I survived the AKM and pressed on. King weaves a lot of detail into the setting, and even the minor characters take on three and sometimes three-and-a-half dimensions. Still, this adds bulk that wouldn’t be afforded to a first-time novelist; agents and editors would bounce this proposal back from anyone but Stephen King. The main characters get their own sections and chapters and great detail. However, I’m not a first time King reader, so I was reading along trying to guess who wouldn’t make it. Life, and King, are cruel that way; just when you get to liking someone, a monster rises from the depths and rips off his or her head.

Still, somewhere after page five hundred pages, the pace picks up and rushes toward a hundred page climax and forty page dénouement. Overall, I’m pleased with the book and even have the strange desire to see the 1990 television movie equivalent which features Tim Curry as Pennywise the Clown–that man has actorial chutzpah.

Still, one has to wonder what Stephen King was thinking when he concocted the plot. Did he say to himself, what this book really needs to drive its theme home is group sex in the sewers among eleven and twelve year olds? Because I could have entirely left that little bit out without really corrupting the story.

All right, so I read this book; I even bought it, although I couldn’t tell you if I bought it at a garage sale or very cheaply at a used bookstore. I bought it, though, because I’ve done needlepoint on plastic mesh before and will do so again before they stop me. Besides, once purchased, it was on my to-read shelves and represented an easy browse to removal. So I flipped through it enough to satisfy my interia criteria for having read a book, and now I’m reporting on it.

The book includes a number of projects one can do with needlepoint taking advantage of the new plastic mesh canvas which apparently came on the marketplace at about that time; the book lists several suppliers and brand names. Now, I walk into Walmart and just buy whatever cheap sheets my Walton cousins stock. But back in the day, undoubtedly this was the hot new technology, like .NET for crafters. The introduction chapter talks about the transition from fabric canvas, and I laughed out loud when I realized that I took for granted a two-step stitch–once down through the canvas and once up–to which fabric crafters, who were used to folding the canvas for a single-step stitch, would have to adjust.

Undoubtedly, Lileks could do a number on the patterns in this book, but I won’t; I will, however, comment that my mother was a Creative Circle representative, and she used to hold Tupperware-style parties to sell patterns, yarns, kits, and whatnot to housewives. This was almost thirty years ago, in the early 1980s, and I remember a certain number of craftesque gifts exchanged and some crafty things around the house and the houses of people whom I visited. Is it just me, or is the number of home-crafted things in decline? I don’t know many of my generation/peerage who sew or do crafts. Acourse, we’re all geeks who spin yarns called computer programs and the assorted effluvia of the IT industry, so perhaps my perspective is skewed.

So what did this book gain me? I have a listing of other stitches I can use on plastic canvases. I don’t think I’ll use the patterns within it, nor did they particularly fire my imagination for projects. I did, however, finish book #31 for the year, and I still have the collection of Dick Tracy cartoons in reserve for if I fall behind my desired pace.

As some of you know, I recently bought this book on Amazon for like full price because its description indicated the book echoed themes I’ve raised before on this blog. And so it does.

Some people get a chill from horror novels. I’m working on Stephen King’s It, and a killer clown in the sewers bothers me less than The Three Billy Goats Gruff did back in the day. When I want to self-impose fear, I pick up a book like this.

The book runs 150 pages, which includes extensive end notes. It comprises an introduction and six essays. The essays do tend to focus on crimes that companies or more powerful people could commit–environmental crimes, medical crimes, violations of business laws. Of course, these sorts of crimes would certainly interest the contributors to the CATO Institute, who put this book together. Although I’m not planning to do any industrial dumping, the implications of these new classes of crimes frightened me enough when I realized that charges for these crimes can apply to the individual as well as the corporation if a prosecutor or law enforcement official wants them to do so. Black magick.

Two other essays in the book deal with:

• Project Exile, which allowed for federal enforcement of gun law violations; although I started the essay disagreeing with the premise that Project Exile was bad (hey, how could it be bad to keep guns from felons?), the essay convinced me. The government’s goal is worthy, but its tactics are frightening. Spending federal money to hire federal prosecutors to prosecute essentially local crimes and do nothing else leads to creative, aggressive pursuit of the goal. High conviction rates don’t necessarily mean success; they could mean creative application of the process and law in pursuit of the goal.
• Federal Sentencing Guidelines, the Byzantine set of documentation that dictates how federal judges must impose sentences based on complex computations established by an unelected commission. The essay explains how this came about and its effects, including creative fact-bargaining and prosecutors holding back evidence from the trial to present during sentencing to increase the perpetrator’s time.

The book didn’t touch too much on layering–the prosecution of the same crime at many levels of government–although it did mention it. Also, it didn’t touch on nonsense measures that outlaw things that offend vocal minorities, hate crimes, or the criminalization of non-criminal acts that criminals sometimes perform as precursor or part of another crime. Perhaps it’s just as well this book didn’t take on those topics; I’m having enough trouble sleeping as it is.

Tone of the book is reasoned essay, unlike stream-of-consciousness screeds you get out of popular broadcast journalists who write political books. These essays build cases and take their time to get to the conclusion. Many of them are actually condensed from longer pieces. So it’s not a quick read, but it’s a thoughtful book, and since it’s only 150 pages, it’s a good week of reading.

Now I’ve read the book, I just need to be an influential about the ideas presented.

I inherited this book from my Aunt Dale; I don’t know if this was her personal copy or if she bought it to sell on eBay, but I do know that she liked Ed McBain, or at least owned one or more of his books; I remember in particular that I read her copy of Lightning when I was young and impressionable.

This collection includes, oddly enough, three of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels: Fuzz (1968), Jigsaw (1970), and Hail, Hail, The Gang’s All Here (1971). That’s right, McBain (or Hunter, if you prefer) has been writing these books for fifty years now, and to a certain demographic, the books haven’t aged too badly.

I mean, of course, to people from Generation X and before, these books have aged well. We remember computers coming into the fore in our lifetimes; before that, typewriters. Criminey, I wrote my first couple of college papers on an old Smith Corona before I could spring the thousands of dollars (with a loan, no less) for the 286-10 running MS-DOS 5.0 and LotusWorks that would last the rest of my college career). So these stories, which feature cops handwriting forms and typing on typewriters, remain relevant and undated to me. I pity writers now (myself included) whose crime fiction will seemingly be ever dated from this point on–what, he was typing on a computer and not just intuiting through the Gibsonterface?

These three novels are short; the whole book runs under 500 pages. But that’s something else I remember: novels running under 200 pages each. Now, the publishers think you’ll wilt if you spend $30 on fewer than 350 pages. Come to think of it, I would, too. Perhaps hardback publishers are pricing themselves out of the entertainment marketplace by keeping their book prices in line with that of video games.

But I digress.

These three novels represent not only McBain’s deftness, but the power of the third person narrator. Because these books don’t rely on a single character’s viewpoint, McBain has more latitude to try different things than, say, a first person narrator writer like Robert Crais.

The novels appear in this book in reverse chronological order (hence, pardon me while I discuss them in the opposite order in which they appear in the book). Fuzz depicts a series of assassinations in the city perpetrated by the Deaf Man, who will become the 87th Precinct’s nemesis over the years. This is his second appearance (I believe, and textual evidence supports it). Jigsaw features a couple of detectives from the 87th Precinct, supported by others of course, investigating a particular crime. Hail, Hail, The Gang’s All Here depicts a 24-hour period in the 87th Precinct, with two shifts of detectives dealing with the crimes that occur on their shift. The third person narrator allows a lot of latitude of who the author can include and exclude and even who can die during the course of the book. Authors who use the first person narrator shortcut its immediacy by including third person sections (see also Robert Crais and, I daresay, Robert B. Parker). McBain p0wns you.

The novels within the book do present an interesting artifact, though, as they depict life in The City (a proxy for New York) in the 1960s and 1970s. Wow, it did seem like a dangerous place to live….until this fellow named Giuliani showed up. McBain found something to write about afterwards, as his books don’t stop with Giuliani’s election, but I cannot help but read them in that context.

So would I recommend the book? Unabashedly. Although my wonderful and well-read mother-in-law has, on occasion, condemned Ed McBain as smut, I still laud the poetry interspersed with the gritty. Also, she was a high school teacher who had the public’s morals to protect. Me? I am a poor boy from the ghetto who wanted to escape with his writing. I cannot think of a better example of the third person narrator in crime fiction series than Ed McBain. Any of them, or any three of them in one volume.

I bought this book for fourteen bucks in paperback at Borders (well, I used a gift card for part of it) because I like Bob Greene’s work. As some of you might recall, I read Bob Greene’s America last year. He’s much better at columns and essays than at full length novels, it would appear based on this single sample.

This book chronicles the aftermath Bob Greene’s father’s death. Greene explores his relationship to his father and seeks a better understanding of the World War II generation as he interviews Paul Tibbets, the man who not only flew the Enola Gay but commanded the military force responsible for putting together the mission. So Greene weaves together the individually compelling stories in what, ultimately, proves to be a less than satisfying mishmash.

Greene wanders between his memories of his father’s last days, his interviews with Tibbets, and the audiotapes that his father made to tell his children his WWII experiences as an infantryman in Italy in the war. Throughout, we get Greene’s earnest voice, sometime plaintive and sometimes naive, discussing the events as they unfold. I’ve complimented Greene’s columns and his collection of columns for their concision and transparent eyeballness, but he cannot sustain it in this longer work. And at the end, Greene gets to meet the two other surviving members of the Enola Gay crew as the three reunite in Branson, Missouri. We get to see they’re older and that most people don’t know who they are, and at the end of the weekend, the book pretty much ends. It doesn’t build to a strong insight or conclusion of any real meat, and although a column doesn’t have to, a book should.

So I’m ultimately disappointed. I look forward to more collections of his columns, if any exist, but have some trepidation regarding his other long works and his novel. But I’ll try at least one, since it’s on my too-read shelves.

Okay I read another of these. I bought 5-10 for 33 cents each at Hooked on Books in Springfield, and they’re well worth it. Star Trek 6, like the others in the series, gathers together some of the episodes from the original Star Trek series and does them in a short story format. They’re quick reads as they run about 130 pages each and, as paperbacks, they fit in one’s pocket.

A couple of things strike me as I read them:

• Wow, you mean there are episodes of the original series I haven’t seen? I guess they made, what, 80 of them over three years; I just assumed that through the years of syndication, I had seen them all. I haven’t. Which means there’s probably a TOS DVD box set in my future.
• Man, do you remember when paperback books had order forms right in the back? Have you ever encountered a paperback book that had its order form clipped out? Me either. Do they still do that? I remember the old paperback versions of Ayn Rand’s writing actually had a card glued into the middle for information about the ARI, but I haven’t seen a paperback with the order form in years. Of course, I haven’t bought a new paperback book in years….