Category: Book Report

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….

I actually ordered Cold Service from Amazon, so I’m a week late in reading it. But I read it in a single night, as is my wont. It helps that the books are thick, but the print is large and the most of the book is dialogue.

The plot basically recycles Small Vices and Pale Kings and Princes in that Hawk gets shot, almost dies, and when he recuperates, he and Spenser will pit the various organized crime elements against each other to get revenge on the gang who shot Hawk and the people whom he was protecting (some bodyguard–sorry, that’s A Savage Place).

The same knocks I make on Crais novels I can make on Parker in the last couple of years. The plot centers on a favor for a friend instead of a case, it features a problem and not a mystery, and it features an ethnic gang of the month (Ukrainians). Still, I was partly raised by Robert B. Parker since I read the best of the Spenser novels in my fatherless formative years, so I give him a little more leeway for the books he phones in.

Still, I enjoyed the book well enough, but I’d prefer to see Spenser work on some cases, not some guerilla campaigns against organized crime.

I saw this book last winter at the 80% off book store before I saw its predecessor The Probability Broach; however, I found the first one and read it first and finally, five months later, got to this book.

This book is a short story stuffed with Libertarian policy. A couple of crimes occur, and the heroes interview a number of authoritarian straw men and shout them down with Libertarian reason. Then, on page 250, a member of the villains committing the crimes comes forward and explains to them what’s going on in the plot and how to reach the climactic shootout where the bad guys die, the good guys are only injured, and an unexpected cavalry arrives.

I guess if you eagerly bought the book, this is kinda what you hoped would happen. However, I found the book tiresome to read without a plot, although the writing was simple and easygoing enough. But it’s hard to overtly root for an ideology as the antagonist.

You damn kids want to know what old skool geeks did before DVDs, before VHS, and even before BetaMax? In the dark, dark days of the early 1970s, after the original Star Trek series disappeared from the airwaves and the animated series offered the only respite (the movie which revived the franchise was 8 years off in 1972, Star Wars the sci fi savior was 5 years off, and the next Star Trek Series a whopping fourteen years off). James Blish, a sci fi writer/hack took the episodes from the original series and published them in a series of books. That’s right, you damn kids. Before they had DVDs, they had books, and geeks read. Not just books on development, but science fiction. In books.

I was first exposed to this series in high school, right before Star Trek: The Next Generation came out. So when I found a number of these books (starting with this one) at Hooked on Books priced at three for a dollar, I bought a season’s worth of Star Trek for a buck sixty-seven. You can’t beat that at garage sales for old videocassettes, werd.

This book runs 135 pages, roughly, and features seven stories. I remember many of the episodes, so I’m really drawn along. One hour episodes, condensed into 15 page stories, translates into some quick and easy science fiction reading. Granted, if you’re not familiar with the original series and its characters, perhaps the book won’t hold the same appeal for you. But you’re a damn kid anyway, and I want you off of my lawn!

This book represents another picture book I inherited from my aunt, and if the used price on Amazon is any guide, it might have been her biggest eBay score. But she lacked a certain follow through on the whole online auction thing. So I’ve got it now, and I thumbed through it, looking at the historical photos of business in St. Louis and reading the flattering paragraphs accompanying the photos. The book was, as a matter of fact, underwritten by one of the enterprises whose start is depicted in the book. Of course that company and all others in St. Louis are praised. Lavishly.

So the book provides interesting photographs, and some trivia and insights, including:

• The smile was invented in 1948.
• It’s a wonder turn of the century families were so large considering how ugly the women were.
• The years since 1994 have been harsh for St. Louis business, since most of the grand corporations lauded in the book–Edison Brothers, May Company, McDonnell Douglas, Pet, Inc., Sherwood Medical, and so on have been bought out or have otherwise left the area.
• Those who have the juice now in the city of St. Louis have always had the juice in St. Louis.

Still, an enjoyable experience, once again a short one since it was mostly photos, and something I’ll share with the more historical members of my family. And, dear readers, if you offer me what they’re asking for it on Amazon, I’ll share it with you, too.

My beautiful wife bought me this book, whose full title is Treachery : How America’s Friends and Foes Are Secretly Arming Our Enemies, for Christmas, because the message of the season is Peace on Earth and this book details, in part, why that ain’t happening.

Gertz compiles the evidence that other countries, including Germany, France, Russia, and China, are arming rogue countries. I don’t know that I would have ever called these nations our friends, contrary to what Tom Clancy would have had us believe, so I’m not plussed by this information. It’s all pretty damning, and it’s the stuff I get daily on the blogs I tend to read. But to the uninitiated, and to those who don’t get their daily dose of human nature writ large on the international scale on the Internet, I’m sure the book was an eye-opener.

Gertz is a good, methodical writer and has a lot of access to insights and insiders to tease out information about national security and to present compelling calls to action with that information. So if you’ve got a hot and sexy wife who buys you things, I cannot emphasize enough that this is a good book to receive.

This book is the latest in the Elvis Cole novels by Robert Crais; he released it just last month. As a later Elvis Cole novel, it features all the hallmarks of the Cole novels:

• A woman character who falls madly in love with Cole, who is oblivious because
• Cole is pining for Lucy Chenier, and that’s going badly, meanwhile
• He takes a case for personal interest instead of for, you know, pay, because this time it’s personal! which leads to
• A major character getting shot and dying, and another surviving but weakened by the aftermath.

So the book covers all of those bases. It’s readable, and one can overlook certain consistencies with plot amongst the novels and certain, um, non sequitors with the plot of this book. Crais does dial back his use of the third person narrator so that more than half of the book uses the first person voice of Elvis Cole.

When a strange, tattooed man is murdered, his dying words claim that Elvis Cole is his son. Cole, who never knew father, wonders if this is the man and if not, why the dying man would make the claim. So Cole investigates, dredges up some long fallow crimes, and pines for Lucy Chenier.

I am finally done with the series, which is a blessing and a curse; now I have to stand before my bookshelves when I finish a book and pick another one from the hundreds of volumes on my to-read shelves. It was so easy to just resignedly pick up the next Crais novel, and now I am stuck with my indecision.

I would have better enjoyed this book, like the others later in the Elvis Cole series, had I not read the first ones in the series. That is, if I had not immediately read the books and thought I’d find a series in the tradition of Chandler/MacDonald/Parker. Instead, the books have petered into a rather mainstreamish detective series with writing ticks designed not so much to be true to the character, but to ratchet up the suspense with devices.

The devices, again: Multiple points of view in a book that features a first person narrator. That way, you see, we get into the heads of the character. The same stop-and-restart changing of the timeline that Crais used in Hostage. The personal-as-plot-filler with the relationship with Lucy Chenier and their continuing breakdown. Geez, some Spenser fans have wanted Susan dead for 20 years, but she’s a foil for introversion with Spenser. Chenier? Nothing but a foil for Cole’s fear of losing her, which is how he’s spent the last couple of books.

At least none of the characters, if memory serves, says “There you go.” Instead, Cole says Panic kills, which is what the Rangers taught him and what the LA SWAT taught Talley in Hostage. Crais blends these sayings and verbal tics across multiple characters, which I think is sloppy. I don’t like when Parker does it, either.

The plot: Lucy’s son Ben is kidnapped while Cole’s watching him by people who claim to want revenge for something he did in the War in Viet shnucking Nam, man. Point of order, Mr. Chairman. The entire duration of the Elvis Cole novel cycle seems to be a couple of years from The Monkey’s Raincoat to the latest novel, but Crais has written the books over the course of almost twenty years now. Cole’s not aging, though. Perhaps Crais should have just done the McBain thing and had Cole as a veteran of the war which seems to occur every decade or so (or every two years in George W. Bush’s term), because although a young and vital man would have been a veteran of Vietnam, by 2005 those fellows are getting into their fifties and are running unsuccessfully for President.

But by page 74, I had figured out what was going on–mainly because of the multiple points of view. Although the writing style’s quick and enjoyable to read, the macro writing things–the devices enumerated numerous times on this blog and in this very book report–keep me from giving an unreserved endorsement of the series. I’ve got one until I’m caught up with Crais, and after I am done with it, I probably won’t seek out others–although I might just be stuck reading them if my beautiful wife keeps giving them to me and putting them on my to-read shelves.

This book finally makes good use of the multiple points of view that Crais has been doing for the last couple of novels. This time, though, he goes a little further and adjusts the timeline, so when one point of view leaves off at a climactic moment, another will pick up a couple of minutes earlier and carries the story through the cliffhanger in the preceding section to the next cliffhanger, where the process repeats. For the most part, it works.

The protagonist, Jeff Talley, burned out as a hostage negotiator in LA and came to a smaller town to hide from the failures in his past and his disintegrating marriage. His undead lifestyle shatters when a couple of young toughs rob a convenience store, kill the clerk, commit a home invasion on their escape, and hold the family hostage after killing a cop. Unfortunately, the house belongs to a mob accountant who has evidence in the house that would put the local don away for life. So Crais ratchets up the tension, with a sort of “Oh, man, what else could possibly go wrong?” suspense that Clancy affords us, and then the story just kinda….disappoints.

Amid the tension, we get a couple of “Why would they do that?”s and a couple of blindsidings added for the sake of a couple pages of mock tension and an ultimate deus ex mobina that left me wondering.

So it was a good read but a disappointing book. Soon to be a major motion picture!, and I look forward to the movie. Not only because Bruce Willis stars, but also because it probably won’t be a lot like the book. It will take a similar premise (I hope) and not end badly.

Well, I’ve explained that sometimes I cut corners to make my annual quota of sixty or seventy books and that I sometimes count pamphlets as books to make sure I stay on pace. So let me expand my repetwa to picture books. This bit of kitty porn contains a rambling introductory essay about cats through history and then 80 pages, in living British colour, of cats and kittens.

Hey, don’t get me wrong, the pictures are colorful and playful and lack inspirational clichés, but I am going to make an admission here that might get me permanently banned from Carnival of the Cats: Pictures of other cats aren’t that inspiring.

Part of my appreciation of cats lies in their dynamism, in their movement, and in their activities and play and moods and the particular facial expressions I’ve grown to know over time. Thirty-some year old stills really aren’t my bag. But I inherited this book from an aunt, the former crazy cat lady of Lemay, and I’ve looked through it and at each of the pictures and will continue to think of her whenever I dust this book on my read shelves. Granted, she only bought it to try to sell on eBay some years ago when I led her down that dark and destructive path, but there you go, and there I go with that damn Robert Crais turn of phrase IN MY HEAD.

Perhaps I am now the crazy cat blogger of Casinoport. Who doesn’t particularly like picture books about cats.

There you go. It’s remarkable how, if you read enough of an author, particularly if you read them consecutively, you can pick up on the author’s particular speech habits and how they translate into the author’s work so that many different characters say the same thing. Robert B. Parker fans know about his particular tics, which are almost inside jokes after thirty years. “There you go” represents Robert Crais’s tic. Elvis Cole says it, and in Demolition Angel, a non-Cole character says it, so I expect Crais says it himself.

This book centers on a former bomb-squad detective investigating a case wherein a nationwide hit bomber has struck–or has he? The detective has issues of her own, as she’s not been the same since nearly dying in a bomb blast. When an ATF agent comes to help with the investigation, he’s not what he seems; when the bomber-for-hire comes to town, his motives are surprising and his relationship with the detective is not too thrilling.

It’s a good change of pace from the Elvis Cole novels; although Heather informs me that the characters reappear, the book represents a self-contained entity. Although technical information and extra flourishes of insanity bog the book down, it’s not as bad as complete chapters which detract from the central storyline. So I like it better than the last Elvis Cole novel.

I look forward to finishing the remaining three Crais novels so I can get on with the rest of my life.

It’s a tough series. I liked the first books, but somewhere my enjoyment peaked, and I’ve enjoyed succeeding novels less. L.A. Requiem continues the trend. Not only does it have personal life melodrama for the detective, but it also features combinations of point-of-view and narrators that rather detract from the story. Elvis Cole tells the majority of the book in first person, but the book also cuts away to flashbacks in the third person starring Joe Pike and other third person views into what the perpetrator’s doing. I understand Crais did this to add suspense, but I think we could have gotten along without it.

The book centers around the death of Joe Pike’s former flame and involves a revenge murder framed on Pike. There’s some element of foreshadowing in the book, not really helped by the narrative changes, and although the perpetrator was introduced early as a minor character, the climax rather blindsided me. Also, the denouement of the piece lasted several wordy pages and featured a couple of deus ex maquina things I could have lived without.

I only have two non-Elvis Cole books and two Elvis Cole novels (including one released yesterday) to read yet, and I have this sinking feeling that once I’m done, I’ll be glad I’m done. And I probably won’t read them again.

I bought this book for a quarter at some long ago yard sale, so I beat the price of the Amazon resellers and I didn’t have to pay for shipping. Neener neener neener.

The book includes two classical comedies: The Birds by Aristophanes and The Brothers Menaechmus by Plautus. The first playwright was Greek and the second Roman; the book was designed to give the layman, or perhaps the student, an introduction to the comedies of both civilizations.

The Birds, oddly enough, does not appear to have been the source material for Alfred Hitchcock’s movie of the same title–or any other Alfred Hitchcock piece for that matter. Two Athenians lead the birds as they assert their authority over gods and men. They speak highly, in verse, and I don’t appreciate much of the esoterica, even with footnotes. As the older play, oddly enough, it would work more as a modernist play; the characters wear masks, and the action is more absurd. If I didn’t know an ancient Greek had written it, I would have guessed it was written by a French academic or someone who came through an English program today.

The Brothers Menaechmus deals with the mistaken identity that ensues when a long lost twin brother appears and inadvertently intercedes in a squabble between his brother, the brother’s wife, the brother’s mistress, and a parasite who lives off of the brother’s largesse. The structure more clearly represents the Shakespearean and later comedies of relationships and errors, where the action is more realistic and less stylized. Ergo, I could relate to it much better and enjoyed it more. Also, it’s not the source material for The Brothers Karamazov and it’s 970+ pages shorter–and that comparison alone makes any book better.

Still, although I was educating myself in the classics but not in the classical languages, I read uncredited translations, so my experience is filtered through the translator’s interpretation and vocabulary, but the 1958 copyright date might indicate that the translation preceded the abominable trend of using too much contemporary idiom, which might make a translated work more accessible to the decade’s hepcats, but really makes the book useless as a long term backlister–or cheap pickup at a garage sale.

This is another book in the Elvis Cole series, and as with the last one, it’s moving quite to the series. Entire chapters and subplots do not relate back to the main plot of the book and carry on their own see-you-next-book cliff hangers. While my beautiful wife likes this sort of thing, I find that it bogs down the action.

But it’s a pretty good book, once more pitting Elvis Cole against organized crime. This time, a Russian mob wants a counterfeiter who’s disappeared and has left his kids looking for a private detective to find him. The Russians want to kill him, Elvis wants to return him to his happy home-in-flight, and Vietnamese revolutionaries want him for their own ends. So Elvis Cole has to dodge bullets, former Spetsnaz, and teenage crushes as he sets it as right as possible. When he can squeeze it in between being in love with the lawyer from the other LA and mooning over her.

So he does, eventually, and the final plot twist was obvious from early in the book. Perhaps I,the writer and the paranoia shidoshi, can sniff out a plot like this early, but I flatter myself. It was obvious. I explained it to my wife last night how it would end, and I was right.

Still, a cut above in writing and whatnot. I’ll continue the series, and not just because they’re on the bookshelf.

This book is where the Elvis Cole books become an obvious series, and that’s not a good thing for a standalone novel.

The plot revolves around Elvis Cole’s experience as part of a high-profile defense team of a wealth restauranteur whose wife’s body is found after she was beaten to death. Although investigators find the murder weapon on the estate of the husband, Elvis Cole uncovers proof of a kidnap plot the husband asserted. Or perhaps he’s being made a patsy by the nationally-reknowned lawyer heading the defense.

Unfortunately, Elvis has the evolving love with Lucy Chenier, which means that we have to deal with passages and chapters which deal with the series storyline, which detracts from the novel storyline. As a matter of fact, the middle of the book features a section where Cole has apparently solved the murder and is being feted as a hero but when Lucy grows distant. So the reader, or at least I, had to bridge this bit of emotional baggage with only the hope that something else would happen in the remaining 150 pages. Of course, as I am a glutton even for bad writing, I waded through the chapters until another problem/mystery presented itself, but that’s a hard fjord to cross, brother, and might poor practice.

I admit, I prefer series that are less sequential and where the books are self-contained units where the characters’ growing/aging/lives don’t represent a chunk of individual books. But then again, I prefer not to need to read books in order to get the most of them.

Still, it’s a fairly good book. Worth a couple bucks used. Even better when it’s a gift.

I bought this book from the Bridgeton Trails library for a quarter. Why? I don’t know.

This book is the worst piece of pulp writing I’ve read in a long while, if not ever. Check it out:

Behind him, Burke heard footsteps clambering up the winding staricase to the left of the catwalk. He sprang up and dashed toward the guard he just killed. Scooping up that man’s weapon as he moved past him, he continued to the end of the catwalk and paised at the top of the second winding staircase. He turned and crouched, an AK-47 clutched in each hand.

At the far end of the catwalk, a face appeared as a guard reached the top of the steps located there. Burke squeezed the trigger and his weapon chattered out a message. The face fell from views, a shriek rending the air. Burke began to back down the first few stairs. He crouched there, just below the level of the catwalk.

Oh, boy. It’s 180+ pages of this edge-of-your-seat-because-you-want-to-put-the-book-down excitement. A DEA agent, Burke, investigates a drug mastermind who has kidnapped a professor to help him transubstantiate drugs into other materials for easy smuggling. Why someone with the power of transubstantiation would need to smuggle drugs instead of just making drugs out of, say, sawdust and packing peanuts, is a question left unanswered. So Burke investigates.

My, I don’t know why this book is so bad. The writing is hypermasculine, but it doesn’t fit together. The main character is a bottle of actions and vague generalizations about how drugs are bad. At about page 90, I started finding the writing style amusing enough to carry me through the other half. Skimming helped.

The pacing? Ill. We get to the climax, where the bad guy has fled his laboratory to a secret helipad in the Canadian wilderness, the normally explosive climax plods. The DEA finds the helipad by intercepting signals from a Russian spy satellite–the one dedicated to watching the Canadian wilderness, apparently. During the course of the bad guy’s quick escape, Burke goes back to headquarters, gets equipped, and then spends just under thirty minutes assembling a hang glider so he can sneak up on the secret escape base which lies in a ledge in a sheer cliff–the perfect fortress!

Burke crashes his hang glider and has to rappel down the cliff, and the author spends three or four pages of the text describing rappelling technique. When the bad guy finishes up killing all of his henchmen but not the professor and his daughter, Burke is outraged at the carnage even though his body count at least doubles the butchery of the bad guy. Apparently Burke lives with himself because his mayhem has the rule of law behind it.

Then the bad guy is eaten by a grizzly bear, and the professor’s daughter serves a pastry called bear claws to the triumphant Burke and her father. Haw, haw.

I know, I have fallen in among the cabal of conservative commentators who reveal the endings without warning the audience, but think I’m okay here because:

• Of my regular readers, only my beautiful wife has made it this far; even John D. has bailed by this point
• I’m doing you a favor; the ending is only as good as it could be, which in a book like this, isn’t worth getting to

I bought this knob-licker‘s book from the three-for-a-dollar rack outside the Hooked on Books in Springfield. The book’s cover and pages are kinda wavy and the book has a sort of sweet odor to it. I don’t know if some Southwest Missouri State student, steeped in openmindedness and something sweet and smoky, dumped the book before moving from the stifling confines of the Bible Belt for a big city or if someone received the book as a gift and ran it through the dishwasher because it’s dirty. I can only speculate, but I didn’t practice safe reading and read this book without protective latex.

I’ve read Dan Savage in the local tabloid and on Salon in the middle-to-late 1990s. His columns tend to have the message that if it doesn’t hurt anyone (unless they want it), sexual practices are okay. He’s right, of course, but focus on the physical pleasure disservices participants who don’t know or expect anything more thank a hook-up.

Savage writes as a know-it-all, slightly an ass, and it’s hard for me to take any more than a couple of pages or letters in any one sitting. Because it will undoubtedly offend Mr. Savage, I’d like to point out that his voice reminds me a little of Rush Limbaugh. There’s a certain amount of tongue-in-cheek in the voice, as though Savage is playing the part of being more ass than he really is. It’s that quality that makes Rush Limbaugh amusing, but Savage is more, well, savage in his assishness. He calls names, casts aspersions, and belittles those whose sexual aesthetics differ from his rather expansive set. So he’s like Rush Limbaugh, but not as good or humorous. Maybe Dan’s more like Michael Savage, who an Internet rumor I’m starting right here indicates is Dan Savage’s estranged older brother.

So I’d recommend sticking to the columns and not investing any more than thirty-three cents on the book, and I don’t imagine I’ll buy any of Savage’s other books of commentary.

This book features Elvis Cole working for an adopted starlet who’s interested in finding her natural parents in Louisiana. When Cole travels to Louisiana, he discovers that her past is shrouded in mystery, mayhem, and the secrets of a small town.

Enough of the back of the book stuff. Another good Elvis Cole book, but one that again makes me think of the work of Robert B. Parker–the end reminds me a lot of Early Autumn, but with a twist. Of course, these novels make me feel like pre-Spenser:For Hire Spenser novels, when I could wonder what was going to happen before I was caught up in the dialog-driven post-Spenser: For Hire Parker novels, when the dialog just carries you from page 1 to page 300 without allowing the reader to wonder what’s going to happen.

On the other hand, this novel represents the first time Crais deploys the old “first person narrator discloses to other characters, but not to the readers, the plans” trick, which is second in cheap tricks only to the “first person narrator dies at the freaking end” device in absolute author naughtiness. Poor form, Peter, especially when you’re just throwing it in on page 200 to create suspense. Stephen King would thrash you, and rightfully so. That doesn’t count as proper foreshadowing.

Still, I recommend the book, particularly if you can, as I did, get it as a Christmas gift from a beautiful wife who gives up her collection because she knows I won’t read books that are not on my To-Read Shelves unless they’re my books. Otherwise, they’re worth your paperback or second-hand dollar.