Category: Book Report

I bought this book for like a quarter this weekend at a garage sale. Did I overpay? Probably. Although, I have to say, Jeff Foxworthy is pretty funny performing, although his country countdown radio program isn’t so exciting. I’ve got one of his comedy CDs and everything.

However, this book merely collects Foxworthy’s most famous one liners. That’s it. Just the one liners without Foxworthy’s expert comic timing or delivery. Some are amusing on their own, but in the aggregate, they’re not as funny collected in a book as, say, The Late Night With David Letterman’s Book of Top Ten Lists. The humor in these stands alone, aside from the performance.

Of course, you have my opinion here versus the opinion of buyers everywhere who kept this book in print for fifteen years. It’s a quick read though, worthy of a browse, I suppose, as you’re waiting for a hockey game to start, much like I did. Also, it’s good for boosting one’s annual books read rate.

So it’s probably a waste of time, but in the book’s defense, it doesn’t claim to be anything else and it’s not much time anyway.

Books mentioned in this review:

 

This 87th Precinct novel runs a weighty 317 pages and delves into character depth that many of the novels don’t. As a matter of fact, one of the great appeals of this particular series, over its 40 some years, is that the books vary not only in plot, but also stylistically. Some are quick epidodes at 150 pages with lots of reproduced police forms to pad them, and some, like this one, are denser prose.

The story details the murder of an actress in a hit play downtown. The 87th Precinct inherits the case as a small time drug pusher in their precinct died from the same lead poisoning days before. As they try to find a connection between the coke dealer and the actress, they have to deal with their own issues, particularly Kling’s failed marriage to model Augusta Blair.

I suppose it helps read these books in order….for example, the book I read previously, Poison, takes place after this books, so the personal relationships are advanced beyond where they are in this book. I already know how the romances and whatnot will turn out, but the books don’t hinge on the personal relationships alone. Instead, the plots and the basic familarity with the characters and the rotation of the characters and….blah blah blah.

You know I like ’em, and I’m going to keep reading them and picking them up whenever I can for a buck a crack at book fairs. I got this one, among others, at the Greater St. Louis Book Fair. So be warned, this won’t be the last book report of an Ed McBain book you ignore in the coming months.

Books mentioned in this review:

As some of you know, I bought four of Roger L. Simon’s Moses Wine novels The Big Fix, Peking Duck, The Lost Coast, and this book) for $5 a throw at a remaindered book store in November, 2004. Oh, how the world has changed since then. Roger L. Simon is now an Internet mogul. Byron Preiss, the man behind the company that reissued the novels, has died and the iBooks has gone belly up. And I’m in no danger of becoming a Moses Wine fan.

This book deals with Moses Wine, ca. 1985, joining a computer company patterned after Apple as its director of security. Wine is given cryptic instructions by the Wiz (not Woz, get it?) that Wine’s not only to handle security, but to look into…something. It’s corporate espionage and it requires a trip to Japan (much like Peking Duck requires a trip to China). We get the obligatory action in Japan, wherein the first person narrator who’s never been to Japan and doesn’t know much about the country provides some excellent expository information. In the end, of course, it’s the government agent gone rogue that’s killing everyone. Except for the Russians, who are killing people too. Or someone.

Here are some quick bullet points that capture what bothers me about this book and the series:

• Moses Wine has been on the cover of Rolling Stone. When a private detective becomes a celebrity, I don’t really relate to the character much. See also Robert Crais’s Elvis Cole.
• The voice of the first time visitor to Japan laying on the expository information and Japanese terms rankles me. It’s the sound of an author who wants to show he’s done his research.
• Although I didn’t work at a computer company in the 1980s, I’ve done my time in the 1990s and the 2000s. I found the characterization of the culture at Tulip facile.
• The introductions by the author were a bit much. I guess that’s what they wanted with the reissues, but I found it self-indulgent.
• Moses Wine reminds me less of Lew Archer and more of Dirk Gently, with drug use and nonchalant sex.

There you have it. I made it through the four books I read, and don’t plan to seek out the remaining in the series.

Books mentioned in this review:

 

 

 

Executive Summary: Thomas Aquinas is teh suck!!!1!!!

I don’t remember where I got this book; it’s either a book fair bag filler or something that was in the free bin at Hooked on Books. However, since I was on a short, smart book kick, I picked it up.

This cover calls the book a penetrating analysis of trends in modern thought. The introduction goes further: as it’s an evangelical book, its goal is to frame traditional, even fundamental Christian thought with modern philosophical schools of thought. As such, it studies the dual nature of man (nature and grace) and how this fundamental dual nature has been corrupted through various schools of philosophical thought. When Thomas Aquinas intimated that only man’s will suffered from The Fall but that the intellect was capable of arriving independently at grace through its observations of nature and so on, he set into motion the eventual slippery slope where the autonomous lower half of man will overrun the higher half.

Ergo, throughout philosophical history, Kant and Rousseau saying that Freedom is the higher order of man and Nature is the lower, but the mechanistic view of human nature eventually logically trumps freedom, or the Christian Existentialist view (courtesy of Kierkegaard) that divides man’s duality into reason and faith (where the leap of faith is rationally inexplicable), or the regular Existentialist view where an act of will is the highest order.

I don’t remember most of the primary texts that the author refers to, so I can only say that the book poses a relatively sound exploration of the theme. I’m not sure, though, whether I’d characterize the Existentialists as embracing the dual nature of man. The author refers specifically to Sartre’s Nausea and how the Existentialists triumphs over the absurd and achieves the higher portion of himself through an act of will, of seeking authenticity. I remember just enough of my Sartre to suspect that this is a convenient reading of true Existentialism, which is monoist in nature.

So although the book does take a couple things a priori, such as the basic framework of its evangelical Christian roots with the cmbination of Jesus and The Scriptures as a framework for all thought, science, and art, it provided a handy (and short) mechanism for me to resharpen my old philosophical edges.

It looks as though this book and others by this author remain fairly popular–hence their higher prices at Amazon. Perhaps I lucked out in getting this first American printing so cheaply. I better bronze it.

Books mentioned in this review:

I got this copy of Poison from the Greater St. Louis Book Fair for $1.00. I know I’ve read it before because my Aunt Dale owned a copy of it; I remember the hot blonde on the cover. For all I know, I own that copy, too, since Aunt Dale is the aunt who passed away a year and a half ago and bequeathed me many of her books. This one, though, still has the price sticker on it and was on the floor in my stacks instead of in boxes or on my completed reading shelves. Well, there, you have my history with the copy I read most recently.

This book represents a mid-career Ed McBain 87th precinct novel, where the 1960s era is early and the 2000-esque books are late. As I’ve mentioned, McBain wrote a long series of books which hold up very well. The back cover offers a quote comparing McBain to Georges Simenon. Peh. He’s a modern Erle Stanley Gardner, and beyond; the books hold up beyond the time in which the author wrote them.

This installment deals with a murder by nicotine poisoning that Carella and Willis catch. Willis starts falling for the lover of the victim. She’s hot, blonde (hence the cover), and emancipated in that 1980s, I sleep with a lot of men way. When her other lovers start dying, the detectives of the 87th Precinct–well, except for Willis–start suspecting she’s the killer.

McBain was a master. I lament the knowledge that there won’t be any more of the 87th Precinct novels, but I know I can reread the ones I’ve read previously again as I acquire them or as the mood strikes me.

Books mentioned in this review:

For some reason, my mother-in-law gave me this book for Christmas. So I read it, disinterestedly, as you might expect. Who am I kidding? I was hoping for a deeper understanding of what I was supposed to be going through than my friends intoning that I was going to lose some sleep circa the end of this very month. This book provided me some of that.

At turns, this book: touched my own anxiety and fear (singular, gentle reader; I have but one of each); made me cringe at the differeces between a pregnancy experienced by a native New Yorker and, well, anyone in the rest of the country; made me snigger at the Roberyt Blyian concept of manhood and its attendant rituals; and made me skim the scientificism of some of the speculated parent-child-father hormonal responses.

Also, the book made me assure Heather, unnecessarily (I hope), that just because I was not puking in the mornings or cooing at other people’s babies in the supermarket, I would be a good enough father to not warrant divorce or murdering while I slept but she fed the baby. The book spends a lot of time talking about couvade, which is either ritualistic or physiological symptoms that the husband has which the author indicates is a subconcious, hormonal way of signalling he’s going to be a good father to the wife. Meanwhile, I’m working for a living, leaving my beautiful wife to gestate on her own.

The writing style is hip. By “hip,” I mean it’s readable and contemporary, but uses the word “shit” far too much for non-fiction. Also, the author is intelligent and makes a number of classical allusions that made me feel smart for recognizing them, but unfortunately he also alluded to the classic Roddy Piper film They Live as Them, which really makes me wonder if all of his other allusions are mistaken, and whether I am a fool for thinking those other allusions were right.

An interesting enough read, and worth the price I paid. (Sorry, Ms. Igert, I mean, it’s a good book, and thanks!)

Books mentioned in this review:

When I saw this book for $.33 in the new secret cheap books back room at Hooked on Books in Springfield, I had to have it. After all, Levar Burton is the former host of Reading Rainbow and star of The Midnight Hour. As I have mentioned before, I think one of my collecting niches is books based on movies, books upon which movies are based, and books by movie and television stars. Hence, I thought this book by a relatively obscure actor would be worth the cold, hard coinage. Plus, I had two other books, no doubt.

This book takes place in the coming decades, after the following has occurred:

1. The United States spends too much on a space station, foreign aid, and small wars so that it’s nearly bankrupt.
2. A black man is elected president and is subsequently assassinated by those damn white supremecist militias.
3. The New Madrid fault goes.
4. Climate change stresses the world. Not just makes uncomfortable, but drives down agricultural yields and so on.
5. A 3 year race war occurs, representing a second coming of the Civil War. Fought on American soil, it pits whites against everyone else in set piece sorts of battles leading to bombings of corn fields. Oddly enough, though, the rest of the world doesn’t intervene, and at the end, no one is bowing to Mecca or speaking Mandarin.

Remember, this book bears a 1997 publication date, so it was probably written ca 1996. Bill Clinton is running for re-election. It’s one year since the Oklahoma City bombing and three years after the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. Perhaps in this era, the books concerns were plausible; however, to me they seem very dated given the way the world has turned. On the other hand, just last week, I had a Jewish friend express rather earnest concern that George W. Bush was going to outlaw Judaism and round up the Jews. Perhaps some people see a racial/creedist civil war still possible in our cards rather than the red state/blue state divide which I think separates us more.

But I digress; this book has a plot. A scientist comes up with an electromagnetic brain stimulator which not only affords healing properties for the human body, but also can sometimes produce, as a side effect, telepathic and precognitive ability. Which comes in handy when some corrupt members of what passes for the post-apocalyptic medical establishment kidnap her for her secret.

The scientist reaches out and touches an Indian medicine man, a now-homeless former meterologist, and a now-homeless young woman to come to her aid. The bulk of the book comprises their individual stories and their eventual coming together for her rescue. And then, suddenly, in the last moments of the book, they resolve the situation with a climactic Hollywoodesque ending. Something out of Star Trek: The Next Generation, almost.

Still, it’s a fairly compelling book. The shifting points-of-view among the major characters and interactive, not overly expository histories make the first portion of the book easy to read and drive toward a conclusion. Unfortunately, again (like in Sharky’s Machine) I can almost sense when a movie option is signed or an author is ready to be done with the book, so the sudden career into a slam-bang finish occurs.

So it’s a good enough genre piece, even if it’s somewhat dated. It reminds me of the 1960s-era topical science fiction I read, so it will live on in that vein at least. If Mr. Burton wrote this himself, he’s not a bad writer, but then again, I would expect nothing less from the well-read public television evangelist of childhood reading and bona-fide star of television and screen.

Books mentioned in this review:

I paid $4.50 for a used copy of this book from Hooked on Books when I went on my books-on-books binge (more details here). Of the other books, this is the one I liked least.

In the introduction, the author mentions that the book stems from a humorous essay. Perhaps the author should have left well enough alone. I bet this was a humorous essay. As a full-length book, though, it’s wanting.

The book defines biblioholism too broadly for my test and paints the accumulation of books as trying to just have books or to build a library to look smart. Maybe it’s a gag. Maybe it’s too close for comfort to me, so I cannot enjoy mirth that ensues as the author lists various and sundry obsessive and compulsive behaviors associated with liking books.

I’m not sorry I read the book, but I am sorry I paid $4.50 for it. Since you don’t trust a word I say anyway, feel free to buy the revised edition noted below for almost $6.00.

Books mentioned in this review:

I bought this book for $1.00 at the Greater St. Louis Book Fair because, as some of you know, I’ll soon need to know when it’s appropriate to place your baby in the icebox. After all, my beautiful wife is reading a number of parenting books; why shouldn’t I pitch in?

Imagine my feigned surprise when I discovered that this book was not actual book about child care, but rather a collection of short pieces by the author of The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity!

As its title indicates, this book collects a number of short pieces from Cain, including a number of the bucolic “dialogs” he wrote in his early career as well as some of the grittier crime fiction he wrote for some serious money.

I enjoyed the book. The early pieces reminded me of Franz Kafka in that they’re more slice-of-lifeish than anything earth-shattering, as though they were written as fictional smalltalk than I’m accustomed. Still I appreciated their language more than Kafka’s.

The crime fiction portions were more pedestrian pulp, but that’s what I handed over the dollar for. Enjoyable, and slightly unrealistic crimes, but set in the thirties and fourties, so they provide small glimpses into the past as well as into lurid crimes.

And in case it ever comes up, the time to put a baby in the icebox is if your husband has unleashed a hungry tiger into your house to kill you and you’re holding the tiger off with a flaming brand which will inadvertently set fire to the house. As soon as I finish this review, I’m going to scan the indexes of some of Heather’s parenting books to see if this holds as true in the 21st century as it did in the 1930s.

Books mentioned in this review:

 

Continuing what only appears to be 70s Week here in the MfBJN book review department: I bought this book at the Kirkwood Book Fair for $2.00 because I recognized the name from the 1981 Burt Reynolds movie and thought that, since it was only $2.00 for a stated second printing, it might be worth something Of course, since I seem to be falling into collecting books that are the sources of movies (more to come from the Kirkwood Book Fair where I fell), I guess it is worth that to me, even though I’m not making a killing on these books. Perhaps it’s just my way of reading the pop culture that everyone talked about some years ago.

At any rate, this book depicts a narc cop (Sharky) who gets put on vice detail when one of his narc stakeouts takes a deadly turn. Once in vice, he gets a case to run, complete with supporting personnel (the “machine” of the title). A simple investigation into a prostitution/blackmail stakeout leads to a presidential candidate looking to unseat President Ford bankrolled by stolen World War II gold.

The book starts out Ludlumesque, but about 300 pages into its 370 page length, the book goes Hollywood. You can almost hear the pens of the Hollywood people signing the option while Diehl was still writing. Nevertheless, the book represents some interesting, accessibly 70s pseudo-pulp. The book relies on a third person limited omniscient narrator, but cuts back and forth betwene characters and even begins with the 1944 theft of gold to engage the middle-aged reader of its day. Equal parts MacLean, Ludlum, and 70s film detective fiction, this book satisfied me. For a couple bucks, who could go wrong?

Of course, you cannot expect to get a stated Second Printing for a couple bucks like I did, gentle reader. You should expect to pay $30 or $150 or something so as to inflate my perceived value of my own collection. If you’re not buying the stuff off of Amazon courtesy the handy links below, it’s the least you could do.

Books mentioned in this review:

I bought this book at the Belleville Book Fair last weekend for a couple pennies because frankly I needed something to fill the $2.00 bag I’d already bought. Besides, it sounded interesting. The cover freatures the title in a very seventies script and offers this teaser: The powerful true story of one woman’s confrontation with every woman’s nightmare. Granted, that was 30 years ago, and some women have different nightmares by now, but a spouse’s affair remains a nightmare for some subset of the population.

The first section is entitled Ending, the second Midway: The Second Year, and the third Beginning. So the book right away carries with it the progression of some sort of self-help mental health journey.

Ending does capture the pseudonymbous author’s discovery of her husband’s affair as they return from a trip. His mistress just cannot help herself and writes him a letter delivered to the hotel, and the husband proceeds to read it on the plane in front of his wife. The woman then has to question their marriage, their life together, and everything she’s known for 25 years. I thought perhaps the book would serve, if nothing else, as a fable of how marriages crumble under time and hopefully could serve as a reminder to not let the dwindling communication and elusive intimacy affect your marriage.

However, somewhere towards the end of the ending, it became clear that Jo Fleming was going to overcome the affair by becoming some sort of whackerdoodle post-Sexual Revolution open marriage proponent, and that at the climax of the book, she would overcome her Victorian upbringing and have an affair of her own as she went beyond fidelity.

Ergo, the book develops a series of diary entries chronicling her growth with her husband into some 1970s era Greatest Generation Geriatric emotional swingers. It’s rife with dream recreations and interpretations, dialogues between her and her husband, her and her therapist, her and her husband’s therapist, and her and herself. The writing’s somewhat adolescent and repetitive, easily skimmable–a quality I learned to appreciate by the end of the second year.

Essentially, it’s a twisted rendition of The Total Woman; to build a better, more loving marriage, instead of working inside that marriage, this book advocates going outside the marriage to fulfill your emotional and sexual needs. Now, while that might play on Manhattan, where the narrator of this book resides among the so-cosmopolitan set, here in the middle of the country, that sort of thing sometimes gets a person dead.

Oddly enough, even though it’s purportedly a true story by a diarist who wants to be a writer, I thought the book might be a clumsy novel. I mean, most spouses don’t frequently sit down and share weepy moments while exalting in their spiritual growth and moral nihilism immediately before encouraging each other to keep growing, where "growing" is a euphemism for going all the way with the handsome fellow in the office. Therefore, I felt perhaps someone had packaged up a rough draft of How To Save Your Own Life without Erica Jong’s Jongness, or whatever made that particular novel worth its weight in wood pulp.

Perhaps I’m being unduly harsh on this book. Perhaps I’m reeling from the offense at being blindered, as the author says:

Some people, reading this diary, might disapprove of the freedom we have tried to introduce into our marriage; they will be the ones who grew up when I did and have somehow managed to keep their blinders on. (p 160)

Well, lovey, perhaps some of us aren’t so ready to sacrifice our morals and our standards for to serve a tawdry narrative, even if that narrative happens to be a life.

So I spent a handful of pennies on it, and I personally wouldn’t spend it again on this book, but I did get my money’s worth on personal outrage and words for the blog, ainna?

Books mentioned in this review:

 

 

This book represents an acquisition from the Belleville Book Fair last weekend, where I got books for an amortized $.09 each ($2.00 a bag, I bought a bag and a half since Heather didn’t fill half of her bag, I got to fill that, too, so the 24+ books cost me less than a dime each). It’s a book club edition, so the real collectors will make fun of me on the playground, but I’m an accumulator more than a true collector.

This book features Pronzini’s nameless detective, a middle-aged collector of pulp fiction who is facing his own mortality as he frets during the course of the book about the results of a biopsy on a lesion in his lung. To distract himself, he heeds the call of his old friend Harry who has a tense situation at a remote fishing and hunting camp. A jealous husband, a potentially wandering hot young wife (red haired, natch), and a number of available fellows grind against each other mentally and physically. Nameless and Harry see a van containing a stolen Oriental rug smuggler crash into the lake, but they discover the man was dead before he hit the water. A couple other bodies pile up, and Nameless needs to find out who’s doing it and survive the detection.

It’s a thin book, and obviously a series book, but it’s contained fairly well for a single book. That is, we’re not lost without background details from the previous books. It’s short and serviceable as a piece of genre fiction, a quick read and a solution that’s obvious once you realize to whom Pronzini pays homage. Definitely worth a dime. Even if it’s only a book club edition.

Books mentioned in this review:

I bought this book for $4.50 at Hooked on Books in Springfield at the same time as I bought Warmly Inscribed and Slightly Chipped. I found myself in the books about books section and went nuts. What can I say? I already had a couuple books in hand, and once you crack that vast barrier between having nothing and buying something, you’re done for.

Unlike the Goldstone books, which are personal narrative essays about collecting, this slender volume is a FAQ. It clocks in at a little more than seventy pages with a couple of appendices and an index. The body of the book is a series of questions about book collecting and answers provided by a book dealer. It delves lightly into why you would collect, how to collect, and what the collector terms mean. So if you’re new to collecting or need some refreshing, the book’s a nice little pocket book. A For Dummies book from before the time when their yellow bindings dominated the introductory scene.

Also, given the age of the book (1993), the book does not include the prevalence of the Internet in this hobby, but its not too out of date in spite of it, because we book collectors still like to visit the second hand shops and book fairs and whatnot.

To slip into collector mode, this edition is a nice piece of work. Although a trade paperback published by a small Kansas press, its pages are resume-quality paper. I liked it. Worth $4.50, even in a good to very good first edition? Eh, you can almost do better on the Internet before shipping and handling.

Books mentioned in this review:

 

 

I liked Full Court Press. I liked Wild Pitch. So of course, I was on the lookout for this, Mike Lupica’s football book. A ne’er-do-well son inherits a football team from his father, the prodigal son hopes for some measure of redemption in achieving his father’s dream….a trip to the Super Bowl. Other owners and the league, however, aren’t sure they want the new blood injecting sense into a gentleman’s sport, ownership, and the man must deal with two hostile co-owners–his siblings.

I thought I’d outgrown sports books sometime in elementary school. I’m not a sports fanatic, contrary to what my widow says. I don’t watch non-sporting events on ESPN, for example. But I like Lupica’s books because they’re well-written. Engaging and often humorous, I enjoy these books, also engaging and humorous, even though they mostly lack dead bodies, space ships, or swords. I was very glad when Heather spotted this book at the Greater St. Louis Book Fair last week for $3.00. There’s my endorsement. I’ll buy the books for more than $.33, and I’ll read them soon after getting them. Unlike the 40 other books I’ve bought in the last two weeks at these damn book fairs.

Books mentioned in this review:

 

 

I bought this book for $1.00 off of the extreme remainder table at Barnes and Noble in Ladue while engaging in a gift-card-fueled orgy of new book buying at the beginning of the year. $1! For a trade paperback! With this profligate spending, it’s a wonder I could buy a new, larger house to contain all of my books.

This book, subtitled The Twelve Bastard Bosses of the Zodiac, appears as a sequel of sorts to a previous book entitled How to Spot a Bastard by His Star Sign. It does the normal office humor bit, identifying various poor management types as cardboard personalities and then associating them with a sign of the zodiac. It’s a conceit that could have carried a ninety or a hundred page book, tops. However, the schtick goes on twice as long as it needed to, and overall suffers as a result.

One of the authors must be British and the other American; the book uses a lot of British turns of phrase (bum, arse, and so on) but a large number of American pop cultural references. Perhaps those were dropped in for this, the first American Edition. It didn’t really impact the quality of the material, but it was noticeable.

Also, I’d like you to know, I don’t share many characteristics with the Pisces bastard boss identified in the book. That doesn’t mean I’m not a bastard boss, only that my bastardism is self-determined, free will-like, and not predetermined by the universe. Thank you, that is all.

Books mentioned in this review:

Sometimes, I take a long time to select which book to read next after I complete a book. I look at my bookshelves bulging with choices and, quite frankly, am overwhelmed with the possible selections. Sometimes, though, the books leap off of the shelf in a meaningful segue. Of course, immediately after reading The Case Against Hillary Clinton, I picked up The Stainless Steel Rat for President.

Like The Case Against Hillary Clinton, I bought this book from the red dot, three for a dollar shelves outside Hooked on Books, but I didn’t buy the two on the same visit.

I’ve tried to read The Stainless Steel Rat for President on at least one other occasion, but its tour-de-farce tone didn’t draw me in, and I moved onto other things.

This time, though, the over-the-top voice and the story of how the intergalactic criminal and undercover operative known as the Stainless Steel Rat ventures to a banana republic of a planet whose thriving tourism industry funds a repressive dictatorship. Penned in 1982, it offers a fable of a criminal fixing an election to free a backward, galactically latino people. If I wanted to, I guess I could dig out some sort of political posturing of the time and a backlash or support of Reagan, but wow, it would take some effort. I vaguely remember when one could read politically-based fiction without trying to determine whose side the author is on.

Regardless, it’s an entertaining read, clocking in at the old school under 200 page mark. An entry into a series, but not a chronological or particularly serialized series, so you can enjoy it if it’s your first Stainless Steel Rat book or if you haven’t read a Stainless Steel Rat book in a decade. In short, it’s good old school science fiction. Well worth my thirty-three and a third cents.

Books mentioned in this review:

I bought this book for $.33 at Hooked on Books in Springfield, Missouri, because I think I like Noonan (everyone else on the right side of the blogosphere does) and because it was on the three for a dollar rack. I expected a partisan book, and I got it.

Noonan wrote the book in 2000 to dissuade New Yorkers from voting Hillary Clinton into the Senate. We all know how that turned out, and it didn’t quite play out like Noonan feared it might–Hillary! never beat Giuliani, for example. Noonan spends a lot of the book bashing the Clintons for the crimes and malfeasance of the Clinton presidency, but I’ll be frank, I have sort of moved beyond my distaste for Clinton and that particular circus. So most of the book doesn’t work on me, particularly the parts where Noonan pads chapters with anecdotes about friends who are New York voters and who might be tempted to vote for Hillary or where Noonan pads the book with dream sequence chapters where Bobby didn’t die….I mean, where Hillary gives phantom speeches and takes Republicanish stands.

So I could almost walk away from the book without any particular additional dislike of Hillary, but for an chapter wherein Noonan accidentally provides actual evidence for why Hillary should scare us. It’s a chapter on Hillary’s views on the rights of children, wherein they should have the same rights as their parents in their upbringing, and where the state will further intrude on behalf of destroying actual families whenever the angelic little demons have temper tantrums. Scary stuff, reminding us that when it takes a villiage, HRC means it takes The State.

So I’ve made my commitment here. If the Democrats inadvertantly nominate Her Royal Clintoness to run for president, I will support and volunteer to elect anyone the Republicans nominate. Even, Heaven forfend, Mitt “RomneyCare Ain’t HillaryCare Because I Am A Republican, Sorta” Romney.

Very far afield from what Noonan intended, but in line for what she might have dreaded.

Interesting note about the particular book I bought: I think it was material for some course or another. A half sheet of paper contained a list of books in a political vein:

• The Declaration of Independence
• Letter from Birmingham Jail
• On the Beginning of Political Societies
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
• The Seneca Falls Declaration of 1848
• The Fundamental Principle of a Republic
• Civil Disobedience [sic]
• Selected Poems from Song of Myself
• The Case of Hillary Clinton [sic]

Quite a reading list there. Previous owner left the half sheet about half way through the final chapter of the book. Now that, my friends, is going through the motions: not bothering to finish the book when you’ve only got a few pages left. Even in my college days, I’d finish the book or I’d leave it on my to-read shelf for decades until I did actually finish it (or I will, honest). Of course, this reading list misspells or mistitles a couple of the works upon it, so I have to wonder about the class. I mean, the founding Fathers, Thoreau, King, and Whitman? And Noonan? That must have been some interesting inculcation.

Books mentioned in this review:

I bought these books, stated first editions both, at Hooked on Books for $11.50 each. Surely, the authors can appreciate that in an aesthetic sense, even if they cannot appreciate it in a royalty sense.

Both deal with collecting books, which is what I like to say that I do. More likely, I just accumulate books, but that’s okay by me, too.

The first, Slightly Chipped, details some of their book shopping in the nearby towns around their home in Connecticut. As they shop, they dine well and they slip into asides about the history of Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury circle, the history of Bram Stoker and Dracula, or a British publishing house amid anecdotes and scenes that drew them into their asides. The pace is leisurely and loving as they dwell on the high-priced books and their pursuit thereof.

The second, Warmly Inscribed, collects a series of essays about book collecting. And although I could relate to parts of it–I’ve been in the Printer’s Row Book Shop in Chicago and wonder if I’ve been to the only decent used book store in West Palm Beach, Florida–more than I could traversing Connecticut and the northeast, I didn’t like the book as much. Perhaps I felt they were trying too hard or reporting more than simply revelling in the experience.

And although the authors are well-to-do northeastern former writers for those papers, I could easily shunt aside their soft liberal asides (did they really think the Chicago policeman at the Dearborn book fair wished for 1968 so he could club them for no reason?). Besides, although they’re talking about high priced books from authors I’m barely concerned about, I cannot get on my low horse kick and go all common-man to pooh-pooh the practice; although I get most of my books from the dollar table or by the three-dollar bagful, I’ve been known to pay top dollar for rare Robert B. Parkercana.

So if you’re into books and want to share in some experiences of serious collectors, you will probably enjoy these books. Let me repeat that so that I’m clear in my enjoyment of these books, as many of my book reports on books bought by the bagful knock said books. Coincidence, I’m sure.

Books mentioned in this review: