Category: Books

Wow, this book is 16 years old now and its subject matter is as relevant as it was then. The plot, as you know, deals with a set of terrorists who get their hands on a lost nuclear weapon and smuggle it into the United States. That’s the first half. And if you didn’t know the rest of it, stop reading now.

Then they blow it up at the Superbowl in Denver, and the United States president thinks it’s the Russians, so the thing escalates into the brink of a nuclear war. Meanwhile, Jack Ryan struggles with the bureaucracy in the CIA and at the top levels of the government. Those struggles, and the inside baseball that goes with it, comprise much of the weight of this book.

The book compares with some of the classical literature I’ve read this year (The Three Musketeers particularly and somewhat with Anna Karenina) in that its cut scenes deal with a war and with a large cast working within and without of the government using intrigue and whatnot. However, this book is frightening in its possibility. Brother, after September 11, 2001, I had trouble watching the movie True Lies because it dealt with nuclear weapons smuggled into the US, and it’s not entertainment if it plays to my deepest fears.

But the book moves along well, and Clancy is a master at torquing up the tension, although the ultimate climax really goes on too long with the heated exchanges between the US and Russian presidents. Also, the book refers quite a bit to A Clear and Present Danger, which I have yet to read, so many of these allusions were lost on me. But a good thriller if you’re into that, and if you want to have nightmares about it.

I italicised Denver above, because the movie version set the Superbowl and the detonation in Baltimore, which holds with my thesis that terrorists could take liberty with pretty much anything between the Rockies and the Appalachians and nobody would care; obviously, Hollywood thought Denver was bucolic and backward enough that audiences wouldn’t feel the tension and the shocking sense of loss that Baltimore, on the east coast, inspires. Also, apparently, the movie changed the terrorists to Nazis or something. Although there’s an element of freelance non-Middle Easterners in the plot, make no mistake, it’s Palestinians who blow up the Superbowl. But I’ve only seen Patriot Games and The Hunt for Red October as movies and I’m not in a hurry to rectify that “oversight.”

I do have more Clancy on my shelves, comprising many shelf inches, so I’ll get to them sooner or later, and I don’t dread the prospect.

Books mentioned in this review:

Like the other MacLean books I’ve read this year (Puppet on a Chain and Santorini), this book represents more “modern” MacLean (that is, up to date when he wrote them; in this case, the late 1970s). Unfortunately, like the other modern books, this one is a little thin relative to the action in, say, The Guns of Navarrone or Where Eagles Dare.

This book details two MacLeanesque heroes who help out a rogue oil billionaire whose revolutionary oil platform, parked in the Gulf of Mexico, is under threat from a bad man employed by the traditional oil cartel. Weapons are fired. However, there really aren’t any plot twists to keep it going. It reads like a television or movie script.

Still, a bad MacLean book is average suspense, so it’s not as though it’s a bad book; it’s just not the best in the MacLean oeuvre.

Books mentioned in this review:

 

 

I bought this book this weekend for a quarter, a super bargain since it’s a two-fer: It’s the first printing of the Signet movie tie-in edition (with the book review from the New Yorker cut out and tucked in as a bookmark), and I bought the next two books in the series last weekend, so I needed to get this book, too. I guess there’s a fourth in the series, but I might hold off buying that that until I see how the first three go. After all, he did ruin the Rama series.

The book, written in conjunction sort of with the screenplay for the Kubrick film, fills in a lot of the gaps of just what the heck was going on. It adds plenty of detail to the monkeys scene and to the ending to make sense of what only served as stunning images in the movie.

The plot revolves around the appearance of the monoliths, strange stones that man has found which have an age of 3 million years. When one is found near a moon base, it blasts a radio signal to Saturn (Jupiter in the movie). A ship is sent to it, and Hal the computer kills everyone on board. Even that is explained better in the book. And it’s all tied together.

I’ve seen the movie once and I saw 2010 a couple of times when it was on Showtime and I was stuck in rural Missouri in the 1980s, so I’ll be a little familiar with the continuing storyline.

Although I don’t know how much I’ll appreciate Clarke and his reputation after I am done. I mean, Childhood’s End was okay, this book was okay, Rendezvous with Rama was great until Clarke ruined it in the 1980s with its sequels. But that this fellow is held up with Asimov, Heinlein, and Niven as one of the greats in the field. Meh.

Books mentioned in this review:

This year, I’ve read pulp novels from the Killmaster, the Enforcer, and Matt Helm series, so why not try one from the granddaddy, Don Pendleton’s The Executioner? It has the most books published about a single character, some 200 or 300 of them. So I found one at a book fair, cheap, and checked it out.

The other two series offered more depth. Sugar’s “The Enforcer” has weird sci-fi elements and Objectivist speeches; the Killmaster gets the chicks; and Matt Helm channels Dean Martin, whether intentionally or not. The Executioner just runs around and kills Mafia.

In this book, he goes to Philadelphia to take out a branch of the Family. He blows up a compound that used to be a bordello and then works his way into the home of the don. He kills a “specialist” that’s come to take care of the problem and then sets elements of the mob against each other while having a hand in, I dunno, 60 deaths? 70?

On a side note, The Executioner (one of the main inspirations for Marvel Comic’s The Punisher, by the way) was a Vietnam veteran. Many characters from the pulp of the era and television of the next decade involved Vietnam veteran characters who were not suicidal nutbars or whatnot; instead, they were tough, efficient crime fighters of one sort or another. Where are the veterans as honorable crimefighters these days in popular culture?

This book reads like a television script (and the book says they’re a major motion picture series coming!) with about that much depth of character (I know, it’s pulp, but this guy isn’t much more than a name holding various guns). I guess that’s what you get with a series written by dozens, but this is only #15, when Don Pendleton himself was writing them.

Of all the series I’ve sampled this year, this is the least likely for a return visit; that’s not to say that it’s bad pulp, but it’s the worst of the pulp I’ve read this year.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book rounds out the Brighton Beach trilogy, and although it’s been decades since I read Brighton Beach Memoirs, I read Biloxi Blues just this May. Ergo, I am sort of up on the characters and storyline. Bottom line? This play was probably the weakest of the bunch and only made its way onto stage and onto the television screen because Neil Simon was all that. As a stand alone drama, it’s a little lacking. You have to be invested in the characters already from the previous works to really care, and the piece doesn’t offer an overarching goal/conflict that needs to be resolved; instead, you’ve got a subplot in the chance Stan and Eugene have to make it as comedy writers, a subplot about the grandmother offstage moving to Florida, and a subplot about the breakdown of the Jerome parents’ marriage. Even lumped together, it doesn’t stick.

On a side note, I find that the actor who played Eugene Jerome in the movie Brighton Beach Memoirs, Jonathan Silverman, reprised the role for the Broadway debut of the play; however, in the made-for-television treatment (as opposed to the other two plays’ movie treatment), Silverman plays Stan Jerome, the older brother. He’s lost the part of Eugene to Corey Parker, who played Epstein in the film Biloxi Blues; as you know, Matthew Broderick played Eugene Jerome in both the Broadway and film versions of Biloxi Blues. Both Silverman and Broderick played Eugene Jerome on Broadway in Brighton Beach Memoirs; so when you’re watching the movies in order, you get some cast switching in odd ways. Kind of like when Lee Van Cleef was two different characters in For a Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

So it’s good to read the play if you need to close out the trilogy, but if it’s your only insight into the Jerome mythos, you might want to pass.

Books mentioned in this review:

I saw this play staged in 1993 or 1994 in Milwaukee at the Milwaukee Rep or one of the subsidiary theatre groups that shares the space down on Wells; at the time, I thought it was the best drama I’d ever seen on stage. I still do, but unfortunately I’m not going to the theatre as much as I did when I was a poor college student making $6.60 an hour and paying tuition. I don’t know how that happened. So my experience hasn’t gotten much broader since the middle 1990s.

This book tells the story of a successful artist, Jonathan Waxman, who visits the home of his collegiate flame in England on the eve before the opening of his first European show. There, he finds a painting from his student period that captures something of his innocence before he became famous and rich and a self-made producer of commodity art. Or maybe it’s his meeting Patty again, a woman whom he dumped unceremoniously because she was not Jewish and who’s now married to an English archeologist whom she does not love.

The play is told in a series of scenes told non-chronologically and in as varied of places as the English house where Patty and her husband live; Jonathan’s boyhood home; the college where they went to school; and the opening itself. When the Milwaukee Rep staged it, I didn’t get the correct sense of the scenes between Jonathan and his German interviewer were at the opening, so I lost a bit from it.

But I got a bit out of reading it that I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t seen it first; perhaps that’s the way to do these plays, unlike movies. Watch them live first and read the book after to see what you’ve missed.

At any rate, I liked the play and I liked the book.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book collects some of the handwritten letters sent by Ronald Reagan during his presidency to people he knew, government officials, and the general public who wrote him. Apparently, the editors were noodling among the former president’s library and uncovered this collection written in his own hand, which they felt gave it a personal touch that would get to the heart of who Reagan was or something. They picked some of the best from each year, add an introduction to each year that details what was going on at that time, and let her rip.

Of course this book reflects the best of what remember from Reagan: his optimism, his faith, and his conservative beliefs. These letters, often written in response to common person critics who wrote to him, do reinforce the man’s impression. How cool is the thought, though, that if you had written Ronald Reagan, he might have dashed a couple lines off on his stationery in response. That’s fascinating.

I worked on this book for a month or so, which explains my recent acquisitiveness of Reagania.

I’ve only read two or three books of letters in my life; this, Raymond Chandler’s, and maybe Ayn Rand’s. This one is the most accessible because I have direct memory of the events to which he refers and because the letters are very brief.

Recommended.

Books mentioned in this review:

Well, I’m counting this as a book I read even though it really is a picture book. Aside from an introduction and an acknowledgments section, the book contains photographs, mostly taken by helicopter, of Detroit and its environs. The selections include a number of corporate headquarters (Ford, GM, K-Mart, American Motor Corporation), a couple of old churches, some of the new developments and high-rises constructed to handle the 1980s resurgence of Detroit predicted by Detroit boosters, a couple shots of Tiger Stadium (Home of the 1984 World Champion Detroit TIGERS!), one picture of the Pontiac Silverdome (where a football team and basketball team played, or so I hear), and a several shots of nearby farms/neighborhoods/and so on.

The only thing I’ll remember from this book, aside from the obvious lesson in urban “resurgence” promised year after year by urban moneyspenders, is a catch phrase. The book also sports a number of thumbnail photos of collections of vehicles taken from the helicopter which sport the phrase “as art.” A bunch of schoolbuses in a parking lot, a number of automobiles outside an automotive plant, a number of train cars in a train yard. The caption is “School buses as art” or “Transport containers as art.”

From this day forward, “as art” shall verily apply to any collection of common goods that I want to elevate to the heights of pretentiousness. Think of this blog, for instance, as “English words as art.”

A quick look at Amazon shows that the photographer did later editions of this book, perhaps with later photographs. But this is the 1985 edition, worthwhile not because the city of Detroit is worth anything, but because of the hysterical historical significance.

Man, I am glad this guy didn’t express his affection for Milwaukee this way; otherwise, I’d have to examine and review the book earnestly.

Books mentioned in this review:

This is actually the first of the Walter J. Black Classics Club/Classic Editions books I have completed; not bad for a fellow who’s been accummulating them for a couple of years now. However, the Dickens Classic Editions volumes (with the green stripe on the spine instead of the red for the Classics Club books) are fiction, and I’ve been tearing through it this year, particularly “classic” literature, so I nabbed this bit.

First, a word on the editions. The printing’s cheap, as it’s rife with printing mistakes like double impressions, some lightly washed out inks, and whatnot. But these editions aren’t fine leatherbound things; they’re designed to sell cheaply to the masses from magazine ads, mail order. So why am I collecting them? Because I inherited four from a grandfather, that’s why! Not Classic Editions, though; the Dickens works I have are just gravy. Perhaps I’ll evolve a rationale for collecting these instead of fine leatherbound editions that centers around defense of the middlebrow and the middle class. Give me some time.

Now, onto the story, which I did not particularly care for.

In his defense, this was Dickens’ second work (or so Wikipedia tells me). But the title character is a passive spectator in his own life. In his defense, Oliver is a child; however, if you’re going to title the book after someone, it might be more interesting if that character plays a role instead of plays the prop.

A poor orphan falls in with a bad crowd and participates, unwillingly and sometimes unknowingly, in a couple of crimes in between bouts of highbrow people being taken with him and helping him out, keeping him like a pet. Then all the loose threads are tied up. 541 pages later, the end.

Like many of the classical literature things I’ve read this year, the book really begins to move about 60% of the way through it; in this case, that’s somewhere in the 300s. Modern audiences don’t tend to have that attention span, I expect; if you’re going to have a lot of pages, a clown demon better rip a boy’s arms off in the first chapter.

Additionally, I have to wonder about what reading all this classical literature does with my sense of the past. Of the four big ones I’ve read (Anna Karenina, The Three Musketeers, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and this) all take place in the past, but the actual centries vary widely. However, as far as I am concerned, the time periods aren’t that different; horse and buggy days, the aristocracy and the poor extremely different, and so on and so forth. Has the last century been that radical that its very decades were different epochs akin to the centuries or millenia of old? Or am I just confused by my own life experience, where I can tell the differences easily because I lived them?

That’s a bit heavy for a simple book report, but I’d like to see those who hit this post for a Google search for oliver twist book report defend that unread and pasted assertion.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book collects a bunch of quotations and a couple of poems about happiness. Eh. But the best part is the photos ca. 1972 of people in various states of happiness and 1970s dress. I highlighted some of them when I bought the book, but let me share a few others. They always bring a smile to my face, announcing happiness. Or perhaps it’s merely a smirk identifying wry superiority; maybe that’s the best I’ve got.

Ah, feeding marijuana to the ducks. Obviously, this is some weird LSD trip; I’d rather have seen an image from about two minutes further into the trip, where the ducks’ bills turn into little aligator snouts with six inch teeth and the hippie girl flees screaming from them, only to jump from a bridge into the dark safety of the water below.

“I’m not giving you the flower, lady; I’m trying to sell these weeds I stole out of Mrs. Busby’s garden so I can afford to buy a shirt or a bottle of Mogen David.”

I’ve had nightmares like this. I am a small child, falling, falling. Instead of hitting the ground, a strange man in a leather vest appears out of nowhere to catch me. It’s my father, and this is the genetical line which I perpetrate through my very existence! AHHHHHHHH!

No, that’s not a fifty yard line or something that would make sense; instead, it’s the gutter of the book because an image this astonishing needs to be spread across two pages.

The prophet ran from the mountains and crossed the fields to warn the villagers that the discosaurs were coming. The villiagers thought he was mad. Only four years later, unheeding of the warning, the villiagers bought velvet suits and silk shirts with the top half of the buttons missing.

This is how the West was almost lost. I’d pay extra for a DVD that features these people in a deleted scene which depicts Clint Eastwood on his walking horse coming into the scene, getting told he was harshing their mellow, man, and shooting the man in the leg and freeing the Indian woman to go back to her tribe.

I think I paid a dollar for this book. I mean, the text is meh (which is about what one expects for a book that collects inspirational junk for review; it’s a hardcover Ideals magazine without the topical relevance). But the pictures are awesome.

Books mentioned in this review:

At worst, this book is nothing more than a set of Bob Greene’s columnesque riffs surrounded by a narrative gimmick and some wish fulfillment (43 year old network correspondent finds true love, sex with 25 year old grad student). As the book begins, that’s about the best I hoped for.

The book follows three friends from high school who, after their 25th high school reunion, take the summer off to relive some of their youth. They travel randomly, whimsically across the country. Ben, the network correspondent, lives alone after his divorce and dotes on his 8 year old daughter from a distance. Ronnie married into money and ended up chairman of a large public company by accident. Michael stayed in their small Ohio suburban town and taught school. Their adult life roles cause some friction for them, as do situations they find along the way. But friendship wins out for some reason.

The story moves along with incidents and asides that don’t add to a larger movement and don’t resolve anything. Ronnie’s father goes into the hospital; Michael meets his first high school love and seems in danger of sacrificing his happy home life to it; and Ben finds out his ex-wife is going to remarry. Then they move on to somewhere else. Ronnie picks up a woman who’s not his wife and she travels with them a bit. They sleep in the Elvis Suite in Las Vegas. Then they come toward the end of the summer and encounter some life-changing events.

I suppose I wanted to see this book as something more than the “at worst.” Perhaps it played to my proclivity toward Bob Greene’s work (see review for He Was A Midwestern Boy On His Own from earlier this month). Perhaps it played to my proclivity to undertaking life-altering lifestyle changes in the summer (or in the spring, as it were). But I enjoyed the book slightly more than I thought I would, and the book was maybe slightly better than the worst case.

But it’s not a good book, and Greene has been wise to stick to nonfiction since.

So it’s worth it if you like Greene’s work; you can find a used copy easily at a garage sale or book fair. Take my word for it; I’ve bought more than one first edition for a buck or two each.

Books mentioned in this review: