Category: Books

I picked this book up at a book fair for a quarter because it’s like TV Superstars ’83, and I already shot my credibility as a serious thinker by admitting a weird attraction to the Scholastic books covering television from the era in which these things mattered to me. Man, I remember the little one page tissue-paperesque book order forms from Scholastic, Tab, Arrow, and so on, and how one could buy real books for a buck or two for a paperback. Of course, we didn’t have a buck or two, so I just got to look at the catalogs and imagine (for the most part). And now, some twenty years later, I’m amassing a library which includes the occasional book I was denied in elementary school.

This book, like the other, deals with television shows in the 1983-1984 time frame, so there’s quite a bit of overlap–Mr. T., Tootie Fields, Gary Coleman, and so on. But where TV Superstars ’83 filled out its pages with stars who’ve faded from even my memory, this book delves into the television industry, including chapters on the portrayal of technology on television, cable television, a bit about ratings, adulation for commercials, and musings about the future of interactive television. So this work might be the slightly more serious of the two.

Like you’re going to run out and get it or click the link below to order it from Amazon. Still, I read it because it was a cheap and quick way to get another item on my annual list of what I’ve read and a last ditch Sunday night blog entry. But I read it, and here’s my post on it.

Books mentioned in this review:

As you might remember, gentle reader, I read Bill Pronzini’s Blowback in May. I thought well enough of it that when I found this particular book at the Carondolet YMCA book fair this month, I picked it up for a dollar. I’d already broken through the buy/not buy barrier and the bottom of a stroller makes it easy to forget how much you’ve already selected. Not that there was a baby in the stroller, mind you; babies take up room better left to books.

This book collects fifty short short stories in the mystery genre. These stories run under 2000 words for the most part–three or four book pages. They don’t offer a great deal of character development, layered nuance, or other such hallmarks of immortal literary fiction that won’t survive the decade. They do, however, have plots, crimes, and sometimes a twist of an ending. Sure, they’re obvious sometimes and are fairly simple in structure, but they’re all good short shorts.

And they’re easy and not very intimidating to start reading because they’re so short, but it’s hard to stop because the next one won’t take long, either.

I enjoyed the book, and I’ll have to start watching out for short short collections. Also, this book doesn’t diminish my view of Pronzini; I think I’ll move him a little higher in my unofficial pantheon and start looking for more of his works. For when I start buying books again, which hopefully will be sometime after I’ve run through my backlog of thousands.

Books mentioned in this review:

 

I have been waiting almost a decade to read this book, ever since its excerpt appeared in Harpers when I still read that rag. I remember recognizing that Meyer was a St. Louisian, as was I. I read the hints of his heartbreak of losing his cush executive job and thought the excerpt was interesting enough to warrant further attention. Unfortunately, I waited a decade until I found a used copy at the JCC book fair for a buck (autographed, too!) before I could delve into it.

What a bunch of sour grapes.

The book spans 1991 and 1992 after Meyer is laid off from a vice presidency at J.I. Case as their communications leader. He’d been laid off previously from McDonnell Douglas in St. Louis from a similar position. The book purports to delve into the new uncertainty in the marketplace for super-executives of billion dollar companies and how hard their lives are when they discover that sometimes at-will means at-won’t-anymore.

I mean, the guy’s laid off, but he’s shocked at the prospect for starters and lacks any imagination for anything other than landing another equal position at another billion dollar company. Atop that little bit of hubris, he attempts to indict corporate America for being what it is. That is, he resents (he actually uses that word) corporate America for not feeding his addiction to power and a big salary. Which corporate America somehow corrupted him into.

Jeez, the one thing I learned from the excerpt was to always downplay your current/recent positions so you don’t overqualify yourself for lower positions in that time of desperation. I could have stuck with the excerpt and had all I could learn.

On one hand, I come from another generation and another industry, raised in a turbulent world of dot-coms and tech companies where your expertise matters more than your pedigree and where it’s expected or okay to work as a contractor or to bounce around. Also, I’ve not worked for many of the big companies, particularly at the highest echelons, but that makes it easier to project a future that’s no more turbulent than the past. As I work in a “fluff” job myself–QA, like communications, is a nicety and not a necessity when it comes down to struggling for a profit–I accept my tenuous position. But someone of the boomer era in the late 1980s, no doubt this would have been terrifying.

But the resentment and the indictment on every page, interspersed with the longing for the irrationally exuberant perks of that upper echelon, really ground on me so much that I didn’t enjoy the book as much as endure it. Do I recommend it to you, gentle reader? Perhaps, if as a historical document whose advice and situations are anachronisms to study, yes; or perhaps as a moral fable of how not to grow to accustomed to the current gravy train in your life and to have something upon which you can fall back, yes. Maybe even as an indictment of hiring English majors for anything, anytime. But this book is hardly a serious study engendering serious attention. It’s like Nickel and Dimed (by Barbara Ehrenreich, which was also excerpted by Harpers in the same era); it’s an indictment of capitalism by people who purposefully refuse to understand it.

Books mentioned in this review:

I bought this book for like a buck at the Jewish Community Center book fair this year, fully conscious that I risked my life to help fund the organization and to add to my library. Sad, I know, but in this modern world, I did note the dangers of being near a Jewish center. If I hadn’t gone, the terrorists would have won. Also, I would not have gotten a good deal on some books I have been meaning to buy.

This book, though, doesn’t fall into the class of books I’ve been meaning to buy, but I bought it never the less. I’ve been intrigued by Steve Martin’s writing forays, in a “if they fall into my lap” sort of way, for some time. I liked Bowfinger, which Martin wrote. I’ve heard good things about L.A. Story, which Martin also wrote. I dragged my poor wife to see a local community theatre production of Picasso at the Lapin Agile (Crikey, soon to be a major motion picture). I’d heard about Martin’s work for The New Yorker. So I wanted to read something on my own. Okay, I probably had read somewhere about the movie version of this film, too. So I bought it. I spent like a buck, okay?

This novella (130 pages) describes a glove department salesperson and her involvement with an older, rich computer guy and how they define intimacy and how it helps them both along in the long run. To make a short book shorter, there you go.

The story is presented entirely in the present tense but for some future tense foreshadowing. The tense choice isn’t particularly jarring, however, to those of us used to past tense whether in third person or first person. I thought the first portion of the book interesting, as the characters develop in their (purposefully limited) fashion. However, when the relationship progressed, it got a little wearing (but not for long–this ain’t Tolstoy). Finally, the end and the resolution seems a bit forced and chopped. Perhaps this would have made a better short story with less, a better novel with more. Or maybe it’s a good prose screenplay–I’ll have to catch the film version sometime later to compare (probably after Sharky’s Machine).

Still, it’s not a bad work if you can get it cheap. If you cannot and want to see what this wild and crazy guy writes like, click the helpful link below. You, gentle reader, have the ability to put MfBJN over the check-cutting threshold from the Amazon Associates program sometime before never.

Books mentioned in this review:

I bought this book for a quarter at the Bridgeton Trails Branch of the St. Louis County library. Because, I guess, I’m frugal and wanted to save the seventy-five cents extra it would have cost me for a non-former library copy of this book at a book fair somewhere. No, more likely, I saw it and knew that I didn’t have it, and I wanted it now, which was then.

As you know, I’m revisiting my Alistair MacLean fixation from high school (I read Partisans, Caravan to Vaccares, and Floodgate last year, as you remember, gentle reader).

Like Floodgate, this book ventures from MacLean’s strongest topic matter, World War II and early Cold War espionage. In this book, a band of criminals hijack the motorcade of the President and a couple oil sheiks as it crosses the Golden Gate Bridge. There, the criminals hold the hostages for ransom, but they have to deal with an FBI agent in their midst.

The book is written in the typical MacLean potboiler fashion, with characters reminiscient of others in his line. The plot is novel and preposterous, but one expects some of that from MacLean. Some of the scenes and technical descriptions within the book–more the depictions of technical details–let us know that the author has carefully considered and choreographed what he’s talking about, but the prose doesn’t bring it to life. Fortunately, as with Clancy, one kind of skims these to get to the action.

So the book is an acceptable piece of the genre work, but more importantly, it solves a discussing I had with a (foreign national) co-worker (who left Oklahoma City in late 1995) about how easy it would be to damage the Golden Gate bridge in a terrorist attack. I was right that an attack on the road surface or the towers themselves would probably be ineffectual, but we didn’t consider the effectiveness of attacking the suspension cables themselves. Probably because we’re not engineers, we’re not committed terrorists, and we were only killing time with spurious talk while watching the smokers gather on the sidewalk outside the entrance to the building across the street.

Never the less, this anecdote should at least illustrate the depth and the breadth of the Noggle Library. Odds are, I probably have a book about it, no matter what it is.

Books mentioned in this review:

 

 

 

This book provides an interesting amalgamation of some of MacDonald’s earlier work, the business-oriented novels, with some of the maudlin sentimentality found in the Travis McGee novels. As it was released as a heavy hardback, with nice paper, it aims to weightiness instead of brisk paperback sensibility. Unfortunately, it’s unsatisfying.

The story opens on Tucker Loomis after a night with an old flame. He’s brought her out to a romantic rendezvous off of Barrier Island, a, well, barrier island off of Mississippi or Florida. He not only wanted to rekindle a little good lovin’, but he wanted his flame, a real estate agent, to witness a payoff to an assistant federal prosecutor. In case the fed fails to carry out his part of the deal, you see.

The book then explores several of the players as the land scheme for which ol’ Tuck is being prosecuted unravels. An idealistic partner in a real estate firm tries to hold his marriage together while investigating the scheme. It seems that Tuck bought the land, envisioned a tropical paradise for millionaires, and sold its lots before the federal government condemned it and seized it for park land. Loomis wants a big settlement based upon the big profits he would have realized, but the idealist real estate man discovers some of the land sales Tuck had made were fraudulent. In addition to his marriage, the partner has to worry about maintaining his real estate firm with the wheeler-dealer who got involved with Tuck in the first place. Meanwhile, Tuck’s dealing with a wife in a vegatative state and an attractive nurse who imagines herself as the new Mrs. Loomis–after the current Mrs. Loomis dies.

With this set of characters and framework, perhaps MacDonald could have done better. Unfortunately, the book suffers from two flaws:

• The point of view is skewed. We’re introduced to Tucker Loomis in the beginning, so I wanted to root for him. However, he’s not the protagonist. He’s sort of the antagonist. The protagonist, as I can tell, is the idealistic real estate agent. Unfortunately, his voice isn’t very consistent throughout the book. When we get the maudlin asides about the pillaging of the environment by the newcomers to the Gulf Coast, it’s almost expository. It’s acceptable in the McGee novels because it’s a part of the character of Travis McGee; but here, it’s hanging out there on its own.
• The end is abrupt. Tucker Loomis is laid low pretty quickly, and the masterful subplots and characterizations end up wasted.

I think the book mixes, unsuccessfully, elements of his early work, elements of the Travis McGee novels, and elements of his later, longer, hardback work (such as Condominium and One More Sunday). As one of his last works, if not the last, it’s not a capstone of his career. But my copy is a first edition, nyah nyah.

Books mentioned in this review:

After I read How to Break Software (which a quick Google check indicates I have not reviewed, gentle reader, but most of you wouldn’t have read it anyway), I bought the companion volumes. This book, which I bought off of Amazon.com at its retail price, disappointed me where How to Break Software did not.

Both books run off of a quick list of fault-model testing (a term I learned from the first book). I had a ball with the first book, laughing at seeing some of my favorite dirty tricks encapsulated in someone definitive’s book. This book, however, didn’t hold the same glee for me.

The first book dealt with a broad subject and offered some very concrete things to try to attack software. This second book deals with a similarly broad subject (security testing), but is more abstract. The attacks it discusses aren’t as narrow and easy to recreate; they’re more methods and abstract ideas to try rather than concrete shortcuts to finding issues. I know, there’s something to be said for a broad, ranging methodology, but the first book wasn’t that way, and I didn’t expect this one to be that way. Additionally, the book is sized similarly to the first, which doesn’t allow it to go into a lot of detail for each of the abstract things it talks about.

Finally, I don’t know that the book focuses enough on actual security attacks; rather, it focuses on attacks that could be construed as security breaches. However, in many cases, they’re not specifically security attacks, but rather regular tests that could, if applied to applications needing security, be security attacks.

Maybe that’s all security testing is, but this book wasn’t different enough from the first book to make me wonder if it wasn’t really a sequel given a better title.

On the other hand, it does come with a CD and a tool which looks to be pretty cool, if I could get some professional time to play with it.

So buy the first book, How to Break Software, and apply its attacks to secure software. Buy this book if you’re really into it or if the company is buying it for you.

Books mentioned in this review:

 

I am pretty sure I bought this book as part of a bag of books at the Webster Groves Book Fair. It doesn’t matter, really, but I know you really dote upon my books’ lineage, gentle reader, and I try to recreate it as accurately as I can for you.

The book collects a number of strips from an online comic, RPG World, and presents them, get this, in a hardback book. A graphic novel, if you will, from an online comic. How about that? Of course, I don’t really follow online comics much; I mean, I see the Cox and Forkum and Day by Day like any good conservative blog reader who, you know, reads blogs that have the strips or cartoons printed on them, but I don’t see the sites out. Heck, I don’t even follow Calico Monkey, even though it’s flashed by an acquaintance into whose debt I remain for setting me up with my current sweet gig.

But put it in a book? I am all on it!

The story follows the action of the characters in a video game for the PlayStation as they go about their quest and side quests and deal with the mechanics of the game. It’s an amusing conceit and is full of jokes available to those familiar with the genre. I liked the book and liked that it took me only a couple of hours to read it. Unfortunately, just because I read it doesn’t mean I’ll follow the online version of the comic. Because I’m a luddite enough that I have certain things I don’t tend to do, and follow comics online is one of them. But if I find another book of RPG World somewhere in the wild, I’ll pick it up.

Books mentioned in this review:

I’m not even sure any more where I bought this book. It clocks in at over 700 pages, friends, and it took me almost three weeks to read. As a matter of fact, I had to take a break in the middle of it to read I Ought To Be In Pictures when I was getting depressed from all the stories of murder and mayhem.

First off, I’d like to say that this collection is one of the most poorly edited and produced books I’ve come across in some time. A cheap edition published in Great Britain, this book features gritty paper, a cover that’s close enough to a pizza box in quality to merit the comparison, pages cut by a dull blade, and partially washed out ink in many places. Additionally, the editing job was poor; many sidebar two-paragraph anecdotes inserted to break up sections actually retold the stories of incidents and crimes told elsewhere in the book. In the case of Black Bart, an old West stagecoach robber, he has his own named section in one chapter and, later in the chapter, is recounted as a part of a section about the most notorious Western robbers. By “is recounted,” I mean the same seven or eight paragraphs appear twice in the same chapter, separated by only a handful of pages. This book definitely doesn’t represent an academic or thoughtful work in any sense of the imagination. It’s completely a case of slapping together a large number of pruriently-interesting things and hoping to make as much from them as possible.

Still, it contains quite the compendium of famous, infamous, and trivial crimes of murder, genocide, fraud, theivery, and whatnot. The first couple hundred pages focus on mass murderers and genocidal tyrants, which led to my distaste to which I alluded. It did, however, give me a little historical perspective on the “disproportionate” and violent doings of the Western military, particularly the American and Israeli militaries, in the last 100 years. I mean, come on, the Huns and the Khans and the Ottomans were capable of real genocide, not having small units go nuts or ordnance going errant. When we lose perspective on what animal mankind really is, I guess it’s easy to think that our civilization isn’t better than the worst man has to offer.

Is the book a worthwhile read? Well, if you’re looking for macabre trivia–and who isn’t? But take plenty of breaks to retain your perspective that all of mankind isn’t like this book depicts.

Books mentioned in this review:

Like The Mystery of Edwin Drood, I bought this book for $2.00 at the St. Charles Book Fair in that orgy of hardback buying that’s populated the top of my sole to-read shelves with overflow of unrelated tomes. Since I’m in the midst of a long nonfiction hardback to be reported later, I picked this book up for a quick bit of levity in between.

As some of you know (all of you who aren’t dammkidz), Neil Simon was a prolific playwright circa the later middle decades of the twentieth century. Many of his plays were even made into movies. Oddly enough, I have a sort of cultural touchstone with this particular piece from that era; my brother, as a boy, received upon him the schtick that he was a button collector, and he had a I Ought To Be In Pictures button, no doubt reminiscent of the time where this play travelled to the Melody Top or the Riverside Theatre in Milwaukee. But I bought the book because I wanted more drama in my life, not some envy of my brother’s button collection. I think I stole inherited it, anyway, when either he needed some money in high school or when he abdicated many of his worldly possessions when joining the Marines.

The play is a simple two act with three characters: a nineteen year old New York girl who arrives at the door of her father’s California bungalow sixteen years after he abandoned her; the almost-failure screenwriter father; and his movie business girlfriend with some substance. The action takes place in the bungalow and deals with the daughter who wants to be in pictures… or maybe just wants to reconcile with the father she never knew.

It’s a short play, and a simple conceit. I liked it enough, but perhaps if I spent too much time on it, I would think it too facile or not complex enough to speak truth to power. Perhaps Simon ain’t Shakespeare. But in 1602, Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare, either.

Books mentioned in this review:

You know, the St. Louis Reperatory Theatre put on this play last year, and I didn’t have the inkling to go. I mean, face it, I hear Steven Woolf on the radio hawking the shows, and his forced enthusiasm kills any I might feel about a play. I mean, this one is a musical, and everybody knows how I feel about musicals (hint). So I didn’t go, and reading the book, I’m sorry I didn’t.

I picked this book club edition for a couple bucks at one of the book fairs I attended this summer. I think it was St. Charles, but come on, St. Charles, St. Louis, Kirkwood, Belleville, Webster Groves….they’re all beginning to blend together. I’m not reading the books fast enough to keep their origins fresh.

Aside from that, let’s dwell on the fact that this is a book club edition. Now, I’ve done my turns with the Book of the Month Club and the Quality Paperback Club (and the Writers’ Digest Book Club) beginning in the 1990s, but they didn’t offer contemporary plays. Is there a Broadway Book Club out there, or is this disappearance representative of the death of middlebrow culture? I mean, not to put too fine of a point on it, where has drama-loving middlebrow culture gone? In the olden days, plays and theatre were cheap and popular entertainment, with stars accountable to their audiences both in their performance and their lifestyles. Now, our popular entertainment is phoned in from somewhere else, delivered via unresponsive screening technologies by stars who don’t know their ultimate audiences, but feel contempt for them. What happened? Oh, yeah, theatre tickets stopped selling for a penny and snotty little English and Drama majors started getting uppity, using the rarification of their academic experience to distance themselves from the dirty, unthinking (or wrong thinking) plebes. Probably more of the former than the latter.

This particular work breaks down the fourth wall in a rather interesting fashion. It does the normal play-within-the-play thing as well; the story revolves around the last, unfinished work of Charles Dickens as presented by a turn-of-the-century British troupe. Ergo, all actors are playing actors playing characters in the play. Throughout, the Edwin Drood action stops as the drama personnel of the British troupe make asides, discuss their parts, and so on. Ultimately, the British troupe asks the audience to help finish off the play, as Dickens died before revealing the Solution of Edwin Drood.

So the play, this play, the Mystery of Edwin Drood, offers a novel and amusing presentation of several conventions and must be very interesting to see in performance, except now I know all possible endings. It’s like watching Clue: The Movie over and over again even when the mystery is gone. Come to think of it, I do that, too, so I guess I’d go see a production of The Mystery of Edwin Drood if I got the chance.

As far as the St. Louis Reperatory Theatre goes, I guess I’ll make my way over there, too, and give Steven Woolf the benefit of the doubt. Especially since we’ve moved to Old Trees, Missouri, and now we’re so close to it that I sometimes bang my shin into Loretto-Hilton Center when trying to find the bathroom in the dark.

Books mentioned in this review:

I picked this book up at the Kirkwood Book Fair because I recognized the local author’s name from the Big Sleep Books, and this book was a First Edition/First Printing. For a dollar. You cannot do wrong, can you?

Well, it’s a child snatch book, and although it’s not Nightmare in Manhattan, I didn’t care for it that much. I’m just not big on that particular plot thing. Perhaps I just don’t have the same nightmares as most parents, but I don’t have an automatic investment in child snatch books, even if there’s the scandalous confrontation of child molestation! It hearkens me back to my single visit to a starting writers’ group in my former suburb, where it was me, a couple of “poets,” and a number of old ladies all writing books on child molestation. It creeped me out, I kid you not.

The book is a serviceable genre piece, though, and worth a buck if you can find it. It did, however, alert me to Mayhaven Publishing and its annual novel competition. Boy, novel competitions are starting to look good to me as far as publishing my last novel are concerned.

Books mentioned in this review:

 

This book represents the third book in the Stars and Stripes trilogy, but I didn’t know that when I threw it in my box at the St. Charles Book Fair. All I knew is what the front cover told me (A Novel of Alternate History, Harry Harrison, and the title), and that was enough for me. I’ve done a Turtledove in the recent past (Ruled Britannia, reviewed here) and another Harrison novel earlier this year (The Stainless Steel Rat for President, reviewed here), so of course I picked this one up, even though it’s an ex-library copy and I would later realize it cost $2.00

The premise of the series: At the onset of the Civil War, Great Britain seizes a Confederate diplomat and unites the Union and the Confederacy into a war against Britain. Apparently the books deal with the initial conflict, subsequent conflict, and finally (this book) an invasion of Britain itself. It’s a quick read and stood well enough apart from the others in the series that I was not lost in it.

Unlike Turtledove, this book is pretty straight-ahead action without a lot of reflection or repetitious, almost extraneous character development. On the other hand, it does skip a bit on actual drama and conflict, since the technology and the battle-hardened nature of the American side and its brilliant strategy pretty much ensures that events unfold as planned without significant hinderance from the British.

That simple, almost logical progression not only plays to my jingoist American sensibilities, but also acts as fast forward buttons on the reading.

So I liked the book and wouldn’t mind reading the others in the series, but let’s face it: I’ll try not to pay $2.00 for ex-library editons in the future. Unless the book fair bug strikes again.

Books mentioned in this review:

 

 

This is Dave Barry’s first novel and the source for the 2002 film, so of course I bought it when it was available from the St. Charles County Book Fair for $2.00. I’ve been meaning to see the movie, too, but now I can compare it to the book, unfavorably no doubt.

As Dave Barry works with Carl Hiaasen (Book reports: Strip Tease, Skinny Dip, and Basket Case), one could expect that the absurdist crime caper bacterium would contaminate the works of the normally serious Mr. Barry. And so it has. The book is full of oddball characters, strange coincidences, and other contrivances that make the work funny. It’s not serious fiction, so it’s good camp and high fun. Or vice versa.

I need to start pitching my books to agents as in the style of Carl Hiaasen and Dave Barry. I’ll just have to be more careful to spell their names and book titles correctly. If you’ve clicked through those Hiaasen reviews, gentle reader, you’ll note I’ve misspelled both in various places.

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What, you think I mention other books just to get the links on the front page of my blog? I am shocked, shocked at the accusation! But it’s a new quarter, and I’m hoping to break my new record for quarterly referral kickbacks of $.08.