Category: Books

I bought this book for six bucks, new, during my recent Springfield binge. Its cover announced that it’s the quintessential libertarian science fiction adventure. Hey, I’m a libertarian sort of fellow!

I fully expected this to be an Ayn Rand novel with some sci-fi verve, and that’s what it was. Basically, a cop from the dystopian future of 1987 (this book was originally published in 1980, so it’s an extrapolation of Jimmy Carter’s America) breaks on through to the other side–where the other side is a Libertarian paradise where George Washington didn’t put down the Whiskey Rebellion under his statist jackboot and the Hamiltonians were run out of the country. Unfortunately, the cop’s statist pursuers, well, pursue him and join up with the Hamiltonians in America and bring gasp! nuclear weapons.

So we don’t have the bounty of Galt’s speech with its pages of long paragraphs, but we do get a lot of shorter lectures from the enlightened libertarians. At the beginning of the book, it’s okay because the action isn’t overwhelmed, but at the end, when the book should be reaching climax, it cuts right to the talking. So, ultimately the book drags, but it’s another interesting dystopian future piece written twenty years ago (much like A Death of Honor).

Still, it was an enjoyable and easy read, fortunately for me; I also bought the sequel, The American Zone and would really hate to let it slip into the pile of books I’ve owned, but haven’t read, for over a decade. Unfortunately, that segment of my library is growing every year. Honest, Dr. Block, one day I will read that textbook I was required for my Literary Criticism class.

I bought this book, a 2000 paperback reprint of the 1973 novel, for five bucks during my book buying spree in Springfield this weekend (wherein I bought 26 new books for myself, which I cannot fit onto my swamped to read bookshelf and must stack on the floor). Mr. Simon, I want you to know that I bought it at an 80% off store, not a used book store, so I hope you’ll get your pennies at the end of the quarter from the purchase. Unlike other bloggers whose books I have bought used.

Well, the quality of the book drops from the cover, wherein Ross MacDonald lauds it, to the introduction, where an apparently hashish-enhanced Richard Dreyfuss, that guy who co-starred with Mike the Dog in Down and Out in Beverly Hills (and, I guess, The Big Fix movie, which would make him keenly insightful into American detective fiction). Dreyfuss gushes about the sixties, man, and how Moses Wine is all that and a big bowl.

The book certainly pays homage to Ross MacDonald and Raymond Chandler. The setting is a light version of Ross MacDonald’s California, not the romanticized landscape of Chandler. The main character is well-read and intelligent man, albeit one who indulges where Philip Marlowe would abstain. Sure, Marlowe drank, but tells a naked Carmen Sternwood to put her clothes on and go home. Wine? He smokes all the dope and hash profferred and takes the freebie from the prostitute. So the main character is likeable enough, but not someone whom I’d want to emulate. So he falls underneath Marlowe, Spenser, and others in the genre. I’m sure Moses Wine is a good role model if you want to be a self-indulgent adolescult (or however you would spell it phonetically to get the proper ess sound out of the sc) like some baby boomers, particularly those I would imagine in California. But not for this stoic-worshipping hard-boiled reader.

The plot, in a timely enough fashion, revolves around a barking moonbat whose support could derail a Democrat candidate’s chances in the primary, and a cabal of rich shadowy figures have their own reasons for it. Moses Wine has to delve, rather easily, into leftist political groups and individuals to find out why. Here’s a hint: It involves Satanism and gambling, but no overt Republicans, although holding companies and corporations play a role.

It’s also quite the period piece; as I was reading it, I was imagining it in the fashion of Altman’s The Long Goodbye which came out the same year.

I did have a little trouble keeping up with the characters and their roles when I was reading a chapter a night, but it eventually cleared into a climax which would have ended differently undoubtedly if Moses Wine carried a gun–which he doesn’t, of course.

But I enjoyed it, thankfully, since I bought the rest of the Moses Wine series except for Wild Turkey for five dollars a throw this weekend. Because he’s a blogger, see, and I hope someday he’ll repay the favor.

When I was in Milwaukee in October, I visited Downtown Books and bought a number of John D. MacDonald paperbacks, including this one, immediately after I read Judge Me Not. Well, okay, it was the next morning, but I plunked down $1.95 each for five of them.

On the Run runs long at 144 pages, but the title page indicates it was based on a story published in Cosmopolitan. A lot of the filler material includes long passages of declarations of love between the protagonists and a lot of early 1960s I’m OK, You’re OKism. Also, orgasms for women are good, and women who want them are not too much for a man to handle, they’re just right.

The premise, or at least the tease on the back cover, is that a man on the run from the mob is startled to find a beautiful woman who claims to represent his unremembered rich grandfather who wants to find his estranged grandchildren before he dies. The Man On The Run (MOTR) thinks it’s a scam, but he soon falls for the Cosmobabble of the liberated woman, who happens to be the rich grandfather’s nurse.

The book represents the worst pacing I have ever seen in a John D. MacDonald book, and I really hope he chalked this one up as an experimentation in style and a departure because he wanted to grow as an artist. However, at its slight weight, it’s interesting enough to follow to its conclusion, one of the darkest I have ever seen in a John D. MacDonald book–although the dark ending matches the beginning of The Green Ripper.

Well, sorry, MacDonald fans for blowing it for you.

I picked this book at a yard sale some years ago and have just gotten around to it now. It’s a thin book, 124 pages, broken into chapters that provide different puzzles/means of cognition and intelligent ways to approach them. Memorization tips, visual skills, and whatnot.

It’s an interesting little book, with nice little tricks. However, it’s not going to put me over the cusp into the warm embrace of Mensa, mostly because the book doesn’t cure lazy. But if you’re motivated to improve your thought, it’s a quick enough read.

I bought this book from my aunt at our semiannual yard sale, and I insisted upon paying her the whole blooming quarter because I don’t want to have her come begging from money from us when Social Security collapses. Also, I like John D. MacDonald.

I have to admit that this is the most exciting tale of a City Manager I’ve ever read. Of course, the city manager and his assistant are going to rid a small town of the syndicate, which this book charmingly misspells as maffia because it was written before the Godfather came out. The Maffia don’t want to go cleanly, and before the 160 pages elapse, murder, kidnaping, and other various mayhem erupts. Also, there’s a fair amount of sex.

I grew up on these potboilers, or at least kettlewhistlers, and I’ve forgotten how much fun they are to read (and they’re very instructive, too; for example, one can learn a lot about how to treat members of the opposite sex, particularly women of the night with hearts of gold). So I ventured to Downtown Books this weekend and bought a couple more.

I wonder if John D. MacDonald, churning several paperback originals a year throughout the 1950s and 1960s, could imagine how well his books would hold up so that some punk kid in the 21st century would read them and find inspiration.

I bet he didn’t.

I bought this book on the remainder rack at Borders for $1.00. It’s by a relatively obscure columnist from Minnesota….

All right, all right, I bought the book full price, okay? Lileks gets his fifteen cents of my money. Not that he needs it with his following, wherein acolytes daily stoop at his altar and do whatever his voice commands them.

The book features photos of mod (er, sorry, slang from the wrong decade) rooms depicted in interior design magazines from the 1970s interspersed with Lileks’ wit. Undoubtedly, most of them are outliers on the stylishness scale, but you’ve got to see them to believe them. Sure, it’s a rip-off of an X-Entertainment feature from a couple years back, but hey, Lileks has the pull to get it into print.

That aside, I liked this book more than I liked The Gallery of Regrettable Food because man, I can remember what it was like in the 1970s. A lot of the rooms in the book were in finished basements or in attics turned into additional bedrooms. Who has those now? Out here in the suburbs, houses are carefully crafted to have no space into which you can expand.

Also, this book reminded me of my red velvet table. You see, when I was in middle school, my family received a houseware which was essentially a cable spool wrapped in a shaggy red fabric. It’s a trailer park thing, you dig? When we moved into an actual house, we brought it along. I took it to college. I brought it home from college. I moved it to my apartment. Hey, it was a functional piece of furniture, of which I had a full eight in my apartment. Then it ran (or rolled) headlong into my wife, who has taste.

So I could relate better to this book because, quite frankly, but a birth a couple decades too late, I could have decorated like this. Actually, some of it’s kind of interesting. So I might yet. Also, Lileks’s text is shorter and more less linear than in TGORF, where he examined entire cookbooks in detail and each section ran on beyond its natural lifespan. With only a photograph to go on, Lileks’ quick humor fits better. Also, I read it in a night.

And I have a collector’s edition, which contains an incomplete word wrap erratum in the the author bubble on page 11. So run out and get yours before they correct it in the next printing. I read this book in Milwaukee, though, a city where no one can spell anything anyway, so this error was only one of many, many I encountered this weekend so I’ll let Lileks off easily by not crippling his Web host with a Briantrickle from this review. Hey, it’s almost the least I could do.

I bought this paperback (oh, the horror, the horror!) from the local library for a quarter. Heather and I, although we’re upper middle class, we’re the evil upper middle class who buy books second hand so the poor starving artists don’t receive their pittances and from the library for less than the books are worth as sort of another tax break for us. Muhahaha!

So what you’ve got here, basically, is a book about immortals that was published ten years ago based on a movie that came out twenty years ago. Wrap your heads around that. Man, where was I ten years ago? Working as an assistant editor at a magazine and moonlighting as a produce clerk, which is where I was when I got the call that my father died. Man, that’s a heavy thing to come up from a cheap little multimedia tie-in book like this, but wow, has it been ten years since that syndicated television show aired? Yessir.

This book, which might have been the first in the series, features the characters from the movie and the series and they run about, lopping off other immortals’ heads, which really means that the immortals are only mostly immortal, but if you don’t know the mythology of the bit before you pick up the book, you probably wouldn’t pick it up in the first place, even for a quarter. But I digress….don’t I?

Unlike the first movie and most of the episodes of the television series I saw, this book takes place entirely in the past, with an old immortal who thinks he’s a god and who doesn’t understand the rules of the Game, which to be honest I’m not entirely sure of, either. But he vows revenge on Duncan and Connor Macleod. 220 pages later, it doesn’t work so well.

Sorry to ruin it, but the Highlander lives on to fight in other books in the line. It’s not a bad junk read, a bit slow in spots, and I sometimes get the sense that the author has done just enough historical research to mention but not really give much sense of place. But the flaws with the book–that it’s written with a definite sense of being adapted from television and lacking in proper setting and mood–come with the genre.

Over a number of Guinnesses as we watched the snow fall on my birthday this year, which I spent in Milwaukee helping a friend move, we exchanged book reading recommendations. I suggested Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, and my friend, who is a part-time Elvis impersonator and full-time Elvis lookalike, suggested this book. When my beautiful wife and I visited Florida this spring, we went used book shopping, which is our wont, and at The Book Exchange on Northlake in West Palm Beach, the book faced out and caught my eye. So I spent ten dollars on it, because my friend really wanted me to read it.

Well, it’s not a hard read. The full title is Caught in a Trap : Elvis Presley’s Tragic Lifelong Search for Love. The introduction says the author’s goal is not to evangelize. The book is published by Word Publishing. You can guess which impulse won out.

Rick Stanley’s mother married Vernon Presley after his wife died, so the Stanley brothers are Elvis’s stepbrothers. That’s his in onto the lifestyle of Elvis, as his family moved to Graceland when Elvis mustered out of the Army in 1960. Stanley became part of Elvis’s traveling crew when he was sixteen, so he had some access.

Still, instead of a straight biography, we get an evangelist building a parable. Two brothers, one really talented and beloved, the other lower key but saved by his eventual conversion to a mid-seventies blue-jeans-and-tee-shirts denomination of Christianity. Stanley relates actual events in Elvis’s life, but he adds pop psychological interpretation to Elvis’s inner state that emphasizes his parable. He also interjects a number of biographical details from his life, which he sets up as a parallel to Elvis’s except for the love of a good Christian woman which will ultimately redeem him from the world of the entertainment industry and the drugs. The final chapter takes place after Elvis’s death, where Stanley comes out on his own as a legitimate evangelist speaker, loved by many because he used to serve the King and now serves The King.

The story and the parable and everything are an interesting read; it sounds as though the story would have made an interesting novel of some sort. Unfortunately, it’s not a good Elvis biography as the man really only plays a bit role in the greater story the author’s trying to tell.

I was first introduced to O’Neil De Noux ten years ago (already) by my friend Stever. He also introduced me to Laurel K. Hamilton, to whom I have introduced my beautiful, but only lightly posting lately, wife. So Stever’s gift lives on eight years after he moved to a better job with a better junkyard back east.

I probably read this book when Stever loaned me his collection, but I’ve been looking for them lately in used book stores. I scored this paperback on our recent excursion to Kansas City, and the fact that I paid two and a half bucks for a paperback should indicate what I think of the series.

Basically, Dino LaStanza’s a new homicide cop in New Orleans, and he’s quite the hotshot after solving the Slasher case (in a book prior to this one). He’s feeling his age (he’s ancient at 31) and it doesn’t help–well, actually, it does–that he’s seeing a younger woman. Like 22. Hey, I know the feeling. I’m ancient at 32, and I cannot keep up with my younger, more attractive, and more energetic wife.

LaStanza catches a whodunit murder–meaning anything which involves more than a percursory investigation–he’s in the pressure cooker again because you’re only as good as your last case. Except this victim is in the Mafia, and suddenly LaStanza’s dealing not only with people who’d put a two .22 slugs in you for no known reason, but with his own Sicilian heritage.

The O’Neil De Noux books are tidy little police procedurals with grit, gristle, and some pretty steamy sex scenes in them. Although they’re not Ed McBain, and although the book didn’t live up to ten years’ worth of idealization, it’s a good, quick read. If you can find it. The book’s out of print and it wasn’t a blockbuster release even in 1990 or 1991.

I bought this book as part of my initial membership with the Writers Digest Book Club last year, and as all writers who subscribe to that book club want the cheap Writer’s Market, and everything else is gravy.

This book looked colorful, and its paragraph description led me to believe it would inspire me in my quest to write suspense novels and mysteries. Well, at least it didn’t take too long to read.

The book is a cross between a morbid coffeetable book, chock full of crime scene photos interspersed with movie stills, and an almost textbookish overview of crimes and their investigations. As a matter of fact, the author spends the introduction explaining that he’s written textbooks. So he’s a credible witness. Until he gets to the Firearms section of the Means to Murder chapter (chapter 2), which starts:

Firearms (other than crossbows, which are occasionally used as murder weapons) fall into two categories: smooth bore or rifled.

And a couple paragraphs later:

Single-shot automatics have to be loaded manually each time the gun is fired.

This section triggered enough doubt about the expert testimony that the author’s presenting to look with a skeptical eye on any technical detail within the book, which pretty much rendered the author’s claims to authority kinda moot.

Plus, it really only captures and distills the procedures and considerations given to a crime (particularly murder) that one would get from a number of years of Ed McBain, Thomas Philbin, and O’Neil De Noux. Of course, it includes the aforementioned photographs, so the actual text of its 190 some pages only really comprises 110 pages or so, but it’s still textbook enough to lack excitement.

Perhaps I’ll have gotten something from the page-long case studies in murders from Ted Bundy to the Unabomber to more obscure–to Americans–cases from the U.K. But probably not.

My beautiful wife gave me this book for no particular occasion. THIS JUST IN (since she’s watching me type this): she heard Bill Sammon on KMOX radio and thought I would like it, but I repeat it was not for my birthday or Christmas or anything.

And then she read it before I did.

I can only imagine the glee with which the historians of the future will dig into the plethora of primary secondary sources for the politics of our time. Tomes such as Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, When You Ride Alone You Ride with Bin Laden, Slander, Treason, Stupid White Men, and other commentary by pundits, comedians, and know-nothings, or the books written by the disgruntled government officials, or whoever wants to make a quick buck off of the suddenly bestselling venomous tome collection.

Future historians will find this book more useful, as it tells the story of the Bush administration, particularly in the run up and execution of the Iraq war, and presents the narrative as the Bush administration would want it written. Sure, it’s lightly partisan, particularly in the choice of verbs to connect a quote to a speaker who disagrees with the Bush administration, but it’s not invested heavily in name calling or scoring cheap points. The book explores how the straight ahead style of the administration often confounds its self-appointed betters.

It’s an encouraging book, and it’s inside baseball in some places, but you’re a political junkie anyway if you’re reading this blog. So read the book if you’d like. Enjoy it while it’s relevant, before it becomes just one more book in the stacks in some university library where it will end up.

I bought this book earlier this year, for full price (minus 30%) from Borders because I didn’t think I read enough contemporary fiction, or perhaps genre fiction, or maybe just good fiction. I was right; I read this book in under two days from the previous fiction book I read, which is some number of weeks less than it took me to read the penultimate fiction book. Maybe I shouldn’t buy all of my books for under a dollar.

So, onto Odd Thomas. This is the first Koontz I’ve read, undoubtedly influenced by those strange disembodied voices I heard telling me to read Odd Thomas–that is, the radio commercials for it. So I gave it a whirl, and I liked it. But since this is “horror” fiction, I have to compare Koontz to Stephen King, and I like them both so far, but each has different strengths.

The first person narrator of this book engaged me immediately, and the voice carried me through the book. The book builds a lot of small incidents into a climax of less scope than a King book, but the voice carries the reader. King’s books begin with what the dark half in The Dark Half would call the wetwork; third person narration, with each character likeable, but inevitably they start dropping like flies pretty early.

On the other hand, King’s foreshadowing is more subtle; although Koontx does the same, it’s obvious that the paragraphs he dedicates to foreshadowing are foreshadowing; however, I forgive him that.

The book deals with a 20-year-old fry cook in a desert community in California who sees dead people. When a stranger comes into the diner where he cooks, followed by a number of shadowy harbingers of bloodshed, Odd Thomas knows trouble is coming. And as he badly foreshadows, the trouble will change his life and that of his town, Pico Mundo, forever.

That’s a shorter summary than you’ll get on the dust jacket, but it will take you not much longer to read the book.

And I don’t want to spoil anything for you, but Deckard was a replicant.

Okay, I cannot tell you much about this book because it just came out today, and my beautful wife hasn’t read it yet, so I cannot give away the details, except:

• It’s a Sunny Randall book.
• Parker continues to explore his femispenser side, which I think involves doubting yourself, paying not only attention to your clothes but also your makeup, and crying. Crikey, I think I must have learned everything I know about writing women characters from him.
• Needs more gun play. Like Checkov said, if you see the big bald black guy in act one, he must fire a couple rounds by act three.
• The Parkerverse crossovers continue; in the last Spenser book, Spenser passed an unidentified Sunny Randall walking her dog, and in this book….Well, I cannot tell you, but rest assured, this will undoubtedly culminate in a Spenser, Jesse Stone, Sunny Randall, Jackie Robinson, Wyatt Earp, race horse, and Spiderman cross over you won’t want to miss! Until next time, Excelsior!

I bought this book for $1.00 at Hooked on Books in Springfield, Missouri, and it should serve as something of a reminder to me. Avoid the books with the red dots on the spine. If the book store puts them on carts outside, it’s because they don’t care if someone steals the book.

All right, it’s late and I am being melodramatic; the book’s not that bad, but its pacing reminded me of walking through thigh-deep water in blue jeans. Sure, it’s occasionally cool, occasionally exciting, but you’ve got to slog a way to get there.

The book is set in a 1987 dystopian future, where the Soviets have pretty much overrun Europe and the East, Canada and Mexico have sealed their borders to isolate us to not piss off the Soviet hegemon, and the only free country is Australia, and everyone wants letters of transit to the promised former penal colony–which is why when Ugarte….sorry, wrong plot there. But America has militarized into a fascist state, where the state raises children and rewards people for procreation. As a result, society revolves around dance clubs with copulation chambers in the back. In this world of countless constitutional amendments and daily terrorist bombings by one aggrieved group or another, crime investigations often fall to the primary suspects–who can exercise their 31st and look into crimes of which they’re accused.

This amendment comes in handy when Payne, a bioengineer, finds a corpse in his apartment. After the authorities come several hours after Payne calls them, they leave a yellow claim ticket that gives Payne permission, under his 31st amendment rights, to all materials the authorities gather; Payne originally decides to not investigate on his own, but he’s attacked by someone who wants the ticket, so he decides to investigate. Fortunately, he’s a bioengineer, because some biology is involved. Interspersed with the interpersonal melodrama in Payne’s life and the exposition about the state of the world, Payne does a lot of meticulously and dryly detailed technical things with lab equipment. Perhaps this can be done now. Perhaps it’s something in a biologist’s current fantasies. Who am I to care? Just the reader, and fortunately a dedicated one at that.

But, as I indicated, the plot offers just enough interest through the first half to make you think maybe, maybe it’s going to pick up. And it does, around page 140 (of 273). Finally, action moves along more quickly than explication, revelation replaces mere investigation, or at least the pages turned; perhaps the wind was just blowing more from a righterly direction to give them a good tail wind.

So it’s not a good pick up if you’re looking for a set-in-the-dark-near-future sci fi novel, or a medical thriller, to both of which this book undoubtedly aspires. However, it’s an interesting and heartening bit of historical perspective into the fictional nightmares projected from current evens that are now history. I mean, encircled by the Soviets, with even Mexico against us, and nary a Wolverine in sight? How strangely inspiring that our own current dark times might be so suddenly resolved, all of our worst fears overturned by resolution and confrontation of danger.

Until our future current dark times arrive, of course.

I bought my copy of this book at Downtown Books for $3.95 because I was feeling extravagant, and because I liked the second television show. TSR, the former role playing game company commissioned this book to promote its former role playing game, which was based not on the television show but on the original books from the 1930s (but not the film serial). So I read the book bearing in mind the comparisons that sprang from its precedents.

And the book lacks.

Of course it’s a role playing game novel. It features five adventures put together into a loose campaign, wherein Buck is updated from a World War I pilot to a 1990s ace who is purposefully suspended by a secret military program. After his revival in the 25th century, each of Buck’s adventures goes through the common RPG cycle: going to the store (wherein Buck and the reader are innundated with technical detail to increase the plausibility of the 25th century technology); briefing (wherein Buck and the readers receive the salient explication laid out by the dungeon master superior officer); adventure (wherein Buck does neat things in a progression of exotic locations); and debriefing (wherein Buck receives his experience points and resulting promotion in level/rank and the dungeon master superior officer gives the hook for the next adventure). Unfortunately, in Caidin’s presentation, this cycle is too obvious, and the formula too patented and used with appropriate license from the company that owns all role playing gaming concepts.

So it was a brief, mildly entertaining read crushed under the weight of its own rule books and descriptions of the items, back story, and rules of the game.

The back of the book features a reprint of the original Buck Rogers origin from the 1930s, which provides a means of comparison between the eras. So the book’s best impact is as a source of an alternate retelling of the myth. But it’s not a very good primary source to enjoy on your own.

One final note: Defense of Michelle Malkin‘s thesis from her new, often-assailed book In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror comes in the darndest places. Here’s a bit from page 309, wherein the sudden spy revelation, well, reveals the spy to be Japanese:

The Japanese used secret agents on a long-term basis. They would plant their people in a foreign land for years. They were part of the local community, a fifth column, so to speak. Then, when Japanese forces made their moves, they always had amazing knowledge of defenses and how to get through them. By now it was getting obvious we had some kind of agent on our hands.”

Undoubtedly, this is one of the reasons why the reviewers for this book call it RACIST!!!! I’m not historical scholar, so I cannot attest to the historical accuracy of the assertion, but I attest that the book’s not racist. It presents different racial groups such as the Mongols and the Chinese as different, with different agenda that oppose the main characters. Antagonists of another race or ethnic group is not racism in and of itself, but keep trying, kids.

I bought this book as a four books for four bucks selection from Quality Paperback Club, as the soft covers do less damage to the walls and furniture when I read, hm, opposing viewpoints. So that’s why I paid over a quarter for this book, and my bookshelves and floor appreciated the comfortable soft binding.

In spite of Al Franken’s best efforts, I learned two things from Al Franken’s book:

1. It’s important to remember, when someone tells you something, a fact or set of facts is being relayed to you through the prism of the teller’s experience and interpretation, and your miles may vary; that is, when someone tells you something happened, remember to seek out other sources for a richer context of any event. Hey, even if you’re present. More knowledge will lead to better judgment.
2. Al Franken is so full of excrement his hair should be brown? It is? My point, exactly!

Franken slaps around the label of liar widely. According to Franken’s definition, anyone who builds an argument by presenting any group of facts in a light to build to a conclusion, unless that conclusion is Franken-approved, it’s a LIE. Say that Walter Mondale chaired a committee that issued a report that concluded something, and you’re a LYING LIAR who tells LIES if you don’t say Mondale disagreed with the report. Got that? To avoid the LYING LIAR who tells LIES tag, which Franken would build into HTML 6.0 for his convenience, one must not only tell facts, but one must tell all facts, in all contexts.

Let’s illustrate:

Prosecutors?	LYING LIARS who tell LIES
Defense attorneys?	LYING LIARS who tell LIES
Debate teams?	LYING LIARS who tell LIES
Philosophers?	LYING LIARS who tell LIES
Grad student writing theses?	LYING LIARS who tell LIES

You get the idea.

Franken illuminates, inadvertently but gleefully, the poison infecting our political discourse; a lack of empathy for people with other viewpoints, a recognition that perhaps we share common ground and we can discuss, even argue, our viewpoints honestly. Nah, never mind, anything with which we disagree is mendacity on the part of those with whom we disagree.

Franken likes to posit himself as an answer to Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, George Bush, The National Review, Sean Hannity, and other popular commentators on the other side of the political divide. Unfortunately, he lacks one component they do: they’re arguing in good faith, even when they stoop to fire-and-brimstone rhetoric.

Franken’s book is so over the top in its own mistruths that I couldn’t stand it. Part canard, it recycles some of the basic talking points of George W. Bush’s opposition without reflection, but not without invective. In other places, it blatantly presents its own misrepresentations; I particularly disliked the imaginative “Operation Chickenhawk” chapter, which imagined a mission in Vietnam led by John Kerry featuring a platoon comprised of Republican leaders who did not serve. An underground campus literary magazine would reject the piece if submitted by a college sophomore, but since it’s Al Franken, it’s worth printing in a book? Jeez, at least Motley Crue’s filler material was sophomoric and prurient.

If pressed, undoubtedly Franken would respond that he’s a comedian, not a thinker. That’s a convenient cop-out. Sorry, Al, if you want to play, you’ve got to be subject to all the reasoned scrutiny I can muster after a couple beers. I give you an F, for Farce. Farce you.

I mean, to take this book seriously as a political statement would be like taking financial advice from Triumph the Comic Insult Dog.

At Hooked on Books, they have a bin of books marked Free with Purchase, so I always grab something. Once, I grabbed this book, and I have read it.

I’ve doubled the publication dates in the header because the book’s obviously an early sixties pulp novel, with its lurid cover and almost cartoonish action prose. However, sometime between editions, the “author” updated the setting a decade, changing a World War II secret agent into a Korean vet seamlessly.

Oddly enough, the book is set in Florida, much like Cancel All Our Vows, and like the other book, it features an almost textually unremarkable sexual assault, wherein the main character forces his attentions on a woman because she’s the type who needs it. By textually unremarkable, I mean that the book itself glosses over the assault as a matter of course–something reflective of the time and genre, probably.

Aside from that distasteful bit, the book’s a good romp. A wife and her brother kill the drunkard husband by sending the husband’s Cadillac into a canal when the husband’s drunk. The moment the cold water hits the husband, though, he “comes to,” thinking he’s a secret agent in a Korean river. He’s got to deal with his amnesia and to discover what’s happened in the twenty years he’s lost. Eventually, he recovers enough of his skills and his muscle tone (hidden beneath forty pounds of liquor) to break up a gun-running operation.

It’s easy reading, action movies in 60,000 words, and I ate books like this up when I was in high school. Perhaps that’s why I grew up misogynistic, my sensitivity destroyed by these books like the Greatest Generation and early boomers, who currently tut-tut hip-hop music for how it depicts women.