Category: Books

I got this book at ABC Books at the first (I think) of the writers’ group group signings I went to in November 2022. I don’t mind telling you that those are the expensive book signings, as I buy one or more books from all of the authors present. Plus often other books. So I definitely prefer the single author signings.

This book has a healthy display at ABC Books, or has in the past–I’ve often seen it and thought about picking up a copy, and eventually I did. I thought it would be about the author’s dog or a novel about a dog, but it’s actually about a real dog who amazed parts of Missouri with his intellect. Not tricks; the owner would tell the dog to find the man with the red hair, and the dog would; the owner could spell out words in the request, and the dog seemingly understood; and if asked in French to go to the Ford automobile, the dog would. He was examined and tested by members of the University of Missouri staff, and they could not determine how he might be doing it. They never mention whether the dog could do it without the owner present, which would have certainly ruled out responding to cues from the owner, but perhaps they didn’t think of that, or perhaps that was the trick and not part of the legend.

Jim the Wonder Dog is still the pride of Marshall, Missouri, with a Web Site which includes a shop where you can buy this book, a museum, and a park with a statue of Jim.

It’s a short book–60 pages plus end matter including photos and references. To be honest, it kind of inspires me to write similar, short form popular history books on a single subject. Heaven knows when I wrote my piece for History magazine fifteen years ago (!), I thought I could mine the compendia that I read (or read) for tidbits, research them, write about them, and make a living at it. Of course, I was still thinking in print in those days–today, I would be thinking I would do short videos or podcasts on them and make a living at it, but somehow the video form seems cheap and easy and ultimately uninformative, but perhaps I’m just tangentally exposed to what my kids watch. Still, it might have inspired me to try my hand at it.

The book has copious sources listed for each chapter of the book, and it helped clear up something for me. I thought I had just read about Jim the Wonder Dog somewhere, and the probable source appeared: Rural Missouri magazine, which my electrical co-op sends to me every month, had two “recent” articles on him noted in this book: one in 2010 and one in 2014. So it’s possible I read one or both of those articles and thought I read them recently; it’s possible that I did read one of those articles recently because I pulled the old magazine out of the depths of the old magazine drawer (some of whose back issues arrived new around the turn of the century to my home in Casinoport or Old Trees before being moved to Nogglestead); it’s also possible that Rural Missouri, keeping with its schedule, published a more recent article on Jim the Wonder Dog which I read in a more timely fashion. Instead of speculating, I did a little research, and an article entitled Pawprints on Our Hearts indicates the magazine had a story on Jim the Wonder Dog in the May 2020 issue. So I could have read the articles when they first came out, in reprint, and recently.

So a nice little book. Suitable for young readers, but it’s not really a kids’ book. Or maybe it is and it’s just suitable for older readers, too, but that thinking leads to Harry Potter, which I am trying to avoid.

As you know, gentle reader, the year is winding down, and I tend to cut my annual reading list off the week after Christmas sometime. So I thought that this book, which I purchased in 2021, would make a fitting fin de siècle. However, I have previewed the 2024 Winter Reading Challenge, and it begins on January 2, so I might as well count the books that I finish before then as 2023. It will help pad my anemic total for the year if nothing else.

Long time readers will know I have been a big fan of Dave Barry since I seemingly stained a borrowed copy from Smurphy in high school. Although those keeping track would say, “If you’re such a big fan, Brian J., why haven’t you delved into his work since that audio book in 2020?” Maybe I’ll allude to that a bit by-and-by.

In my defense, I have also reviewed:

• Best. State. Ever. (in 2020).
• Insane City (in 2016).
• Dave Barry Does Japan (in 2011).
• Dave Barry Turns 40 (in 2011).
• Homes and Other Black Holes (in 2009).
• The Shepherd, The Angel, and Walter the Miracle Dog (in 2009).
• Dave Barry’s Only Travel Guide You’ll Ever Need (in 2009).
• Dave Barry’s Gift Guide to End All Gift Guides (in 2007).
• Big Trouble (in 2006).

Suffice to say, I’ve been a fan for a long time. Although I do not remember the last words my father spoke to me, I remember the last thing Barry’s father said to him (he, the father, wanted some oatmeal). So take it for a given that I’m a Dave Barry fan, okay?

Well, that’s a lot of pixel inches in self-defense. What of this book?

This book starts with a preface which abbreviates history in Dave Barry fashion (a longer treatment of American history appears in Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States, Smurphy’s book that I might have soiled with snack food when it was brand new) and then reprints Barry’s year-in-review columns/articles from 2000 to 2007 (skipping 2001, as the events of September were too recent for him to be funny). Read fifteen years on, the book astonished me both with “That was twenty years ago already?” (Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Kelly Clarkson wins American Idol in 2002, and so on) as well as “That was twenty years ago?” The latter stems from how many names from the headlines today appear in gags from the turn of the century. I counted 7 jokes about Donald Trump whose role on The Apprentice kept him in the cultural zeitgeist back then. But, like so often happens, I found 6 jokes about Joe Biden late, presumably based on his performance in the Senate when confirming Bush appointees in the latter’s second term. We have gags about Vladimir Putin and Robert Mueller, the iPhone, and other things as familiar today as they would have been when the jokes were fresh.

As I have mentioned (just recently–see above) that I am a Dave Barry fan from way back, I have to wonder how he “hits” with the younger generations. I mean, he spends the preface goofing on history, and I appreciated the jokes, but I wonder how much of an outlier I am because I was a bit of a nerd in school with a great degree of retention and speed of recall that led me to dominate the chapter-review Jeopardy!-style quizzes in the Western Civilization class that Smurphy and I shared. I know a lot of history that my boys do not and probably won’t ever. Plus I am not sure that the style of humor has wide appeal in 2023. Dave Barry actually retired as a regular columnist in 2004 (continuing to do his annual reviews and gift guides, though). That long ago.

I probably wonder about this every time I read a Dave Barry book, but he might well be the last American humorist with wide reach. I mean, I know that Roy Blount, Jr., is still churning out monthly columns and Doug Larsen is still working–or they were the last time I had subscriptions to magazines where they plied their trade–but Barry had reach, and eventually had a television show based on his life. Starring Harry Anderson, for crying out loud. I am not sure anyone could ever recreate that. Certainly not in print.

It looks as though Barry, like many other authors (Hiaasen, Pearson, and so on), turned to young adult books in the 21st century, which was a good business move as the YA market was just about the last refuge of big-selling books. It also means that I probably won’t find them at book sales since I don’t hit the children’s books sections (and the old, unsorted book sales for the Friends of the Christian County Library and Friends of the Clever Library seem to have gone by the wayside). But I still have plenty of other Barry titles to discover in the adult humor sections because he was pretty prolific in the 80s and 90s.

I picked this book up right after Brett Favre: The Tribute. Actually I pulled them from the Nogglestead to-read stacks at the same time, which is appropriate: I bought them together in an online order from ABC Books during the big No-No of March 2020.

Like the Favre book, this book comes out in what would turn out to be the middle part of Patrick’s racing career. She has moved up the ranks and placed fourth in the Indianapolis 500 as part of her open-wheel racing career, but she has not peaked (she later placed third in the Indianapolis 500) nor yet moved to NASCAR nor appeared on the GoDaddy home page or Super Bowl commercials.

The book clocks in at 128 pages with index, and it does not focus exclusively on Patrick. I mean, it does talk a bit about her youth, some success she had in kart racing that led her to go to England to a minor league racing team and then back to the states and to 2005. It talks about her media success and the attention given to her when she does the Indianapolis 500 for the first time. It mentions her fiance (didn’t last) and has numerous photos of her at the time when she was 23 or younger.

However, the book is also an introduction to open-wheel racing as a sport. It delves some into the history, the classifications of the races, and most of all the business of it–individual racers apparently have to get their own sponsors, and they have to know how to schmooze (and develop a media persona) to succeed in addition to the technical skill in racing. As a matter of fact, the book does not actually get far into describing the technical elements of racing–one gets more hanging around Jack Baruth’s Avoidable Contact for any length of time.

But the book is an interesting mix of Patrick’s life story until then (when she was, what, 23?) and that introduction to Indy-style racing (and we’re not talking outrunning rolling boulders in ancient temples).

Definitely something worth picking up for a buck or for ordering at used book store prices during the next Great Enshackling.

Sports Illustrated must have had this book ready to go, as it was published in that brief period in which Brett Favre had retired as a Green Bay Packer but before he did his little thing and got traded to the New York Jets, for whom he would actually play (unlike his predecessor). Favre announced his retirement on March 4, 2008; the book was published March 31; and Favre started making unretirement motions on July 2. I presume that book sales cratered in summer and autumn. I bought this book as my first ABC Books online order during the great national time-out in 2020 and picked it up last week when I could not watch the football game on television (reading this book was probably better for me anyway).

When I picked up the book, I mentioned to my beautiful wife that I’d read another book on Favre earlier in the year. I am correct if I did not specify the year; I read Life After Favre in May 2021 (which led me to ask was it that long ago?)

The book is composed of numerous stories about Favre’s career from the magazine–perhaps these were all his cover stories. At the outset, it looked like it was going to be a pretty comprehensive retrospective, as the first articles are on his background, his drafting by the Falcons, his trade to the Packers, and the Packers’ playoff return and two Super Bowl appearances in the mid-1990s. Then we get a story about his painkiller addiction around the same time, and then…. Well, a gap, until it starts talking about his pending retirement (the first noises the first year he thought about it) resulting in a moving tribute followed by another article the next year about how he did not retire. Then half the book is given over to Sports Illustrated photographs not only of Favre but also other Packers of his time.

I must admit I became an active Packers fan during the later Favre years. Although I went to a couple of Packer games at Milwaukee County Stadium in the early 1990s, it was before Favre’s time, and I did not follow football then. I really started following in the early part of the century after the Packers lost to the Rams in the playoffs, buying and wearing Packers apparel to shine on my co-workers. So I missed the mid-1990s Super Bowl years, but some mentions of the early 21st century Packers teams and players resonated with me (and led me to ask was it that long ago?)

The articles are feature stories, which have a depth and richness to them that you don’t get from reading modern sports Web sites. I guess the 90s represented the swan song of magazine writing much like the 2020s might represent the swan song of human writing at all. But the sports photography–I don’t get that. Although they have crazy depth of field, everything is flattened to the foreground. Blockers a couple of yards down field? The crowd at the back of the end zone? Right there with Favre on the 20 yard line. Not my bag.

Also, for posterity, I would like to note this: In my whole life, I shall probably only read two books that mention that Leslie Nielsen had a “fart machine” that he used to make sounds of flatulence at unexpected times. The first was Surely You Can’t Be Serious. The second was this book, where the Sports Illustrated writer mentions that Nielsen had it when he and Favre played in a golf tournament together (although the journalist here mistakenly calls it a “whoopee cushion”). Friends, I will in all my life only read about this in two books, and I read those books one after the other. That’s some sort of cosmic kismet, and probably the best kind of luck I can hope for (all these losing lottery tickets piling up on my desk affirm it). Which might not be true, as I think I have Leslie Nielsen’s “autobiography” around here somewhere which might mention it depending upon how surely serious it is.

Gentle reader, after reading the story about it in the New York Post, I ordered this book immediately from Amazon. And it got hung up somewhere in, what, East St. Louis? So I requested a refund and ordered it right away again, when it got hung up again in shipping in East St. Louis. Where did these books go? I requested another refund from Amazon, but Amazon’s process got a little pissy, telling me I would have to return the copy I ordered at my own expense if it arrived. Which it did not, but thank you, Amazon: You’re rapidly falling out of being my go-to site for ordering, with your Prime membership now meaning “Sometime, Maybe Shipping” benefit. Ah, but gentle reader, after a month passed (and I got my second refund), I ordered it again, and the roving gangs stopped looting Amazon trucks as they traveled through Illinois apparently (how do you know that didn’t happen? It would be in the news? Which news? The local television station manned by four interns and two people who thought they would be good enough for the networks someday or the local daily which is down to four pages, including the comics?). For I got this copy in a couple of days, and I jumped right into it after A Knight’s Bridge Christmas.

So this book tells, in interview-style snippets from Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker and various associates, including several stars from the film and studio people, the history of the making of the film from the beginning of their collaboration together with Kentucky Fried Theater in Madison and then in Los Angeles, where they wrote Airplane! and faced rejection before they put some of their multimedia clips from the comedy theater together and got a group of theaters in California to finance Kentucky Fried Movie. Even though that film was a modest success, they still had trouble getting movie professionals to grok what they were trying to do with Airplane! which was a comedy where everyone played it like they were in a drama, no matter how ridiculous the lines were.

At any rate, I enjoyed the book. I don’t really think I’m that much of a celebrity nor fame chaser, but sometimes I do like a behind-the-scenes look at the making of movies or television shows, particularly ones I enjoy (see also Star Trek Memories). Also, as you might know, Zuckers/Abrahams/Zucker are from Milwaukee (well, Shorewood, but that’s Milwaukee enough for me), and they return frequently to their old school (unlike Steely Dan, although I guess it was Steely Dan’s college). And although I just watched Airplane! (well, a year and a half ago, which is “just” at Nogglestead), I will probably pull it out to watch again soon.

And I bought this movie at full price. Only once, but it took me three tries (and a trip to Barnes and Noble to see if it was in stock, which it was not). So let that be my endorsement.

As you know, gentle reader, I like to read a Christmas novel around Christmas time, and I generally pick them up at various places throughout the year, maybe one or two a year (I bought this one in Arkansas this summer). But when they go into the Nogglestead to-read stacks, well, they’re often lost for a very long time and especially hide well during November and December. A couple of nights I went to the stacks specifically looking for a Christmas book and could not find one. So when we were preparing to go to ABC Books for a book signing, I told my beautiful wife that I hope Mrs. E. had Christmas books. At which point she swiveled in the chair she was sitting in and said, “What about this one?” This book was there all along!

At any rate, the book is one of a series which deals with the town of Knights Bridge, Massachussetts. A new librarian moves to town from Boston with her precocious and abnormally adult-like six year old son six years after the death of her husband in an automobile accident. She meets the hard-charging emergency room doctor grandson of a longtime Knights Bridge resident who has moved into an old folks’ home when the doctor returns to help with the grandmother’s move. She (the librarian) promises to help the doctor decorate the grandmother’s house one last time. Could they–fall in love?

C’mon, man, this is a holiday romance. That’s exactly what happens!

The book really has absolutely no conflict though. I mean, the townsfolk look down on the doctor a bit because they think he neglected his grandmother. The librarian wonders if she’s ready for the romance or if she would be just a conquest for the doctor who would leave her life forever. But it’s all unserious internal conflict that gets mentioned in the protagonists’ interior monologues fairly briefly. There’s no antagonist to speak of. Just some set pieces with a bit of idealized small-town Christmas season scenes and a bit of an underdeveloped back story about how the grandfather helped the great-grandfather get over his experiences in World War II, but….

Well, if you’re looking for a simple confection with holiday themes, here you go. It has less depth than most of the Christmas books I’ve read, and the six-year-old boy is really wise beyond his years.

So I’m not likely to charge out and get others in the series, but I am not the target audience anyway.

It did not take me long (relatively) after reading Sheriff Without A Badge to pick up the fourth Harbison Mystery Western, which was the last of them that I owned at the time.

In this installment, Sheriff Harbison deals with a variety of side quests as per the usual, but the main storyline is that a man who had worked on a local farm years ago has become a successful Western novelist with a character based on Chet Harbison as the main character, and it recounts the events of Terror Near Town but with extra salaciousness and sleaze. So the townfolk start to look at him and his wife with a bit of a jaundiced eye. Meanwhile, he and his deputy and friend Pete capture a well known repeat offender as he was stealing a pig from a local widow, and they hold the dangerous miscreant without bail until his trial, but a slippery lawyer gets him off. And the man might have more thievery or revenge on his mind.

The actual murder at the Morse Inn doesn’t take place until, what, more than half way through the book? But, again, these books are westerns and now whodunits, so it works.

I finished this book last week, and last Saturday, James R. Wilder was back at ABC Books to sign his newest book. So I dragged my poor but beautiful wife up there, and apparently I made her wait whilst I talked to Wilder for an hour, leaving her starving for lunch to the point where she devised a plan to walk to a restaurant without me.

Wilder mentioned that he participates in a couple of writing groups, and that he (and they) think his writing is improving. And I have to agree, although I previously thought that the books were just growing on me. Probably they’re getting better. Undoubtedly, I will read his latest before long and maybe concur. Aside from the hunger and the pain in my underdeveloped retail muscles which screamed at me for a couple of days for standing pretty much still on carpeted concrete for an hour, the conversation with Wilder inspired me. Perhaps in 2024 I’ll actually spend some time trying to write another book instead of banging my head against modern programming paradigms in pursuit of an application that no one would use. I mean, I can write books nobody reads in my native tongue much easier.

But I bought the next book in the series and the first two for my brother for Christmas (don’t tell him), but nothing else at ABC Books, which explains why no Good Book Hunting post. I mean, the martial arts section is practically empty–just a set of martial arts flash cards of some sort that I will eventually buy because I’m a completist (I have, after all, bought two books on Tai Chi walking and a video on tae kwon do forms because that’s all they had)–and I have numerous unread books here. I glanced at the music books and found they have three books on learning to play the banjo, but I have not actually bought the banjo I saw at Relics Antique Mall. So I’ll wait until a windfall lets me make another foolish purchase before foolish book purchases in support of a potential foolish purchase.

Maybe I’m growing up.

Oh, sorry, where was I? Oh, yes, a book report. I liked it. I bought more in the line. Which is the best recommendation I can give.

Not long after I read The Barrabas Fire, I picked this up, the last volume in the series. I mean, I have only read a handful of them and have not seen them in the wild recently–not that I’ve been looking–so it’s not as satisfying as reading the last of The Executioner novels on my shelves. But it’s a little sad to reach the end, although I have plenty of books in the gaps in my collection if I am so inclined.

At any rate, I had thought that the book would not wrap things up or address the ending of the series as I expected that the books/stories would have been farmed out in such a fashion that the writer would not know this was the end, but I might have been mistaken. In this book, Barrabas wonders whether he’s getting to old or if he’s lost his focus, and he considers retirement. But first, one last job: to reclaim a Soviet scientist who defected but was snatched from a safe house in the Ozarks and whisked away to Scotland by a tech millionaire with communist sympathies who wants to return him to continue work on Icefort, a Soviet space weapon.

Barrabas assembles the remaining elements of his team, and, well, does that thing they do. Set pieces, assaults on heavily defended positions, and finis. In this case, finis finis.

The book was dated whilst it was still on the book stands. It mentions going back and forth across the Berlin Wall, and the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The collapse of the Soviet bloc must have had a crazy impact on these monthly subscription thrillers with that international flavor. The ones in the actual printing pipeline–what would you do with them? The ones already on spec–do you have them re-written, or do you just pump them out there and hope for the best? Perhaps it explains why non-international thriller series like The Executioner and The Deadlands would continue on for another decade or two.

But this one does feel a bit like the end of an era, which is probably just me retconning my own midlife crisis onto it.

Oh, gentle reader. I confused this author with V.J. Schultz, whose book Truth or Dare and Other Tales I read in August. I thought it might be another book by the same author, but it is not. One could perhaps easily make the mistake as both write short stories with a little paranormal twist to them set in southwest Missouri, and the authors undoubtedly know each other as members of the same writing groups in Joplin and attendees of the same book signings (as they were in in July when I bought both books). They’re similar in those regards.

This book collects fifteen stories:

• “Clean Heist” wherein a woman discovers her boyfriend has stolen several cases of sanitizer for COVID-era profiteering. Quite a product of its time, and easily the most dated story in the bunch. COVID-era concerns dated very quickly, did they not?
• “Aunt Rose’s Cabin” in which a woman inherits her aunt’s cabin, hidden armory, and a secret that can put several government bad actors away–if she can survive their onslaught.
• “Gold Grand Prix” wherein a woman walking home after a bad date is picked up by a strangely familiar man in a Grand Prix.
• “A Bigfoot’s Dreams” wherein a freespirited female Bigfoot rankles against her traditional male counterparts.
• “Silver’s Curse” wherein a woman is saved from her abusive ex by the werewolf of her dreams.
• “Aunt Ida” wherein a woman inherits her aunt’s cabin, hidden armory, house and a secret that can put several government bad actors away is keeping Aunt Ida’s ghost from moving on.
• “Devil Rooster” about a family with a rooster that attacks them until they eat it. To be honest, it started like it might be a more horror story like Cujo or something, but instead it’s a slice of chicken life vignette.
• “One Foggy Night” wherein a woman has a car accident and is rescued by someone who looks vaguely familiar.
• “Grandma Dottie’s Secret Recipes” wherein a woman receives a collection of recipes from her disinterested cousin and wins a cooking contest/publishes a cookbook based on the overlooked recipes.
• “A Terrible Neighbor” wherein a woman detective looking for a missing person visits her neighbor and hears that the missing woman is a terrible neighbor with men coming in and out of her house in what was a respectable neighborhood. But DUN DUN DUH! The respectable neighbor being interviewed is the real terrible neighbor.
• “Gwen’s Used Books” where a used bookstore owner, upon receiving books from an estate, opens an old book and releases a ghost. Or is it a demon?
• “Yellow Bicycle” wherein a woman receives a gift of a yellow bicycle from an older neighbor whose son is moving her into assisted living, and the bike comes with a ghost.
• “Lost Sheep” wherein Little Bo Peep goes looking for her sheep. A modern mash-up of nursery rhymes.
• “Ashes in the Evening” wherein a woman becomes the victim and protector of a child-sized vampire until she is rescued by the werewolf of her dreams.
• Runaway Asses” wherein a woman calls the police because of some donkeys in her yard and earns the handsome responding officer’s respect when she steps between them and her little dog.

A little better written than the Schultz stories and a little less formulaically DUN DUN DUN! than Caroline Giammanco’s Into the Night. At 148 pages, definitely a quick read. I am pretty sure this author and Schultz are in some of the same writing groups, so it’s not surprising to see some cross-pollination. Perhaps even with Giammanco.

A pleasant read, not unlike the stuff the other members of Marquette Writers Ink and I would bang out in college. Well, more like I would as topically the other writers in the group were more less interested in genre writing.

I got this book at ABC Books in June 2021 when it must have been fresh off of the presses. Heaven knows that it had numerous typos in it, but that did not really impair my enjoyment of it. This series–I’ve already read Terror Near Town and Tough Times in Grubville–has rather grown on me.

This book takes place right after the events of Tough Times in Grubville. Chet Harbison has taken the deputy sheriff’s position in Jefferson County, but he gets a field promotion when the current sheriff has a heart attack and can no longer run the department. He stands for election and narrowly defeats a DeSoto barber / county commissioner, but as he learns, politics ain’t beanbag. He has to deal with a near-lynching of a pedophile held in his jail along with attempts to paint him as corrupt.

The book, like the others, is more of a Western in the Louis L’Amour tradition than a mystery, although the cover says they’re “A Harbison Mystery”. You get a fair amount of detail in raising cattle and farming during the Great Depression than a whodunit, but that suits me fine.

As I mentioned, the book has some typos in it, which lead to some false positive ackshuallys on my part. It mentions the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and I verified that the Post-Dispatch papers were combined before the 1930s. It mentions Eagan’s Rats, and I thought, aha! I’ve got you now because I know the St. Louis gang was Egan’s Rats, but apparently the first mention was a typo as the secon mention spells it correctly. There’s a spot where he mentions a quarter mile hike into the woods that might be taxing to an old doctor, and I was going to call that out, but then I recalled when my elderly friend “Roberta” came to Nogglestead, and we went to the Battlefield Park for its Independence Day festival, she had trouble with far less level ground. I am a little less forgiving in him saying that someone is going fishing for perch. Perch, as native Wisconsinites know them, are not found in Missouri. Not walleye, not yellow perch. They have a couple species down here classified as perch, but they’re not really the eating fish we know up north.

Still, I liked the book, the pacing, the style of writing which is more Hemingway than Faulkner (or L’Amour) suit me well. I bought the fourth book in the series last August, and I will probably pick it up before long. And probably before I have to go to ABC Books to buy newer entries in the series.

I’ve also decided to pick up one or more of these books for my brother for Christmas. So don’t tell him if you see him.

Sweet Christmas, gentle reader, but sometimes these book reports, or at least the “research” in them, makes me feel old. In this case, I have discovered that the last time that I read a book in this series was in 2014 (The Barrabas Hit, #29 in the series). And, in my research (which means my trip to Fantastic Fiction), this entry, the 32nd in the series, is the penultimate one–the other that I have on my shelf, #33, is the last. Which kind of fits my general fin-de-siècle mood. Everything is coming to an end.

But enough about me: Let me briefly talk about me reading this book. Barrabas and his team (the same one from The Barrabas Hit) are hired to help a deposed president/king of a tourist-attraction archipelago in the Indian Ocean recover his throne. They face off against the new leader and his army of mostly untrained African mercenaries and a big boss French mercenary. So they come ashore, set up some guerrila ops, and then have the big battle with the tower defense of a particularly nice resort.

So a set of, well, set pieces and finis. Not a whole lot of threat, really, to the main characters, not a lot of character development, but it is a men’s adventure paperback. The literary equivalent of the 80s action film. If you’re into that sort of thing–as I am–you’ll enjoy this book and its type for a quick read amidst heavier books (well, not that Wizard or Wizard were particularly weighty, but…)

I will probably pick up the last of the series before long. But do not worry: I have plenty of other Gold Eagle paperbacks mostly from Executioner spin-off titles which I have not really gotten into since I finished the last of my Executioner paperbacks last June.

Well, after reading Wizard by Ozzie Smith, of course I immediately picked up Wizard by John Varley. As it happened, they were close together, relatively, on the to-read shelves in the hallway which we just turned over as we painted the hall.

It turns out that this book is the middle book in a trilogy–I did not know that when I started it, as it does not seem to pick up en media res but instead introduces us to a couple of characters who will factor into the story and establish some world building. It starts with Chris, a schizophrenic in California who goes into the embassy of Gaea and meets some Gaeans–well, Titanides, who are centaur-like except that they have both sets of genitalia on the horse-part at the back but a single set of human genitalia on the front–heaven help us, this will be explored later. Chris seeks to visit Gaea, the god-like computer running a small Ringworld-lite space station in the outer part of the solar system as Gaea can cure his condition. Meanwhile, a woman raised in a woman-only society on a space station at a LaGrange point seeks a similar audience with the computer to heal her epilepsy.

They both make their way to Titan, the space station, and climb the kilometers-long cable to the hub where Gaea, represented by an old woman avatar, resides. She’s grown bored, having created and destroyed civilizations and races on her habitat over the millions of years, and she in recent millenia has started to have to deal with insubordinate local computer systems which run different regions of the planets. So Gaea encourages “pilgrims” to come try to visit her, and they can choose to live in her hub without their diseases or they can go out and do something “heroic” to earn a permanent cure. Both pilgrims decide to try something heroic, and they link up with Rocky, the titular Wizard, and her associate Gaby who is an engineer doing contract work for Gaea.

Turns out that Rocky and Gaby were the stars of Titan, the first book in the series, but they’re kind of introduced as individual characters, so early on it does not require a lot of knowledge of that book to get into this book.

So the party sets off, nominally to do something heroic, but easy heroic quests have already been done. Few dragons remain; the idols have lost their jeweled eyes; and so on. But Gaby and Rocky use the journey, nominally a survey of the regions and interviews with the sometimes rebelious, sometimes obsequious, regional computers, to determine what allies they might have in an attempt to overthrow Gaea.

So it’s kind of like Ringworld with some fantasy elements to it. In addition to the centaur-like creatures, the book features “angels” who have wings and a variety of other beasts, all created by Gaea for amusement or to set the stage for later heroics. As the party goes along and encounters difficulties, members die, so one does not know who might make it through the journey–and the actual point of the journey, from Gaby and Rocky’s intent, only becomes clear later as one lies dying and explains why the odds were so stacked against them.

And although the book starts off as though it were not part of a trilogy–with a good intro to the world (well, space station) and characters new and old, the ending makes clear that the story is To Be Continued. Although some survive and find resolution (abruptly), it ends with a vow of vengeance.

So it was an okay read; a bit disappointing in that it leads into the next book, Demon (and when I checked out the science fiction shelves at ABC Books last weekend, they only had a copy of Wizard–no first or third book available).

I did mention that the Titanides have both male and female horse genitalia in the rear and one set of human genitalia up front. The book goes into detail about how Titanides procreate, and it’s complicated, starting with the fact that the Wizard has to put the unfertilized egg in her mouth to activate it, and then it has to be fertilized both in the back and in the front and…. Well, okay, it’s weird. But a helpful appendix shows you the many ways it can occur between female and male Titanides. Also, Titanides and humans, as it turns out.

Also, I flagged a couple things in this book on a common theme. When we did our recent trivia night, one of the categories was words without the vowels. One of the questions was MSM, and my beautiful wife and I had the same answer: miasma. Cooler heads amongst our team realized that this word was more likely museum. But right after that, I found the word miasma in the book. Then, one night at dinner, I asked my boys if they knew what portage meant. They did not, so I explained it. And then I found the word in the book. On a later evening, my wife said the word offal, which would fit right into the book and…. Well, that word was not in it. But talking about two words that showed up in this book shortly thereafter probably speaks to the belief that the AI and algorithms are listening to us because we spot patterns about what we talk about and what ads we see on the Internet. And that lesson is: The AI in this forty-year-old Book Club Edition is smart enough to not also display offal to establish the pattern and make me suspicious. Truly, truly, I say to you, the world is magic and duplicitous. Which might also be the lesson of this trilogy.

So in looking back at the two other books of Varley’s that I’ve read–Millennium and The Ophiuchi Hotline, I’ve found them kind of meh, but I remember them fondly. If I had found one or the other of the books in this series this weekend, I would have bought it. And I have one or more books by John Varley on my bookshelves, and I’m not likely to recoil from them when I come across them in the future. Perhaps the next time I paint. In 2035 or so.

I read Bob Gibson’s From Ghetto To Glory earlier this year, so it seemed a prime time to pick up this book as I came across it in a partial book turning this autumn.

Ozzie Smith played a generation after Gibson, starting his career in the late 1970s in San Diego before being traded to the St. Louis Cardinals. I knew him twice: Once as an enemy as a member of the team that eventually beat the Milwaukee Brewers in the 1982 World Series, and a couple of years later as a favorite on the team that then lost the World Series to the Royals and then to the Twins. He didn’t get traded; I moved from Milwaukee to St. Louis, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch kept me awash in free Cardinals tickets for good grades. Between my brother and I, we got to see six to eight games a year gratis, so we became fans of the hometown team. So I’ve seen Ozzie Smith in person, and I’ve seen him do a back flip as he took the field, and I booed Royce Clayton when he appeared in the Dennis Quaid movie The Rookie (Tony LaRussa replaced Smith when Clayton in the 1990s, which caused a rift between the Cardinals and Smith that took years or decades to heal).

At any rate, this book does talk about Ozzie Smith’s race (he’s black), and it mentions he lived in the ghetto (Watts, during the riots in the 1960s, when Smith was very young). But the book focuses mostly on the business side of baseball–Smith’s dealings with the Padres, a penny-pinching team in that era who didn’t want to spend money on retaining players and vilified players who went elsewhere for more money, often beginning in their contract years if the players did not sign right away–to the difficulties and pressures of being a highly paid defensive player. The book also focuses on how Smith approaches self-improvement, including trying to become a better hitter even after he received a big contract.

So the book is more inspirational throughout than the Gibson book. I wonder how more modern sports bios written later than 35 years ago and with different generations scan. Probably not as hopeful as this one.

Not many books have sentences where I know exactly where I was when they happened. This one does.

Some of the fans may have had a little doubt in their hearts about then, but we didn’t. If anything, the Brewers’ rally picked us up as we came up to bat in the bottom of the sixth. We loaded the bases, and that brought up Keith Hernandez to bat against Bob McClure, who had been Keith’s teammate in Little League in California. Keith must have had the book on him, because he came through with a single to score me and Lonnie and tie the game.

Gentle reader, my brother and I left Boogie’s apartment, where his mother had been watching us while my mother had gone out, when the score was 3-1, and when we got to our apartment in the next building over, the score was tied. And we know how the game turned out–if not, you can read this book to find out–and I cried myself to sleep. For a long time, I called Bob McClure “Chicken” McClure, and that probably wasn’t fair. But I was ten, understand.

I also flagged a bit in the book where Ozzie Smith said about a trip to San Francisco for the All Star game where he was going to start the game for the second time, but he was more excited to meet Huey Lewis. C’mon, man, did Ozzie Smith say that, or did Rob Rains through that in because Huey Lewis was one of the biggest musicians of the 1980s? I guess we’ll only know when there’s an estate sale at Smith’s house–if we see a bunch Sports and Picture This on cassette, we will know he really was that excited.

Given that he retired a couple of decades ago, he’s still a beloved figure in Cardinals nation. We used to eat at Ozzie’s when we lived in Casinoport, and a relatively new medical center called Ozzie Smith IMAC Regeneration Center opened in Springfield a couple years ago.

Maybe someday I’ll come across a copy of Ozzie Smith–The Road to Cooperstown by Smith and Rains, written 14 years after this book. I’d like to think it has a similar tone, but one never knows when it comes to athletes who have retired and are not in the middle of their careers.

I picked this book up off of the free book cart at church. Although I check the cart every week, or at least when my beautiful wife needs to be at church early because she’s singing, playing trumpet, or ringing bells (which might only be five out of every six weeks), I do generally wait a week or two before grabbing a free book because I do have other things to read here.

This is a coffee table book that covers seven days in the beginning of April and documents various activities going on throughout the world at churches of the LCMS, its schools, and its missions. The church, from its then-new headquarters in the St. Louis area (I drove by it many times back in the day, which is right after it opened, although I, a new driver exploring the St. Louis area for the first time, did not know that), the church called (well, not called called) for members of various congregations to take photos and submit them, and then the editors up at Concordia Publishing (in the same then-new building) selected photos from every day of the week.

So, that’s it, basically. You get churches and services on Sunday, school kids, missionaries doing their things, the little old ladies of the church doing their crafts and outreach, and the people at LCMS HQ hard at work. You’ve got some photos of church members in their professional lives, and you’ve got what seems to be an overrepresentation of church members working to get the services on the radio or to record the services on video, but I guess those distribution channels would have been pretty novel in 1996. Well, except radio–church services on the radio and television predate this book, but maybe this offered a behind the scenes look? Or maybe it was new to Lutherans then.

I admit that, with some photography books, I only glance at the photos and spend most of my time reading the captions. Such with this book: the photos themselves were fairly pedestrian, although I could not help notice that most of the fashions would have as easily been at home in 1983 as 1996. Nary a bit of flannel here. But, for the most part, the engines of any church are people in their thirties, but more likely their forties and beyond. And these people would have fixed their fashion and how they thought they should look in the 1980s. The young people tend to be in their best or, even in casual clothes, in rather timeless casual wear. The people who would chase fashion would be in their late teens and twenties, the ones looking to define themselves in how they look, and they’re pretty thin in churches now as perhaps then. Not that we’ve had a “look” aside from maybe haircuts and makeup trends this century. Or maybe I am too old to know the subtle differences that youth see.

Given that this picture book showed up on our church’s rack, of course I looked for members or names from the church that I recognized, but I did not find any I knew. I also looked for churches that I have visited, which is not a large number, but we do tend to go to a local LCMS church when possible when we’re vacationing, so I’ve been to LCMS churches in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arkansas. I only have sort of visited one of the churches down the road from here a ways–my sons played basketball at its school, but I’ve not attended service there. One of its youth in 1996 has the same last name as the current principal of the school, to whom we have sent some money from time to time when possible.

I did, however, spot a confirmand named Kaepernick from Turlock, California, and I looked it up: It is, in fact, the former football player’s older sister from his adopted family. I also learned that not only was that former football player likely raised in the LCMS, but that he was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Geez.

At any rate, an interesting artifact, probably more interesting if you attend an LCMS church. Especially if you did so in 1996.

Now this book will not go on my read shelves immediately. It has been routed to my beautiful wife for her review, and from thence it shall likely go to my mother-in-law for review. And heaven knows if or when I will see it again.

As I read the first in this series, Star Rebel, earlier this month, of course I picked it up right away. I figure if I did not, I might not pick it up and “complete” the series for a couple of years–witness how long it’s been since I picked up Iroshi by Cary Osborn–five years–without picking the second book in the trilogy there because I was unimpressed with the first book in it.

Joe at Glorious Trash has completed Busby’s The Demu Trilogy, and he was unimpressed. But I think this book was okay–as I’ve mentioned, it’s been a few years since I read The Demu Trilogy, but I think I am coming to understand F.M. Busby’s writing: He’s more of a short story writer stringing together incidents and episodes, perhaps with some idea where they’re going but perhaps not.

This book picks up where the last left off. Bran Tregare, a member, but of an outcast branch, of a wealthy Earthborn concern has survived the UET military academy, survived serving his first tour aboard a ship with The Butcher, a captain known for throwing cadets out of the airlock for minor infractions, and he has participated in a mutiny that liberates an armed UET ship for him to command. His situational brutality, however, has caused his lover to have second thoughts about him, so she has left him. And we start this book….

Well, the book is basically a series of episodes where Tregare and his crew travel to different planets and meet different people. He buys a load of slave women from a captain who was treating them humanely; he picks up a new second, a black woman who was captured from a Earthen gang; and so on. They’re episodic in the way that, say, Star Trek was: The ship goes somewhere, something happens/they do something, and they move on in the next chapter. Some characters are introduced, some leave the main story line, and then we get to an end where Tregare marries an agent of his family’s organization, a woman from another of Busby’s series and they deal with a family of assassins on the Hulzein outcasts’ new world. But the book leaves off with him preparing to assemble his fleet of ships to take first Stronghold and then, presumably, Earth–or maybe the other way around.

The back of the book says:

REBEL’S QUEST is the final chapter in the Hulzein Chronicles, bringing this monumental saga to a resounding conclusion.

Uh, this is the second book of what looks to be (now that I looked it up) a four-book series. So I guess it makes sense that it ends with threads unresolved.

I don’t know if Busby was padding this out to be a four-book deal, or a trilogy, but this book does not advance the main story arc a whole lot. Instead of padding, though, I think Busby probably just liked the character and wanted to throw him into some adventures.

But my previous sentiment continues to hold true: Pretty lightweight rocket jockey stuff with a lot of sex thrown in. Not graphic sex, but Tregare gets his share, from the black warrior woman to the wild child of a backslid culture whose colony returned to wild when the last ship to visit could not lift again and other encounters that are described as occuring, but not too graphic.

So if I fall over other books in the series for fifty cents each, I’ll pick them up. I don’t know that I will look for them in used book stores, but now that I said I won’t, I probably will.

Gentle reader, you might know I am a sucker for children’s books on celebrities or sports figures. For example:

• TV Superstars ’81
• TV Superstars ’83
• TV Superstars ’83
• TV Now: Stars and Shows
• Deion Sanders * Brett Favre

So you might have expected that I would have picked this book right up right after I bought it. Well, gentle reader, two things impacted that.

First, I must have bought the book in the St. Louis area before I really enumerated the books I bought each week in Good Book Hunting posts (which go back not quite two decades).

Second:

Well, it was not quite forty years. The memory came up on the Recycler Tour just a day or so before we had to move all of those bookshelves for some work to be done on our lower level, and I grabbed the book. And, of course, I had to read it to prove the prophet, in this case me twelve years ago, mistaken.

At any rate, what of the book?

Well, it’s an interesting artifact. Number 15 in the NFL Punt, Pass, and Kick Library. A hardback with a binding suitable for libraries, it has a cover sticker which prices it at $2.50 in 1971, so it might have been priced for the tax write-off when donating to libraries in that era. $2.50 is pricey for a kid’s book then, and this did not come out of a school book order, brah.

The book basically covers a number of running backs from the NFL and the AFL with small bios of several (Floyd Little, Leroy Kelly, Dick Bass, O.J. Simpson, Alvin Haymond, Ron Johnson) in individual chapters and then groups a couple sets of other running backs (Gale Sayers, Mel Farr, Dick Post, Mike Garrett, Donny Anderson, and MacArthur Lane are “The Breakaway Artists”; Jim Nance, Larry Csonka, Jim Kiick, Hewritt Dixon, Ken Willard, and Mat Snell are “The Workhorses”, and Calvin Hill and Duane Thomas played on the same team).

Given how few of the names resonate now, fifty-some years later (Gale Sayers, Larry Csonka, and O.J. Simpson for non-football reasons from thirty years ago), the book really highlights how ephemeral the position really is. A number of these guys are very young, and they’ve already been injured a number of times. Running backs tend to have a couple of really good years, and then they fade except for rare exceptions (and only a couple of the guys in this book are exceptions). I mean, if you look back at the Green Bay Packers running backs of recent note (and of course you do because you’re a Green Bay Packers fan, aren’t you?), you see Ahman Green, who I nicknamed “The Bowler” because he fumbled a bunch, sometimes forward for extra yards. Ahman Green is the Packers’ leading rusher of all time. You see Samkon Gado, who spelled Green when he was hurt, had a couple of good games and maybe a season, but who is most notable for finishing his studies to become an ENT (Ears, Nose, and Throat) doctor–that’s his current career. You might think of Eddie Lacy, who was good for a couple of years until injuries caught up with him. You might think of Aaron Jones, who had a couple of really good seasons but is getting slowed by injuries…. So, yeah, these guys will also be forgotten in fifty years along with so many of us.

This book is also a product of its time in that many of the subjects are black, and they come from poor neighborhoods. Back in my day, we called it the ghetto (as did Bob Gibson, as did the other neighbors of the projects where I lived, as did Robert B. Parker in a number of his books). But that term has fallen out of fashion in a way that barrio has not. Or has it? I dunno. But, still. Notable.

So an interesting read even though it’s a kids book because of the historical information and perspective it provides.

Now, I would say that I’m going to look for the other titles in the series, but I rarely get to the kids’ section in the library book sales I go to, and the titles are too old for the garage sales, even the church garage sales, that I go to. Maybe I’ll stumble on one at one of my rare trips to estate sales these days, but probably not. These books and those like them have already probably passed through the cat litter factory.

I just picked this chapbook up in April, so reading it in October represents reading it right away at Nogglestead. As you know, gentle reader, over the years, my autumn reading has drifted toward poetry chapbooks and art monographs that I can browse during football games. However, this year, we have opted out of the NFL Sunday Ticket package because it’s on YouTube TV. Instead, I have gotten the NFL+ package, but due to the scraps of streaming rights that the NFL swept up after making big deals elsewhere, I can only get games that appear in the local market and only on hand-held devices. So it’s hard to hold a book while one holds an iPad and struggles with the deficiencies of the NFL app (stopping it, restarting it every couple of minutes when it bogs down). Which is just as well as I have not collected a bunch of monographs recently. So I have been reading chapbooks recently by themselves.

Now, this book must come with an interesting story. It is a chapbook copyright 2013, but the copyright page indicates that some of the poems within it were published in the mid 1990s. Which would seem to indicate that the poet took almost thirty years to come up with a chapbook’s worth of material. Gentle reader, my first chapbooks appeared in 1994 and 1995. It did take me almost thirty years to work up a full length collection, though. Well, not exactly–most of the material in Coffee House Memories comes from the middle 1990s. It just took me thirty years to get up the desire to enbooklenate the poems. And it might be another decade at my current pace to cough up enough for another chapbook. I have to wonder if the poet here experienced something similar. Or maybe it took thirty years to save enough money or for the cost in rights for a Peter Sellers movie still on the cover.

And the poetry? Overall, pretty good. A couple of them are meta poems about poets writing poetry, a couple of reflections on other works (including a Peter Sellers movie moment), but the lines are long enough to convey meaning, and the poems rely on images although sometimes a bit obscure. Still, leaps and bounds above most of the things I read.

This is her first chapbook, but Finishing Line Press has a number of later ones listed. I will keep an eye out for them.

A book review of F.M. Busby’s Cage A Man, the first part of the Demu Trilogy, prompted me to pick up this book (as I prophesied a couple weeks ago). It’s the first half of a two-book set which I purchased in 2011. So it’s been, um, a couple of years since I read the Demu Trilogy in my early adulthood.

This book takes place in a far future world where near faster-than-light travel exists, possibly stolen from an alien race. A corporation has taken control of the Earth and its outworld colonies and looks to eliminate its rival corporations and foundations on Earth. Members of one such rival foundation get their young son into a military service academy under faked papers to keep him safe, but he endures hardships in the brutal training academy. He shows aptitude in ship piloting and fighting, though, so he graduates despite two stints in the special torture cell used as punishment. He gets posted as a cadet to a ship whose captain notoriously “spaces” cadets, throwing them out of the airlock for small offenses. Bran survives and thrives in his next posting.

He learns that mutiny is not uncommon, and that after mutiny, the mutineers rename their ships and head for Hidden worlds–worlds that the corporation does not know about but whose locations are shared by the Escaped captains. When the captain decides to punish Tregare’s friend and lover for an infraction, he triggers a mutiny that liberates a ship. A counter-mutiny by captured corporation loyalists elevates Tregare from third in command to captain of his own ship, and he vows revenge upon the corporation and hopes to build a wider rebellion.

Part of the world-building going on is that the spacers, who travel at near light speeds, take the Long View because their calendar time differs from the experience of time for residents on planets they visit. We don’t see much of this in the books as most of the books and characters are on the same ship, but although it tries to handle this, it’s a little wonky. The personal calendars of individuals are going to differ based on how long they travel at near-light speeds and how long they spend on planets. Forget the people on the planets, who are going to age decades for every couple of months that the spacefarers travel–the other space farers are going to age at different rates as well, but this book kind of overlooks that. And the trade–basically, the ship is going to load up 40 or 50 years before it will reach its destination in real time. What goods and services will those planets need in a hundred of their years? The book is vague on the trade goods, but one wonders how that would work. It’s a shame to introduce the Long View when it’s not all worked out, but I guess it added a touch of novelty and verite to the book in 1984.

It’s not bad for rocket jockey kinds of science fiction. However, unlike some of the juvie stuff, the books contain sex–not especially graphic, but it’s there, so if you’re put off by that, the book might put you off. But not bad for its time.

I must confess to you, gentle reader, that it took me three tries to make it through this book. The first, no doubt, was during or not long after our vacation to Florida which included a stop on Sanibel Island in 2016. I am not sure why I powered through this time. Perhaps because access to my library was limited for a bit. Perhaps my new reading habits allowed for it–although I did not take this upstairs to read whilst stretched out on the sofa. Perhaps my present “reading habits” also includes dodging my dilligence in reading a little bit of the Story of Civilization every night. But I made it past page 50 (of 232).

Okay, so, the plot: A Russian arms dealer blackmails an attorney into helping him take over land left by a Sanibel-island resident to create a nature conservatory (along with others in various places) so that he can store biological and chemical weapons that he’s selling. Local and part-time Sanibel residents including a couple of government and quasi-government officials, a potter, the former judge handling the estate, and the main character, a marketing guy who has just written a book and was instrumental in the incident of the Sanibel Arcanum (a previous book) work to thwart the Russian. I mean, the plot has some interesting twists to it–the blackmailed attorney plans to double-cross the Russian. Okay, that’s the twist.

Unfortunately, the execution poorly serves the plot.

Most of the narrative structure is very short peeks into various characters. By “short peeks,” I mean sometimes we get two or three paragraphs before jump cutting to the next group. This makes it difficult to really tell the characters apart. And even the longer pieces are the groups getting together to talk about what’s happening instead of actual action. The characters come together and have dinner; they talk about biochemical weapons, which is the subject of the report that the quasi-government characters are working on and, coincidentally, what the Russian hopes to store and/or traffic from Sanibel Island.

At about page 70, the marketing guy/novelist goes to the Grand Cayman where the Russian has another home. The books focuses on this single character, who happens to be on Grand Cayman because he has a freelance assignment to write about the island. Not because he’s investigating the Russian, although he does while he’s there.

Even when focusing on the single character, the tone of the book shifts to a bit of travel writing with exquisite descriptions of the island and the food the character eats. A little action happens, and then the reader thinks, “Ah, a story!” But then after a bit of action, the character returns to his main home in Indianapolis, several months elapse, and then his family returns to Sanibel Island and we get dinner parties again. Oh, wait, no, the potter goes on a mission trip to Russia to a Siberian town where the Russian’s father coincidentally lives, and he gets info that will ultimately become important.

We get another burst of action/action in the book’s climax, but a lot of the book hinges on coincidences and improbable-to-poor decision making. It repeats some of its descriptions early and refers to the previous book far too often.

I did flag a couple of things in the book:

• The book mentions several times the bin Laden organization as a possible buyer for biological and chemical weapons; this book was published years before 2001.
• “We have established a strong environmental stewardship here. Thanks to the wonderful efforts of Ding Darling when he worked for the federal government.” To be honest, I was a little afraid to search the Internet for that name, but I guess you probably already know he was an early 20th century cartoonist who founded the National Wildlife Federation. The book is all-in on trusting the government and believing it’s a force for good–and perhaps that simply raising awareness of the dangers of biological and chemical weapons will change the world.
• “Hey, Dad, you’re on Amazon.com!” one of the children says. True fact, children: We did call it Amazon.com once upon a time.

The book is also very dated for its relatively young age. It goes into too much detail about computer use and the Internet–people sure are printing out a lot of Web sites–and it is before the Department of Homeland Security and the whole two-by-two/hands-of-blue/pats-for-you regime. So the bad guys wheel an incapacitated character onto a plane in a wheelchair and just walk through security like that in a fashion we cannot fathom now, where we still have to take off our shoes after that one thing twenty years ago.

One biography of this still-living author says he has a third book in the works, but I have not seen evidence of it online. He does have a blog which he looks to update monthly or a little more frequently with photos and musings from his life in California (not Sanibel Island). I’d link to it, but although he says the media is broken, he also says that those who creatively indict the former president are patriots who are sucking the poison out of our country. So, nah.