Category: Books

This book is another post-Pendleton Mack Bolan volume. In it, Bolan has to go to Italy to rescue the wife and child of an Army officer from a terrorist group holding the hostages to get the officer to falsely confess to involvement with the Mafia.

Bolan goes and shoots up a bunch of stuff, and then he infiltrates some stuff. The book is a lesser entry than Vulture’s Vengeance, but it’s not bad.

Once or twice a year, I get the urge to plow through the unread books I have in this series (and there are 93 left on my to-read shelves according to this count) minus the two I’ve read since). Then I read a bunch of them in short order and realize how similar they are to each other. Apparently, three is my limit, so I’ll probably focus on reading other things for a bit.

And hope to live another thirty-some years to make it through my Mack Bolan library at this pace.

I bought this book at Barnes and Noble via a gift card because I appreciated the topic matter: Hornby, the author of High Fidelity and About a Boy, writes a magazine column discussing the books that he has read every month. This volume collects ten years’ worth of those columns.

Hey, for about the same period, I’ve been jotting down my thoughts into the blog here. Since I bought five ISBNs when I published John Donnelly’s Gold. I thought about collecting them into a volume and calling it The Last 1000 Books I Read or something like that (as you can see, there are well over 1000 book reports).

However, after reading this book, I have discarded that idea.

I mean, my book reports here are more about what I’m thinking about than substantive book discussions. Hornby’s columns are similar–he writes a bit about what’s going on in his life as he’s reading. His columns are monthly roll-ups of what he’s read and a bunch of banter about the magazine (The Believer). But. Reading one of the columns once a month or so in a magazine is one thing, but hundreds of pages of them is another. The columns became more repetitive than they would monthly. I can’t imagine reading 1000 of my book reports in a row would appeal to anyone.

At any rate, over the ten year period covered by the book, Hornby and I only read one book in common: Then We Came To The End. Our tastes do not run in common. Hornby favors biographies of sports and entertainment stars, literary fiction, and young adult books. Me, I read a bit of this and that with emphases on history and genre fiction.

The real gauge of a book review or column is whether one wants to go out and get the book(s) mentioned. I thought a couple might have sounded interesting, but before I bought them or even wrote them down, I was into the next column and set of books. The only one I considered getting from the library is the Motley Crue bio The Dirt, and that is because the book misspells Naugle’s (Tacos) as Noggle, and I wanted to see it for myself.

So I’m kinda glad I read the book (over the course of months or years). And as obsessive as I am, I compiled a list comparing what Hornby reports on in the ten years versus the books I’ve read in those ten years. You can review the comparative list here. Spoiler alert: I read three times as many books as he mentions in his columns. On the other hand, I’ve written and sold far fewer books and traveled to far fewer places than Hornby, so I guess we’re even.

This book is the follow-up to Mead’s How to Succeed in Business Without Trying. You might have heard that title because it was turned into a Broadway show that was recently revived.

Based on that success, Mead was able to move to Europe. In this book, he talks about moving to post-war England for business and plays upon the differences between America and England. It’s much more amusing if you’re old enough to get mid-century jokes and concerns. I’m not sure you could just watch Mad Men and get it.

It’s an amusing book, but it’s from another time. Here’s a gag in the section about England’s quaint socialized medicine:

However, it is only fair to warn you that in England you will be living under socialized medicine, and every American knows how dangerous that can be.

Forty years later, every American is going to learn how dangerous that will be, and we won’t have to travel abroad to get it.

Here’s a gag that’s even funnier forty years later:

The “British language” you have been hearing on televsion in the States is not really spoken anywhere. This is a special tongue known as Mid-Atlantic, designed to “sound British” to Americans, and still be understood. The British can understand it, too. They think it is a kind of funny American, and wonder why Robin Hood should talk like a Yank.

Given Kevin Costner’s turn as Robin Hood, there are many Americans who think it’s funny that Robin Hood sounded American.

At any rate, it’s an amusing book. If you’re old enough, I suppose.

This book is a pretty good entry in the series. Perhaps I’m far enough away from reading a bunch of them in a row (Doomsday Disciples notwithstanding) that I’m not overwhelmed by the similarity of the plot (woman in distress, Bolan must penetrate hard sites).

In this particular case, Vietnam veterans are being–kidnapped? and used as forced labor/mercenaries by a Central American warlord who kills a popular ambassador and kidnaps the wife who is a popular spokesperson for human rights. The warlord rigs a plane and stages what looks to be an attack on the White House with an unpiloted plane carrying the woman, but after Bolan averts the crisis, it turns out that she’s still a captive in his Nicouraguan lair. Which Bolan must then attack to get the bad guys out.

The story is an eighties product all the way: The Uzi is an unstoppable killing machine, and the Harrier jump jet is all that. Funny thing is that one of the bits has Bolan downing a jet with an Uzi, and I would have thought that utterly preposterous–except that earlier in the week, I’d heard the story of Owen J. Baggett who purportedly shot down a Zero in World War II with his handgun while parachuting from a disabled bomber. So forty-three years after this book came out, I was primed to get the allusion / homage that the author of the Bolan book was making. And it made the Bolan action seem less preposterous than it could have.

Except then Bolan shoots down a couple of attack helicopters with a handgun. So.

At any rate, I’m mellowing on these post-Pendleton books because I’m starting to consider them the equivalent of episodic television. I mean, the plots are the same, the characters the same, and the bad guys just about interchangeable–but I’m enjoying them as light reading while I’m reading them.

Unfortunately, that’s going to mean my measuring stick for these things is going to be whether than they’re better or worse than the ones I read immediately preceding them. If you’re not into these kinds of books, this won’t be the one to make you a fan.

This book is Carl Hiaasen’s first YA book. And it shows. It’s like a Hiaasen story shrunken to kid-sized, and poorly.

First, the plot: A new kid from Montana moves to Florida and sees a barefoot kid running while riding on the bus is getting bullied. He clocks the bully and runs out to follow the kid. He discovers a semi-feral runaway who’s conducting a campaign of vandalism to protect a couple nests of owls from development of a pancake house.

I’ve flagged a bunch of things in the book that don’t ring true. For example, the protagonist reads an X-Man comic. The boy is fresh from Montana, but describes the trees and flora with exactitude unbefitting a middle schooler. Twenty-first century middle school bullies tormenting the new kid by calling him Roy Rogers-hardt (who past the Baby Boomers and a couple Gen Xers know who Roy Rogers is?) A friend says the bully called in sick to school. Kids riding on the handlebars of bikes–do they do this now? One middle schooler says “Why do you care about this kid?”–what kid calls another kid a kid to another kid? “The dead man was soaked with blood and twisted at odd angles, like a broken G.I. Joe doll.” GI Joe, as you might know, was never marketed as a doll, and the action figures from the 1980s and beyond were not as articulated as the GI Joes of Hiaasen’s youth, so I’m not sure if the metaphor makes us think of what he’s thinking of.

Coupled with the simplistic environmental message with caricatures for bad guys, I didn’t care for this book that much. I’m probably not going to hunt down more Hiaasen YA books, but I’m hopeful he gets back to writing adult books. But all the thriller writers, it seems, are deep in the YA market these days. I mean, my son reads a lot of James Patterson, for crying out loud.

As to this book, it’s take it or leave it, even if you’re a Hiaasen fan.

I bought this book at the Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield shop a couple years back. I generally go to the Battlefield, just a mile away, twice a year. Once to renew my annual pass, and then once more for some reason or another, generally on a day where you don’t need a pass. Since I’m in the gift shop anyway, I look to pick up a bit of a history book to read. So I did with this book.

Since I bought it at the Wilsons Creek National Battlefield, I’d expected more of a real history book rather than something assembled by a local historical society. Although this book is not from a local historical society, it’s more of that flavor than the former, so I was a bit disappointed.

The book starts off with chapters about the stage coach / postal line that ran down this way, the creation of the telegraph line from Jefferson Barracks to Arkansas, an the Trail of Tears which followed the same route. The chapter about the Trail of Tears gives a bit of a summary and then reprints excerpts from the journals of “conductors”–guides for the marches. After that, we devolve into collections of pictures and descriptions of cemetaries, some family histories recounted by family members, Ozark stories, sayings, and “Do You Remember?” things.

So I was a little disappointed, more because I expected a more scholarly treatment and more discussion of the Wire Road. Mostly because I have lived at both ends of it: In the St. Louis area, I lived in Lemay just a couple blocks from Telegraph Road and now at Nogglestead which sits either directly on the route or a couple hundred feet from it (depending upon whether it ran along the old train route that is my neighbor’s driveway (but which I own half of) or in his pasture.

At any rate, I flagged two bits in the book:

Manley was a small man in stature; he liked to read Cappers Weekly and his Bible. He belonged to the Marionville IOOF Lodge, Chapter 210.

I know what the IOOF is because I read Lileks.

From the “Do You Remember When?” section:

Telephone lines were maintained by the parties using the line? It was a common practice for anyone to listen in on the conversation if they wished to do so. News of anything unusual, as a fire or emergency of any kind, was spread rapidly by the user of the telephone.

As I’m fond of reminding you, gentle reader, I lived down an old gravel road in a valley back in the first Bush administration, and the phone was a party line until the cable company and the phone company shared the cost of running the lines out to our house and beyond. In 1988 or 1989.

Also from the “Do You Remember When?” section:

You canned vegetables, fruits, jams, jellies, pickles, and everything you could get your hands on? Sometimes these were not used during the summer months but were put aside for winter.

I’m fond of telling the story where, when we lived in the projects, we were friends with the girl across the street who lived in the farm house whose surrounding fields became our neighborhood some decades before. Her yard had several large pear and peach trees, and one year my mother got bitten by the canning bug, so we staged commando raids on her yard to purloin some of her fruit. I hope her family wasn’t planning to use it. My mother laid up those pears and peaches and crab apple butter and sauce made from the crab apple trees in the common back yard of our apartments, and we ate them for years. I guess it was only five, but we still had shelves full of that preserved fruit when we moved to the aforementioned house down the dusty gravel road. So we moved those jars from Milwaukee to our aunt’s suburban home in St. Charles to the trailer in Murphy and then to House Springs.

You know, perhaps I shouldn’t be so disappointed with the book after all. It did remind me of some stories from my relatively recent youth.

This book is one of the many I bought in Spring 2014 and that I’ve been reading through since then (see also Bomun Temple in Seoul Korea and Wonderful Korea, New Pearl of the Orient Korea, and Art Treasures of Seoul).

The books themselves are tour guides or art coffee table books, but I’m picking up a smattering of Korean history from them. For example, I can put the Koriya, Silla, and Yi dynasties in order. So I’ve got that going for me, although I don’t have the exact dates nailed down yet.

This particular volume describes the various buildings in this particular palace with full color photos and text in I assume Korean and Chinese (although the Asian languages do not all look very similar to me, I am not yet able to distinguish between them) along with the English.

And, strangely enough, the end papers have a map of Seoul, a page for written notes, and, I kid you not, pages for names and addresses. You know, why leave blank pages at the end of the book when you don’t have further installments of a pulp subscription series to sell? This is very practical, although not so much for me: I’d write an address in it and then lose the book amongst its thousands of brethren in the Nogglestead library.

At any rate, worth a browse if you’re into Korean or Asian architecture, but I wouldn’t order it from Amazon or eBay unless you’re serious.

This book is the 49th in the Executioner series, and it came out when I was eleven years old. Its plot is topical of the 1970s, but because it was tropish in the 1970s, it seems fresher and more twisty because I’m used to twenty-first century tropes.

The Executioner is looking into a religious cult with ties to the Russians; the daughter of a Senator has joined this group, and in the first set piece, they’re about to take the young lady for the last ride before Mack Bolan intercedes and rescues her. He then proceeds to dismantle the operation of the cult which was founded by a Vietnamese Buddhist with the goal of warping the youth of America and sowing destruction in the American homeland.

So in the 21st century, when you hear about a religious cult, you’re expecting an extreme Christian sect (which, in the news, is pretty much all Christians except maybe Episcopalians). But this book capitalizes on the popularization of Buddhism in the 1970s, when it was a pretty new and fadish thing. So although a reader in 1983 would have found this to capitalize (and maybe exploit) contemporary trends and fads, in the 21st century those fads are mostly forgotten and we get something fresh.

I enjoyed the book pretty well for a post-Pendleton entry in the series.

Any time I enjoy them, I’m hopeful, because I have 61 Executioner books, 10 Stony Man, 17 Mack Bolan adventures, and 7 Able Team books from the mythos yet on my shelves. When I read one I don’t like, I think I’ll never get through them. When I read one I do, I have hope I’ll stomach it.

At least the number of them I see in the wild has tailed off so I’m not adding a bunch more to the shelves as I go (although the Spring book sales are a month away, and this assertion is subject to change).

I didn’t care for this book, but it did help me cement that I don’t care for this artist.

The book itself first: The book is written by someone who absolutely adores the artist, which I would like better if I liked the artist. The author spends a lot of time and florid prose discussing individual works, whether paintings or prints, from the Lautrec’s oeuvre, but the images he discusses are generally not close to the discussion, so if you want to look at what he’s talking about, you have to flip forwards or backwards. If the images appear at all. However, it’s definitely distracting and makes one–by “one,” I mean “me”–less likely to look at the images during the discussion. And the discussion is more complex and nuanced than the art itself.

Frankly, I have finally found a scapegoat that bridges the gap between art and comic book and such presented as art: Toulouse-Lautrec. The art is generally simple, easily changed to prints without too much loss of depth (and the prints and posters might have been why we might know of this fellow). He’s been heavily influenced by Oriental art, as was all the rage in France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. So although other artists of the period liked it, but he never really doesn’t mature much beyond that influence. Lautrec died young, and some of his later work started showing some depth and maturity. So maybe he would have been more of an artist that I would approve of if he’d lived longer.

So, to sum up: This is a poorly organized, overwritten art book about an artist I don’t particularly care about. Although I might pick up other books on Degas and Manet, and I’ll certainly pick up more general Impressionist and French art books and will glom onto any Renoir books I come across, I won’t bother with more Toulouse-Lautrec.

This book describes the creating of the G.I. Joe action figure (the original, not the Real American Hero we grew up with in the 1980s) from its inspiration through design and the initial manufacture. It includes a number of pictures, but it’s not a picture book. It’s the story, told by the artistic director of Hasbro, along with accounts from other people in the process.

As such, it’s not so much about the stories and narratives that would become part of the comics or the television series. Instead, it’s a look inside the toy business and how something like this got built from the ground up in the middle 1960s, from pitching it to the company CEO to handling production overseas (which was a new step for Hasbro).

An interesting story, indeed. At 92 pages, it’s more of a written oral history than a scholarly work, so I read pretty quickly. I am quite disappointed, though: The book seems to indicate it was bundled with a commemorative GI Joe of some sort, and all I got was the book. For a buck, I guess I can’t ask for more.

This book is apparently a children’s book by the cartoonist behind “Bloom County”, “Outland”, and “Opus”. I remember him from his Bloom County work (see Tales Too Ticklish To Tell and Billy and the Boingers Bootleg). I didn’t get much into Outland, and I missed Opus, apparently. But when I saw his name on the cover of this book, I bought it. Not realizing it was a children’s book.

Not that I’m above cutesy books about dogs; see also my report on The Shepherd, The Angel, And Walter the Miracle Dog which might also double as an entry in my cutesy Christmas books list. But I digress.

This book details the story of Sam the Lion, a bred-for-showing Dachshund with an extremely rare curl of hair who escapes his designed owner and befriends a lonely orphaned teenaged girl as she moves in with her former dog breeder and shower uncle. When he’s framed by the resident poodle for a crime he didn’t commit, Sam is shot and left for dead. After this incident, Sam moves onto a series of shelters, labs, and life as a freebooter until he regains a sense of purpose: To stop the poodle from winning the Westminster dog show.

It’s whimsical, although I don’t think it’s entirely cohesive. I thought the bit about being in an animal testing lab for years was only included to remind children that animal testing is bad. It veers from the cutesy to the cartoonish, which is acceptable, I suppose, since the author is a cartoonist.

Ultimately, it wasn’t my bag, baby.

This book is a Spillane novel! From 2007! (Which mimics my reaction to Black Alley, which is a Mike Hammer book I read thirteen years ago, apparently the last Mickey Spillane novel I read).

Except this book is a Spillane book by way of Max Allan Collins. I’ve recently become acquainted with this author from his work on the DC comic book Ms. Tree Quarterly from the early 1990s, and I’d thought about reading a book of his. So it’s kind of kismet that I picked up this book and found it was a book that Mickey Spillane started or mapped out and that Collins finished.

Set in the early part of the 21st century, it deals with a police captain who retired after thirty years on the force. He gets a message that his fiance, believed to have been dead after a botched kidnapping twenty years ago, is alive and is living in a retirement community in Florida populated by former police and firemen from New York. Her savior from twenty years ago, who took her in and hid her, has recently died, so his last wish was that the police captain protect her. The kidnapping incident has left her blind and amnesiac, but when the police captain moves in next door, she starts to recognize him from his voice and his mannerisms, and along with the memories of their love comes the memories of the crime she was bringing to him when she was snatched: The theft of nuclear materials in the middle 1980s.

The books is a pretty good mash-up of modern paperbacks blended with comic book sensibility along with the old-school style of Spillane, but. It was weird to me to read about the cop retiring after 30 years on the force and how different the world was then. The difference between the 1940s and the 1970s would have been vast. Between the 1970s and 2000s a lot less vast (and me calculating 30 years from the present day takes us back to 1987, and the changes there are less vast still. Drop a mere 25 years ago, after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the world hasn’t changed that much, even with the Internet; however, I was an earlyish adopter and was on dial-up computer BBSes thirty years ago). So that motif didn’t ring as true. Also, the recurring motif of the Dead Street–where the captain and other principals of the story lived, but that is getting razed for redevelopment (the Dead Street of the title) motif was drummed a bit much, although it came to be important in the end. And all the interesting individual bits of the story didn’t completely fit together in the end–the plot might have been better treated with a different MacGuffin.

Still, I enjoyed reading it, and I’m interested to pick up a pure Max Allen Collins book somewhere along the line when I find one in the wild. And a pure Mickey Spillane–I can’t let another 13 years go by. The Mike Hammer books (boosted by the Mike Hammer television series) were a staple of my reading diet in the late 1980s. When the world was a vastly different place.

When you open a Rogue Warrior, you should know what you’re getting. A vulgar, fourth-wall-breaking, gung-ho voice that is engaging but on the edge of obnoxious; a backdrop of military political machinations; and set piece gunfights and battles. This book is no different. As the second book in the series, it would be setting the pattern yet, not merely repeating it.

In it, the Green Team, which is the current team of Marcinko’s black ops group, takes down a bad guy in Egypt; when the fellow dies in transport, Green Team become wanted by their unappreciative superior. A group assassinates high ranking military officials in Britain, and Green Team has to find out who did it and exact revenge. They find a Muslim group with inside contacts responsible, and the group’s next plans include simultaneous biological attacks across Europe.

So it’s on par with the other Red Cell/Green Team books I’ve read: It’s a lot of fun, but the political nonsense bogs it down, and it goes on just a couple dozen pages too long, usually about one set piece, where the voice starts annoying. But widely spaced, they’re good fun reads.

This book is most noticable, though, for its prophetic nature. It talks about how easily terrorists move through Europe because there are no internal border checks; it talks about a leader “leading from the front” as a contrast to a president without a military molecule in his body. Additionally, it features said President–Clinton at the time–who is sometimes reluctantly cudgeled into doing the right thing (often by his wife, who twenty years later is running for president).

It’s a pretty timeless book in that way; the president is not named, and although there’s some political stuff and bashing, it’s pretty much the individual-versus-the-system sort of stuff that has been pretty common in thrillers and paperbacks forever, without the political garbage that became commonplace in the 21st century (this book is timeless enough I forget how old it is). Also, the threat of international Islamic terror supported from inside the West is sadly contemporary as well.

A pretty good read. Better than a post-Pendleton Executioner book, for sure.

I bought this book a year ago in Florida. As I was browsing my bookshelves, I told myself I was in the mood for some military sci-fi. I’ve tried some before: I picked up something by Robert Frezza, but I put it down not long into it; I tried some of David Drake’s Hammer’s Slammers stories, but also put them aside. It looks as though military science fiction is not going to be my genre of choice.

This particular volume did not dispel me of that notion.

Wait a minute, didn’t I just get published in an anthology of military science fiction? Well, yes, which explains why I became interested in reading some of it. Because I’ve got a plot in mind that would take the conceit of my poem and turn it into a novel. So I wanted to do some research into the genre to see what it’s like and whatnot. Which is why I read this book.

This book, as the link below indicates, is volume 6 in a series. So immediately I’m dropped into a world with a whole back story to it. Whereas I’ve complained previously about series business taking over books in a series, it’s not so much the case in this book. However, there is a whole world/universe/mythos that has evolved and been explained in hundreds of pages prior where that information gets stuffed into a book as exposition. As it appears here. Perhaps it would be better to have been more lightly alluded to since much of the exposition doesn’t directly relate to the plot.

The plot: A deep reconnaissance team is sent to a distant planet to investigate what might be an enemy base. New to the team is an alien from a race that has manipulated mankind in the past, and the other team members don’t trust him. However, they’ll need his extra sensory perception abilities to succeed. When they get there, after their snoop-n-poop (as Richard Marcinko would put it), they find an ancient alien artifact worth slightly less than a Powerball ticket. At which point, the team’s sniper kills most of the rest of the team to steal the artifact, but the alien takes it before he can. And suddenly it’s a cat-and-mouse game as they try to reach the extraction point without getting shot by each other.

That’s the plot. That’s what the book flap says when I read it wondering what the point of the book was.

Because the plot doesn’t really start until about page 130 of about 300. Beforehand, we get a mission briefing, a training exercise, a night on the town to left off some steam and get laid, a ride to the planet, and a long walk to the alien base. The book is rich in detail. How much detail? It spends four pages talking about how the team crosses a river. Then most of them die and the chase is on.

Even then, much of the exciting chase is spent shifting between the characters viewpoints as each expresses internally how he cannot trust the others and how he’ll kill them. They traverse terrain, engage each other a bit, and then one wins. Sort of. Then there’s a wrap up epilogue.

I don’t think the plot was worth 300 pages as it was.

So I’m not sanguine that I’ll enjoy the subgenre as a whole; it seems to be written by post-military people by post-military people with a military precision at least as far as the detail goes. I’ve got a couple more Ringo books; I’ll give them a try at some point, but I’m not eager to base my forthcoming (forevethcoming is the new term for “Forever Forthcoming”) on the subgenre. It’ll be more a science fiction novel with a militaryish setting.

Of course, I’m basing my blatherings here on a novel, part of a novel, and a couple short stories’ worth of study of the subgenre. I’m open to suggestion and revising my opinion if I like the other Ringo books. Or because tomorrow is sunnier.

To be honest, although I have recently tried to portray myself as a Sinophile, I’ve read more books about Korea in the last year than China. They include New Pearl of the Orient: Korea, Bomun Temple in Seoul Korea, Wonderful Korea, and this book.

This book is a coffee table-sized book that combines a historical study of Korea with the art trends from those eras. The book is more balanced a bit heavier on the text than a pure coffee table book, but the text is very informative and just a touch touristy. It covers the construction of pagodas and stupas, Celadon pottery, and some painters. The pottery and architecture is interesting; I’m not that into the rather minimalist painting. The painting seems very primitive relative to contemporaneous European art.

But the continued exposure is good for me. I’m getting familiar with the Silla, Koryo, and Yi time tables and whatnot just from these art books, which is good, because the library has fewer Korean history books hanging out on the shelves than Chinese history (which is about two if you don’t count the current events tomes about the forevethcoming Chinese century).

Worth a browse if you’re into that thing.

Also, do not be fooled by the back cover:

This is in now way a tie-in to the Saw movie franchise.

I’ve been reading Jerry Crownover’s column in the Ozarks Farm and Neighbor for a couple of years now, and I ran across one of his books, so I picked it up. This book is an early collection–from twenty years ago–where Crownover was my age and had a couple of kids in the house. That is, these columns apply to my life a little more than his current ones do. Especially since I’m not a cattle man.

At any rate, they’re short newspaper-style columns, many of which are built around a single anecdote where Crownover encounters a neighbor, another cattleman, or a non-rural fellow and has an epiphany or can spin some rural wisdom from the experience. There are also a couple of lightly politically themed jibes (in the First Clinton Regnum), but it’s mostly lifestyle column stuff.

I enjoyed them and will pick up other books as I come across them, and I’ll continue to read the column in the OFN.