Category: Books

This book is a collection of black and white photographs, along with a couple of poems, by the author, a former architect who brought his design eye to photography. He prefers, as do many photographers, the wild, bridges, and old buildings. He also is a fan of a certain photographic techinique–longer exposure times or development times–that washes water splashing into a white miasma. I remember when my photographer for the St. Louis Artesian used a similar technique for the first cover with her photograph “Shattered Water”. Wow, I was the editor of a literary magazine such a long time ago that its Internet presence is slim? That was almost twenty years ago.

At any rate, the photographs are what you would expect. None leapt out at me. I’m not a real critic, so don’t take my dismissal as definitive. I’m that way with most of the contents of museums and books of work by serious artists, too.

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I swapped a copy of my novel for these books, since I know the author from the old BBS days, when he dominated the local CG64 boards as White Knight. Or maybe that was me.

Regardless, these books collect the first two years (already?) of his Web comic Frik’in Hell. The motif centers upon a medieval warrior who finds himself out of war-work and takes up as the counter man in a fast food inn. He doesn’t take it too well, and beheads customers in between visits to a support group, attacks of ninjas, and a quest by another character to create ketchup.

Strangely, given that I’m an IT professional, but Web comics don’t tend to draw me in. I see the occasional Penny Arcade and XCD-something (see? I can’t even remember the name of it). I did read another book made from an online Web comic (RPG World). But it’s not my thing. Old Heathcliff? My thing. Maybe even Marmaduke.

But if you’re hipper than me, check his comic out at frikinhell.com.

This book is a little tourist guide to the All Saints Church in Wing, Buckinghamshire, England. I certainly didn’t visit it, and I’m not sure what I would have paid for it, but I doubt it was fifty cents. The booklet is only 20 pages of text and photos, after all.

But this book like so many of the tourist-centric, very localized books I’ve read about locations in Europe (see Orvieto and Bruges from last football season, for example). Each is focused on a single city or location with the attendant pile of photographs and maps. More importantly, and more startlingly to someone who has lived in a city-within-a-city where its lustrous history extends back about a hundred years or now a region whose densely worded histories extend back a couple of hundred years, the history of Europe extends back millenia. In more narrative-driven history books, you tend to lose a little bit of a sense of wonder in the sweeping epochs and the rises and falls of civilizations and monarchies.

But All Saints Wing church extends back to when manor owners tended to take care of the churches on their manors. The church was probably built in the tenth century, as its first mention appears in the will of the manor owner in 966, and its architecture reaches back to the Anglo-Saxon period before the Norman Conquest. The guidebook points out what features survive and how the church was modified in the centuries, including during Henry VIII’s break with the Catholic church and the English Revolution. The various defilements of the historical character of the church are now part of the historical character of the church.

And in the present day, or at least in 2003, All Saints Church was not a historical venue maintained by a foundation or the British equivalent (with the additional U that is so characteristic of the Queen’s English is fouundation).

It is a church. With people attending services there and children’s programs. Just like your church, which is probably about a millennium younger than it.

You want to know what Noggle does when he’s desperate to make his annual reading quota, and he’s nowhere near finishing the three different 1400+ page books he’s spending a lot of time on this year? He reads a children’s book.

This is a children’s book circa 2000 that introduces children to the very high-level concepts of computers. What a computer is, how computers were in the 1940s, what a component is, what a peripheral is, what kinds of computers there are, what software is, and so on. Kind of like if you just read the titles of that old Time-Life Books series.

Twelve years later, I guess it’s hard to justify keeping this in a library, since most kids these days are born with an iPhone in their hands, and libraries themselves have whole rooms dedicated to functioning computers rather than books, so children can get hands on experience without the need for a book about them. Still, this book is a book targeted to libraries; I cannot imagine many people picking this up and giving it as a gift, even to children who don’t already have a computer (which brings to mind how I used to pore through the Radio Shack ads in 1980, looking at the pictures of the Tandys for sale, and now I have piles of computers with lots of blinking lights and whirring fans beneath a monitor bigger than my television playing Whiz Kids, and all I want to do is get away from them these days).

It’s a book for libraries, and the local library has discarded it.

Is it worth a read? If you pick it up at the local library book sale with an eye to mockery (although I’m not as wry about it as I would have hoped on that particular bag day), if you need to pad out your reading list, if you’ve got the book, and if you’ve got a football game to watch in between large print definition of mouse and keyboard (it’s the part that looks like a typewriter, which isn’t something someone born in 1994 is going to be familiar with).

On the other hand, this book just might be a good starter book not for children, but for seniors getting in touch with their first computer. It’s short, it’s basic, and it’s larger than normal print. Hmmm. I think Roberta could have used this book.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is a collection of 90 pages of 2-3 quips per page filling out the set-up You can tell you’re a Midwesterner when….. They’re almost akin to Jeff Foxworthy’s redneck series, but a little less absolutely funny. They skew a little northern Midwest than Missouri, and they’re about small town living more than big city quips. A couple of them ring true, with a deeper understanding and statement of small town America than others.

An amusing, short read that I browsed while watching the preseason football game. I’d better stock up on these sorts of things and coloring books, since this in only the 55th book I’ve read this year and will have to make tracks if I want to get close to 100.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is a 1970s-era business book designed to help you understand the cut-throat world of business where everyone you do business with is out to get you, and how you can adopt a strong posture to defend yourself against these tactics and intimidate them into honoring their commitments. Ringer was a business real-estate salesman in the era where the Dirty Harry movies were contemporary commentaries and the apartment buildings he sold were bedecked in shag carpeting, avocado appliances, and bead curtains.

That said, it’s a worthwhile book once you re-orient the book’s focus to a more realistic worldview (where not all businesspeople are sharks). It has valuable lessons in attitude focus and sustenance (Theory of Sustenance of a Positive Attitude through the Assumption of a Negative Result) and a number of good lessons in professional image presentation and management. So you can still find something in the book worth remembering almost 30 years later. As a matter of fact, Ringer refocused and rereleased the book this century as To Be or Not To Be Intimidated.

It’s a quick enough read, engaging in prose and laden with a couple of life lessons and the philosophy interspersed with real-life stories of deals that Ringer closed and how they proved his pudding.

Additionally, he invokes Ayn Rand in the first sentence. Turns out, he’s still alive and an active advocate of laissez-faire capitalism with a very nice looking Web site and everything.

I’m glad to have read it, and I’m a bit amazed to find out how collectible this mass market paperback is.

(Oh, yeah, and I did a parallel review for IT industry folks over at QA Hates You if you’re so inclined.)

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is definitely not one of the stronger entries in the series (contrast with Red Hammer Down, Point Blank, and Gulag War). Actually, I think I liked Gulag War the best and have been hopeful that these books would recapture some of its pulp glory, but for the most part, after it they’ve all been hackish.

This one, too, suffers from more problems than good parts. The books spends a good portion of the first half with the set-up, which is before the title characters appear. Apparently, there are some elements of the Bolivian armed forces double-crossing US anti-drug military forces and Bolivian military members in the field; the Swedish prime minister is assassinated; there’s a coup in Bolivia where a crooked general with the backing of a Swedish chemist who can make artificial cocaine throws out a democratic reformer. Then we have a chapter of the Washington contact for the SOBs being pulled away from a glorious dinner to tend to the problem. Then we have a long chapter of the team members on their own after their recent most adventure getting restless and awaiting the call from Barrabas. Then, some sixty percent of the way through the book, they get to Bolivia, split up into teams, and then we get some jump cuts between the teams, even the team that is essentially sitting around and doing nothing, and more not much exciting happens, until we reach a simplistic climax that is a bit deus ex maquina. Most of the team doesn’t get a lot of action, but they get a lot of pages.

Again, the book does have the feel of an eighties action film baked right into it, but it’s more akin to a straight-to-VHS action film than something that would star Chuck Norris.

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I had hoped that this book would be akin to Dear Customer: You Are A Loser so I could get double duty out of it and to post a blog entry on QAHY about it (such as this, which apparently actually sold a copy of the title to my benefit).

Oh, but no.

Instead, this book is a collection of short anecdotes about bad business ideas throughout history (this just in: Tulip futures in Holland hundreds of years ago–what up with that?) and out-of-context quotes from luminaries and businessmen (hey, it’s 2001: let’s throw something in from Bill Gates! Hah! I didn’t get it, and neither will most people who weren’t at the Microsoft convention!). Worse, in a lot of cases, the anecdotes seem anti-capitalist (Martha Stewart got hers for insider trading on the ImClone thing! Neener neener neener! Although in truth she was convicted for conspiracy and obstruction of justice). I mean, what sort of magazine is Business 2.0 to revel in that?

Oh, a failed magazine. Right.

(Full disclosure: I was a subscriber there at the end, when they killed it and sent me Fortune magazine to fill the subscription instead.)

At any rate, it’s a brief read for an idea book, but not something worth spending a lot of review time on, and not something I enjoyed all that much, really.

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When I wrote about my visit to Smallin Civil War Cave last month, I mentioned this book, which is a book about Ozark caves that the Smallin Civil War Cave’s proprietor wrote about caves in the Ozarks. He wrote this book before he bought and ran the cave.

The book is more of a memoir than any sort of actual field guide, since it doesn’t talk much about actual caves per se. It talks about the author’s experiences in amateur spelunking as well as some experience of being a cave guide (from which I drew much of my glibness about cave guides from the book). As a personal memoir, it interested me than a more stilted book would. Bright recounts stories about chasing goats and discovering caves, finding abandoned home sights in caves (and the attendant story therein), and a host of other folklore and geology filtered through his experience and explorations. The book also contains a large section of pictures from the author’s collection. As such, it clocks in at 128 pages, which makes it a very easy, quick, and pleasant read.

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I’ll be honest: I was not in a real hurry to pick up the Zombie Parker titles, including this book, a Spenser novel written by Ace Atkins. However, a piece about it and its author in Mystery Scene magazine changed my mind. So I started watching for it in the library. As you might know, I found it. And I was pleased.

Atkins does his best to capture old Spenser novels from the pre 1990-something era, where the books had some depth and lyricism to them. The plot: Spenser is hired (for a box of doughnuts) by a fourteen-year-old girl from South Boston who wants Spenser to investigate the murder of her mother four years before. He looks into the murder, which the police have already solved, and finds that the man in prison probably did not do it. But once he gets that notion, finding out who did puts Spenser and the girl in jeopardy from scary individuals in the crime syndicates and whatnot.

As I said, it’s a good throwback to the old style Spenser novels, before Parker stacked them up with nothing but dialog. Atkins adds depth and, get this, new allusions. He throws in references to previous books and characters, but also peppers the book with quotes and references to other material. I dunno, maybe Parker stopped reading, or maybe he thought his readers were more interested in references to the Spenser mythos (and now that there are two authors in the field, it has achieved mythos), but I find the new allusions satisfying and fresh.

Sadly, though, Atkins does go to the established baddie well much like Parker would have done (Gerry Broz plays an important role in the plot), but it’s not the sort of book where Spenser knows the answers but has to work out a solution. Instead, he, Hawk, and the girl spend a lot of the book trying to figure out what’s going on, and that makes the story move along well and keeps one going.

It didn’t take me just a night to read like they did in the old days–the old days are gone, as are the short Parker entries in the series–but I did read it in only two nights. I’m looking forward to the next entries in the series more than I have in some time, although I’ll probably go with library copies. But if Atkins–or other designated heirs–keeps this up, I might take to buying them again.

Books mentioned in this review:

As some of you might remember, I visited the Smallin Civil War Cave a while back, and while I was there, I picked up this book in the gift shop. One of the cave’s owners wrote this book before he and his wife purchased the cave, but now they’ve got a good retail outlet for it.

The book itself is not a field guide to caves, per se. It doesn’t identify many locations to visit or that sort of thing. Instead, it’s the musings and recollections of an amateur spelunker who grew up in the Ozarks with its river caves that he could explore while out hunting. He talks a little about a cave operation and being a guide in a cave. Remember, this was written before he owned Smallin Cave, so he wasn’t just going into the industry on a lark.

I enjoyed it better as a memoir than if it had been an actual field guide.

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This book is far less topical and dated than Dixie Convoy, which was definitely stuck in the 1970s with its CB focus. This book has a more typical Executioner excursion into the heart of Mafia territory: Manhattan.

The bosses in New York are scrambling for power after the recent death of the Boss of all Bosses at the hands of Mack Bolan. A confidante of the BoAB has been working to secure his own place as the old man was slipping, but his quiet push for consolidation encounters some scepticism from some of the other leaders of the mob. The power behind the Aces, an autonomous group of mob super-hitters, looks into the mess, and Bolan steps in to make sure that mess keeps boiling and the mob men keep dying.

Does that sound like a blurb for the back of the book?

As I said, this is a better book than #27 (I missed 28). Not only does the book avoid dated technologies, but it also has a climax (two, sort of) that rather smoothly fits into it.

At this time, I’m closing in on the end of the Pendleton books of the series, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to miss them. I’m not sure who the publisher used immediately after Pendleton, but I know the far later books lack some of the depth and philosophical musings that lift these books above the other period pulp. And I’m not just saying that for you, Ms. Pendleton, although I hope you take some pride that your husband’s work continues to be enjoyed 35 years later.

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This book offers a template through which you can view the relationship with your significant other, typically a spouse as this is a lightly Christian-flavored book (although it’s lighter than something like So What’s The Difference, so non-Christians can get something from this book if Christianity does not offend them). Chapman identifies five distinct silos of behavior types to which classify interactions with one’s significant other (or others–more on that later). He uses the metaphor of a “love tank,” a vessel that holds positive feelings towards one’s SO, which is constantly draining but that you can fill up with one or more actions in the template.

The five love languages (sorry, apparently this is a registered trademark, more appropriately The 5 Love Languages®) are:

• Words of Affirmation, which is saying something nice.
• Quality Time, doing something together.
• Receiving Gifts, which relies on physical tokens.
• Acts of Service, which is doing something for someone.
• Physical Touch, which is pats, hugs, holding hands, and sex.

So finding your partner’s primary love language and showing love for your partner will help to “top off” that love tank and keep the relationship strong and healthy. Okay.

Well, it is a new framework in which to view one’s relationship, and by thinking of the relationship and the trappings/interactions of the relationship qua relationship, I can see where this is helpful. However, the book focuses a lot on primary love language, where I can see how using more than one of them as expressions of love in daily interactions can be more beneficial still than only focusing on one (although one might have primacy over the others, yes, I get that).

Chapman explains or wonders whether the source of the primary love languages stems from youth, what the child lacked at home or how the child saw his parents interact and chose to emulate or reject those patterns of behavior. That can be a little forensic, really, and what matter most is in the present application of the framework.

The book is told as a series of composite sketches, where Chapman talks to people or couples and they have epiphanies every chapter. I guess I can live with that fictionalized dramatic recreations of complete conversations. But after he gets through with his thesis, Chapman tacks on a couple chapters of further examples that were a bit superfluous and includes a chapter of using the framework with your children, which I didn’t find consistent with the premise that the source of the primary love language came from childhood. I can see it being something on the nature side of the ledger, but in the first chapters, the source of the primary love language comes from the nurture side. I dunno. Didn’t work for me.

So it’s an interesting read and might be a new framework, a template for considering your interactions with others, but it’s just a template, ultimately, and if or how you choose to apply it should remain up to you.

Books mentioned in this review: