Category: Books

It’s been three years almost since I read an Ed McBain book (Doll in April 2012). It’s hard to believe because they were such a staple of my early adulthood, but he was producing new books at a rate of one or two a year until his death in 2005, and I had a source of new books to read then. By now, I’ve been through most of them more than once, and any reading is likely to be re-reading.

As is the case with this book.

An actress reports threats as she rehearses a play about an actress getting stabbed. Then she gets stabbed for real, superficially, which leads the detectives of the 87th Precinct, in particular Carella and Kling, to investigate. It turns out to have been a stunt cooked up by the actress and her lover/agent, but someone really stabs the actress good and dead, which complicates things.

The book makes good use of the play within the play trope (wrapping it in a novel–Ed McBain was nothing if not novel and clever as a writer). It has some series business in it–Kling is starting a new relationship with a deputy chief who is black–and some of the characters only make walk on appearances (although Ollie Weeks appears, and I’m not sure why McBain focused so much on him at this point in his, McBain’s, career). The beginning of the relationship–the first dates and whatnot–give McBain an opportunity to explore The Race Question especially in terms of personal relationships. Some of McBain’s books have crime-based subplots, but this one only has the one crime plot and the relationship plot. So it reads a little like an episode in a television series.

Which is what you expect when you’re picking up one of these books after having read others. And it’s not a bad thing. And McBain is an excellent writer in the genre. So it’s worth reading more than once.

Books mentioned in this review:

I don’t want to make you feel old, old man, but Calvin and Hobbes hasn’t been in the newspapers in twenty years. One day soon, you’ll have a doctor born so late that he’ll never have read it in the funnies, and how can you trust a doctor that young?

This book is not a comic collection. Instead, it describes an art exhibition that took place in 2001, fourteen years ago and six years after Watterson ended the strip. Watterson’s Sunday work was rolled into an art exhibition, and this book describes some of the history of Calvin and Hobbes as well as some of the Sunday comics. Each included comic includes the rough sketch and the finished product along with some commentary about the comic. Readers also get insight into how the Sunday comic is structured–in many cases, the first line of a three line comic is expendable as editors might have to cut it out to fit it into a particular newspaper or they can be sold “as is” as a half page, wherein the panels can be sized differently than normal and won’t be cut (Calvin and Hobbes started as the former but ended as the latter).

It’s a good bit of information, and the cartoons themselves are timelessly humorous.

The cartoon has been gone twice as long as it actually appeared in the paper; however, that’s probably a good thing, as Watterson got to end it on his terms, and readers were spared the endless “vote which cartoon stays” sorts of polls pitting Calvin and Hobbes against the Boondocks or having to write letters to the editor to get it restored.

I’m glad these books appear, though, because my children are coming to enjoy the strip. To be honest, my oldest son borrowed this book from the library and I poached it.

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I received this book for my birthday this year; it’s definitely the kind of book bought new as a gift. Or perhaps by serious, institutionizable fans of the show. It contains no narrative, no fan stuff: It’s basically an introduction by the fictional Carson (the butler) writing for new hires at Downton Abbey followed by tips and tricks for each job and their attendant responsibilities.

I’ve said recently what I think of the show these days, but there’s not any of that to dislike in the book.

Carson’s introduction is a nice bit of Stoic philosophy encouraging new workers: You are part of something meaningful and grand, and you should do your best at it. Then the tips and tricks are pretty much polish it with chamois leather. That’s two things I learned from the book: That chamois leather is good for polishing, and the source of the pun inherent in the ShamWow name.

Yes, friends, there are gaps in my classical education, and I’m unlikely to get certain French puns, especially those relating to cleaning products and practices, until decades later when reading gift books tied into British soap operas. Which probably means the chamois/ShamWow joke is the only one I’ll get.

So the book is an interesting little read if you get it as a gift or pick it up at a book fair, but it might not be a thing you order. But just in case you’re institutionizable, note this post is full of convenient links.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book starts out with an interesting conceit: The Gunsmith is playing poker when a group of ranch hands come into town and claim that he has killed their boss who was planning to hire him for something. It turns out he’s playing cards with the mayor, the judge, and the town’s attorney, so they call an impromptu town council meeting to order the sheriff to keep the men out of the saloon. So we’re presented with something novel: Clint tries to find out who killed the rancher by interviewing people while playing cards.

Ah, just when we’re wondering exactly how the author will handle this conceit throughout the book, it ends, and Adams sneaks out the back door to do a little, erm, investigation in that way he does. And he uncovers a pretty staple Western trope that ends with a gunfight in the street where (spoiler alert!) the title character of the series wins.

It’s unfortunate that the book couldn’t carry on with the novel setup to its conclusion, but that’s not what buyers of the series want or expect.

Me? I expected a thin bit of book to read that I spent a quarter on. And I got it.

So it’s the least bad of the books I’ve read in this line because of the novelty. I’ve only got one more in the series, and I don’t expect I’ll buy any more, though.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is another in the 1982 Bolan books; at this time, they seem to have gone to the monthly model, which means of course that individual entries are passed onto different authors, which accounts for an uneven series.

This entry isn’t bad, but its plot is exceedingly similar to the others reviewed recently (Terrorist Summit, Return to Vietnam, and The New War especially). In each, Bolan gets wind of someone being held in an enemy camp (twice a jungle, once a desert, now a swamp). Bolan infiltrates the compound, leaves the compound, and then has to go into the compound with the bad guys on alert to extract the hostage and blow everything up.

In this case, the hardsite is a compound in the Everglades run by a right-wing corporate government contractor who wants a biological weapon to facilitate the invasion of Grenada, where he can then start properly trying to take over the world for right-wing reasons, which seem to be just being corporate and having a military.

This book preceded the actual United States invasion of Grenada, so its author was a little prescient in recognizing the political situation with the small island nation making it unstable. So I got a little history lesson on that which covers some of the gaps I didn’t gather when it happened because I was eleven years old at the time and dealing with boyhood things, like my parents’ divorce and my mother’s nascent plans to uproot us from Wisconsin to Texas.

So, as a book, it’s too much in the line with then-recent Bolan offerings but an interesting artifact in a meta way.

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This book is a chapbook containing a single short story by a local author; I think I have one of his full length works here somewhere. I must have gotten this book in a package of books for a buck at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County book sale.

At any rate, in this story, an author with writer’s block and a looming deadline agrees to take a quick vacation to a random spot on a map, and he ends up renting a car and driving with his wife into the Ozarks. They pull off the highway where a sign promises a restaurant and a place to stay, but the road turns to a dirt road. They pass an old gypsy woman and do not give her a ride, which leads to her placing a curse upon them. When they reach the ramshackle inn, they find it’s run by gypsies, and they’re kidnapped and taken to a hidden gypsy camp where they are locked in a ramshacklier shanty on the Night of the Wolf. And werewolves attack, and they survive. BECAUSE THEY’RE NOW CURSED WITH LYCANTHROPY.

It’s a pretty basic story, and not a very good one. But it hearkens back to a time of less cellular coverage and fewer smartphones. In a more deft storytelling, this might not have been quite so disparate, the distance between then and now, but reading it left a lot of brainpower for thinking about other things instead of the primary text.

Geez, Charles, I hope this isn’t your brother I’m pooh-poohing.

This book reads so much like an authentic Don Pendleton book that I checked Fantastic Fiction to see if Pendleton wrote it. He did not; Steven Krauzer did. Krauzer, apparently, had read some of the Pendleton books before starting out. You have a lot of the elements of the Pendleton Bolan in the book, but a decided bit of tomfoolery at the end that is uncharacteristic of Pendleton.

In the book, Bolan has to go to Algiers to look for a missing technology executive whose daughter was kidnapped by terrorists of some stripe. For ransom, they want a prototype suitcase nuke the exec’s company had developed. The man goes to Africa himself to find his daughter and is instead captured, and it’s up to Bolan to get him out. Bolan does so early, getting the nominal plot out of the way so it can turn Pendeltonesque. Bolan pursues the woman to a camp in the Sahara where a Soviet-trained bad guy has assembled a summit of numerous terrorist groups to organize them under an umbrella operation headed by him. Bolan infiltrates the base posing as a Mafia-based bigwig and turns the groups upon themselves. This is all pretty Pendletonesque.

However, at the climax, Bolan is escaping from the site in a Range Rover when a Jeep pursues. He puts down his rifle to pick up his trademark .44 and has the Range Rover spring into reverse so suddenly he’s coming at the terrorists hard and fast while firing the handgun. Instead of, you know, shooting them with the rifle from a distance.

The tacky ending makes me wonder how the whole business worked. Did the editors have this cinematic ending in mind and perhaps on paper when turning it over to the writer to fill in the gaps? I dunno, but it diminishes the book.

I’m going to start calling these things the thrown silverware moments in honor of Silent Night: an outlandish moment in the climax thrown in for cinematic value but that leaves any thoughtful reader agape.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book was a little bit of a gift; it was, for me, an unexpected new Robert B. Parker Spenser novel. And although I savaged a lot of his later work on this very blog, because I know (suspect) this will be the last of his Spenser novels (although it was completed by someone else), I enjoyed it.

The plot: Around Christmas time, a boy comes to Spenser for help. The boy is associated with an unlicensed youth help facility. Run by the brother of an importer/exporter. Of drugs. The center is funded by the brother, who is unhappy about it but promised his mother to take care of his brother. Someone is attacking the brother who runs the shelter, trying to drive him off. The authorities are on the drug-smuggling brother, and he’s about to bolt, but he’s going to tie up some loose ends–including his former tennis pro girlfriend who might know too much. Until Spenser.

You know, trying to sum up the plot, I wonder if it holds up to scrutiny, or if the plot is merely the excuse for some Spensering.

Regardless, it’s full of proper Parkeriana: “Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?” and unnecessary asides and psychoanalysis. We also get the obvious errata, like describing a Playstation and a couple of game cartridges or taking the shells out of a rifle. But because this is the last new Parker Spenser I’ll (probably) read, I kind of viewed them with affection.

Although I did laugh out loud in the climax, when the tennis pro is faced with a killer at a dinner party and picks up a knife from the table and throws it at the fellow, stopping him cold with a table knife to the chest. and Helen Brann, I presume. That does not read like something Parker would have done.

At any rate, I enjoyed it affectionately, and as time passes, Parker’s rising again in my memory. Perhaps I will fill out my collection of his works after all.

Now, with this rosy glow, do I pick up some of the latest John Sandford novels from the library?

UPDATE: As he mentions in the comments, Friar has already read this book.

Books mentioned in this review:

In case you’re wondering, it looks like it takes about nine months for me to forget how much I don’t like a series. I read A Daughter’s Revenge last May, and it took me until February 2015 to pick up this book.

Clint Adams, the Gunsmith, is camped out when clumsy horse thieves try to get the drop on him and steal his horse. He outfoxes them, goes to a nearby town (Red Water of the title), has an, erm, encounter, discovers the local marshal is forming a posse to hunt those dangerous (but clumsy) outlaws. The Gunsmith thinks that’s odd, and when he joins the posse after an, erm, encounter, he finds the marshal doesn’t have a plan for all the town’s decent gun handlers except that they’re out of town. Apparently, the marshal is in on a scheme to steal the plans of safes made by a local safemaker. Which Adams thwarts amid the, erm, encounters.

Of the contemporary Jove Western series, Longarm is the better of the two. As to the Gunsmith series, I think I’ll put them on a higher shelf and avoid them until I forget, again, how I feel about them.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is one of several books tied into the original Kung Fu television series from the 1970s, in which a half-American Shaolin priest with a bounty on his head wanders the west having adventures. It ran for a couple of years and then ran in syndication for far longer (ask your dad what “syndication” is). Then, in the early 1990s, a spin-off appeared featuring the grandson and great-grandson of the original character, and that series played for longer than the original. I think I saw more segments and/or episodes of the spin-off than the original. So I didn’t come to the book with an existing love for the characters or story.

The book starts much like a pilot of the television series; in a series of flashbacks, Caine’s training is revealed and the events leading to his exile from China and the bounty on his head. In the present day of the book, which is the old West, Caine is fitting in with a bunch of railroad building Chinese immigrants driven by a harsh and murderous foreman who insists upon following the exact route planned for the railroad even though the company’s pesky geologist predicts disaster in blasting through mountains. When the disaster occurs, the Chinese rise up and only Caine can protect them from slaughter at the hands of the railroad guards.

It’s a short paperback, but it’s not as quick a read as could be expected. There is little dialogue, and there are stretches of paragraphs or pages of unnecessary musing–I guess this is the character development. The flashbacks aren’t problematic, though, and if you’re not familiar with the television series, they do provide a bit of parallel tension as his training unfolds.

I’ve got a bunch more of these paperbacks, and I’ll read them by and by. It did interest me in looking up the television series, but it doesn’t look like it’s free on Amazon Prime, so I won’t rush out to buy the DVDs for them. But the book is working its marketing and synergy magic, albeit forty years later.

Books mentioned in this review:

I’ve been reading this book to my son(s) over the course of the last two or three years. It’s a 368 page book, so cut me a little slack. Also note that we did the book in fits and starts, where we read a bunch of Aesop together, both boys and I, at the outset, but once we got into the relatively bloody Grimm brothers, we held off a bit. Eventually, the older boy wanted to hear the stories more than his younger brother did.

At any rate, we’re through it now. I’m not going to go into great detail because it’s been three years, and I’ve forgotten any of the lessons of Aesop’s that I might have learned. I will sum up some thoughts on each:

• Aesop’s fables are good for children. They have a message in them, and their fanciful use of animals will make the children pay attention.
   
• The Brothers Grimm are pretty bloody. There’s a lot of chopping getting done and bodily harm, but most of the stories have a redemptive element if not a Christian message. Famous Grimm stories include “Rapunzel”, “Hansel and Gretel”, “Cinderella”, “Little Red-Cap”, “Little Snow White”, “Rumplestiltskin”, and “The Golden Goose”. When Disney got a hold of them, the films had more survivors than the stories. Which is the same complaint I had about Disney’s Hamlet. Also, the brothers reuse elements of their stories, so if you read the whole kit and kaboodle at once, you’ll feel a sense of deja vu.
   
• Hans Christian Andersen has a reputation about being child friendly, but his stories are about as bloody as the brothers Grimms’, and they often don’t end on a note of redemption. Instead, some like “The Emperor’s New Clothes” just kind of end abruptly, while others end like “The Shadow” end with a nominal protagonist losing in the end. Hans Christian Andersen is not unlike a children’s Stieg Larsson. Famous HCA stories include the aforementioned “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, “The Little Mermaid” (which does not probably end like the Disney film), “The Ugly Duckling”, and the source for at least one Kate Bush song (which does not end the same way as the song or its video).

      

All in all, a good collection. Now we’re going to read the Harvard Classics Arabian Nights, and three years’ hence when we finish that, the lad(s) should be ready for Plato and Aristotle.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book shares an awful lot of plot with The New War. Grimaldi flies Mack Bolan into the jungle, where Bolan is supposed to rescue a man from an enemy camp, and then Grimaldi returns to save the day.

This time, though, Bolan is returning to Vietnam to exfiltrate a soldier who stayed behind and who knows about American POWs still held by the Vietnamese. He joins up with some Hmong in-country and runs into difficulty when a beautiful resistance fighter fancies Bolan over another man in her unit, and that man is a hothead who might cross Bolan to get the girl.

Unfortunately, this book was a bit of a slog for a variety of reasons. For starters, there are some technical inaccuracies to consider: For starters, the method of getting Bolan into the jungle is for him to eject from a Harrier (the new hotness at the time), and then for the Harrier to fly back to base. With part of the canopy missing. Presumably, Bolan will land and go on fighting, albeit an inch or two shorter for the time being (ejecting from a fighter is not the same as jumping from a skydiving school, kids; it’s a violent action that sometimes knocks the ejected unconscious). Then there’s a lot of bringing weapons up to the hip in firing position. Oh, and the firsts. When thinking about how good Grimaldi is, Bolan thinks, “I’m a pretty good pilot myself.” Uh. That’s new. And he lights a cigarette. And he sheds a tear. So Bolan in this book is a bit more of a stock action hero than the man shaped by the history of the first forty books in the series. He even moons over the Hmong woman even though he’s got the love of his life in America. On the other hand, the contact with Stony Man Farm is dismissed, and we don’t get chapters of Hal and April fretting or remembering what an awesome guy Bolan is, either.

Still, I think I’ll take a break from the series for a bit.

Oh, and if you’re wondering whether I’m actually reading Julius Caesar or merely using its presence on my chairside table as a pretext to read junk: I’ve finished The Civil War, but it’s all Super Mario Brothers on poor Caesar. “Thank you, Caesar, but victory is in another castle!” And so Caesar is off to Egypt. I’ve got the Alexandrian War and the Spanish War to go.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book says its text is by Abraham Lincoln and the photos are by Mathew Brady; however, only the latter is true for the most part. Although the book does quote Lincoln on every page, the editor’s text far outweighs Lincoln’s words. The book is 200 pages of photographs, and the images themselves take precedence. The editor provides a light running history of the war accompanying the images, and then Lincoln gets his say at the end of each snippet of historical text. Lincoln’s comments come from speeches, letters, and cables he sends during the course of the war.

It’s a quick perusal–although it’s 200 pages, I ran through it in a little over an hour–but the book has a good summary-level review of the Civil War and, most strikiningly, the photographic record of a war one hundred and fifty years ago.

That’s before the Internet, child. And before television, even over-the-air broadcast television.

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This book is a 1949 paperback. Let that sink in for a minute. It’s sixty-five years old. That’s a quality paperback. And it was in pretty good shape before I started sticking it in my pockets and sitting on it for a couple of weeks.

At any rate, this book covers ten painters considered “old masters” in 1949, including:

• Leonardo da Vinci
• Raphael
• Michelangelo
• Titian
• Bruegel
• Rubens
• Rembrandt
• El Greco
• Velasquez
• Vermeer

Each chapter includes a two-page intro by the author that talks about the text selection for each author, and then the text that follows is some writing about the author. I have to say that generally, because some of it is biographical, some of it is interpretive, and some of it is fiction. For example, for the Renaissance Italian fellows, we have some biographical sketches of da Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. But for Titian, we get a bit of purple prose describing Titian’s works in glowing and abstract terms. For El Greco, we get a section of On Human Bondage, a novel. So it’s unfortunate that the chapters are uneven.

This book also includes a number of black and white reproductions of some of the artists’ work. It’s unfortunate that they’re only in black and white, though, but given this is a little pocket paperback from the immediate post World War II period, it’s understandable. Still, the writers often talk about the artists’ unique use of color and that’s not something the reader can see.

Still, it’s a good quick summary course in these artists and could serve as a stepping stone to further interest. I’m more interested in Vermeer now and have researched him a little on the Internet to see some of his works in actual color.

So it’s an effective book, for sure, and it made me lament contemporary art museums and the elementary school rubbish on the walls there. But that happened because few enough people in the middle of the last century cared to make artistic judgments for themselves and instead let the academics and critics dictate taste.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is really one of the last books I read in 2014, but it’s taken me a while to write it up because I’m a procastinator and because I wanted to nearly-simultaneously write it up for the professional(?) blog. But now that I’m content to recycle most of the content, it’s much easier. It’s always much easier when you just give up.

As its title implies, this book really does contain a set of rules for programmers to follow: The left pages have the rules in large font, and the right pages have the rules explained in a paragraph or two. The book focuses not only on programming best practices, but also on software development best practices, and these are much more applicable to modern programming than the pre-object oriented programming lessons.

For example, first and foremost are the rules about making sure your program answers the users’ needs. Rules like:

1. Fit your program to your users’ needs.
2. Aim your program at the widest circle of users
3. Explain to your user how to use the program
4. Make it easy for the user to run the program

Other rules cover interface design, such as Display results with pertinent messages which are just as relevant now as it was when the interface designed displayed only green or amber text.

Even the discussion of loops, variables, and breaking your program into sections has a sort of relevance because it discusses these things philosophically, at a high level, in a way that programming how-to books and online language tutorials do not.

It’s a quick read or browse; although it’s roughly 220 pages (which is still slim by modern, $60 computer book standards), it’s really less than that since the text is not densely packed on the pages as described above, and it’s worth the time for the insights not only into the crystallized rules but also in the recognition of some software development problems and goals predate the Internet, which I am pretty sure some of our younger co-workers don’t know.

But now that I’ve read it, I’m torn. Do I put it on my regular read bookshelves, or do I put it on the computer programming bookshelves along side twenty-year-old hardware primers and introductions to the C programming language (some of which are thirty years old)? Well, the decision is probably less philosophical and more practical in nature: there’s space on the regular shelves, whereas the computer bookshelves are tightly pressed with books I have not read. Also, they’re behind four comic book long boxes containing most of my comic book collection and a couple other boxes of paraphernalia.

So I’m definitely putting it on the regular shelves. Because I’ve read it completely, unlike the other computer books which were for reference, text books, or the hope thirty years ago that I’d be more of a knowledgeable IT professional than I actually am. Not because I’m lazy.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book follows closely on the heels of The Violent Streets. I’m not sure Mack Bolan will ever get a full night’s sleep for the next forty years.

In this volume, Bolan is called to protect an Iranian military figure on the run after the revolution who has been hiding in the United States. The night before he is deported from the country, an elite squad of Iranian commandos has been dispatched to take him out. Bolan looks over the compound and finds the security is Mafia, and that the Iranian’s American wife wants out–and the Iranian is not above killing her lover in front of her to teach her a lesson.

So Bolan comes in, finds an unlikely ally in a mafia guard and that someone inside the Iranian’s circle is ultimately behind the whole thing, tipping the Iranian government off.

The pacing of the book is pretty good, mixing action and the Bolan War Journal style drop-ins a little better, but it’s still less than seamless. As these are early books written by the staff writers at Gold Eagle, they’re bound to be less smooth than later editions as the book and myth of Bolan becomes clearer. After all, none of these guys read the first forty books before writing them, and this patch of first entries was written at the same time, so the little tics each author introduces contradicts other ones.

Also, this volume identifies a possible flaw in the way the books are written. On page 91, Bolan gives his silenced pistol to the wife of the Iranian for her protection. On page 111, Bolan shoots a bad guy with the very same weapon he no longer has. Then, later in the book, a bad guy has the gun after having taken it from the wife. I can’t help forensically musing that the author wrote the action set pieces first as though they were identified in the outline most clearly and then filled in the other stuff which lead to this particular gaffe. And no one noticed it. Maybe the author didn’t read the whole book through in its entirety in its order. Perhaps someone else punched it up and added this. But this whacky error made it into the book.

Hey, I’m no saint. In my own novel (Available now!), I had an eight day week and demonstrated the old revolver-for-a-semiautomatic switcheroo. But I read the book over and over again looking for things like this, and I found them.

The Gold Eagle books are probably rife with errata like this and with other inconsistencies as authors not familiar with the character but familiar with the tropes of the genre insert them into Bolan books (as we’ll see next time).

On the whole, the series has its up books and its down books, but overall, the quality might not suffer too much from the Pendleton books, although this is yet an optimistic view in my experience and with the hopes that they straighten out a bit and fly truer. Time will tell.

Books mentioned in this review: