Category: Books

This book is the 27th Mack Bolan book, and you might as well call it Mack Bolan on the CB. Bolan travels to Atlanta to take down the transport hub of mob illicit goods and rescues a pair of sisters from under the thumb or protection of an aging mobster from New York.

Obviously, Pendleton was influenced by the song “Convoy” from 1975 (but not the film based on the song, which would come in 1978), and the book hits the common knights of the road and CB lingo tropes from other pop culture in that era and that vein.

Unfortunately, like some of the other Bolan books (even the early ones), Pendleton seems to hit his word count and wrap it up with a very quick climax that seems tacked on. That’s unfortunate, since Pendleton’s one of the better writers in the silver age of pulp. But a man had to eat, I guess. Worth a read if you’re a fan, but if you’re just looking for good action paperbacks, you can probably skip it.

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This book collects a number of related short stories that Turtledove published in Davis publications. Back in the olden days, all the personally named genre magazines were owned by Davis Publications, including Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and Isaac Asimov’s Literary Magazine. Come to think of it, I probably have some rejection slips myself from that very era in my book. So they published a collection of short stories here under the big letters ISAAC ASIMOV PRESENTS. It seems kind of funny that now, in the 20th century, Turtledove is more known than Asimov. Or maybe that’s just in the blogosphere, which went through a big Turtledove phase some years ago.

Anywho: This set of alt-history pieces is set in the late middle ages. In it, the Roman Empire never fell, as Byzantium held out. A young man in the military leads a daring mission to recover a new tool of the barbarians, which turns out to be a telescope, which is giving them an advantage. He becomes an intelligence officer and the stories feature him working on cases where he ends up recovering or applying new technologies to thwart the Persian empire.

It’s a good bit of reading. The interrelated stories make for easily chunked reading. The characters are engaging. The stories are interesting. On the whole, it reads better than a whole novel of Turtledove, which sometimes can drag on as he shows how much research and imagining he has done (such as Ruled Britannia).

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This book was a pretty fun little read for a British midcentury version of Dilbert with slightly less absurdity.

The author was a naval historian who also dabbled in the study of organizations, and this book collects some of his essays that examine elements of bureaucracy and poke some fun at them. The schtick is that of a very serious scientific study, but the tone is tongue in cheek. The author’s “law,” sometimes quoted, is that work expands to fill the time and effort available to do it, but Parkinson also takes a look at perfect buildings, hiring practices, the proper time and method of conferring retirement on the elderly, and other things.

As with Dilbert, a certain amount of truth rings through the humor, and it’s funny and educational because it’s true. And note that I brought up yesterday’s post because Parkinson also recommended checking out the bathrooms of places when considering a position there, but he did it fifty years before I did, when bathrooms were all steampunk by nature.

I got the book via ILL because of the Instapundit post linked above, ultimately, and I’m glad I did. Although I seem to have hit a bit of a library book period interspersed amongst my longer reads (I’m currently working on a couple of books over 1000 pages and a 700 page collection of short stories), so I’m not knocking off any of the books on my to-read shelves these days. In my defense, the accummulation has slowed quite a bit, too.

Books mentioned in this review:

First of all, let’s log the defect. The book is called St. Louis 365, but it includes February 29, so it should be St. Louis 366.

That said, it take each day of the year and relates a set of things that happened on it in St. Louis history. Sonderman and his assistants scoured newspaper archives, apparently, to come up with this list. It includes a lot of one-off tidbits that give you neat little origins for street names and whatnot throughout the city and county, but also provide some narrative in identifying events in a series for larger stories, such as the Greenlease kidnapping and the World’s Fair in 1904.

It took me a while to get through it, since it’s not a book that drags you along. It is, however, a good book for stop and start, pick it up for a couple minutes in a doctor’s waiting room, sort of reading. I started reading it last year when I was going through browseable books during ballgames and only finished it in January.

But a good idea book and something that will give me odd bits of trivia to throw out randomly in conversations where the trivia don’t exactly fit and will meet a sort of stunned silence as people puzzle out the irrelevance. But that’s why I read.

This book is a basic survey of religions other than Protestant Christianity and how their tenets relate to the Bible and Christianity. As a Protestant-centered book, each chapter gives a brief overview of the other religion and identifies where the other religion differs from the Protestant Christian worldview and with the Bible. It’s written for a Christian audience to give them insight into why the other religions fall short.

Strangely enough (or maybe not), the book spends three chapters on Catholicism, probably because the similarity to Protestantism is so much relative to the other religions that the inquiring Protestant might not think the differences are a big deal. Au contraire, this book argues. The book includes a history of the church, a bit of the divergent beliefs that led to Martin Luther’s theses, and a whole chapter on why you would not want to marry a Catholic (basically because there used to be a contract at some point that practicing Catholics had to present to non-Catholics ensuring that all religious training in the house had to be Catholic under the penalty of excommunication and worse). I think the book focuses a little too much on this and tying American Catholics to the yoke of Rome, but it takes its faith more seriously than most churchgoers and Catholics.

It’s by no means a collection of Christian apologetics, but instead operates a priori from there to provide a summary and comparison. Interesting and educational in the sense both of an overview of what the other religions think and what evangelical Christians are to make of them according to Fritz Ridenour.

I understand the later edition has 20 different religions, cults, or chapters in it. The world of religion in the United States has diversified quite a bit since 1967.

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I saw this book on the shelf at the local Price Cutter and was intrigued. A small press book, local, and it was a collection of jokes and cartoons. What was not to love?

Well, it’s a collection of common jokes, not particularly Branson-y or Ozark-y. Additionally, they are old jokes, coming from the days before Orben’s Current Comedy. I recognized many of them, thought maybe one was worthy of tweeting, and generally was disappointed with the collection.

Still, I admire the pluck and the drive to get the book out there.

This is the book you wished your grandmother had written.

Part memoir, part musing, Clarissa Start talks about her youth and living on the South Side of St. Louis, and sometimes Florida, as her parents eked out an existence in the 1920s. Those years and her attendance at University of Missouri during the depression were made adventurous by a father with a predilection for the ponies. Then, Clarissa deals with her husband’s getting called up for World War II after they buy their first house (just down the road a piece from where I lived in Webster Groves; I went looking for it since there was a picture in the book). She details a bit about her job search and finally her placement with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

The book then muses on aging a bit; her first husband dies, she moves out to the country (she lived in High Ridge while I was in House Springs, so we were almost neighbors). It has a wise, even tone to it.

Even retrospectively, Start doesn’t apply contemporary standards to history. She mentions internment in WW2 and explains it seemed like a good idea at the time. So that was noteable.

I liked the book enough that I bought another copy to send to my mother-in-law, another UMC graduate. On purpose. So, you know, I liked it.

This book collects a number of stories about technology problems from the 1980s onto its publication date, but most of the problems occur in the high tide of the Internet in the late 1990s and early part of the 21st century.

I remember some of them, but certainly not all. Most of them stem from mistakes on the technical end and not on security breaches, which do not allow for a wry commentary.

An amusing read. It reads like a series of blog posts, with each individual story only a couple hundred words, which makes it perfect for a nightstand book you want to pick up and put down quickly. The end of it includes a “Mail me your stories” bit which indicates the author might eventually have or might eventually release a sequel that I wouldn’t mind reading.

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