Category: Books

I bought this book 1) because it was at a book fair for a buck and 2) because it was written by Humphrey Bogart’s son. I wasn’t 100% sure when I saw the book at the book fair, but come on, the book’s named after a famous misquote from Casablanca and the guy made sure his middle name was in it. He ain’t Joe Hill here, hiding out and trying to make it on his own.

So this book follows the story of a private eye in NYC named R.J. Brooks, the son of an actor and an actress (write what you know! Hey, Margaret Truman made a good living at this sort of thing) who rarely sees his mother and avoids her mostly when she is in New York because she didn’t pay him much attention when she was a child. When his mother is murdered, Brooks can choose between self-pity and finding her killer–and something about her in the process.

The book is an interesting, weird blend. It hearkens back to old school pulp detective stories with spots of brutality for its own sake, but in our own date and time this really isn’t appropriate (says a fellow whose first novel–unpublished–is full of the same). There’s the attempt at emotional stuff as the private eye works through his feelings for his mother (I can relate–as you remember, gentle reader whose name is ‘Charles’ and represents my only long-term reader–my own mother passed away just over a year ago.

But the story doesn’t really move forward much on the detective’s initiative. The resolution of the main plot line is driven by the italicized-text bad guy, whose thoughts pop in from time to time to remind us of what’s at stake. Finally, when the time and wordcount is right, the bad guy kidnaps the love interest and streetwise sidekick, ties them up in the dead actress’s bedroom, and awaits Brooks. Then, in a laughable climax, the bad guy picadors Brooks and holds him at bay with a fencing foil with a sharpened point. To make it dramatic, the bad guy gives Brooks a toy sword to defend himself. In a room full of furniture, Brooks tries to defend himself from a death of a hundred little pricks. Come on. If I think I would do better than the hero in a climax, it really takes one out of the moment.

I mean, it’s not that bad of a book. Most of your pulp boils down that way. Because it’s a sort-of semi-biographical imagining that mixes the old and a new in a not entirely convincing fashion, it’s…. not a particularly good book, either.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is one of Carl Hiaasen’s, so you know what to expect. Off-beat characters, a smart hero who is at odds with mainstream Florida society and development, and some zany situations. Unfortunately, this is not one of Hiaasen’s strongest works, but it’s one of his earliest.

When a witness to a four-year-old disappearance tries to sell her story to a television investigative reporter suspiciously close to Geraldo Rivera, she tells them that the now-retired investigator is important to the case. So the television crew accosts him. Then the witness tells her former boss, a poorly skilled but wildly successful plastic surgeon who killed the disappeared woman during a simple rhinoplasty, that the investigator is cooperating with the television program to take the heat off herself, which inspires the plastic surgeon to put a hit on the former investigator, who has to figure out why New Jersey hitmen and then local talent want him dead this time.

Unfortunately, this particular book features an anti-MacGuffin. One of the hit men loses a hand to a barracuda and instead of getting a regular prosthetic, he has a Weed Whacker® attached to his stump. Every time that the book mentions this, it pulled me out of the amusement into dismissing the whole thing as absurd. Maybe this seemed funnier in 1989. To Floridian newspapermen.

It’s an okay way to pass the time. I read this in paperback, and the book has more of a paperback vibe. I would hate to have bought it in hardback.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book compendiates gangsters, murderers, conpeople, and terrorists from the modern era (20th century, roughly, but with some late 19th century Wild West outlaws). Each section covers a type of crime, such as robbers, and each chapter within the section covers individuals or gangs within it, such as Black Bart and Timothy McVeigh. Each chapter contains a couple of sidebars and some suggested further reading. Ergo, this is one heck of an idea book for historical essays and whatnot. Also, it really serves the Jeopardy! play, as I found man of the criminals in the book to be answers for Jeopardy! questions while I was reading it.

On distraction it offers, though, is parenthetical appositives throughout to define each and every crime in common terms. As though larceny, espionage, and extortion were too obscure for the average reader. Worse, it does it each and every time the term appears for the first time in a chapter so that it just pounds simple definitions into your head.

I recommend the book if you are into this sort of thing and if you’ve got room in your life for a book that you can pick up, read a chapter, put down and pick up again some days later.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is the first part of a two-part set that was a Book of the Month Club selection in 1956, if I read my Internet correctly (and that Internet is correct). Funny, hey, how our grandparents actually bought classical literature for mass consumption? Funny and sad.

This book includes Kim, The Jungle Books, Just-So Stories, and Puck of Pook’s Hill, each a whole book in its own right. However, I don’t get to count them as individual books in my annual reckoning because I count physical books. So I’m going to have to read The Green Mile to balance things out.

Kim is the story of a young orphan, the son of an Irish soldier and a native woman, who joins a Buddhist holy man as the holy man seeks a location from Buddhist myths. Along the way, Kim plays upon his relationship with a Muslim horse trader and an English intelligence man to become a player in The Great Game. Kim’s experience as a beggar in India and his familiarity with the peoples there serve him well as does his native intelligence until he can become an active spy. When he does, he helps to thwart some Russian surveyors coming to measure for the curtains they’ll put up when they rule the region. The book dovetails with what I’ve read recently in Flashman, Sharpe’s Tiger, and Sharpe’s Triumph. Kipling is very respective of the different cultures within India and makes the reader appreciate them, too.

The Jungle Books mirrors a bit Tarzan of the Apes and The Return of Tarzan with the whole child raised by animals motif, but in Mowgli’s case, it is wolves instead of apes. I cannot imagine how Disney turned this into a musical, but if they can take The Hunchback of Notre Dame and do it, they can do it to anything. The books follow similar story arcs as Mowgli learns some things and then defeats an enemy or an enemy of the wolf pack, including a razing of a human village. It’s interesting how the whole Avatar motif gets called a remake of Dances with Wolves and whatnot, but in The Jungle Books, a human gone natural/native sides with the animals against man, too. But Kipling presents the native village as savage and superstitious, not representative of the contemporary sensibilities of the civilized (Mowgli isn’t leveling London or anything). I guess that’s the main difference and why one can forgive Mowgli for it when one cannot forgive Cameron for it.

I’ll be honest; I skipped Just-So Stories because I read it in a stand alone volume in 2008.

Puck of Pook’s Hill is a neat little book about two children in England who meet Puck, the last of the People of the Hills, and he brings a couple of historic personages to tell them their stories and an ultimate lesson. A Norman knight from the era following the Battle of Hastings holds a manor with the help of the Anglo-Saxon former lord and the duo travel to Africa with Vikings; a Roman centurion guards Hadrian’s Wall against the Picts and Winged Helmets as the governor marches on Rome to unseat the emperor; and a Jewish moneylender thwarts King John’s source of funds, ensuring that the barons will make him sign the Great Charter. The main lesson of the book is that the Sword leads to Treasure which leads to Law. A secondary motif is that the present (the end of the 19th century) is so far more advanced than the past that the children are better educated than the knight (he can’t read and refers to a mystical needle, the compass, which the boy produces from his pocket). In the 19th century, the children are familiar with the lineage of the British monarchy that the succession following William the Conqueror is mentioned as though it should be common knowledge and whatnot. A sort of double-effect message comes to an American reader in the beginning of the 21st century, though. I’m familiar with the history of Britain enough to know a bit about Hadrian’s Wall and William Rufus’s unsuccessful reign, but that’s because I’m particularly well read. A hundred years ago, I would be on par with a schoolchild. So civilization, or at least its education, is receding. Finally, one cannot read the book without commenting on the final chapter with the Jewish moneylender, which speaks of a secret cabal of moneylenders who behind the scenes control the fate of kings and kingdoms with their pursestrings. You know what? It’s fiction. Now perhaps better than in Kipling’s day, we are equipped to recognize and dismiss the thing as a stereotype. However, we’re not trusted to do so. Another way civilization or its education are receding.

So that’s four Kipling novel in under a year and a half, and i’m going to read the next volume soon. I guess I’m going through my Kipling phase like I’ve gone through my Dickens phase and my Hardy phase. Still, these are easier to read because they’re children’s books, and I’ve already promised to read them to my children in a couple of years. I can’t wait.

Books mentioned in this review:

I bought this book because it’s a Fawcett Gold Medal paperback. It looks like a John D. MacDonald book from the era, and it’s part of a series featuring derring-do much like the other little pulps I like to read. However.

This book’s pace is too slow, really, for pulp goodness. It features a Cajun American agent named Durell who goes to a fictitious African nation to spirit out its prince after a neighboring nation, spurred on by the ChiComs’ need for a railroad right-of-way, overruns the small nation. Durell has one chance to get the prince, a former student radical during his studies at Yale, out: an old woodburning steam locomotive and a single track. Durell is distracted and aided by a beautiful woman–the golden girl of the title–who turns out to be the prince’s younger sister, whom the prince wants dead to cement his claim to the throne.

The book’s scenes are pretty stock bits of action spaced well among long descriptions of the terrain that only pad the book out. The final climactic battle isn’t really that climactic, and as I mentioned, the pacing of the book is pretty poor.

But it’s the thirty-somethingth in the series, so someone in publishing must have supported it. Maybe the first books in the series were good enough to build a following and the author coasted from there.

I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re an absolute glutton like me.

Books mentioned in this review:

You know, I wouldn’t read a comic book and put it on the list here, but somehow I can read a YA adaptation of a film based on a video game (which is not a first: see here where I’ve read the novelization of a sequel of a movie based on a video game).

That said, come on, it’s a book about a military operation that incorporates the characters from the side-by-side fighter game and somehow gets Jean-Claude Van Damme in front of them. The plot is about a mad warlord in a backwater country in Southeast Asia who is using science to tip the balance in his favor on his plan to rule the world. The good guys, the AN (Allied Nations, a proxy for the UN), need to infiltrate the hidden base to free some hostages, and several non-military players get into the base to seek vengeance on the warlord.

Meanwhile, in a stunning turn of events (and the fact this is not the film version of Heavy Barrel), everyone drops their weapons and starts fighting with martial arts. Someone fires a bazooka stolen from the military, presumably a military museum. The bad guy gets his comeuppance. The book ends.

It’s a straight forward story with some back story fleshed out to the depth you’d expect. Maybe the backstories scrolled on the video game itself. But this book, like other YA adventures including those of Heinlein, really could serve as a gateway to more in depth reading. But in 1994, it probably just was a gateway to Street Fighter II.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book proves that there are some things that should be left untried, some experiments should remain conceived in the mind of the inventor and not carried out to their horrible, unholy result. Edward Hoch should never have tried the novel form.

I love Edward Hoch’s Nick Velvet short stories. Short and snappy. This book is not.

It takes place in the near future of 1974. A team of surgeons on an island off of Baja California seek to reanimate a man from cyrogenic sleep using parts from other cyrogenic sleepers whose maintenance payments have lapsed, including the brain of a murderer. When the operation finishes, people start dying. Is it the reanimated sleeper? Or one of them?

The book pays homage to Ten Little Indians and names the earlier work. However, this book is a bit of a chore to read since the characters are cyphers who are really just names and specialties except for the woman, who is sex on a stick, and the investigator who was supposed to look in on the scientific institute’s finances (his tech investigation bureau, HQs atop the World Trade Center, natch). Finally, the numbers dwindle and the authorities arrive just in time for the real murderer to be unmasked.

The author builds tension with customary devices such as splitting up and weapons remembered halfway through the book as well as actions and behaviors on the part of the characters that I could not adequately suspend disbelief to enjoy the book.

On the other hand, the book describes a board game called Laser that hasn’t been invented yet, but it sounds interesting. I might have to work on it.

Books mentioned in this review:

I thought I’d read a quick bit of drama to break up a larger multi-book volume that I’m also working on currently. A full evening play. You know, something you could read in a night. Ha. This one took me three nights.

It’s not a straightforward play, unlike the stuff I’ve read by Neil Simon recently or even this author’s own Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. It’s a bit, erm, stylized, which requires a lot more attention reading and relies on some conceits and whatnot that you have to keep in mind to follow along.

For example, this book takes place in a future England from 1972, where England has landed on the moon, but tragedy struck there as the lander was damaged and the two landing astronauts fought each other to see who would survive, and the television audience back home saw the fight live. Fancy that: in 1972, they thought everyone would go to the moon.

Also, the government has been taken over by a totalitarian left (but I repeat myself) party that has rounded up the usual suspects and has replaced the Archbishop of Canterbury with some other government minister. The main characters are a philosopher who holds a chair at a university where the ultimate leader has a band of professors/acrobats (the titular jumpers) and his wife, a former musical actress who lost it singing a moon song after the above mentioned astronaut incident.

During a party, when the professor is working, the wife shoots one of the jumpers.

She deals with covering it up with the help of her “therapist” who does some strange things with her and might be schlepping her.

The professor works on a major presentation and tries to reconcile with the wife. Then an inspector, a fan of the wife, shows up. He might know something about the dead jumper, but he squelches the investigation for a chair at the university (open as said jumper is dead), maybe some autographs, and maybe some schlepping.

I think I’ve given you the nutshell of this piece. I don’t even remember how it ends. I certainly didn’t get the point.

On the whole, I think the nicest thing I can say for it is at least it’s not French drama.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book not only covers not only making necklaces with beads, but also how to make beads from different things such as clay, fabric, and papier-mache. As part of a series, the book focuses on necklaces and the projects include traditional bead stringing coupled with some wire work.

Projects include:

• Papier-Mache bead necklaces.
• Flowering vine necklace made from clay-sculpted flowers and chain.
• Marbled beads made from clay.
• Faux Millefiori (Venetian glass beads) made from clay.
• A necklace incorporating feathers.
• A seed necklace.
• A necklace made with hardware washers and leather thong.

Each project offers a couple of photographic variations on the main project. They really do spark your imagination; I really enjoy most the books that go astray from basic beading techniques.

I do have a couple of notes about the book, though, that are less laudatory:

• Whatever font they chose for it has a little loop that connects the tops of st and ct whenever they appear (in words such as lost and impact, for example, the loop connects the last two letters). That was distracting.
• Individual numbered steps in the projects include more than one action. As an occasional technical writer, I find that irksome. A single action gets its own step. Not
  1. Gather your materials. Mix the paste. Tear up some paper. Wrap the paper around a core bead and apply the paste.

  That’s not a single step.

Still, worth your time and trouble perusing it if you’re looking for some new ideas.

Books mentioned in this review:

This is a small paperback from the same publisher as the Adam-12 books I read recently. It’s a book from the “Man with No Name” series tied into the Sergio Leone films starring Clint Eastwood. The book features an ensemble of characters and sort of plays up the camp of the series. The Man With No Name is the best shooter ever and always shoots four times to hit four bad guys as fast as he can. Unfortunately, as he has no name, the other characters call him Nameless, which is troublesome.

In it, the Man with No Name comes upon a town at the edge of a badlands. The badlands feature a group of bandits, of course. At the outskirts of the town, an Englishman has built a castle and staffed it with hired guns. An insurance salesman–or is he?–proves to be almost as good with a gun as the Man with No Name. Two scientists, one British and one American, have gone missing and are presumably held by the bandits who have not made ransom demands for some reason. The Man with No Name investigates and eventually has to storm the castle, of course, with his compatriots who also include the sheriff of the town and the cranky old editor of the local paper.

It’s not a bad book; pulpy and paperbacky, but not poorly written. In fact, the book has a number of similes that are plain awesome, like “shrieked like a banshee in labor.” That’s some shrieking.

Books mentioned in this review:

I could say many of the same things as I could say about Adam-12: The Runaway for this book. The structure is the same: the Adam-12 car guys handle a couple days’ worth of investigating in Los Angeles, including: repeated calls to a mansion deep within a narrow canyon by the nervous sister of the owner; documentary filmmakers who say they want to do a movie about a solid black neighborhood but who really want to shoot a movie about tension and crime, even if they have to manufacture their own riot; an armed robber targets the neighborhood in the shadow of a concrete plant; and so on.

The book’s climax occurs in the aforementioned mansion during an earthquake that isolates 300 partygoers, the Adam-12 guys, and a murderer, so Reed and Malloy get to play English locked room detectives.

A quick enough read and apparently only half as valuable on the Internet as its predecessor. I do have to quibble with the title, though, since there’s no one actually Dead on Arrival in either of the main cases that thread their ways through the book.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book collects three Heinlein novels:

• The Puppet Masters, a book in the near future that deals with an invasion from a species of mind-controlling parasites from Titan. A super agent in a unacknowledged government agency is taken over by one of these invaders and survives de-coupling. The agency tries to get the political arm of the government to take drastic measures to oust the invaders, but to no avail, until it is almost too late.

  A good piece of rocket jocketry, with a past future strangely in our past now, but it’s not too badly dated as long as you remember life before the Internet. It’s pulp fiction, but with bits of agreeable politics within it.

• Double Star, a book about a down-on-his-luck actor selected by an expansionist faction to portray a missing politician for an important ceremony. The double has to avoid assassination attempts and gaffes as he finds himself growing into the role.
• The Door Into Summer, a bizarre time-traveling novel about an inventor cheated out of the company he founded by his business partner and a woman who set herself up as the inventor’s fiancee and business secretary. The man takes the long sleep–an offering by insurance companies where they will take your money now and put you into cyrogenic sleep for decades so your money will grow and they will get their cut. The sleep goes well, but the inventor finds that the fiancee, bless her heart, has altered his investment election to make it worthless in the future. So the fellow needs to get that straight and to find a young woman he knew in the past. To do so, he travels to the past.

As I said, prime rocket jocketry. Published in the early 1950s, most are set in a future whose date has passed. For example, in The Door Into Summer, the first future setting is 1970, and the second future setting is thirty some years later. That is, both times have passed. If you can get your mind past that, and people born before 1980 probably can, you can really enjoy the books for what they are: simple adventure stories not relying too much on hard science (unlike the stories of today). Additionally, given Heinlein’s politics bent bends along with mine, you can read them without worrying that some smart comment will knock you out of the books.

Worth a read.

Books mentioned in this review:

I bought this book for my sainted mother because I think she liked books tied into television shows she liked. Maybe I just made that up. But I got her a pair of Adam-12 books for a buck or something. Little did I realize that these listed on the Internet at $50.00 each. A lot of times, you can find old paperbacks, particularly series, listed on the Internet at bonzo bucks that you can find at book fairs cheap. I’d recommend you buy them if you like them; otherwise, you will buy them and list them on the Internet for bonzo bucks and have them listed there for a long, long time.

At any rate, this book is a hundred and fifty pages of lightweight crime drama. There’s a central case, the Runaway thing in the title, and a series of other incidents that occur to the patrolmen in the course of their rounds. I haven’t seen the show in 20+ years, so I can only assume that the book follows the pattern of the episodes.

It’s a good light quick read, not Ed McBain or John D. MacDonald by any means, but the writing is more pleasant and higher quality than bad pulp.

A couple salient facts:

• It takes until page 47 for the word “groovy” to appear earnestly and unironically.
• The climax of the book focuses on a dark mass, with upside down crosses! and dogs dressed as ghosts to keep those meddling kids away. I was going to mock that harder than I am because I realized that, 2 years later, Robert B. Parker’s The Godwulf Manuscript also featured a rescue of a runaway in a dark mass. And if Parker did it before 1990, I cannot mock it.

The cops are upstanding and good. Adam-12 was a Jack Webb program, after all.

Books mentioned in this review:

This is a retelling of Firestarter from a conservative perspective. Try as you might, you make the inevitable comparison. Children with mystical powers on the run from bad men who want to exploit them protected by a single parent.

The book’s telling has key differences, of course, since Andrew Klavan is not Stephen King and their politics diverge, which could explain elemental differences (the bad guys as corporate goons vs. government goons; the special children result from experiments not involving vs. involving LSD, and so on). Also, Klavan tells the story from multiple points of view with cut scenes within each chapter to build tension. This is a common enough device, but it really detracts from the ultimate climactic scene and it also slows down helping the reader engage with the book, since the multiple points of view don’t allow the reader to lock onto the protagonist until well into the book.

A good enough book, but probably not the best in his line. I’ll try again.

Interesting note on how I got this book: before we moved, Mrs. Noggle was thinning her library with a stack of (two full bookshelves’ worth) books to give away. Before she did, I went through them and rescued a couple because I was getting a little light as my unread books were falling to a couple thousand in number. I’ve watched Klavan on the Culture on PJtv and decided to give him a try. I’ll give him another try, maybe with his new book coming out.

Books mentioned in this review:

I’m not saying that I am not particularly bent artistically, but I almost thought that Art Noveau remade Bill Withers’ “Lean on Me” in the 1980s.

Turns out, I was mistaken. Art Noveau was an artistic movement at the turn of the last century featuring natural motifs and rounded curves. This book includes a nice introduction to the movement, a very high level summary of the different media and countries in which it appeared. Then the book goes into some projects inspired by different examples of the art movement.

For example, the projects include:

• A bracelet based on the painting “Libussa” by Vitezlav Karel Masek. Before this book, if you would have asked me about Masek, I would have guessed he played goal for the Nashville Predators.
• Earrings inspired by a Paris Metro station fence.
• A vase based on the painting “The Embrace” by Gustav Klimt. Klimt really isn’t a good hockey name at all.
• A bracelet based on a council room door handle in Bremen City Hall.
• A bracelet based on a Laburnum Lamp by Louis Comfort Tiffany.

The projects are quite varied, and as noted above go beyond jewelry. It sparks the imagination of the beginner, or at least me, to see a wide array of techniques and results. Each project includes sidebars of trivia and tips to help you with your wirework or whatnot. Some of the projects really do match their inspirations, but in others I don’t see the influence as clearly. However, I guess the inspiration in each worked enough to get the authors to create some nice designs.

Books mentioned in this review:

The first two paragraphs of the book:

Twenty-five hundred Missouri troops surrounded the Mormon town of Far West on the night of 31 October 1838. Nearly eight hundred Mormon defenders waited silently behind their makeshift barricade of wagons, house logs, and floor planks, which extended three-quarters of a mile across the southern edge of town. Gen. Samuel D. Lucas, commander of the militia, warned Mormon leaders that he would destroy the town if they refused to surrender and leave the state. The Mormons prepared for attack. “We knew their determination was to exterminate us & [we] made up our determination to defend the City until the last man should fall to the ground,” wrote a sleepless Mormon soldier tbat night. “…we have the promise that but little blood would be shed at this time. But God only knows how we are to be delivered.”

The confrontations between the Mormons and their Missouri neighbors vividly illustrate the powerful cultural forces that have fostered a tradition of extralegal violence in America. Since colonial times, when impassioned citizens tarred and feathered tax collectors, dumped English tea into Boston harbor, and declared their independence from Great Britain, Americans have claimed the right to take the law into their own hands to enforce justice. Such violence has generally been conservative in purpose, and thus supported or tolerated by a large portion of the population. Vigilante organizations, often led by members of the local elite, acted to preserve established customs and practices against persons and groups that were perceived as a threat to society. “One is impressed that most American violence…had been initiated with a ‘conservative’ bias,” writes historian Richard Hofstadter. “It has been unleashed against abolitionists, Catholics, radicals, workers and labor organizers, Negroes, Orientals, and other ethnic or racial or ideological minorities, and has been used ostensibly to protect the American, the Southern, the white Protestant, or simply the established middle-class way of life and morals.” Another historian of American violence, Richard M. Brown, similarly concludes, “American opinion generally supported vigilantism; extralegal activity by a provoked populace was deemed to be the rightful action of good citizens.”

Oh, for Pete’s sake. Two paragraphs into a purported history, and the author is pointing the finger at conservatives. This is a current political term that the author and the historian he cites apply retroactively to the bad guys in their narratives. Maybe he’ll go on to mention the extralegal violence perpetrated by those seeking to overturn the political and cultural order or to “advance the cause” of the aggrieved populations listed in Hofstader’s litany.

Somehow I doubt it.

I made it almost two paragraphs into the book, but I’m not eager to rush into a “history” book that wears its bias and narrative on its sleeve. Hugh Thomas cheerleading human sacrifice, I can take. But not this.

The fact that this book is still in print probably indicates that it’s a textbook somewhere, at the very least at the University of Missouri. Joy.

I made it further into The Ruins, but that makes two books this year I have opened but won’t finish. I am such a quitter.

Books mentioned in this review: