Category: Books

I had a certain sadness reading this book, the first Spenser novel published after Robert B. Parker’s death. The copyright notice even attributes the copyright to the Estate of Robert B. Parker. Even though I’ve been a bit rough on him in book reports for the better part of a decade now, his early works still meant a lot to me.

An art expert and college professor engages Spenser to guard him while he conducts a ransom-for-old-painting swap. A precise bomb kills the art expert after the swap, while Spenser is still on the job, so Spenser tries to track down the art thieves. In the course of events, he finds himself as the target while investigating an elite ring of mercenaries and art thieves who might be seeking to right art confiscations from World War II.

This book eschews some of the pitfalls of the later books. When he’s the target, Spenser has the chance to summon the rainbow posse of multicultural tough guys from around the country, but he does not. The book mixes in a large number of allusions to classical literature, but it still hits the regular Spenser catch phrases (“Tough, but oh so gentle” and “Pretty to think so” and whatnot). Additionally, the plot is a little forced, particularly the resolution, which takes a ring of the aforementioned international mercenaries out for Spenser and turns in a resolution based on a bad mommy and daddy domestic situation. A couple of the plot elements and set pieces within the book might also have been lifted pretty much wholely from the early works.

So it’s not too bad, but not without its flaws. Knowing that Parker won’t pen any more of them, good or bad, still saddens me, and I’m not sure how I feel about the series continuing without him.

Books mentioned in this review:

It’s strange; I’ve borrowed a number of the later parts to this series from the library, and this is an ex-library volume that I own, so I kinda felt like I had to be extra careful with it when I read it. Even though, as an ex-library copy, it’s obvious that other people have not been as scrupulous as I. I passed this book a number of times on my shelves, each time a little surprised that I owned one of Sandford’s books that I had yet to read. Finally, the time was right, and I happened to spot it sometime other than I was 300 pages into a 600 page science fiction or high fantasy epic.

It’s an early volume from the series; number four, I think. Davenport has not yet become the political fixer cop he does later, although he does get a glimpse of that lifestyle as he travels to New York to try to hunt a serial killer whom he’d already captured in Minneapolis but who escaped custody. The killer is strung out on drugs and–wait for it–does gruesome things. Seriously. Although he just dumps the bodies and does not pose them ritually, which differentiates him from some of Sandford’s other villains.

As Davenport purportedly is supposed to draw press attention from the actual cops hunting the serial killer, he’s also commissioned as an outsider by a secret intelligence project to find a group of vigilante cops who might be vigilanteing. So there’s another thread here with lots of intrigue.

It’s an okay book, but Sandford does a very, very naughty thing: he withholds a very pertinent bit of information so he can spring it on us as a surprise. The bad guy is crossdressing to get his victims. So we get him all out and about and whatnot, and this pertinent bit is not revealed until an interview with a jailhouse neighbor transvestite reveals that the villain learned how to do it right from him. Then, suddenly, we get passages of the villain dolling himself up and mentions that he’s walking in heels, and so on. I mean, he’s hiding out as live-in help for an elderly woman by wearing drag at all hours, and this is not mentioned until two-thirds of the way through the book. Oh, for Pete’s sake.

Books mentioned in this review:

I missed a book in the series, as the last Executioner book I read was #20, New Orleans Knockout. However, when one misses a book in the series, it’s not like missing an episode in the serial. Although I might miss a couple references to prior characters, it doesn’t completely hang upon what happened then.

This book sends Mack Bolan to Hawaii, where he encounters some recurring characters and they get together to bust up not just a mob plot, but a plot from a Red Chinese general, possibly rogue, who is using a secret volcano lair for ill. Strangely, though, the hit on the lair doesn’t play out like a secret agent novel would; instead, it’s a pretty straightforward assault, and a bit anti-climactic as a climax for the novel. So it’s not one of the better ones in the series, or I wasn’t in a proper appreciative mood.

That said, the novel is noteworthy for the number of times it refers to a karate wraparound or a terrycloth karate wraparound. Kung fu movies were emerging in the culture, but I guess the word gi had not made it across the pacific just yet.

Books mentioned in this review:

Given that the local school district has removed this book from its school library and curriculum and seeing as I’ve defended the school board’s right to do so and have taken issue with use of the word “ban” to describe the school board’s actions (see this and here). Since I already owned the book, it seemed a topical time to read it. And…. meh.

It’s a novel about a writer writing about his experiences in Dresden during the firebombing in World War II. That’s the frame story: a writer has produced this book and has dealt with his compatriot who was also there. Then, there’s the text of the novel, where a survivor of Dresden has come unstuck in time and goes back and forth between the past and the present and who was kidnapped by aliens and kept in a zoo for a number of years on their planet, where he copulated with a porn actress. This novel-inside-the-novel was a successful optometrist until he started expressing his belief in the extraterrestrials, who can see things in the fourth dimension and to whom all moments are equally present or some such, through newspaper letters to the editor and appearances on late-night radio. So maybe he’s going crazy instead of it being a science fiction book. Also, the writer of the novel inserts himself into the novel by pointing himself out when the narrator of the novel-inside-the-novel meets him.

So I can see why this was popular on campuses: it’s a messed up novel that has the play-within-the-play thing going on, an anti-war message at the time of an unpopular war, and enough oblique things open to interpretation to make smooth sledding for students or tenure-track scholars who need to publish. That’s not to say it’s unentertaining and a lightweight read. It is. But I’m unsold on its presence on any list of serious literature. No doubt I did not enjoy it as its previous owner, Mr. J. Tobacco.

Books mentioned in this review:

I got this book relatively recently and dived into it as I thought it would be a quick, episodic read. Well, it was quicker than I thought; of the book’s 190 page heft, only 165 of it are the book itself; the rest are footnotes, index, and whatnot.

The book expands upon an essay, and it shows. Separated into chapters covering conservativism’s rise in talk radio, the blogosphere, new publishers, and on college campuses, the book reads like a series of blog entries where footnotes replace hyperlinks. It’s audience is not the readers of blogs, per se, as most of the information within it is well known to people who have followed blogs for years. Instead, it’s geared to those who read books and newspapers.

In 2011, it’s an interesting time capsule. Its semi-triumphalist tone is kind of amusing given the events of the 2006 and 2008 elections which proved that conservative values were not as widely ascendent as they seemed. Also, the book provides a time capsule of the blogosphere in 2004-2005. Remember when Andrew Sullivan and Charles Johnson were conservative stalwarts? Good times, good times. Also, the book refers to a blog called “2blowhards” which I don’t think I’d heard of, but the author must have read it plenty. The book shows how much changes and how much has remained the same.

I dunno. It’s an okay book, I suppose. A bit stretched to fit book size and, as I said, a bit dated and a bit redundant if you read blogs.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book collects a number of news photographs from the century and a half in question. Some were Pulitzer Prize winners, but there are quite a few that I don’t recognize, and more importantly, there are quite a few that I would recognize that are not included herein. So maybe it’s really the best news photos of the period to which the producers of a coffeetable book could get cheap reproduction rights.

That said, each photo has an accompanying couple of paragraphs to explain the context. As though we need context. I’m no history major, but I know what the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre was and what the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire was. Okay, I did not know who Billy Sunday was, and although I’ve missed the answer on at least one trivia night, I have to continue to repeat to myself to remember that Gertrude Ederle was the first woman to… to… dammit!

At any rate, it’s definitely worth a flip through during a football or baseball game.

Books mentioned in this review:

Given that the Heinlein quotes are making their ways around the Internet courtesy Instapundit (see here and here), I thought I’d pick this book up. Well, I did.

It started out as a pretty good spacer yarn. It revolves around Lazarus Long, previously seen in Methuselah’s Children, which I read as part of The Past Through Tomorrow, as he gets “rejuvenated” 2000 years from now after he’s lived those 2000 years and has run out of things to do. As part of his therapy, he tells stories about his adventures. For about 200 pages, it was cool, but then it got to be a little tedious. There were allusions at a greater plot at work, but that was played out in dribs and drabs. Then, he gets rejuvenated and leads a group from the planet Secundus, the planet where he was rejuvenated and that is becoming a bit stale culturally and politically, to Tertius, where they build the Heinleinian free love commune.

Around that time, where the action switches to the free love commune, the book bogs way down. The first half of each chapter explains how awesome free love and polyamory are, and then we get a couple pages of plot development. Unfortunately, the plot develops that Long travels into the past and then falls in love with his own mother, so we then get about 50 pages of them trying to couple in 1917, and when the attempts at coupling fails, we get 50 pages of them talking dirty to each other. Hey, I’m not a prude, but this stuff made me squicky given 1)It’s a science fiction novel, and 2)It’s his mother.

So, frankly, the book doesn’t hold together very well. It meanders a lot, of course, since it’s kind of a collection of short stories with an overarching plot, sort of. When I was reading this book, I was comparing it a bit to Atlas Shrugged as maybe a collected statement of the author’s philosophy, and I was comparing Heinlein’s plotting skills unfavorably to Rand’s, for crying out loud. Then there are the explicit details of the philosophy, which include a lot of sex, lots of women asking for Long to impregnate them, approval of sex with your own clones, and twisting the head of a fully born baby if it had Down’s syndrome.

Um, yeah. The philosophy expressed within has its good points, as the Instapundit quotes capture and as the Notebooks of Lazarus Long (two sections in the book with bullet points and no narrative, later published independently). However, there’s more to Heinlein’s view of life than that, and it makes this conservative say, “Ew.”

But the man can write some interesting science fiction amid the unclothed rubdowns.

Other Heinlein reviews:

• The Past Through Tomorrow
• A Heinlein Trio
• Infinite Possibilities
• Friday
• Farnham’s Freehold

I do so prefer his rocket jockey stuff to the adult books, for what it’s worth.

Books mentioned in this review:

Last spring, I lost a part from my rototiller, so I went down to the sporting goods store and bought a metal detector to find it. And since I live on the edge of the Old Wire Road / Trail of Tears, I thought I might become a relic hunter–that’s what the people who use metal detectors call themselves. Or treasure hunters if they look for pure metal. So I ordered this book to get an idea of how to use my metal detector.

The book was written by Charles Garrett, President of the Garrett Metal Detectors company, so the book gives a lot of attention to the innovations in the latest Garrett detectors. It provides a broad overview, from looking for coins on the beach to using metal detectors to prospect for gold in the American West. It has a chapter on how good the hobby is for seniors and children. Ergo, it’s a little broader than I would have hoped.

I guess to get the knowledge I hope for, I’ll have to spend a little more time using the device rather than reading about it. Ain’t that the way?

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is a short collection of tales from Ozarks lore, broken into categories such as “Tales of the Supernatural”, “Indian Tales”, “Treasure Tales”, “Outlaw Stories”, and so on. None of them are well-researched or well-documented, but they do give one interesting stories to tell the children and ideas for little essays and historical bits if one wants to put in the time to conduct real research.

The best bit about this book, though, is this written on the title page:

As some of you assuredly know, the William Quantrill led a pro-Confederate band of guerrillas in the Civil War. The William Quantrill does not appear in this book, so it’s not a notation of a previous owner. I assume it was the name of the previous owner, perhaps a distant relation of The William Quantrill. So I can boast I own a book once owned by William Quantrill, but given that this is the 1998 reprinting of a book that first appeared in 1983, it’s not The William Quantrill. But those to whom I boast need not know.

Books mentioned in this review:

This is the next book after Firestorm U.S.A., but it’s far different from the earlier book. We get a lot of allusion to some things in Barrabas’s past, but the book starts him out in Egypt without much to give this reader any bearing on why he’s there and what he’s doing. After a very slow and disengaging first chapter, one discovers that Barrabas has a recurring villain, a former CIA agent who bedevils Barrabas repeatedly. So this book ties into that storyline with which I was familiar.

At any rate, Barrabas goes hunting for this guy; coincidentally, two members of his team are spending some of their “off” time in Africa helping the medically needy there, and they find the super-villain in an abandoned copper mine, weaponizing this new deadly disease AIDS using African natives as incubators. The super-villain frames Barrabas for the attempt on the life of Barrabas’s ex-lover, who then comes to Africa to avenge her brother by killing Barrabas. And other member of Barrabas’s team come looking for him as Barrabas survives a plane crash in the desert.

It comes together at the villain’s lair, of course, and Barrabas’s team wins, of course. Unfortunately, the pacing of the book is kinda slow, and even the jump cuts don’t build suspense because it reminds you how obvious the required coincidence is. So it’s my least favorite in the series, but it does not kill the series for me.

Now, if I could only read something weighty to impress my smart friends.

Books mentioned in this review:

This is not the first Foxworthy book I’ve read; I read You Might Be A Redneck If… in 2006 and How to Really Stink at Work: A Guide to Making Yourself Fire-Proof While Having the Most Fun Possible last year. This book proved its worth in merely providing me with the fodder for a blog post ("Wherein My Life Intersects, Again, With The Humor Of Jeff Foxworthy And Larry The Cable Guy") and a tweet/status. Strangely enough, this is my gold standard for books by comedians these days. Also, books by Roman emperors.

This book is better than How To Really Stink At Work anyway. The humor and musings are more aligned with Foxworthy’s humor. Unfortunately, the book does stray into his personal life a bit too much for my taste. I dunno, he talks about his courtship of his wife and whatnot, and I guess I like my humor a little more abstract. When he’s talking about wives and women, I cringe a little to tie this to a specific person. Maybe that’s just me or my taste towards the middle of 2011.

So it’s an amusing enough book, but not pure enough comedy for me.

Books mentioned in this review:

I inherited this book from my wife’s uncle, who was something of an expert on period firearms. This book collects images of the Kentucky Rifle, focusing on the craftsmanship in the inlays and etching on the stock.

To someone not that into period rifles, the pictures look a lot the same until you really snap into the lingo and the variation, at which point I could appreciate the differences and the artistic flourishes more.

But it’s definitely a book for enthusiasts more than the casual reader. It took me many football games and baseball games to make it through it.

Books mentioned in this review:

I borrowed this book at the library this weekend because I was running short of things to read around here. Actually, no, I have this tendency to stop by the local history section at the Republic Branch of the Springfield-Greene County library and check something out in spite of having enough to read. This particular volume is a collection of photographs taken as part of an Ozarks studies class at Lebanon High School from the 1970s to the early part of the 21st century.

That lends the book a certain double effect narration: Some of the photographs are themselves history, as many capture not only the old timer residents of the area wearing their horned rim glasses unironically, but also some of the students are captured in their flared bottom pants, also worn unironically. Sometime in the 1980s, old people stopped looking like these vintage old people, didn’t they? I have some pictures of my great aunts from the late 1980s with the horned rim glasses, and they looked old. In contrast, I have a grandmother and a friend approaching 90 and a mother-in-law approaching, well, maybe I shouldn’t use her as an example since she sometimes reads this blog. But some of the photographs in this book are of people who fall between those ages, and they look older than the aforementioned people who will unfriend me on Facebook for mentioning their ages. Maybe it’s that I’ve gotten older, but it’s not exclusively that, is it?

So I enjoyed looking through this book while watching a Cardinals game. The photographs capture some of the natural beauty of the region as well as some of the residents of the area who were farming it before electricity reached them (in some cases, as late as the 1960s). Although the pictures of the native fauna was less impressive since I’ve snapped most of them myself in my backyard.

A side note: you know, one can easily dodge high school literary works as subpar (come on, they’re just learning). However, one overlooks high school history programs at one’s own risk. This is pretty good stuff, much like Webster Groves High School’s In Retrospect series that started in the middle 1970s, too.

I recommend the book. Of course, instead of going to the library for it, you can order it right off the Internet from the link below. Or, if you’re like me, you can get it from the library and then scoop it up later after you’re sure of it’s worth.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is the 16th in the series; I read the 5th of the series, Gulag War, in 2009. Strangely enough, I bought this book, too, for a quarter, although I see it’s not as quite in demand as the earlier books when I search the Internet. I told the kid at Castle Books, a used book store here in Springfield that I’d never heard of (!), that I was excited to get it. He tried to riposte, but could not. I hate it when repartee dysfunction happens to me, too. I’ll keep my eye out for others in this particular series when I’m there. I’ll just have to look in the back cheap books closet again.

Speaking of used book stores, this volume has made the rounds: It has three different used book store stamps from the Kansas City area within it. I guess it was held onto by some serious pulp readers who bought it, read it, and turned it in for store credit elsewhere. Unlike me, who is a serious pulp accumulator.

So this story shares some broad strokes in common with the Chuck Norris film Invasion U.S.A.: A group of terrorists infiltrates Florida and starts wreaking havoc until the Soldiers of Barrabas can stop them by firing their submachineguns from the hip.

The strokes they share are only broad, though. It’s not the Russians behind this, but some group that has a plan to introduce a dictator into the United States as a reaction to the terror. Ah, the olden days, before 1995, when you could posit that a coordinated terrorist attack could topple the government. Before 2011. Before we did actually have terrorists and enemies of our way of life popping up every so often to shoot or otherwise wound innocents. I dunno, the drama loses some relevance since it’s no longer unthinkable, and the stakes are somewhat diminished since what’s at stake is a little more ripped-from-the-headlines-where-the-government-warns-us-not-to-assume-terrorism.

At any rate, a quickly paced read that is more like a text movie than a book, and if you can forgive that and forgive some actually laugh-out-loud funny cinematic moments (no, really, one of the SOBs does bring her MAC-10 up to firing position, her hip, and shoot a terrorist in a crowd three times in the chest, or when two SOBs chasing a bad guy toward his car bomb wait for him to pull his gun before bringing their MAC-10s up to their hips, or any of the points where a soldier with a rifle even with open sights could have ended a dramatic moment really quick), you can enjoy the book.

Books mentioned in this review: